[In the following essay, Githii compares several of Gordimer's earlier and later stories in order to trace her thematic and stylistic maturation.]

Nadine Gordimer's Selected Stories (1975) is a collection of short stories from an author whose eight novels and numerous articles and critical reviews form an impressive body of work extending over thirty years. Her precise observations and impressions of life in South Africa recorded in the stories have won for her a reputation that has grown through the years, while many of the stories have become classics both in literature of Africa and around the world. An examination of the stories will reveal the author's intellectual and moral development, as well as the artistic embodiment of that development. We shall also discover the extent to which the author's background and circumstances determine the shape and scope of her literary work—its content, themes, techniques, and levels of interpretation.

Although Gordimer began writing at the age of nine, partly in response to "a solitary" childhood during which "she read voraciously," at fifteen she published her first story, "Come Again Tomorrow," in November of 1939 in The Forum, a Johannesburg magazine. Ten years later her first collection of stories, Face to Face (1949), was published in Johannesburg and signalled the beginning of a long and distinguished career. Selected Stories is drawn from five collections of stories, and her remarkable talent is immediately apparent in these stories that she selected herself. They show the full range of her imagination and understanding as well as her growth and subsequent development in quality over the years of her writing life. [In the Times Literary Supplement, July 7, 1966] a reviewer has written:

When Nadine Gordimer's short stories first began to appear, she seemed to be the very best kind of New Yorker writer. . . . Although these stories tended to be constructed to a recognizable pattern, her sensibility and perception were already such that one was sure she would eventually burst the bonds. She did in fact achieve freedom and real stature with her first novel A World of Strangers. . . . Since then the stories as well as the novels have taken on new dimensions, though continuing to explore the same areas of experience. Those in Friday's Footprint are faultless in technique, sharper in irony than the earlier ones, but no less controlled.... Miss Gordimer improves steadily and excitingly from book to book.

Arranged in a chronological order that reveals both her personal and artistic development, Selected Stories shows as well Gordimer's awareness that Africa has also changed. The thirty-one stories were written between the ages of twenty and fifty, during a period in which the society itself has aged, sharpened, and grown less amenable. The perspective given to her readers is, therefore, historical—in the sense that the people, situations, relationships, and moments she describes are unique in the history of South Africa. Commenting on this point, Gordimer has said:

I had wanted to arrange the selection in sequence from the earliest to the latest . . . because . . . I myself enjoy following the development of a writer. Then I found that . . . the chronological order turns out to be an historical one. The change in social attitudes unconsciously reflected in the stories represents both that of the people in my society—that is to say, history—and my apprehension of it; in the writing, I am acting upon my society, and in the manner of my apprehension, all the time history is acting upon me.

In Gordimer's stories and, indeed, in all her work, politics, race relations, and the turmoil of blacks and whites trapped in South Africa operate as silent pressure and as subject matter. Against the silent backdrop of forest and veld with its geographic isolation and physical apartness, blacks and whites wait in alienation and despair, suffering patiently. [According to Martin Tucker, in his Africa in Modern Literature, 1967] Gordimer's work bears the air of "the compassionate observer rather than the passionate protestant, and it is filled with themes of understanding, forgiveness and adjustment." Although she never passes judgment and allows her characters to reveal their own motives and desires, her own attitude remains a unique blend of irony, compassion, and disgust. South Africa is undeniably present in all of her work: from the mining towns of Johannesburg with poor black townships, rich white suburbs, and Greek cafes—well documented in the novels—to the carefully chosen, unforgettable characters—bewildered whites, well intentioned liberals, disillusioned Africans, and determined colonialists—who spring to life from her stories. All is set against a magnificient African landscape—from the River Zaire to the Kalahari Desert, which becomes a dominant presence in the stories, emphasizing the wasted beauty of the occupied land.

Many great short-story writers have influenced Gordimer's work. In acknowledging her debt, she has noted [in London Magazine, May, 1963] that the stories of Pauline Smith and Katherine Mansfield "confirmed for me that my own 'colonial' background provided an experience that had scarcely been looked at let alone thought about, except as a source of adventure stories." Other influences include D. H. Lawrence, who changed her "way of looking at landscape and the natural world in general." Henry James made her aware of "form—a single sentence as much as an entire novel." From Hemingway she learned to leave things out, "or, rather, to hear the essential in dialogue." E. M. Forster influenced her handling of human relationships, "later came Conrad; and latest, Camus." Two South African writers, Uys Krige and William Plomer, have also greatly influenced her work. Krige encouraged her to publish in periodicals outside South Africa and provided an introduction to a literary agent in New York. In "Leaving School" she describes the effect of her first meeting with Krige: "that day I had a glimpse of—not some spurious 'artist's life,' but, through the poet's person the glint of his purpose—what we are all getting at." Plomer's short story, "The Child of Queen Victoria." made a deep impression on her, causing her to place it with Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich": "the whole idea of what a story could do, be, swept aside the satisfaction of producing something that found its validity in print."

