Tales of Taylor and Gordimer
Douglas Dunn
Livingstone's Companions Nadine Gordimer (Cape £1.95) The Devastating Boys Elizabeth Taylor (Chatto and Windus E1.75) Publishers still maintain that short stories are the least saleable of their products. No doubt such an observation is based on real disappointment; readers do seem to prefer their stories in magazines or inexpensive anthologies such as Penguin Modern Stories; but at the same time there is a credible argument for claiming that the genre is' flourishing, and that there are writers such as Nadine Gordimer and Elizabeth Taylor who can succeed in a short story to an extent that few novelists can match in more sustained fictions. If there is one plain reason for this, it's probably because in a short story the writer is under some compulsion to tell a story and produce the kind of satisfaction that many seem intent on avoiding.
Nadine Gordimer's stories are poised over the dilemmas of Africa and its denizens of both shades; the difficulties of married life; and the loneliness of indivi duals faced with the massive intrusions of geography and milieu. The politics of Africa — the apartheid of the South, the situations created by the independence of new states to the North — are frequently a background of these stories, as in 'Abroad' where an Afrikaner-cum-Scot visits his unemployed son in Zambia, or 'Open House' about a woman who can fix meetings between visiting journalists and black intellectuals.
The situations are representative and tense; but there is so much intelligence being brought to bear in her work that revulsion or criticism is never pious or direct but almost invisibly balanced by ironies, by the natural moral of fiction itself. Indignation is constantly being toned down by sympathy for the general human condition. She is always more interested in people and what makes them happy and unhappy than in political moralities, although the political concern is there.
One of the best stories is Inkalamu's Place.' A woman returns to the place of her birth, brought back to the country by independence celebrations as a representative of a UN commission. Her father's neighbour, Inkalamu Williamson, had African wives and mixed-blood children, and was therefore beyond the pale of the neighbouring white settlers. Tremendously rich, he built a tasteless mansion that imitated the grandeur of what he couldn't get in England. The house is a ruin, Inkalamu is dead, the fortune has vanished, and Inkalamu's daughter keeps a beer stall at the end of the long, impressive drive. It is concise as a parable or allegory; the language is scrupulous and poetic, a poetry of actuality, not of the fabulous. This is also true of less atmospheric stories about love and loneliness, such as 'A Third Presence' and The Life of the Imagination' — there is such a ripe, memorable blending of several situations that the effect is a genuine poetic realism, Elizabeth Taylor falls some distance short of Nadine Gordimer's standard; but that is hardly meant as a detraction. Two of her stories, ' Praises' and 'In and Out the Houses' indicate the particular quality of Englishness that stunts her intelligence and encourages a sweetness that tends towards the sentimental, although in fact she has stringency enough to avoid that easy abyss. She is masterly at creating absorbing atmosphere in a small space, especially in ' In and Out the Houses' where an inquisitive, worldly child, a budding gossip, learns the various frustrations of domestic life by visiting the kitchens of neighbours. This is the most amusing story in the book. Others are much more disturbing; 'The Fly Paper' has a gruesome surprise worthy of Roald Dahl. ' The Excursion to the Source," Sisters,' ' Miss A. and Miss M.' offer absolute proof that the kind of characters Miss Taylor does best are middle-ageing, spinsterly, frustrated or repressed types. A similar character is central to the title story; but the story is wasted by unconvincing psychology; it was perhaps too ambitious of her to attempt to write about young West Indian boys, or the African immigrant in 'Tall Boy.' For all that, the book is a positive achievement.
Previous page
