John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

This is what he writes.

‘He has had his hair cut for the interview. He has trimmed his beard. He has put on a jacket and tie. If he is not yet Mr Sobersides, at least he no longer looks like the Wild Man of Borneo.

‘In the waiting room are the two other candidates for the job. They stand side by side at the window overlooking the gardens, conversing softly. They seem to know each other, or at least to have struck up an acquaintance.’

You don’t recall who this third person was, do you?

He was from the University of Stellenbosch, but I don’t remember his name.

He goes on: ‘This is the British way: to drop the contestants into the pit and watch to see what will happen. He will have to reaccustom himself to British ways of doing things, in all their brutality. A tight ship, Britain, crammed to the gunwales. Dog eat dog. Dogs snarling and snapping at one another, each guarding its little territory. The American way, by comparison, decorous, even gentle. But then there is more space in America, more room for urbanity.

‘The Cape may not be Britain, may be drifting further from Britain every day, yet what is left of British ways it clutches tight to its chest. Without that saving connection, what would the Cape be? A minor landing on the way to nowhere; a place of savage idleness.

‘In the order paper pinned to the door, he is Number Two to appear before the committee. Number One, when summoned, rises calmly, taps out his pipe, stores it away in what must be a pipe case, and passes through the portal. Twenty minutes later he re-emerges, his face inscrutable.

‘It is his turn. He enters and is waved to a seat at the foot of a long table. At the far end sit his inquisitors, five in number, all men. Because the windows are open, because the room is above a street where cars are continually passing by, he has to strain to hear them, and raise his own voice to make himself heard.

‘Some polite feints, then the first thrust: If appointed, what authors would he most like to teach?

“‘I can teach pretty much across the board,” he replies. “I am not a specialist. I think of myself as a generalist.”

‘As an answer it is at least defensible. A small department in a small university might be happy to recruit a jack of all trades. But from the silence that falls he gathers he has not answered well. He has taken the question too literally. That has always been a fault of his: taking questions too literally, responding too briefly. These people don’t want brief answers. They want something more leisurely, more expansive, something that will allow them to work out what kind of fellow they have before them, what kind of junior colleague he would make, whether he would fit in in a provincial university that is doing its best to maintain standards in difficult times, to keep the flame of civilization burning.

‘In America, where they take job-hunting seriously, people like him, people who don’t know how to read the agenda behind a question, can’t speak in rounded paragraphs, don’t put themselves over with conviction — in short, people deficient in people skills — attend training sessions where they learn to look the interrogator in the eye, smile, respond to questions fully and with every appearance of sincerity. Presentation of the self: that is what they call it in America, without irony.

‘What authors would he prefer to teach? What research is he currently engaged in? Would he feel competent to offer tutorials in Middle English? His answers sound more and more hollow. The truth is, he does not really want this job. He does not want it because in his heart he knows he is not cut out to be a teacher. Lacks the temperament. Lacks zeal.

‘He emerges from the interview in a state of black dejection. He wants to get away from this place at once, without delay. But no, first there are forms to be filled in, travel expenses to be collected.

“‘How did it go?”

‘The speaker is the candidate who was interviewed first, the pipe-smoker.’ That is you, if I am not mistaken.

Yes. But I have given up the pipe.

‘He shrugs. “Who knows?” he says. “Not well.”

“‘Shall we get a cup of tea?”

‘He is taken aback. Are the two of them not supposed to be rivals? Is it permitted for rivals to fraternize?

‘It is late afternoon, the campus is deserted. They make for the Student Union in quest of their cup of tea. The Union is closed. MJ’ — that is what he calls you — ‘takes out his pipe. “Ah well,” he says. “Do you smoke?”

‘How surprising: he is beginning to like this MJ, with his easy, straightforward manner! His gloom is fading fast. He likes MJ and, unless it is all just an exercise in self-presentation, MJ seems inclined to like him too. And this mutual liking has grown up in a flash!

‘Yet should he be surprised? Why have the two of them (or the three of them, if the shadowy third is included) been selected to be interviewed for a lectureship in English literature, if not because they are the same kind of person, with the same formation behind them (formation: not the customary English word, he must remember that); and because both, finally and most obviously, are South Africans, white South Africans?’

That is where the fragment ends. It is undated, but I am pretty sure he wrote it in 1999 or 2000. So … a couple of questions relating to it. First question: You were the successful candidate, the one who was awarded the lectureship, while Coetzee was passed over. Why do you think he was passed over? And did you detect any resentment on his part?

None at all. I was from inside the system — the colonial university system as it was in those days — while he was from outside, insofar as he had gone off to America for his graduate education. Given the nature of all systems, namely to reproduce themselves, I was always going to have the edge over him. He understood that, in theory and in practice. He certainly didn’t put the blame on me.

Very well. Another question: He suggests that in you he has found a new friend, and goes on to list traits that you and he have in common. But when he gets to your white South Africanness he stops and writes no more. Have you any idea why he should have stopped just there?

Why he should have raised the topic of white South African identity and then dropped it? There are two explanations I can offer. One is that it might have seemed too complex a topic to be explored in a memoir or diary — too complex or too close to the bone. The other is simpler: that the story of his adventures in the academy was becoming too boring to go on with, too short of narrative interest.

And which explanation do you incline towards?

Probably the first, with an admixture of the second. John left South Africa in the 1960s, came back in the 1970s, for decades hovered between South Africa and the United States, then finally decamped to Australia and died there. I left South Africa in the 1970s and never returned. Broadly speaking, he and I shared a common stance towards South Africa, namely that our presence there was illegitimate. We may have had an abstract right to be there, a birthright, but the basis of that right was fraudulent. Our existence was grounded in a crime, specifically colonial conquest, perpetuated by apartheid. Whatever the opposite is of native or rooted , that was what we felt ourselves to be. We thought of ourselves as sojourners, temporary residents, and to that extent without a home, without a homeland. I don’t think I am misrepresenting John. It was something he and I talked about a great deal. I am certainly not misrepresenting myself.