OVERVIEW

The themes in The Lying Days highlight the interaction between the personal and the public, for the novel is both a bildungsroman, a story of a young person's growth and education, and a topical novel that engages directly with the history of South Africa in the twentieth century, particularly with the period in which apartheid was established. As a result, the body is a focus of interest as Helen grows up and discovers sexuality and at the same time recognizes the racism of her society. Positive and negative versions of bodily discovery are juxtaposed. Helen's adolescent feelings well up from her inmost self and propel her beyond the narrow life of her parents. Beneath her feet, however, quite literally, are thousands of buried black bodies, miners in the underground seams, whose existence is invisible to her. Helen comments in horror on the discovery of a mine worker's dead body close to the railway station, where he has lain with a knife in his back, unnoticed for a whole day. Yet, for most of the novel she fails to notice the existence of his fellow blacks.

Indeed, in her obsession with liberating herself from her mother, Helen rarely sees any other character clearly in her mind. She is always fastening on her mother's views of them, comparing her mother to their mothers, or considering their reactions to her mother. It does not occur to Helen that her dependence and repression, understood in individual, psychoanalytic terms, is in some sense a form of narcissism, given the systematic economic dependence and underdevelopment among the entire black population. While the reader is engaged by Helen as she struggles to develop and mature, to act by her own criteria and values, Gordimer highlights the plight of those for whom any such development is baulked by the larger forces of history and politics. Gaining a degree of independence from the mother also involves renegotiating the relationship to the motherland. Possessing her own body in freedom demands that Helen recognize the claims of black bodies to the same autonomy. When the Mixed Marriages Act converts interracial sex into a crime, Helen's own relationship with Paul Clark breaks down, as if state repression had operated on her own psyche. In this way the themes of the novel are always Janus-faced, looking inward to Helen's private self and simultaneously outward to the society in which she has to operate.

THEMES IN RELATION TO GORDIMER'S LIFE

Although The Lying Days is in some respects autobiographical, it is more a fantasy of a self that never was than a reflection of Gordimer's own youth. There are obvious parallels with the writer's background. The novel is clearly set in the same area where Gordimer grew up. Helen's mother is dominant and her father ineffectual; she goes to college late and does not graduate; and the years of her youth are roughly coterminous with the years Gordimer spent growing up in the Witwatersrand (the region of South Africa centering on Johannesburg and including Gordimer's hometown of Springs to the east). The novelist also became involved with an artistic and radical circle of friends in Johannesburg, much as Helen does. Gordimer, however, was not the child of a mining official but of a shopkeeper. She was not brought up in the mine employees' housing but in a nearby small town. In contrast to Helen's English background, Gordimer was of Jewish origin. Helen represents both a longed-for and a resented alter ego of Gordimer, a full member of South African white society who is not excluded by ethnicity or illness from playing a role in that world.

Above all, the fictional heart condition that kept Gordimer at home as an invalid from the age of ten meant that she did not enjoy the luxuriant life of the body as Helen does in the novel. Helen's adolescence—with its dances, barbecues, swimming parties, golf lessons, and days spent at the tennis club—is exactly what Gordimer's was not. At times, the reader almost feels a concealed resentment emanating from the author toward her protagonist, a jealousy of the self that might have been. Much the most trenchant criticism of Helen emanates from Joel Aaron, who is, like Gordimer, the Jewish child of a shopkeeper. Male, but in some curious way never of any erotic interest to Helen, marginalized as a Jew, invalided out of the army, he is in many respects Helen's alter ego and voices the concerns of his creator.

It is striking that Helen's story begins when she is nine years old (an age just preceding the diagnosis of Gordimer's supposed illness) and then skips over the years until she is seventeen and able to go on vacation by herself. The period in which Gordimer remained at home, alone except for a tutor and her parents, is scanted. When Helen returns from visiting the Kochs, it is as if she has rejoined the world after an immense absence. She is greeted at the pool by boys and girls of her own age: “They exclaimed over me. You were away a long time! How long was it, Helen?” (89). When one of the boys calls to her, “Come away to the lagoon with me, Tondelayo!” she is bemused. She has not seen the movie from which the catchphrase comes, White Cargo (1942). When he makes a grab for her, she slithers away. Nor can she read the bodily clues of the flirting adolescents or join in their horseplay. In the changing-room mirror she sees “two tears of loneliness” (90) in her eyes. Importantly, the pool is also connected to illness. One of the other girls complains that the Cunningham children have ringworm and are in the water, exposing the other swimmers to infection. Illness, loneliness, and a lost adolescence are combined.

