[In the essay below, Lomberg traces Gordimer's changing attitudes towards life and love in her short fiction.]

In the introduction to her Selected Stories, Nadine Gordimer suggests that the process of composition is, for her, like burrowing into a warren 'where many burrows lead off into the same darkness but this one may debouch far distant from that'. An instance of that is provided by the development of two stories in A Soldier's Embrace into the novella which is the title story of Something Out There.

One of the stories which provides intimations of the subsequent 'exploration' in Something Out There is 'Oral History'. In that, a chief, trying to protect his village from attack by reporting 'guerrillas' in it, finds that the 'arrests' that were to be made become instead an army attack which devastates the village. There is the cruel irony that he had taken his bicycle with him when he went to make his report, and that it 'would have been lost if it had been safe in the kitchen when the raids came'. Gordimer dryly reveals the chief's suicide through the remark 'No one knows where the chief found a rope, in the ruins of his village.' There is a notable intimation of perseverance and endurance, though, in the concluding report of the return of the surviving villagers and their gradual rebuilding of the village.

In terms of style and foreshadowing, 'A Lion on the Freeway' is a more interesting preparation for Something Out There. It has an aura of dreaminess, reflecting the half-sleep in which thoughts and reminiscences run through the narrator's mind. The development proceeds by association and accretion. The 'Open up!' develops threateningly into 'Open your legs' which leads to a recollection of love-making 'once . . . near the Baltic' thence to lovemaking 'heard . . . once through a hotel wall'. Parallel to that progression, and interspersed with it, is a progression related to the lion and its roar, a progression which culminates in the fusion of the sound of the lion—'that groan straining, the rut of freedom bending the bars of the cage'—with that of a group of black strikers, 'A thick prancing black centipede with thousands of wavy legs advancing'. There is a further intimation, through a device used more than once in the story—'(no spears anymore, no guns yet)'—that the strikers, like the lion, are waiting to reclaim their country.

Those earlier explorations develop into the stories in Something Out There which deal with the socio-political and socio-economic situation of apartheid South Africa. In 'A City of the Dead, A City of the Living', one of the protagonists (Moreke's wife) reflects on the young man they are sheltering: 'You only count the days if you are waiting to have a baby or you are in prison.' That curious combination is indicative of the circumstances by which the man has come into their lives. Were he a relative, even a distant one, they would have been obliged to give him shelter; but This one is in trouble', and his claims on them are only justifiable in that 'If you are not white, you are the same blood here'.

While providing a detailed picture of township life with its privations and its special sense of community in the midst of poverty, together with a high rate of infant mortality (indicated by the otherwise unnecessary qualification that this is the woman's fifth 'living' baby), and the unhygienic conditions and multiple uncertainties, Gordimer traces the progress of events in parallel with the woman's private thoughts and feelings about the man who is 'in trouble'. The woman's ambivalence is shown to be moving towards self-protection in a manner similar to that of the chief in 'Oral History'. The wish not to be involved is reflected in her thoughts: 'how long does it take for a beard to grow, how long. How long before he goes away'. In the end, it is fear of being punished for complicity, an unuttered tendency towards self-preservation, that drives her to report the man's presence to the police. Even then, she has mixed feelings: 'I don't know why I did it. I get ready to say that to anyone who is going to ask me, but nobody in this house asks'. Judgement of her action is, however, clearly provided by Ma Radebe, the shebeenkeeper, who, when she next saw the woman in the street, 'gazed at her for a moment, and spat'. That terse conclusion emphasizes the fact that, however much may go unspoken, there is no question where loyalties should lie.

The ambivalence of Moreke's wife parallels the uncertainty of the chief in 'Oral History'. He had worried that his report to the army 'was not coming out as he had meant nor being understood as he had expected'. Moreover, the villagers 'never saw' but only 'heard the government say on the radio' that the strangers the chief was reporting committed atrocities to force people to connive with them. More importantly, various aspects of these stories build towards the novella, 'Something Out There', in which there is a much fuller treatment of a general anxiety about something numinous about which people hazard an identity only so that fear might be made manageable.

