Saturday 23 December, 2006

"Haven't we had enough of New York editors scolding the natives to be rational?"

The falling out between Nadine Gordimer and her biographer Ronald Roberts draws attention to the tensions inherent in the biographical form, and, inevitably, continuing racial tensions in South Africa. 'Gordimer expressed objections both to Farrar, Straus and to Roberts, who insisted on his right to authorial autonomy. In an interview with South Africa's Sunday Times in 2004, Galassi said Farrar, Straus had "independent objections to the manuscript" beyond Gordimer's, including "the meandering quality of the narrative and the author's gratuitous insertion of himself into it." If Roberts "had been more rational and measured in his approach, I believe his book could have been published as originally planned," Galassi said. In response, Roberts told the paper, "Haven't we had enough of New York editors scolding the natives to be rational?" Roberts told the Book Review he felt Gordimer "was treating me like a benefactor in a certain way, as though I was a product of patronage rather than a professional doing the work I wanted to do and doing it to the best of my abilities."'

In short, an extremely interesting and complex literary shit fight.