Nadine Gordimer and the Vices of Biography: A Reply to Hedley Twidle

Books returned by a native messenger must be properly wrapped up.

—apartheid-era library label found inside my second-hand copy of a book written by Gordimer (1956)

Controversial, uneven and occasionally brilliant biography of Gordimer. Use with care.

—Hedley Twidle's annotation assigning No Cold Kitchen as course work in 2010

As Hedley Twidle corrects my "biographical demeanor" (108) and maps my "coordinates" to "capture" my lopsided ethics (94), he expands the contemporary archive of "redhibitory vice," the concept that Patricia J. Williams critiqued from the first page of The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Such vice entitles a purchaser to return defective merchandise, Williams explains, including a slave deemed crazy for constantly running away, or (per Twidle), "a life writing project that slips its moorings and runs out of control" (92).

Twidle uncritically recites the xenophobic Johannesburg Sunday Times insult: I am a "carpetbagger," like those anti-racist Northerners stereotyped as unscrupulous by segregationist Southerners during "the propaganda of history" (Du Bois)¹ that followed the US Civil War. Williams vividly recalls that a London tabloid similarly styled her as "a militant black feminist of slave stock" when she arrived there to deliver the BBC Reith Lectures.²

You cannot tell from Twidle's negligent "coordinates" that Williams is the first name in the acknowledgments of my first book, or that the book exists. Yet Clarence Thomas and the Tough Love Crowd: Counterfeit Heroes and Unhappy Truths critiques Julien Benda's untethered intellectual ethic (19–26), demystifies "evenhandedness" as a partisan tool (194–95 and passim), and prefigures the generative ethics of No Cold Kitchen (7–9 and passim). Twidle performs a very strange lobotomy.

Twidle, moreover, valorizes an ethic that Gordimer disdained. He first rejects (100) and then embraces (111) the self-same liberal humanist trope where "the supposed richness and idiosyncrasy of individual character has been sublimated or traduced by the demands of the political moment." As did Farrar, Straus & Giroux editor Jonathan Galassi before him, Twidle flip-flops like a minor politician.

On biographical method, Twidle cites parochial figures, artifacts formed during the cultural lag of the anti-apartheid boycott, demanding "imaginative surrender" (Lenta) and an "exemplary life" and an "edifying text" (De Waal). Contrast Biography's 1978 manifesto: "the biographer's quest is not primarily to discover archives and materials—that is the kitchen-work of the task—but to discover the lies and delusions by which all men and women defend themselves against the indignities of life. … How arrive at the subject's life-lies? By probing, by asking questions, by examining the implication of things" (Edel 2). No cold kitchen-work, then.

Precisely where Twidle finds me an "unreliable narrator," centered upon Iraq and Palestine, he spectacularly performs his own unreliability, misreading the question whether Susan Sontag ought to boycott the Jerusalem Prize (Roberts, No Cold Kitchen 572–88; and see "Corrigendum"), as whether Gordimer should do so.

Turning gratuitously from Gordimer to Mbeki, Twidle graduates from retail to wholesale carelessness. Citing a tendentious secondary source, al-chemically redescribed as "evenhanded," Twidle faults Fit to Govern's "closed mode" of racial thinking (113). Yet that book positions Charlize Theron as fundamentally African (12), her film Monster as strange fruit of her violent Johannesburg childhood (14–15), and its concluding chapter, "Natives and Nonracialism" (266–287), animates openness.

Twidle prescribes less an "ethics of reading" (103) than a vice of non-reading.