The 'beast' in the novella is more menacing than the 'lion' on the freeway because it is not just a threatening, misunderstood sound in the night; it has attacked, and continues to do so. The city's inhabitants have a range of suppositions about the nature of the 'beast', and there is the predictable 'embroidering' which takes place when opinion needs to be bolstered by details which will make supposition convincing. Encounters (and purported encounters) with the 'something' outline that process by which a creature or event moves from the real to the surreal, and thence into legend. While tracing that progression, Gordimer also provides cameo portraits of various social groups—from the correspondents of a Sunday newspaper who use the opportunity to air their own gripes, to a group of medical specialists out playing golf, there of whom decide the mystery creature is 'one of the black out-ofworks'. In all these instances Gordimer uses the sightings as a basis for some cutting social criticism, implicit in some cases, more direct in others. Mrs Naas Klopper (whose husband has rented a farm to the two white members of a four-person guerrilla group) equates accounts of the predator with 'good old stories of giant pumpkins'. Important things happening in the world are considered an irritation at best, compared to the incidents of 'normal' life. For the four medical specialists, their Thursday afternoon golf game is more important than their patients. A more general selfishness is reflected in the lack of concern of people in one neighbourhood when the creature no longer appears to be active there: 'So long as it attacked other people's cats and dogs, frightened other people's maids—that was other people's business'. The most absurd response is that the animal 'wouldn't have had to live the life of an outlaw' if it had stuck to 'its proper station in life'. That remark has obviously been transferred from its application to people who, under the apartheid system, are expected to do just that.

The remark may also be seen as applicable to the four guerrillas. In a pattern akin to that of 'A Lion on the Freeway', their story, beginning with Charles' and Joy's renting of the farm from Naas Klopper, is carefully interwoven with the reports of, and reactions to, the various attacks of the animal. An interesting reaction (and one that is typical of Gordimer's style) comes after the creature has ripped the flesh from a leg of meat hung in the window of his house by a sergeant who interrogates political detainees. The sergeant's superior says that the man's wife ought to learn to handle a gun because 'Next time it might be more than a monkey out there in the yard'. That casual, reasonable remark is one of a kind that Gordimer adroitly deploys; its dramatic irony subsists in the fact that we know that there are four people out there who are planning an attack on a power plant. After the attack, there is irony as well in Mrs Klopper's providing a degree of anonymity while trying, conversely, to identify the black man she had seen at the farm: 'Just like any other black—young, wearing jeans that were a bit smart, yes, for a farm boy'. There is irony of a slightly different sort in one of those small details that are inimitably part of Gordimer's style: in a police photograph of various captured weapons (some of them thrown in 'for added effect, as a piece of greenery gives the final touch to a floral arrangement'), Mrs Klopper sees 'her own biscuit tin, in which she had made the offering of rusks' to Charles and Joy.

While the stories discussed so far show an interplay of ideas and style and reflect one of Gordimer's persistent concerns—chronicling life in her country and the changes that evolve over the years—other stories reveal more strikingly her experimentation with new structures and approaches. In 'For Dear Life', the normal transitional and/or signalling phrases have been stripped away. The point of perception switches from one narrator to another so that only the form of expression and the nature of the concerns expressed are left to indicate to the reader that this is the independent narrator, the pregnant woman previously observed in the story, the father of that woman, and so on, down to the child itself ('Behind me, the torn membranes of my moorings') emerging from the womb.

As Gordimer has herself observed, there are some stories she has 'gone on writing, again and again'. Prominent among those must be Gordimer's repeated treatment of love affairs. While the primacy of the body is something she has spoken of as applying particularly to adolescence and early adulthood, she treats love relationships at many stages of life, and her heroes and heroines are usually engaged in extra-marital affairs. As with Bray in A Guest of Honour or Liz in The Late Bourgeois World, a change of partner seems to be an inevitable concomitant of developing changes in attitudes and beliefs. As in her other work, Gordimer is constantly in search of the truth about things; not, however, in an abstract manner, but as it emerges in real situations, with all their distinctive colour and flavour and (often) incongruity, paradox and irony as well. The truths that emerge in her fiction are more accurate and significant than 'the truth' that can supposedly only emerge from non-fiction.

