No Cold Kitchen: A Biography of Nadine Gordimer

by Ronald Suresh Roberts

Eight years in the making, this book charts Nadine Gordimer's life and work, providing a vibrant portrait of the country in which Gordimer lives, the history she lived through, and the people around her—people in South Africa, such as Nelson Mandela, George Bizos, Es'kia Mphahlele, Bram Fischer, Nat Nakasa, Desmond Tutu and Alan Paton; and people abroad, including Susan Sontag, Salman Rushdie, Anthony Sampson, Edward Said, Amos Oz, Harry Levin and New Yorker editor, Katherine White. Drawing upon unprecedented access to Gordimer and her documents, No Cold Kitchen gives sympathetic but rigorous attention to the full range of Gordimer's work, teasing out the inevitable contradictions between her public and private voices and granting the reader an intimate insight into what Gordimer underwent and overcame, both during apartheid and afterwards. The author shrewdly chronicles the drive that led Gordimer, who described herself as a "barefoot girl from Springs," to a Nobel Prize for literature.

733 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2005

Reviews

[Molebatsi · Rating 3 out of 5]

NO COLD KITCHEN: A BIOGRAPHY OF NADINE GORDIMER – Ronald Suresh Roberts
Ronald Suresh Roberts set out to write novelist and Nobel Prize winner in literature, Nadine Gordimer’s biography with the provision of her right of the final review.
After going through the first draft, she was displeased with some parts of the biography and demanded changes which were not granted by her biographer who invoked authorial autonomy. In response she revoked her authorisation of the subject.
The conflict between Gordimer and Roberts became the highlight of the biography, at the expense of the book itself, with hysterical headlines like the Sunday Times newspaper’s “GORDIMER BANS BOOK.”
Be that as it may, the over seven-hundred pages tome that is No Cold Kitchen is the most authoritative biography of the Poet Laureate Nadine Gordimer. Before his fallout with Gordimer, Roberts had interviews with her personally and permission to use her archives at the Lilly Library in Indiana.
Looking at the sheer size of the book, Roberts made good use of the initial all access to her subject and her archival material. Nothing appears to have been left out, even the flimsiest of details are written into the imposing biography.
Much of the book is devoted to her writerly life with snap reviews of her novels and short stories. We also learn that she conceded defeat in drama and poetry.
Gordimer’s life journey is a galaxy of luminaries in every sector of society, in South Africa and the world. Among the luminaries who graced her life is Nelson Mandela in politics and every notable writer in the world, the latter being owed largely to her being a Nobel Laureate herself.
She may have not taken up arms against apartheid, but Gordimer was an activist to the core. He literary oeuvre struck blow after blow against the inhuman system that held black people in bondage. The ANC looked at her as one of its own. In 1982 she participated in the Culture and Resistance Conference in Botswana organised under the auspices of the ANC Cultural Desk.
The last word goes to fellow Nobel Laureate in Literature, JM Coetzee. He said of her:
“She does not thrive on strife. She is not even, in a fundamental sense, a political writer. Rather she is an ethical writer, a writer of conscience.”
No Cold Kitchen is a companion of Gordimer’s literary oeuvre, a reference book to find context and text on her illustrious life of literature and activism.

[Arja Salafranca · Rating 3 out of 5]