Several other scenes suggest the sense of exclusion from the adolescent world that Gordimer herself felt keenly. At a rather dull Johannesburg dinner party, for example, Helen's eyes linger on one of the guests, a girl in a taffeta dress “with a string of pearls round her neck of the graded kind that small girls are given on their ninth or tenth birthday, along with their first bottle of scent, and a lace-bordered handkerchief which she kept clutched in her hand all through dinner” (220). Like a little girl of nine or ten, the young woman plays no part in the talk around the table and is “as inhibiting to conversation excluding her as a child who listens with round eyes to what she cannot understand” (221). In her own childhood, taken to grown-up gatherings by her mother, Gordimer must often have been in the same situation. The young woman appears to have been arrested in her development at a prepubertal stage, presenting a haunting image of a fate worse than death from which Helen has moved on. In the event, it is because of the presence of the boring child-woman that the party guests themselves move on to Marcel's Cellar, where Helen and Paul meet. Subconsciously, Helen needs to distinguish herself from the child-woman and initiates the relationship with Paul.

Given the facts of Gordimer's adolescence, it is also worth noting the subliminal references to illness and health throughout the novel. The relationship with Ludi represents a physical flowering, after which Helen returns to her mother's home renewed. The old routine now seems strange, “as it might come to someone who has been ill and is filled with the strangeness of standing upright in the sun again. When we stopped to talk to people, I had the smile that invalids summon” (86). Helen's father sees her education as something to “fit her for the world” (88). In the vocabulary of the mine community what is fitting (proper behavior) is a measure of health and adaptation. Mrs. Shaw is delighted when Helen begins to go out with Charles Bessemer. As members of the professional class, doctors are erotic objects, even when, like Charles, they smell horribly of ether. Helen is first drawn to Joel when she goes with him to buy a toy ambulance for a hospital model that he has to construct as part of his architectural training. She is fascinated: “To me the model was a cunning and delightful toy and I exclaimed over it with pleasure” (113). Joel, too, has been an invalid, discharged from the army because of a mastoid problem that made him deaf for a whole year. When they discuss their parents, with Helen complaining furiously about hers, she suddenly sees the same potential for embarrassment in Joel's family, like “a person who suddenly remembers that the illness of which he has been talking with unsparing clinical thoroughness is the very one from which his companion must be suffering” (127). Parents are the source of illness; young men are fellow-sufferers or, if cured (as Joel's deafness has been), a potential remedy.

Helen moves in with Paul after nursing him for a week following a tonsillectomy. (She tells her employers that she is ill.) The later stages of their relationship are, however, bedeviled by her fear of pregnancy, of becoming a mother herself, and thus merging once again with the maternal role (331). All of her relationships are in some way sick relationships, in the sense that she thinks always in terms of illness and health, nurse and patient, oscillating between the roles herself. When her parents decide to forgive her after the family arguments over her living with Paul, she returns to spend a weekend with them in some trepidation. Yet, there is no tension at all: “It had all been so easy in such a matter-of-fact, flaccid way, like the expected resistance of a muscle that is discovered to be atrophied. My mother, who never had the strength to give in, could always evade. She did it this time by creating an atmosphere of convalescence in the house; she treated my father and me, and even herself, as if we were all recovering, shaken, from an illness we did not speak about” (305). Back in Johannesburg, waiting for the strike to happen, Helen recognizes that in some sense her mother is right: “I am like an invalid: between the illness and the cure” (317). The person who dies, however, is the black activist Sipho, with Paul at his hospital bedside, a real victim of the political situation. At this point the personal and the political come together. The reader wonders whether Helen will become “fit” for South Africa, whether she will fit in, or whether she will recognize that in a sick society, to fit in is to damage oneself and others, to be part of the disease rather than part of the cure.

THEMES IN RELATION TO GORDIMER'S ERA

The Lying Days is set in an area bearing witness to the peculiarly violent nature of South Africa's industrialization, and the themes of the novel reflect the political and economic history of the Witwatersrand. Helen is born in the 1920s, and the action of the narrative takes place between the 1930s and 1950. Her home town of Atherton is a typical South African mining town. Gold mining began in the Witwatersrand in 1886. Between this date and World War I, a space of merely thirty years, the area was transformed from an agricultural backwater to a colony with the world's largest and most technologically sophisticated gold-mining industry. In Gordimer's own words, “On nine farms in Africa in 1886 there began gold mining operations that were to produce great riches and political and economic power that would outlive the deposit of ore and the individual lives of successive generations of men who mined it. There also began a way of life shaped by the nature of the work to be done, the relationship of the strangers who came together to do it, and the blankness of the place on earth where they found themselves.” The area was known as the highveld, part of the Transvaal, a rural republic that was later to become part of the Union of South Africa (1910) and then the Republic of South Africa (1961). Names of farms became names of mines, “simple designations, characterless as an X in place of a signature, identifying emptiness by its few natural features, a spring, a stream, a rise in the ground.”¹

Prior to the advent of mining, the area had been inhabited by Africans of the Ndebele and Sotho-Tswana peoples and about six hundred white farmers with their families. The farmers lived there only seasonally, descending from the cold plateau to the lowveld in the winters. Gordimer depicts it as an empty place: “Skirmishes between men, black and white, tribal wars, had blown across as the wind did. There were no monuments, no ruins.”² Yet, it is also a world of vitality and change. To quote Charles Van Onselen, “Into this cauldron of capitalist development poured men, women and children drawn from all over the world, giving the Rand a cultural diversity and social texture that bubbled with excitement and vitality.”³

The South African gold industry was producing twenty-seven percent of the world's gold by 1898, forty percent by 1913. In the process the forty-mile stretch along the line of the gold reef from Gordimer's birthplace in Springs in the east to Krugersdorp in the west became marked by mining headgear, ore dumps, railway lines, dams and pools of waste water, and the hastily erected homes of the miners. Helen looks out of the train on this landscape:

The yellow ridged hills of sand, thrown up and patted down with the unlovely precision that marked them manufactured unmistakably as a sand castle; the dams of chemical-tinted water, more waste matter brought above ground by man. … The wreckage of old motorcar parts, rusting tin and burst shoes that littered the bald veld in between.

