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PARTISAN REVIEW
WHITE WRITERS' BURDEN
HEAT AND DUST.
By
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Harper and Row. $7.95.
SELECTED STORIES.
By
Nadine Gordimer. The Viking Press. $10.00.
These are good books, both of them, by two talented and
prolific writers who have spent much-or all-of their lives in what
used to be known as the Empire. Their now extensive ceuvres-eight
novels, three volumes of stories in the case of Jhabvala; six novels, five
collections of stories by Gordimer-have been written in response to a
fate far more peculiar than that which Henry James assigned to being
an American. While India and South Africa are vastly different
countries with very different experiences of white imperialism, they
both exert similar (and extreme) pressures upon writers who share an
essentially liberal and English-trained sensibility. The private emo–
tions are constantly being overwhelmed by the public, by the historic.
The revolting poverty of India has a way of seeping beneath the doors
and around the windows of the best-appointed living rooms.
In
Africa
no white writer can possibly shield her fiction from the shadows cast by
Dr. Vorster, Ian Smith, Idi Amin, and what they represent. There is no
escape from the topical. Even a very "British" story by Gordimer of
suburban adultery in Pretoria ends with an unlatched door banging in
the wind and the woman sleepily imagining that "black men with
knives in their hands" are about to enter her house and kill her.
They share another unfair burden. Even after fifty years, an
"enlightened" white experience of such countries can scarcely be
rendered in fiction without evoking for the reader, if not for the writer,
the presence of E.M. Forster. His specter is obviously more of a
problem for Jhabvala than for Gordimer, but Gordimer's fiction too is
preoccupied with the liberal's unremitting effort to "connect", with
the frustrations of the Sensitive, with the callous behavior of the
Insensitive, with the embarrassed gatherings-as painful as the famous
" bridge party" in
A Passage to India-where
the white and black (or
"coloured") meet.
