Nadine Gordimer Interview (page: 3 / 8) Nobel Prize in Literature	Print Interview

In that first municipal library, what were some of the books that you just couldn't get enough of?

Nadine Gordimer: Well, it was amazing, because in the children's library they were obvious. For my generation, it was Hugh Lofting's Dr. Doolittle. I did pass it on to my children and their children.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. But, as soon as I moved into the adult library -- and my mother was a friend of the librarian, who was a woman, so nobody stopped me -- and then I read an amazing variety of things. Some history, some translations from Greek, a bit of Sophocles and so on. And then my parents had friends whom they used to go every weekend to play cards there -- and I went along. And then I would be left alone -- and the man, who was a lawyer -- in his study, and he had quite a good library. And it included the -- of course banned -- Lady Chatterley's Lover. But I read Lady Chatterley's Lover when I was about 12 years old. And there were many other books of that nature.

Are there any other titles that come to mind?

Nadine Gordimer: Well of course I read Dickens, and very soon I discovered Tolstoy, War and Peace.

At age 12?

Nadine Gordimer: No, bit older, about 13 or 14. And so it went on. Then E.M. Forster, Passage to India, and of course some poetry. Though at school we'd had Wordsworth stuffed down our necks, but then I moved on obviously to contemporary poets of my time.

When you were a little girl, did you put on shows or do impersonations for family and friends?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Nadine Gordimer: No. I think I used to mimic other people rather nastily, my mother's friends who came to -- I don't know whether it was a book club or what it was. I would listen carefully and then I could reproduce for other people's amusement, which wasn't a very nice thing to do. But I think quite a good training for a writer, because as a writer you have to project yourself and indeed you have to use the vocabulary and the turn of phrase of characters who are very different from you. So this was a kind of training of this projection.

So this observation was part of your training?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Nadine Gordimer: I think if you ask what the qualities of a writer are, you have to be born extremely observant. That is really the beginning of it. Because as Graham Greene notably said -- when people asked, "Are your characters based on people?" -- the answer is no, if you're a real writer, unless you choose a particular individual. You choose Napoleon and then you write a novel about his love life, you know, then you recreate it. But in general, what Greene said, and that I think is absolutely true and I found in my own life, he said, "You are sitting in a bus or in a queue, you are waiting to go in at the dentist and there are people there." First of all, you have to have big ears. You eavesdrop. You catch a word here and there. You see that there's a quarrel brewing perhaps, in the restaurant, and a love affair brewing somewhere else, and a case where one dominates another. You see these people and you read their body language and you create alternative lives for them.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

Your first stories were published in the children's section of the Sunday paper. How did that come about?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Nadine Gordimer: Obviously, my parents got the Sunday paper and there was this large spread that was the children's section. And then they invited children to send things in. And I was already, from the age of nine, scribbling away. So I wrote a story which had something to do with the rainbow and what was found at the end of the rainbow and sent it in and it was published. But my first adult story was published when I was 15, in a liberal journal that was on at the time. And of course they didn't know that this was written by a child. And what a great moment when, indeed it was November that year when the paper arrived, and there was my story printed and I was even paid for it.

That must have been a really exciting moment.

Nadine Gordimer: It was a great moment, yes.

Were your parents supportive of your ambitions?

Nadine Gordimer: Well, fortunately for me, I think I could have been ruined by being made a child prodigy. It was just a moment, you know, Nadine amusing herself. At that time, until I was 11, I was a passionate dancer, at dancing class. Of course I had the right build for it, being very small and light, and my ambition was to be a dancer and I wasn't bad. But fortunately for me, I changed ambitions or I would have been really over and done with long ago now.

What happened when you were 11? Why did you stop dancing? Was it your health?

Nadine Gordimer: Yes, and it's a very curious thing, because I had some very common condition that I've discovered since, to do with the thyroid gland, which happens sometimes when you're on the brink of adolescence and all your glands are starting to throb and come up. For reasons that I shouldn't go into, my mother's marriage and so on, she clung very much to her children, and she made a tremendous thing of this, and the first thing I was made to give up was the dancing, which was a great deprivation for me.

So you didn't want to give up dancing?

Nadine Gordimer: Well, of course not, but she said I had a bad heart. I've lived now to this great old age with that same old heart, so I'm afraid it was a mistaken diagnosis.

What about your middle years at school? Was your health a factor there as well?

Nadine Gordimer: She took me out of school, and then I had to be taken every day to a retired school teacher. So all on my own I learned my lessons, which again was a great deprivation, without my friends. Anyway, I've survived.

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