John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

Are you saying that you and he commiserated together?

Commiserated is the wrong word. We had too much going for us to regard our fate as a miserable one. We had our youth — I was still in my twenties at the time, he was only slightly older — we had a not-bad education behind us, we even had modest material assets. If we had been whisked away and set down somewhere else in the world — the civilized world, the First World — we would have prospered, flourished. (About the Third World I would not be so confident. We were not Robinson Crusoes, either of us.)

Therefore no, I did not regard our fate as tragic, and I am sure he did not either. If anything, it was comic. His ancestors in their way, and my ancestors in theirs, had toiled away, generation after generation, to clear a patch of wild Africa for their descendants, and what was the fruit of all their labours? Doubt in the hearts of those descendants about title to the land; an uneasy sense that it belonged not to them but, inalienably, to its original owners.

Do you think that if he had gone on with the memoir, if he had not abandoned it, that is what he would have said?

More or less. Let me elaborate a little further on our stance vis-à-vis South Africa. We both cultivated a certain provisionality in our feelings towards the country, he perhaps more so than I. We were reluctant to invest too deeply in the country, since sooner or later our ties to it would have to be cut, our investment in it annulled.

And?

That’s all. We had a certain style of mind in common, a style that I attribute to our origins, colonial and South African. Hence the commonality of outlook.

In his case, would you say that the habit you describe, of treating feelings as provisional, of not committing himself emotionally, extended beyond relations with the land of his birth into personal relations too?

I wouldn’t know. You are the biographer. If you find that train of thought worth following up, follow it.

Can we now turn to his teaching? He writes that he was not cut out to be a teacher. Would you agree?

I would say that one teaches best what one knows best and feels most strongly about. John knew a fair amount about a range of things, but not a great deal about anything in particular. I would count that as one strike against him. Second, though there were writers who mattered deeply to him — the nineteenth-century Russian novelists, for instance — the real depth of his involvement did not come out in his teaching, not in any obvious way. Something was always being held back. Why? I don’t know. All I can suggest is that a strain of secretiveness that seemed to be engrained in him, part of his character, extended to his teaching too.

Do you feel then that he spent his working life, or most of it, in a profession for which he had no talent?

That is a little too sweeping. John was a perfectly adequate academic. A perfectly adequate academic but not a notable teacher. Perhaps if he had taught Sanskrit it would have been different, Sanskrit or some other subject in which the conventions permit you to be a little dry and reserved.

He told me once that he had missed his calling, that he should have been a librarian. I can see the sense in that.

I haven’t been able to lay my hands on course descriptions from the 1970s — the University of Cape Town doesn’t seem to archive material like that — but among Coetzee’s papers I did come across an advertisement for a course that you and he offered jointly in 1976, to extramural students. Do you remember that course?

Yes, I do. It was a poetry course. I was working on Hugh McDiarmid at the time, so I used the occasion to give McDiarmid a close reading. John had the students read Pablo Neruda in translation. I had never read Neruda, so I sat in on his sessions.

A strange choice, don’t you think, for someone like him: Neruda?

No, not at all. John had a fondness for lush, expansive poetry: Neruda, Whitman, Stevens. You must remember that he was, in his way, a child of the 1960s.

In his way — what do you mean by that?

I mean within the confines of a certain rectitude, a certain rationality. Without being a Dionysian himself, he approved in principle of Dionysianism. Approved in principle of letting oneself go, though I don’t recall that he ever let himself go — he would probably not have known how to. He had a need to believe in the resources of the unconscious, in the creative force of unconscious processes. Hence his inclination towards the more vatic poets.

You must have noted how rarely he discussed the sources of his own creativity. In part that came out of the native secretiveness I mentioned. But in part it also suggests a reluctance to probe the sources of his inspiration, as if being too self-aware might cripple him.

Was the course a success — the course you and he taught together?

I certainly learned from it — learned about the history of surrealism in Latin America, for instance. As I said, John knew a little about a lot of things. As for what our students came away with, that I can’t say. Students, in my experience, soon work out whether what you are teaching matters to you. If it does, then they are prepared to consider letting it matter to them too. But if they conclude, rightly or wrongly, that it doesn’t, then, curtains, you may as well go home.

And Neruda didn’t matter to him?

No, I’m not saying that. Neruda may have mattered a great deal to him. Neruda may even have been a model — an unattainable model — of how a poet can respond creatively to injustice and repression. But — and this is my point — if you treat your connection with the poet as a personal secret to be closely guarded, and if moreover your classroom manner is somewhat stiff and formal, you are never going to acquire a following.

You are saying he never acquired a following?

Not as far as I am aware. Perhaps he smartened up his act in his later years. I just don’t know.

At the time when you met him, in 1972, he had a rather precarious position teaching at a high school. It wasn’t until some time later that he was actually offered a position at the University. Even so, for almost all of his working life, from his mid-twenties until his mid-sixties, he was employed as a teacher of one kind or another. I come back to my earlier question: Doesn’t it seem strange to you that a man who had no talent as a teacher should have made teaching his career?

Yes and no. The ranks of the teaching profession are, as you must know, full of refugees and misfits.

And which was he: a refugee or a misfit?

He was a misfit. He was also a cautious soul. He liked the security of a monthly salary cheque.

You sound critical.

I am only pointing to the obvious. If he hadn’t wasted so much of his life correcting students’ grammar and sitting through boring meetings, he might have written more, perhaps even written better. But he was not a child. He knew what he was doing. He made his accommodation with society and lived with the consequences.

On the other hand, being a teacher allowed him contact with a younger generation. Which he might not have had, had he withdrawn from the world and devoted himself wholly to writing.

True.

Did he have any special friendships that you know of among students?

Now you sound as if you are angling. What do you mean, special friendships? Do you mean, did he overstep the mark? Even if I knew, which I don’t, I would not comment.

Yet the theme of the older man and the younger woman keeps coming back in his fiction.

It would be very, very naïve to conclude that because the theme was present in his writing it had to be present in his life.