(97)

In the background, rather than African drums, she hears the thump of the mine stamp batteries. As Gordimer herself commented of this landscape:

We who were born into it in the Twenties and Thirties opened our eyes not so much on God's creation as on our fathers' bold rearrangement of it. This was very different from the hedgerows and fields that domesticate the earth. This was a making of mountains and waters. There was even a smell to it all, a subterranean pollen-scent of chemicals, as of the minerals flowering underground. The forms were as austere as Egypt's; but these pyramids of tailings entombed no lost civilisation.

(On the Mines)

While generally seen as ugly, the landscape could suddenly become a parody of picture-postcard beauty, as the dust put a red filter over the sun, while the water shone like mother-of-pearl in its impurity, or left brilliant verdigris on the sand.

Helen Shaw lives at 138 Staff Officials' Quarters, Atherton Proprietary Mines Ltd., in an area laid out by the mining company with married quarters and a recreation club, a few miles from the small town of Atherton. The houses are socially calibrated according to the status of the inhabitants: “The houses of the officials in the fourth row were bigger than the others, set well back from the road with a tall row of pines screening their long narrow gardens” (27). The compound manager has a very large garden, tended by mineworkers. Opposite the houses is a small park, and in the middle of the park is the recreation hall, also built and owned by the mining company. Facilities like these were provided in reaction to the early male-dominance of the area. At the beginning of the twentieth century this was a masculine world of robber barons and roughnecks who knew little about culture but were out to get rich. Immigrant miners tended not to bring wives and children with them, and as a result, drinking, gambling, and prostitution became major social evils. The Rand was a society characterized by large numbers of single men, living close to their workplace, the whites in boarding houses, the blacks in mine compounds. Other immigrants included Chinese workers and Indians, whose presence allowed the mine owners to undercut black wages. Gordimer's grandmother's experience of discovering a murdered Chinaman under her kitchen table, while her husband was out gambling, is emblematic of the kind of society she was living in.

Gordimer's own era was less violent. The deep-level mines of the Witwatersrand lacked the raffish quality of the earlier diggers' camps. The first digger-adventurers, with their picks and shovels, made Johannesburg a seething social cauldron, but to reach the gold of the Main Reef demanded capital and technical resources, men, machinery, and money:

The eruption of gold through a static agricultural economy brought the sons of white farmers to the barracks of small rooms behind a wood and iron verandah—the Single Quarters built on “The Property”—and the uniform houses permanently darkened by wire-netting against flies—the Married Quarters. The pressures of a colonial money-economy brought young black men as migrant labour from tribes all over the country, and beyond, to the inward-facing Compounds on “The Property.” It was a company of strangers in a place without a past, with nothing to quiet that certain spiritual hunger whose bread is memory.

(On the Mines)

In order to stabilize the white working class population, the mining companies began in the early years of the twentieth century to put up married quarters for their workers. In 1897 only twelve percent of the European mine employees were married and had their families with them. By 1912 the figure was forty-two percent. On the one hand, the growth of family lives marked a welcome shift away from the male-dominated world of the earlier years. Yet, it also increased the social distance between white and black miners, who now lived in very different social worlds. The separation of the races meant that industrial action was less easily coordinated in the twentieth century. White miners enjoyed supervisory roles, whereas black workers were poorly paid and maintained in unskilled positions.

The mining company ruled the lives of its workers. Helen describes her mother meeting other company wives in town, both her own neighbors and “women who had been transferred to some other mine on another part of the chain of gold mines called the Reef, and transferred back again just as unexpectedly” (30). The area is booming: “The Mine people came from Atherton, Atherton Deep, Platfontein, New Postma, Basilton Levels and the new mines opening up, but not yet in production, to the east of the town” (29). In the local paper each mine has a “Social and Personal” column to itself, reporting the results of sports fixtures and dance competitions, births and marriages—all of course concerning whites only. The world is a colonial one. The ladies favor dresses in the “blues and pinks of English royalty” (120); the Mine is English-owned and represents the English economic dominance of South Africa, against which the Afrikaners were to rebel in 1948. In On the Mines, Gordimer described the mining towns of her youth as colonially organized:

The social pattern was, literally and figuratively, on the surface; the human imperative, like the economic one, came from what went on below ground. Perhaps it always remained “below ground”; in men's minds, too. It belongs to the subconscious, from where what matters most in human affairs, often never comes up to light, or does so disguised as coarse sentiment or expedience, patronage or indifference. Above were the neat standard houses and the recreation club of the white men, the compound and concession stores of the black men. The colour bar kept them separated. Below, at work, there was a life-and-death dependency between them. It was codified in something called Safety Regulations. Such a code is the recognition of a final faith necessary between man and man, for survival.