Truths about love relationships in these two collections range over a span from adolescence to middle-age, and arise from reminiscences as well as from more immediate events. The narrator of 'A Need for Something Sweet' looks back at an affair of his youth with an older woman who represented an adolescent fantasy lover. He harks back to it from the position of a settled middle-aged man who has just had 'a few words with the wife'. It is an instance of sloughing off something considered to have been a minor aberration of one's 'salad days': 'Who would believe a clean youngster could get mixed up with a woman who would end up like that'. That sort of ex post facto rejection takes different forms in the two parts of 'Town and Country Lovers', but reflects an important aspect of Gordimer's thinking about the way our lives develop, whether in terms of our love affairs in particular or our values and beliefs in general.

Another good pointer to Gordimer's view of love comes in 'Time Did' when the narrator speaks of the 'great confessional of our early intimacy . . . that, paradoxically, real life familiarity (in marriage, for example) seals off'. She also remarks of her lover: 'your delight in the variety of my sex delighted me, too. How many men really love women?' There is a certain familiarity about this narrator which, combined with the structure of the piece, reveals Gordimer reworking aspects of a previous work. With her assertiveness, occasional hesitation, and petulant defensiveness, she reminds one of Liz in The Late Bourgeois World. This new venture into the 'burrows', however, has several distinct qualities. The opening, without even a 'whistle' of introduction, is cryptic: we have no idea who the narrator is, nor the person being quoted. More than with Liz, the focus here is on a dying relationship. The narrator notes that her lover is seeing in her 'the final softening of the flesh that is coming to you as a man one day, your death as a lover of women'. Moreover, as 'Time' has its way, 'the schema of cosmetics . . . chalks a face that no longer exists'. This 'truth' is a variation on the more general one of the various changes that take place over the course of our lives, and which everyone who is honest must acknowledge.

'A Hunting Accident' also provides a variation on the theme of love affairs. In the midst of the actual hunt—finely described by Gordimer—we become aware that Christine is engaged in her own 'hunt'; the reference to 'her' photographer in the opening line making her possessive attitude clear, a point reinforced in subsequent lines. She is later concerned that the photographer's behaving as if he were 'incredibly staid' would 'give other people the wrong impression of the kind of man she chose'. The quietly affectionate quality of that relationship bears certain resemblances to that of 'Sins of the Third Age', in which the subdued tone reflects the mostly muted, nervous quality of the protagonists' responses to each other and to their situation. The only indication of their identity and why they had eventually decided to settle in a 'fifth country' (Italy) is revealed in the simple statement that he had 'a number branded on his wrist', just as the harrowing ordeals they must have experienced are intimated by the statement that her hands 'retained no mark of the grubbing—frost-cracked and bleeding—for turnips, that had once kept her alive'. Like their existence, which was that of 'a well-made life' which 'did not happen; was carefully planned', 'Sins of the Third Age' is neatly arranged and subdued in tone, culminating in the toneless 'there had never been a sign of what had been found, and lost again'. He had had an affair, a fact he conveyed to her by simply saying, 'I've met somebody', which remark made them 'two new people' who 'didn't know what subject they had in common'. In the same matter-of-fact way, he subsequently announces the end of the affair by saying, 'I gave up that person'.

Gordimer takes a very different approach in 'Crimes of Conscience', where the relationship, which seems to develop naturally from a casual acquaintance, is misunderstood. There is an echo of the effect that the man's announcement of his affair in 'Sins of the Third Age' had on his relationship with his wife when the narrator of 'Crimes of Conscience' likens one development to that of a situation in which an 'old friend suddenly becomes something else . . . as if a face is turned to another angle.' In this case, however, on the 'next day . . . nothing's changed'. Unknown to her, this new friend has not become 'something else' but has been so all along. Like Harriet in 'A Correspondence Course', this narrator appears to be one of those young whites who have been 'dumped by their elders with the deadly task of defending a life they haven't chosen for themselves'. Thus, she feels she has been giving her lover 'a course in the politics of culture', whereas her attempts to reveal aspects of her earlier life (such as her time in prison) have simply been feeding him with the information he is meant to get out of her, his purpose becoming clear when he reveals, 'I've been spying on you'. While the relationship is similar to others Gordimer presents—she had, for example, lived for three years 'with someone who, in the end, went back to his wife'—the difference—relative guilelessness encountering the deception of an agent of the secret police—is a reflection of the developing social and political situation in South Africa between the time of the earlier and later stories in the two collections.