Gordimer's early stories, when compared with the later ones, reveal some weaknesses which she later corrected: "Some of them were awful," she says of the stories in her first collection, adding that they were "concerned with catching the surface shimmer." The technique is particularly evident in "The Soft Voice of the Serpent" (1948), where a man who has lost a leg and is attempting to regain his faith in a garden identifies with a locust that also has a leg missing, until the locust flies off—he is bitter with the awareness of his own helplessness, for he had forgotten a locust could fly. The theme is a remarkable one, since the garden where he sits parallels the Garden of Eden. The voice of the serpent, the story implies, comes partly from the world of nature but is also an inner voice which whispers to man the condition of his mortality. The "surface shimmer" is evident in the analogies: the flowers shake "in vehement denial" of the man's hopes; a "first slight wind" lifts "in the slack, furled sail of himself"; the firs "part silkily as a child's fine straight hair in the wind"; and the locust's body is compared to "flimsy paper stretched over a frame of matchstick." In "The Soft Voice of the Serpent" Gordimer also uses another technique which she will dispense with later: the ending relies on the technique known as "the bitter bit," a reversal. Her later stories do not depend on surprise endings.

In fifteen of the twenty-one stories, the leading characters are not named, and many of the minor characters are also anonymous. In one story, "The Catch", she discusses the reason why several characters fail to learn each other's names: "So their you's and he's and I's took on the positiveness of names, and yet seemed to deepen their sense of communication by the fact that they introduced none of the objectivity that names must always bring." Five years later, however, names have come to represent closer personal relationships. In "Horn of Plenty" (1956), Mrs. McCleary, an American living in Johannesburg, is exasperated because her African maid, Rebecca, keeps calling her "Madam" instead of "Mrs. McCleary." She longs for the intimate relationship she had had with her Negro maid in New York. Ironically, Rebecca is confused and finds it difficult to understand Mrs. McCleary's insistence: after all, every white person wants to be called either "Madam" or "Master." Based on her previous experiences, Rebecca has learned to keep an enormous emotional distance between herself and her employers.

The early stories show Gordimer's potential development as a short-story writer. From the very beginning, she demonstrated her skill in the use of imagery; "The Kindest Thing To Do" (1945) is an excellent example, although critics agree that it is spoiled by overwriting. The story depends on images of lethargy in both humans and the setting to convey the atmosphere of a hot, lazy afternoon and to portray the dulling of the senses in the main character, a girl. The image of "drooping" is repeated and reinforces the mood of inertia: "Her head, drooping near the drooping, bee-heavy, crumpled paper chalices of the poppies, lifted half-protestingly, her lazy hand brushed the gray specks of insects which flecked the pages of Petrarch's 'Laura in Death.' " The long drawn-out sentences effectively describe the lazy afternoon and the soporific effect of the sun. Some of the later stories in the The Soft Voice of the Serpent (1952) show the extent of Gordimer's progress in making effective use of a single image. In many instances, she allows a single detail to make a revelation on its own, illuminating significant facets of character or emphasizing important points in the story. The recurrent image of the metronome in "A Commonplace Story" (1949), for example, tock-tocking even when it is not needed, emphasizes the monotonous existence of the music teacher. An empty box which once contained an expensive face powder in "La Vie Boheme" (1949) reveals to a younger sister the economic struggle her elder sister is facing. An African child in "Ah, Woe Is Me" (1949) responds to his mother's query as to why he caddies on the golf course instead of going to school by opening his hand to reveal two shining coins.

The first volume also reveals other things about Gordimer's technique. For one thing, it indicates a development in the handling of time. Most of the early stories are limited to a single episode or a very brief span of time. "The Kindest Thing To Do" covers a few minutes during which the girl neglects her dog and another few minutes during which she buries a bird that the dog has mutilated and that she herself has killed. The conclusion of the story shows still another few minutes when the girl is at a party, obviously forgetting what appeared to be a traumatic encounter with death. "The Train from Rhodesia" (1947) lasts only as long as the train makes the short stop during a long journey, while "The Soft Voice of the Serpent" is confined to the single episode described.

