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By Rory Carroll
JOHANNESBURG, AUG. 7. She is a giant of literature and a symbol of free speech, a writer who stayed in South Africa during the apartheid years to fight for liberation by chronicling human relations under an evil system. Her novels earned a Nobel Prize and a reputation as the symbol of restless white conscience. But on Friday, Nadine Gordimer stood accused of censorship and hypocrisy. She was alleged to have killed what would be the first biography about her, because some passages suggested a tart tongue and bitterness about colleagues. A shaken writer Ronald Suresh Roberts spoke here of being shaken by a subject he revered turning on him after a seven-year collaboration that was intended to produce a sympathetic biography of her life and work. The 80-year-old author's objections led to publishers in the United States and Britain dumping the manuscript. ``She is supposed to represent freedom of speech but she wanted complete control, tsar-like, which would have turned the manuscript into pious crap.'' He supplied letters from Bloomsbury Publishing in London and the New York-based Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which had lavished praise on his book but made publication conditional on the approval of Ms. Gordimer, whose novels and short story collections they publish. Both publishers dropped the biography after she objected. Mr. Roberts said the Nobel laureate objected to his quoting a letter from the 1960s in which she revealed disdain for Ruth First, a fellow anti-apartheid activist who was subsequently assassinated by a letter bomb. ``I keep thinking of points to score off the silly b****,'' the letter allegedly said. The biographer also said she was unhappy that he mentioned her feelings about the apparent failure of another writer, Doris Lessing, to congratulate her on the Nobel Prize: ``I suspect she thought it didn't seem sufficiently Olympian.'' In fact Ms. Lessing had congratulated her but the letter had been mislaid. Soured relationship Mr. Roberts, a Trinidad-born writer based in Cape Town, said a close relationship that included lengthy interviews and full access to archives soured when Ms. Gordimer read the manuscript last year and instructed editors in New York and London to amend it. ``I thought she would rise above the occasional discomfort in the manuscript. But it was weird vanity stuff she objected to.'' Contacted by phone at her home in Johannesburg, Ms. Gordimer declined to respond to the allegations. ``I really can't comment on it. I've nothing to say. It's a private matter.'' The author of July's People and Burger's Daughter is celebrated for nuanced dissections of human nature but seldom discusses her private life. Her children live abroad and her husband died in 2001, leaving her alone in a house designed by the Victorian architect Sir Herbert Baker. She had said last year that the biography would be authorised if she liked the final draft. ``My idea of biography is concentration on the work, not whether [the subject] eats eggs for breakfast, or if he's a good lover or not.'' Mr. Roberts said the 700-page tome did focus on her work and was a positive portrait of a literary master. He showed a faxed letter from Ms. Gordimer's daughter, Oriane, which called the manuscript ``very, very interesting and a joy to read.'' A letter from the New York editor, Jonathan Galassi, said he was favourably impressed with its sensitivity, style and insight. ``I don't know anything of her reaction yet, but my own hunch is that she too — once she absorbs the shocks that being written about so intently must give rise to — will... be glad about what you have done.'' After learning that his hunch was wrong, Mr. Galassi wrote again to say that the manuscript was ``in the shallows with no sense of the actual current'' and needed extensive rewriting. Publisher's praise In a letter sent last month, Liz Calder, a publisher at Bloomsbury, said the biography was in many ways a brilliant book. ``For Bloomsbury, however, it is not a publishing proposition, given the fact that it no longer has the authorisation of Nadine Gordimer. I am very sorry about this but I am sure you will understand the problem for Nadine Gordimer's own publishers.'' In a statement Ms. Calder said the contract was for an authorised life of their star writer, and that it was no longer authorised. Books by Ms. Gordimer, whose routine is to write from 9 a.m. to lunchtime on a portable typewriter, sell better abroad than at home and she remains one of the world's leading novelists. Mr. Roberts claimed that the publishers succumbed to ``Faustian leverage'' from a woman who made her name speaking out: ``It's a perverse irony; it's beyond hypocrisy.'' Titled No Cold Kitchen, a pun on the subject's ability to withstand critical or political heat, the book will be published in South Africa early next year but Mr. Roberts said he had yet to find new publishers in the U.S. and Britain.
— © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
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