'Blinder' provides an interesting contrast to relationships in other stories since the principal relationship here is between an employer and a servant. Although there is never any question of the difference in status—the usual social distance reinforced by the fact that the employer is white and the employee black—there is an aura of mutual affection and symbiosis to the relationship. The focus on the maid produces some of the acute observations that are typical of Gordimer: the human body is like the sea, 'into which no abuse could be thrown away' since it would be certain to be 'cast up again'; and the maid, who regularly goes on a binge (the 'blinder' of the title) has a face 'ennobled with the bottle's mimesis of the lines and shadings of worldly wisdom'. Gordimer also comments on two important aspects of the South African situation, one applicable anywhere, the other peculiar to that place: the poor are people 'to whom things happen but who don't have the resources to make things happen, don't have the means, either, to extricate themselves from what has happened'—'black' and 'poor' being largely synonymous in this situation. The other point is that there is no resentment between Ephraim's wife and his lover, Rose, the maid; instead, there is acceptance of the fact that the socio-economic circumstances of apartheid have made it necessary for a man, far from home, to take a temporary partner.

Those circumstances are also important in the two stories which contain the fullest treatment of the development and termination of love affairs, the two parts of 'Town and Country Lovers'. The title, sounding almost like a fictional relative of Home and Garden Magazine, belies the outcomes of the relationships. In both cases the couple end up in court, but not because they have done anything that, in almost any other country, would have led to legal action. In the second of the two stories, the relationship between Paulus (the farmer's son) and Thebedi (the daughter of one of the black farm workers) is lovingly developed from the early exchange of gifts between them to the sexual relationship that seems as inevitable as it is natural, and—unnaturally—illegal. Gordimer chronicles the early white lies they tell to cover up the growing relationship, and Paulus' adolescent exaggerations about his life at boarding school. Part of the dénouement is prepared for early on when 'a boy in the Kraal called Njabulo . . . said he wished he could have bought her a belt and earrings'—gifts Thebedi had received from Paulus. When Paulus eventually discovers that he is obviously the father of the baby Thebedi has borne, there is uncertainty about what Thebedi heard when Paulus went alone into the hut where the baby was. When she is first questioned, an apparent confusion of feelings leads her to claim that 'she saw the accused pouring liquid into the baby's mouth' and that he had 'threatened to shoot her'. Her testimony is different when the case eventually comes to trial, and she has had another baby, by Najabulo, by then her husband. Clearly recovered from her early dumbstruck horror, Thebedi dismisses the affair as 'a thing of our childhood'. The male protagonist of the first part of 'Town and Country' lovers had dismissed his affair by saying that even in his own country it was 'difficult for a person from a higher class to marry one from a lower class'. The ironies here are obvious.

Thebedi's dismissive remark is important because it relates to an important aspect of Gordimer's philosophy. The remark is echoed at the conclusion of 'You Name It' when the narrator reflects on the situation of the illegitimate child she bore and which her husband still supposes is his. She observes that there must be other children 'whose real identity could be resuscitated only if their mother's youth could be brought back to life again'. These remarks, together with that of the narrator in 'A Need for Something Sweet', clearly reflect Gordimer's belief that, as we grow, we change, even to the extent that we come, in later life, to regard our youthful personalities as those of different people.

Gordimer's persistent concern to capture in words the truths of love and life involves a process of re-exploration, and of attempts to find new structures by which she can best reflect the ideas that emerge from her own examination of life. Her development as an artist, then, runs parallel with the development of her views on love and life. Common to both is that fidelity to experience results in changes without which there can be no true growth. We are not products of some form of Freudian determinism, whereby what we become in later life always has a referent in childhood experience. Instead, if we are honest, we must acknowledge that we keep changing as we grow older, and our responses to life, our attitudes and values, alter as we affirm the changes wrought by experience. Moreover, life is full of irony, paradox and incongruity, not something neat and seamless, unless we choose to ignore deliberately the details which keep disturbing the pattern and which lead to changes such as those reflected in the eventual estrangement of Thebedi and Paulus, from which point their lives will diverge and reflect little of that 'thing of [their] childhood'.

The narrator of A Sport of Nature puts Gordimer's position clearly: 'Only those who never grow up take childhood events unchanged and definitive, through their lives'.