312
PARTISAN REVIEW
period. Although, as she states in her introduction, the chronological
order of her stories turns out to be an historical one, reflecting the
change in social attitudes in Africa and her apprehension of them, I
can detect little real change or development in her art as a writer.
Unlike Jhabvala's fiction, which has moved from deft social comedy
into something at once bolder and deeper, Gordimer's early stories are
as vivid in characterization, as evocative of milieu and landscape, as her
most recent. Their range is considerable, incorporating the profes–
sional British middle classes, Afrikaaner farmers and townspeople,
Indians, Coloreds, and Black militants. They depict
breat~less
girls
teetering toward political or sexual awareness, strident matrons, lonely
old men, and dumbly suffering servants. Geographically, they venture
beyond the familiar South African terrain into the Rhodesias and the
Congo, into a world of road-builders, crocodile hunters, and naked
tribesmen. Gordimer is an intelligent, sharply observant creator of
what might be called classical short stories, each carefully wrought and
finely finished, each containing its epiphanal moment. As a writer she
is less free than Jhabvala, less willing to cut away connective tissues,
more trammelled by the superego of conscientious explanation. Still,
the completeness with which the potential of each of her pieces has
been realized affords a satisfaction that compensates for the lack of a
flashily exciting surface.
At their best (and the number of successes in this selection is high),
Gordimer's stories prickle the memory, prolonging the pain of missed
connections and failed enterprises in a land that is corroded by terror. I
particularly recommend "Six Feet of the Country" from her second
coll ection, the story of a rather flighty coup le who suddenly find
themselves with a dead African on their hands, and "The Life of the
Imagination" from her latest-the tale, referred to earlier, of the
adulterous wife and the banging door.
ROBERT TOWERS
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