"A Present for a Good Girl" (1949) covers a much longer period than any of the previous stories, from September to just before Christmas, during which an old hag of a mother comes to pay installments on an expensive purse for her daughter. The jeweler's shop, the scene in each episode, remains the same as the old woman returns to it, thereby increasing our impression that her daughter must be deserving. When her daughter finally appears, she destroys all our illusions; that the time is Christmas makes for a kind of double irony. From here on, the stories cover longer periods, until they span twenty or thirty years, frequently without flashbacks. They also foreshadow other things to come in Gordimer's technique—the sharp focus at the end of the story and a heavy reliance on contrasts. "The Train from Rhodesia" is a good example of both. The train makes a stop on a long journey, and we are shown the rush of a crowd and venders around the train before focusing on a couple in one of the compartments. The technique is effective, for we are shown the overall picture of the Africans' struggle for existence and their reliance on the train for their livelihood. On the other hand, the sharp focus toward the end implies that the Africans are being exploited by the whites: the woman in the compartment is angry at the man for paying a paltry sum for a work of art, a lion carved in wood, showing a remarkable propensity for detail. Gordimer uses the sharp focus at the end increasingly in her later stories.

In discussing Gordimer's first volume of stories, a critic [Honor Tracy, in New Statesman and Nation, April 11, 1953] has said "her faults of occasional over-writing, of over-charging with emotion, of mild hysteria even, are the faults of immaturity while her splendid gifts are those of a born story-teller." In Six Feet of the Country (1956), her second volume of short stories, Gordimer shows an amazing mastery of the techniques and craft of short-story writing, and her development appears far beyond that of her first volume. Her eye and ear for the conversations and conventions of her surroundings are clearer, more sharply focused, and stylistically perfect; she maintains rigorous and unyielding control over her stories but allows the reader to discover the moral and social truths. Characters are named and more carefully drawn, while similes and metaphors replace other figures of speech and are fully used.

As an artist within but not of the society she writes about, Gordimer seems to have achieved "solitude" without "alienation": "I was able to let myself out and live in the body with others, as well as—alone—in the mind. . . . The tension between standing apart and being fully involved, that is what makes a writer. That is where we begin." Her heightened powers of observation, coupled with an excessive preoccupation and identification with the lives of others, imply an unusual disinvolvement and detachment which have resulted in lifelike characters. The style of writing is highly discursive. Gordimer takes the reader into confidence but excludes the reader from the action—presenting him with information he cannot adjust to suit his reactions. The approach is "more intellectual." The reader accepts the information in trust. Illumination, indignation, or compassion, which involve the reader in the action and make him understand the story, are left for the end, where a single episode pinpoints the meaning of the story: "Her technique is to present her characters for recognition, and then, by a shake of the kaleidoscope as it were, to reveal the different and truer pattern implicit in the behavior" [John Wakeman, in New York Times Book Review, January 10, 1960]. Gordimer's stories can be described as "plotless" because she is "preoccupied not so much with the how, but the why." The technique has proven most effective, despite the fact that she has not always succeeded in conveying the "why."

Of the several stories which exemplify this technique, two in particular are most effective. In "A Bit of Young Life" (1952) Mrs. Maisel vacations with her baby at a beach in Durban and becomes the darling of the hotel. Old ladies, young men—even Ed, a lady's man—all succumb to her charm. After she has returned to Johannesburg, they learn of her adulterous behavior which results in a scandalous divorce. Gordimer uses an omniscient viewpoint, which allows the reader to see Mrs. Maisel through the eyes of the other guests; therefore, the reader is beguiled also. At the end of the story Mrs. Maisel is alone in her flat in Johannesburg, having received the photographs of the baby taken by Ed. She finds the guilt of having duped the hotel guests a greater burden than her infidelity. The story is not about how first impressions are deceiving, as it appears. The final glimpse of Mrs. Maisel and an earlier one where she almost breaks down in tears because Ed insists that she cancel her plane reservation make a profound statement on society. Had Gordimer revealed the impending divorce sooner, the hotel's guests would have become a mob prepared to cast the first stones—they execrate her when they learn of the divorce. Mrs. Maisel is thus prevented from seeking out from among the guests the one person who could have helped her through the crisis she was silently undergoing. The ending implies that Ed would have been that person—which increases her guilt feelings.