Looking back on this world from the perspective of the seventies, Gordimer recognized the strong impression of security created for whites by their social arrangements. Mining people lived and worked together in Company houses on Company streets, looked after by a mine doctor in a mine hospital, playing tennis and soccer on mine playing fields against mine teams:

One could go from christening to old age pension within the shelter of the Company plantations of blue gums that surrounded The Property. One need never be aware of the threatening space of the veld without. Inside the magic circle of blue gums everything was decided for you, from annual leave to social status; a cosy society with every social gap where loneliness might blow in stopped by the availability of a talk over the fence or a game of billiards down at the Rec, where all faces were as familiar as one's wife's. We were just like one big family in those days. What other way could there have been of making a community in that emptiness, that memoryless place? It was an autocratic family, of course, and the social hierarchy, based on the hierarchy of working importance, provided the sense of order.

(On the Mines)

The black community was decidedly less cosy. The period of Helen's youth is a period of increasing segregation, as the whites strengthen their grip on the black population. A series of “colour bar” measures prevented blacks from competing with Afrikaners (a more impoverished group than English-speakers), who only gained economic ground slowly. Many Africans were being transformed from sharecroppers into tenant and wage laborers. The wage gap between black and white mine workers was twelve to one in 1911; it had increased to more than twenty to one by 1969. It was only in 1973 that some categories of skilled jobs were opened to black workers. Between two and three hundred thousand black men a year have worked in the mines of the Witwatersrand, always outnumbering the twenty to forty-two thousand white miners, technicians, and administrators.

Migrant labor was common, with blacks traveling from the “reserves” to work for whites, most of whom never set foot in a reserve and spoke no African languages. Miners came from Tanzania, Rhodesia, Mozambique, Malawi, Swaziland, Lesotho, Botswana, the Transkei, and Zululand. Helen describes the miners in their blankets and clay-spiked hair (14), recognizable from their appearance as Shangaan speakers from the area near the border with Mozambique. Miners were not allowed to bring their families or to settle in the region where they worked. Gordimer has commented that “what the experience has meant to them is difficult to trace, since most are not literate, and they speak with a variety of Africa's seven hundred tongues” (On the Mines).

What is intriguing, given the emphasis in The Lying Days on the young girl's initiation into life, is that some blacks viewed the period of migratory labor itself as an initiation. Gordimer writes in the preface to On the Mines that “in some tribes, in territories far distant from the Witwatersrand, the six- to twenty-month spell of labour in the gold mines became one of the trials attesting to the attainment of full adulthood. Once back from the mines you are a man.” In the black male Bildungsroman the mine is the vital entry into mature self-knowledge, a journey to the underworld to bring back a mature vision. Gordimer contrasted this interpretation of the experience with the views of more sophisticated black and white commentators, who see the black man's experience of the mines as a traumatic one:

Labour underground epitomises the black man's baptism by darkness and dust into Western civilisation. Tribesman comes to Jo'burg—the obsessive theme of African writing … is the twentieth century myth of Africa gathering to itself round one simple story all the harsh and bewildering experience of a forced rebirth from one age to the unknown of another.

(On the Mines)

Helen's entry into her society is decidedly less brutal than that of the black men all around her whom, as a child, she hardly even sees. Yet, it would be wrong for the reader to diminish the degree to which the black miners also made a life and culture of their own on the mines. Helen realizes something is wrong (a strike) when she fails to hear the drums of the black mine-dancers one Sunday morning, a sound that woke the white community on Sundays as regularly as their own alarm clocks. Gordimer has described the way that the miners adapted an older cultural form to their new situation:

Into the new rhythm of working by shift down the mine instead of by season on the land, the black miners brought the familiar rhythms of tribal dances. The dances lacked the context of occasion which belonged to them, at home. They became adapted to, expressive of the new situation, just as the traditional seed-pod rattles worn around the dancers' ankles became bottle caps. Among the stock-in-trade characters of the dancing mimes, the white Shift Boss appeared. Few white people were aware of their image, integrated into the black man's new world: yet it was there to be seen in the things that made us smile or that we found incomprehensible—the trousers tied with string beneath the knee, for example, which were not recognised as representing the high boots worn by the heroes of the Westerns shown at Compound cinema shows, and the busy arrangement of the paraphernalia of watches, badges, cline rules, pens and pencils worn by Boss Boys, caricature and apotheosis of white red tape.