When this biography of Nadine Gordimer was published in South Africa in 2005, author Ronald Suresh Roberts drew flak from the writer he had set out to profile. Initially he had her blessing, and access to her private papers, from letters to diary entries, and was able to interview her, as well as accompany her on several travel trips. But Gordimer objected to the final draft of the biography, and then withdrew her support, and there was a storm of controversy and criticism. My reading of this biography was thus informed by the history of its publication; yet my interest in its subject had been piqued from a long time ago. Studying both African Literature and English Literature in my first year at the University of the Witwatersrand in the early 1990s, I was introduced to Gordimer’s novella The Late Bourgeois World, her finely crafted short stories and the body of novels she had written. Coming from an apartheid, all-white schooling system, in which we read more Shakespeare than local writers, although we were taught, in my last two years of high school., some contemporary South African poetry, my introduction to both Gordimer’s work and other South African and African authors was a revelation, a throwing open of the doors, so to speak. Here was Johannesburg described as a locale, and moreover, it was legitimate to set your stories in the place you lived and had grown up in. I devoured many of Gordimer’s books, and was especially drawn to her short stories, which are my special interest. But, famously private, facts about her life were hard to come by, especially in the pre-internet days. I went on to major in African Literature, and she came to address us once. I was in awe. She had two children, I knew, had been married once, young, then divorced and then married the art dealer Reinhold Cassirer, which resulted in a long happy marriage, from 1954 to his death (in 2001). But facts were hard to come by, biography out of reach. She remained an icon, an esteemed writer. She won the 1991 Nobel Prize, a source of pride for us studying African Literature. She was briefly featured on the TV news. Once the literature department screened an interview she gave and this was a rare chance to hear her talk about her writing. But there was no YouTube, no way of finding too many other interviews with her. Facts have filtered down through the years, however, and Gordimer isn’t quite the closed book to me as she was back then. But what this biography did for me was to present a more human portrait of the writer. There are gaps, this isn’t a perfectly filled-in portrait of a life, however. There are the concerns over her daughter’s unsuitable early marriage to a labourer Frenchman; her son leaving South Africa to live in the US, the impact of having her two children living abroad. Cassirer was fifteen years older than Gordimer – but there’s no indication of what she felt about that, or why her first marriage failed, or even why it came into being. Sometimes Roberts simply elides over the facts; at other times chronology jumps around; you have to be on the ball to follow it all. Gordimer and Cassirer met in 1953, were married a year later, and had a long and happy marriage. There’s not all that much about the marriage, aside from some quotes from letters in which Gordimer despairs over Cassirer giving up his career, or Oriane, her daughter revealing that Cassirer could be strict. Then towards the end of the book, while discussing Cassirer’s decline into old age and emphysema, he reveals that Gordimer had an affair in the 1960s, it lasted a few years. But it didn’t break their marriage: Cassirer even knew about it, and fumed and even asked her to at least take the time to tidy up her hair before she came home to him and the children – but as to how it affected them, why she had it, how to overcome it, there are, again, no details. These biographical facts are woven into an analysis of her works through each decade. I found these over-long, at times dry, and assuming a closeness with her writing which I no longer have. And since the list of fiction published, as well as essays, is long indeed, few readers will have. So this is both biography and critical analysis of Gordimer’s ouvre, and runs to nearly 900 pages. Roberts isn’t above putting in his own critical notes about Gordimer’s behaviour and politics; far from being absent in the text as expected in a “traditional” biography, his voice is sometimes very firmly present. Still, I found this an interesting, worthwhile, enjoyable read, and I’m glad to have read it. The woman behind the esteemed author is revealed for the first time in all her imperfect humanness, fragility sometimes at the surface. There are some notes about her thoughts on her writing, and her processes, which gives further insight into Gordimer the artist. A scholarly, well-researched and fluidly well-written biography. A note – as the biography appeared in 2005, and Gordimer died in 2014, the last decade of her life is unrecorded here, and it would have been useful to include update with this 2016 release.

[Mandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a long, detailed and meticulously researched portrait of Nadine Gordimer and her world - the turbulent times she lived through, the people she met, the events she experienced. It’s a wide-ranging and comprehensive book, not a conventional cradle-to-grave biography by any means, (although it does of course cover her life,) but it’s much more than that, exploring as it does the history, culture and politics of South Africa as well as offering a literary analysis of Gordimer’s writings. A long book, it’s not an easy read, and feels sometimes a bit scatter-gun in its approach. Nadine’s writings are gone into in some detail which I found somewhat dry at times, especially if I wasn’t familiar with the work being discussed. It’s not in fact an authorised biography as Gordimer, after having cooperated fully with the author over many years, withdrew her consent at the end when he refused to delete certain passages. Such author/subject controversy always adds a certain frisson to the publication of a biography, but even without that I found this a compelling and convincing account of Gordimer’s life and times, and well worth the effort demanded to keep going with it. I enjoyed learning not only about her, but about the broader picture, which places her firmly in her environment and historical period. Overall, an enjoyable and instructive book.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brilliantly done biography. To read about all the uproar this biography has caused in South Africa see:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/31/boo...

Note though that the conclusions Ronald Suresh Robert's draws are heavily influenced by Edward Said (to whom he dedicates this book) so how valid you find Robert's interpretation of Gordimer's life and writings will ultimately boil down to how convincing you find Edward Said.