A purse snatching by a native in "Is There Nowhere Else Where We Can Meet?" (1949) takes place on a lonely path across the veld. The incident might have become a melodrama of racial confrontation, but Gordimer chooses to show the hurt compassion of the bruised girl as she limps down the street and out of the story: "The poetic imagery of the girl's consciousness—the sky like gray silk, the platinum and black of the burned-over veld, the minute pleasure of the sticky pine frond—all invite us to share the girl's sense of wholeness. It is a sense of wholeness, symmetrical and balanced in design which includes the native when he first appears. . . . he completes the design, orderly and interesting in the girl's musings" [Robert Haugh, in Nadine Gordimer, 1974]. The assault, therefore, is as much a psychic bruise to the girl's sense of order as to her purse and person. The girl's awareness saves the story by sharing with the reader a truer, more universally human experience in a racial situation. The native is elevated above the condescension of the "victim" and shares the sadness of the human dilemma. He becomes "dignified by the girl's vision of his human potentiality," whereas "the role of ' victim,' in the polarized idiom of race conflict, offers no such dignity." It offers, instead, "pathos and sentiment." Although the story is simple, with few events, "it rings like a carillon, true and right in its statement of sorrow and compassion. Among Miss Gordimer's many superb stories, it ranks first in my judgment for its beauty of conception, in lyric imagery, in its deft avoidance of tempting melodrama, in its total, profound achievement" [Haugh, Nadine Gordimer].

Friday's Footprints (1960) and Not For Publication (1965), Gordimer's third and fourth volumes of stories, place her in the ranks of the most distinguished modern writers. Her characters are incisively drawn from many strata of society, linked by their common loneliness and their inability to touch each others' lives except in very rare, fleeting moments. Many of Gordimer's stories portray the isolation of the individual, both black and white—in particular, the alienation among Europeans in her country. A character in her second novel, A World of Strangers (1958), describes it as: "Loneliness; of a special kind. Our loneliness. The lack of a common human identity. The loneliness of a powerful minority." This powerful minority is responsible for the circumstances of nonwhites in their country and shares in a kind of collective guilt. They are made aware of their guilt when they travel to other countries: "That was the first time I encountered what I was soon to recognize as a familiar attitude among South Africans: an unexpected desire to dissociate themselves from their milieu, a wish to make it clear they were not taken in, even by themselves." The method of handling the loneliness, the guilt, and dissociating themselves from their milieu is described by Anna Louw, an Afrikaner persecuted by the government for fighting against apartheid: "you must understand that you are in a country where there are all sorts of different ways of talking about or rather dealing with this thing. One of the ways is not talk about it at all. Not to deal with it at all."

Livingstone's Companions (1971), Gordimer's fifth volume of stories, is made up of "twice-told" tales, for the stories have first appeared in various magazines. The title of the volume is more than just the title of the first story in the collection. Gordimer has commented that everyone who lives and travels in Africa is, in a real sense, a companion of Dr. Livingstone, the famous nineteenth-century explorer of the continent. He, more than anyone else, was responsible for bringing African and European cultures face to face in a confrontation; and as Gordimer says, the problems are still being solved "in reality and irony." These stories focus on character rather than events; they are about human relationships, the ways in which people see one another and see themselves. They involve chance encounters which bring people together in new, unforeseen ways. Several of the stories use relationships among members of families, showing how we reveal ourselves to one another in times of domestic crisis, whether the crisis is, on the surface, trivial or important. Gordimer is always sensitive to minority groups and their problems and has included in this collection stories about Jews, black Africans, and Asiatics living in Africa. In some instances she uses the perspective available to her as a woman; in others, her perspective as a liberal woman. These stories are varied, and they are sometimes ambiguous.

Nadine Gordimer's works do not yield simple themes or interpretations. One can talk about "the loss of innocence, of growing up or of learning about death and the horror of loneliness" or "about love denied where love is most difficult but desperately needed . . . about the violations of love, about injury to one not loved enough . . . undeserved love, given from simple hearts." If her works have a single, predominant theme, it is that "men are not born brothers; they have to discover each other." In the concluding paragraphs of the introduction to Selected Stories, she says:

My time and place have been twentieth-century Africa. Emerging from it, immersed in it, the first form in which I wrote was the short story. I write fewer and fewer stories, now, and more novels, but I don't think I shall ever stop writing stories. . . . A short story occurs, in the imaginative sense. To write one is to express from a situation in the exterior or interior world the lifegiving drop—sweat, tear, semen, saliva—that will spread an intensity on the page; burn a hole in it.

[According to Haugh] Nadine Gordimer's stories "rank with the finest of their kind," "the best of Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, Hemingway, James Joyce's Dubliners. " Although they arise from the African scene, they are not about Africa; they reveal Gordimer's ability to plunge to the depths of human personality and to expose those hidden feelings which we dare not face. Consequently, they have universal appeal.