(On the Mines)

Later, when a student, Helen visits a location and describes the small street of shops, the pullulating dogs and children, the ashes everywhere, the small houses, decently furnished within but ballasted outside with lean-tos made of beaten-out paraffin tins, the patches of vegetables growing beside each house, and the communal water-taps, shared between four or five houses. The pressure of people is evident everywhere. In the oldest parts of the township, “The closeness of the place, the breath-to-breath, wall-to-wall crowding, had become so strained that it had overflowed and all bounds had disappeared” (176). Here there are no fences or windows; people are in rags, gathered around fires in the open, close to a streambank caked in soapsuds, which is both the water supply and washing facility. Mary Seswayo, Helen's fellow student, lives and studies in the township. At this period a few blacks had managed to gain access to education through mission schools, which is the background Helen imagines for Mary. Helen is almost entirely blind to African political development, however. In 1943 the African Congress Youth League was founded by Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu, and Nelson Mandela; three years later the African mine workers' strike closed down nine mines and paralyzed twelve others. It was suppressed with considerable violence. The Lying Days deals directly with this period but the strike is not mentioned.

Conditions in the mines in South Africa remained arduous. Men worked in intense heat in a crouching position, and between 1933 and 1966 nineteen thousand gold miners, ninety-three percent of them Africans, died in accidents. As a child, when Helen hears the mine hooter, she assumes it is an accident and comments, in the callous fashion of the child, that “there were very seldom any serious accidents, and few of those that did happen involved white men” (32). The death of a white miner is reported in the Atherton local paper, with full details of his name, occupation, and the family he left behind. However, if “no white man was affected,” the newspaper item would read along the lines of “FATAL FALL OF HANGING. There was a fall of hanging at the East Shaft of Basilton Levels, East Rand at 2 p.m. yesterday. Two natives were killed, and three others escaped with minor injuries” (32).

The African miners were housed in single-sex compounds of between three thousand and six thousand men, sleeping on concrete bunks or homemade beds in dormitories, outside which they also ate, no other facilities being provided. The mines themselves were run on military lines, with white, shift bosses and compound managers commanding underground “boss boys” who controlled the mass of laborers. Although the men worked together they could often communicate only with great difficulty:

Their relationship was defined in phrases from THE MINER'S COMPANION IN ENGLISH, AFRIKAANS, SESUTO AND MINE KAFFIR: Come here. Go there. What is your name? To what tribe do you belong? Do you understand mines? I don't want a loafer. I cannot afford to feed and pay loafers.

(On the Mines)

Helen's father regrets that, as the Assistant Secretary, unlike the underground people, the shift bosses, mine captains, and surveyors, he has no “mine boys” to use in his garden. When Helen returns to Atherton later in the novel, she is astonished at how it has changed. The old one-storey shops have been replaced by a department store, the bank has a bright steel grille and Ionic columns, the grocer's has become a limited company with a five-storey building, selling hardware and crockery. South Africa has prospered economically on the basis of its black labor force. On the way back to Johannesburg, on the eve of the May Day strike, Helen notes the newspaper headline “STRIKE SITUATION: POLICE PREPARED FOR TOMORROW” (312) and realizes that what she had taken to be football rosettes worn by many of the blacks at the railway station were Freedom Day badges, supporting the strike.

THEMES COMPARED TO EVENTS OF THE DAY

The major theme that connects the novel to the events of Gordimer's time is the beginning of apartheid. In the 1930s a group of Afrikaners, led by D. F. Malan, a Dutch Reformed Minister, founded the Purified National Party and in 1938 took over celebrations of the Great Trek centennial, describing the Voortrekkers in heroic terms, including their opposition to the mixing of races. In 1948 Malan's Afrikaner National party won the elections, despite the fact that Afrikaners were only twelve percent of the population, and the apartheid era began. Apartheid (separateness) was essentially a political program of separate development founded on the idea that Africans were a distinct subspecies of humanity, permanently inferior to white people, and with no historical claim to the land of South Africa. Twelve African leaders called immediately for African unity and supported the ANC Youth League proposal to engage in mass struggle. The battle, which was to end only in 1994 with the first free and fair elections in South Africa's history, had started.

Many Nationalists had been openly pro-German during World War II, and Jews were banned from party membership; extremist Afrikaner organizations such as the Ossewa-Brandwag (“Ox-wagon Sentinel”) and the New Order had explicitly supported Nazi ideology. German radio broadcasts in Afrikaans had been beamed to South Africa. As a result the opposition, both Left and Liberal, saw their role as part of the wider struggle against fascism, particularly as a whole series of repressive legal measures came into force. In 1949 the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act made marriage between whites and members of other racial groups illegal. Gordimer describes the effects in The Lying Days as Paul tells Helen of mixed race couples arrested in their beds and of couples who have lived together for years being suddenly forced apart. In 1950 the Population Registration Act classified everyone by race, as white, colored, Indian, and African, though later even more nonsensical groupings were introduced, including “Other Coloured” and “Griqua” and according the status of “honorary whites” to the Japanese. A central tenet of apartheid was that whites formed a single nation (whether they spoke English or Afrikaans) whereas blacks were from many different nations. In the same year the Immorality Act (with its various sequels) made interracial sex illegal. The Group Areas act divided urban areas into racially exclusive zones, and the Suppression of Communism Bill was introduced. In the novel Edna Schiller is infuriated not to be on one of the lists of those who were named as Communists and informed that they would be prosecuted. The Group areas act and its sequels effectively evicted blacks from any desirable areas, now reserved for whites, and was part of a group of measures designed to confine blacks to poor nonurban areas, as a pool of labor to be used and then immediately returned to what eventually became ten “homelands.” Hendrik Verwoerd became Minister of Native Affairs. The Nationalists were unashamedly racist and believed in European supremacy in South Africa. There was no longer even a pretense at “trusteeship,” or guardianship, of blacks. “Baasskap,” or boss-ship, was the order of the day, and its symbol became the sjambok, or ox-hide whip. Politicians posed, unashamedly clutching a sjambok, for photographs. One of the protests, a stayaway mounted against the Suppression of Communism Bill, took place on May Day in 1950, the day on which Helen witnesses the police killing of a black protester in a township. The growth of African nationalism and separatism in the period is exemplified in the characters of Sipho (a believer in passive resistance) and Fanyana (a less idealistic political activist.)

What is particularly distinctive in Gordimer's treatment of these events is the fashion in which she creates the texture of the time through the reactions of the characters, who lack the hindsight from which the contemporary reader benefits. Before the election takes place, Helen and her leftist and liberal friends are quite unworried. They joke about the chances of Malan being defeated in the Nationalist stronghold of Calvinia (235). None of them believe that the Nationalists have any chance of coming to power. Laurie demurs, though he resists the suggestion that he enter the competition run by a local paper to predict the outcome of the election and name Malan as the next prime minister. The others cannot believe that the voters will forget how the Nationalists cheered on the Germans during the war, but in the end, “Laurie was our prophet and not our clown” (255), as Helen comments ruefully. Helen describes the effect of the Nationalist victory:

the moral climate of guilt and fear and oppression chilled through to the bone, almost as if the real climate of the elements had changed, the sun had turned away from South Africa, bringing about actual personality changes that affected even the most intimate conduct of their lives.

(256)

Helen makes this observation during the second summer after the Nationalist victory. The novel bears witness to the slow realization of what apartheid was going to mean, the initial lack of reaction of the English-identified whites, and the beginnings of black and white opposition. At first the whites have a sense of unreality as they contemplate “the flat-faced, slit-mouthed Dr. Malan staring back from under the caption PRIME MINISTER” (255) from the television screen. They expect calamity and are surprised when nothing much happens:

what we were going to get was much slower, surer, and more terrible: an apparent sameness in the conduct of our lives, long periods when there was nothing more to hurt us than hard words in Parliament and talk of the Republic which we had laughed at for years.

(255)

A wearying series of battles then begins, over apartheid in transport and buildings, the Suppression of Communism Bill, the language ordinance separating Afrikaans and English-speaking children in the schools, the removal of colored voters from the common electoral roll, and the setting aside of the Supreme Court judgment that made this act illegal. Helen notes each of these measures was passionately debated in Parliament with the United Party and the Labour Party forming the opposition, but each battle was immediately lost to the government. Helen's friends are politically conscious and more aware than most South Africans of the reactionary nature of the new regime, yet, even they never show much concern over events. Helen is surprised to discover that as long as political change does not impinge on their personal lives, people's happiness is unaffected:

If the change of government throws you into a concentration camp, then your preoccupation with politics will equal that you might normally have had with your wife's fidelity or your own health. But if your job is the same, your freedom of movement is the same, the outward appearance of your surroundings is the same, the heaviness lies only upon the extension of yourself which belongs to the world of abstract ideas.

(255)

In this respect, however, Paul and Helen are slightly different from many of their friends. Because Paul's job takes him into the black townships, he spends most of his time in the black world and is aware of the contrast between its poverty and squalor and the gleaming, modern, white city of Johannesburg. The Africans themselves, in Helen's view, had had so little to hope for under the preceding government that the new regime has merely substituted one kind of despair for another, removing the velvet glove from the preexistent iron hand. The humiliations steadily intensify:

In Parliament cabinet ministers spoke of them as “Kaffirs.” There was continual official talk about the preservation of the “purity of white races of South Africa” and the “sacred duty of the Afrikaner nation to keep itself unsullied.” The Africans had always been kept outcast; now they began to feel it, to feel themselves outcast in their very features and voices.

(258)

While laws and statutes may go over the heads of the population, “shame does not need the medium of literacy” (258). Helen sees that, at the beginning of the process by which apartheid was instituted, the “tightening-up of discriminatory devices” is not much more than a slow intensification of previous oppressions.

The way in which the new things are done, however, is massively offensive. When the Nationalists introduce a ban on mixed marriages and interracial sex, for example:

there was something shameful in the manner in which the police hunted up their prosecutions, shining torches in upon the little room where an old coloured woman lay asleep with the old white man with whom she had lived quietly for years; prying and spying upon what has always been the right of the poorest man to sleep in peace with his woman.

(258)

Paul knows the couple and tries to help the woman, who is destitute without the man's pension; he hears a full account of the arrest from the neighbors, who howl with laughter as the woman tries to hide under the bed and refuses to come out without her headcloth. Hooligans begin to play jokes on people by climbing up to their windows and shining a torch on them in the night. Paul's colored clerk worries that his wife (whose light skin was previously a source of pride for him) may now be considered to be white and taken away from him. When the lights of car headlights outside shine on Helen and Paul, she feels a sudden shame, draws away from Paul, and suddenly remembers an embarrassing moment with the innocent Joel, when she found a used condom stuck to her shoe: “The only difference was that this time, unlike the real time that it happened, we were not safe from disgust” (261). The public shamefulness of the political situation begins to wash into even the private corners of white lives.

Paul's previous alliances with township black leaders now crumble away, reflecting the growing movement among Africans of noncooperation with whites. Although the movement begins in a semi-official fashion in the policy of the Communists and the leaders of African Nationalism, it becomes a general distaste among blacks for any kind of interaction with whites. Division is also the result of the pressure on segregated housing. Paul has to deal with the case of a colored family evicted by an Indian; the Indian cannot find anywhere for his brother's family to go. Meanwhile, opposite Paul's flat a new building for whites is going up, slowly blocking off the sun from Helen's balcony, bringing a chill to the air. No new houses have been built for blacks in Johannesburg for seventeen years; the old “locations” have overflowed into squatters' camps. In the housing department, where Paul works, there are eleven hundred houses for twenty thousand families. Though Paul goes on trying to help, studying methods of passive resistance and pouring over legal books, it is clear that he will soon lose his job. The head of his department has already questioned him twice about his activities. The government lumps together as “communists” all those who are opposed to its views.

The culminating event in Helen's awareness of the politics of her era is the 1950 May Day strike. That evening, rioting breaks out and is suppressed by the police, leaving eighteen blacks dead and thirty wounded. Sixteen of the dead are shot by the police; two are burned to death in a movie theater that had been set on fire. Helen reports the events in a factual, dispassionate tone:

A crowd attacked the bus depot, and another police squad, hurrying to the scene, met with a road block and was stoned. The police got out of their cars and fired. At Orlando trains were stoned. On the Reef, at Brakpan, a thousand demonstrated outside the location, screaming and shouting, and were dispersed by a baton charge of a hundred police.

(322)

Her own experience in the township is treated rather differently, however, as she sees a crowd demolishing a telephone box, the police arriving and being stoned, and suddenly:

There were more shots, shots and their echo, clearing a split second of silence in the space of the retort. The man with the stones looked up with a movement of surprise, as if someone had tapped him on the shoulder. Then he fell, the stones spilling before him. I knew I had never seen anyone fall like that before.

(326)

Gordimer is careful to maintain a distinction between the Helen who sums up the events of that night, the death toll and the details, which she clearly learned at a later date, from the Helen who experiences, who is right in the thick of events, shuddering with horror.

THEMES COMPARED TO OTHER LITERATURE

A writer's era is, of course, as much literary as political. During Gordimer's youth the only South African novelists widely known were Olive Schreiner, Pauline Smith, Sol Plaatje, and Sarah Gertude Millin. One novelist, Joy Packer, developed a large European following between the 1950s and 1970s, essentially writing naively racist romances for women readers. As far as more serious writing was concerned, John Cooke has noted the vigor of South African publishing after World War II, when a clutch of important novels appeared: Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country (1948); Peter Abrahams' Mine Boy (1946); Dan Jacobson's A Dance in the Sun (1955); Phyllis Altman's The Law of the Vultures (1952); and Harry Bloom's Episode in the Transvaal (1955).⁴ In 1956 a conference of writers and critics, meeting at the University of the Witwatersrand, heard descriptions of a flourishing literary scene, from William Plomer and Alan Paton among others. By the early 1960s, however, Gordimer was almost the only member of the group to be producing fiction in South Africa. The only other novelists to have maintained a longterm concern with their era in South Africa are Es'kia Mpahlele, André Brink, and J. M. Coetzee. Alan Paton came back into the literary world with Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful only in 1982, his first novel in thirty years.

Yet, the end of apartheid has drawn attention back to its beginnings. One novel that invites comparison with The Lying Days is J. M. Coetzee's memoir, Boyhood: Scenes From Provincial Life (New York: Viking, 1997). Coetzee spent the years from 1948 to 1951 in rural Worcester, South Africa, as a child from an Afrikaans background attending English-medium classes at a time of raging Afrikaner nationalism, when laws were being passed to prevent Afrikaners bringing up their children to speak English. As an adolescent in Cape Town, a Protestant enrolled in a Catholic high school with Jewish and Greek friends, he felt himself marginalized, on the outside of a culture that was busily defining itself as the core of South African society. Boyhood is an account of his life in Worcester and as a teenager in Cape Town, with major events concentrated between 1950 and 1953. The background is that of the early years of the Malan government and the family's slide from middle-class respectability to poverty. Although autobiographical, it is told in the third person and in the present tense. Because it is in the present tense, it does not introduce an adult irony to complicate the boy's innocence, in contrast to the double-voiced quality of Helen's narration. It is more confessional, marked by a sense of fiercely guarded, shameful secrets. Like Helen, the boy hero is both uncomfortable with the racial prejudices of South Africa, yet also mouths them unthinkingly on occasion. Like Helen, he feels that he will never live up to his mother's all-consuming love and tries to harden his heart against her.

Gordimer, however, wrote almost contemporaneously with the events described. Coetzee writes retrospectively and is part of a tendency in recent South African fiction to use a child at the center of a novel of confession. At times this can be a means to self-exoneration. A child is always implicitly innocent and unaccountable for the events lived through. Mark Behr's first-person novel, The Smell of Apples (published as Die Reuk van Appels in 1993, then in English in New York by St. Martin's Press in 1995) is also told in the present tense by an eleven-year-old boy growing up in an Afrikaner family in South Africa. The young boy is slowly lured into participation in South African racism, and the reader sees how easily this happens. Its author confessed in 1996 to being a paid informer for the South African security forces while ostensibly running a left-wing student organization. The novel, unlike Coetzee's memoir or Gordimer's fiction, thus becomes something of an explanation, or apology for prejudice. In contrast, Coetzee describes deliberately trapping his brother's hand in a grinder (half of a finger had to be amputated) but makes no attempt at easy explanation or justification. The truthfulness of his account is enhanced by the refusal to insert it into a set pattern or mold, just as Helen recognizes that to give a truthful account of her life means not eliding its mysteries, disjunctures, and uncertainties, not smoothing out its randomness and contingency.

Where Coetzee and Behr offer accounts of the development of the Afrikaner adolescent, the black perspective is offered in several novels and autobiographies that have appeared in recent years, particularly from women writers. Following the end of apartheid, the preoccupation in South Africa has been as much with the past as with the future, from the official and public inquiries into events of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to the publication of a host of autobiographies, autobiographical novels, life stories, and academic accounts of the apartheid years.⁵ Paradoxically, the more overtly political the account, the more closely it tends to adhere to generic conventions, tending to treat the woman's life either as exemplary or as subordinate to the political purpose to be served by the text. Representative examples include Mamphela Ramphele's Across Boundaries: The Journey of a South African Woman Leader (1996), an account of a woman activist within the Black Consciousness movement; Miriam Moleleki's This is My Life (1997), also the story of a political activist; Phyllis Ntantala's A Life's Mosaic (1992), an account of life in South Africa between the 1920s and the 1960s and the life of exile afterwards, written by a member of an African elite; and Nothemba Ngcwecwe's Not the End of the World (1997), published by a writer from a much more deprived background. Ngcwecwe dwells upon the problems of women whose lives are regulated by African customary law and who, therefore, live as legal minors in an enforced dependency, which makes Helen Shaw's individual domination by her mother appear utterly insignificant. Black South African women's struggles against apartheid were often described as the struggle of mothers, attempting to gain the right to care for their families on their own terms. As a result, however, the construction of images of the strong black woman tends to obscure the realities of a subordinated position. Feminist analysis of the relation between women's oppression and the family have tended to be based on Western middle-class women and nuclear families, like the Shaws. African women's accounts offer a needed corrective. Noni Jabavu's The Ochre People: Scenes from a South African Life (1963) concerns a visit back to South Africa in the 1950s after schooling in England, and focuses upon the different sense of “family” in a rural, traditional milieu. Mamphela Ramphele also complicates feminist readings of life writing in her account of the struggle for gender equality within a movement that was itself struggling against political oppression.

On the other hand, leaving family behind in the quest for an active life may have its own pitfalls. In the 1980s the focus in South African autobiographies on community tended to diminish the personal individualized “I,” but not all autobiographical writers avoid this individuation. Sindiwe Magona's To My Children's Children (1990), spanning the years from 1943 to 1966, and Forced to Grow (1992), which spans the years between 1966 and 1984, engage with the transformation of a rural girl into a professional woman, but as a result Magona comes close to envisaging the self purely as an economic unit, exactly the sense of the self that Ludi refuses to contemplate in The Lying Days. In contrast, Elsa Joubert's The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena (1980) a novel written in the form of an autobiography, with both a first and a third person narrator, gives more sense of a woman's life story as organized around the roles of daughter, granddaughter, wife, and mother.

Notes

1. Nadine Gordimer, preface to On the Mines, by David Goldblatt (Cape Town: Struik, 1973), n.p.

2. Ibid.

3. Charles Van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand (Longman, 1982), p. i.

4. John Cooke, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: Private Lives/Public Landscapes (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), p. 2.

5. On South African autobiography see Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee, eds., Negotiating the Past; the Making of Memory in South Africa (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1998); Martin Trump, Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1990); Maria Olaussen, “Imagined Families In South African Women's Autobiographies.” Unpublished paper, Department of English, Abo Akademi, Finland. Forthcoming in Erickson, Baaz, Maria and Mai Palmberg eds., Same and Other: Negotiating African Identity in Cultural Production (Uppsala: The Nordic African Institute, 2001).