John Coetzee: Scenes from Provincial Life

Ten years. He was ten years older than me.

[Silence.]

Is there anything you would like to add on the subject? Other aspects of him you would like to comment on?

We had a liaison. I presume you are aware of that. It did not endure.

Why not?

It was not sustainable.

Would you like to say more?

Would I like to say more for your book? Not before you tell me what kind of book it is. Is it a book of gossip or a serious book? Do you have authorization for it? Who else are you speaking to besides me?

Does one need authorization to write a book? If one wanted authorization, where would one seek it? From the executors of Coetzee’s estate? I don’t think so. But I can give you my assurance, the book I am writing is a serious book, a seriously intended biography. I concentrate on the years from Coetzee’s return to South Africa in 1971/72 until his first public recognition in 1977. That seems to me an important period of his life, important yet neglected, a period when he was still finding his feet as a writer.

As for whom I have chosen to interview, let me put the situation before you candidly. I made two trips to South Africa, one last year, one the year before. Those trips were not as fruitful as I had hoped they would be. Of the people who knew Coetzee best, a number had died. In fact, the whole generation to which he belonged was on the point of dying out. And the memories of the survivors were not always to be trusted. In one or two cases, people who claimed to have known him turned out, after a little scratching, to have the wrong Coetzee (as you are aware, the name Coetzee is not uncommon in that country). The upshot is, the biography will rest on interviews with a handful of friends and colleagues, including, I would hope, yourself. Is that enough to reassure you?

No. What of his diaries? What of his letters? What of his notebooks? Why so much reliance on interviews?

Mme Denoël, I have been through the letters and diaries that are available to me. What Coetzee writes there cannot be trusted, not as a factual record — not because he was a liar but because he was a fictioneer. In his letters he is making up a fiction of himself for his correspondents; in his diaries he is doing much the same for his own eyes, or perhaps for posterity. As documents they have their value, of course; but if you want the truth, the full truth, then surely you need to set beside them the testimony of people who knew him in the flesh, who participated in his life.

Yes; but what if we are all fictioneers, as you call Coetzee? What if we are all continually making up the stories of our lives? Why should what I tell you about Coetzee be any more worthy of credence than what he writes in his own person?

Of course we are all fictioneers, more or less, I do not deny that. But which would you rather have: a range of independent reports from independent perspectives, from which you can then attempt to synthesize a whole; or the massive, unitary self-projection comprised by his oeuvre? I know which I would prefer.

Yes, I can see that. There remains the other question I raised, the question of discretion. I am not one of those who believe that once a person is dead all restraint falls away. What existed between myself and John Coetzee I am not necessarily prepared to share with the world.

I accept that. Discretion is your privilege, your right. Nevertheless, I ask you to pause and reflect. A great writer is the property of all the world. You knew John Coetzee closely. One of these days you too will no longer be with us. Do you think it good that your memories should pass away with you?

A great writer? How John would laugh if he could hear you! The day of the great writer is long gone, he would say.

The day of the writer as oracle — yes, I would agree, that day is past. But would you not accept that a well-known writer — let us call him that instead — a well-known figure in our common cultural life, is to some extent public property?

On that subject my opinion is irrelevant. What is relevant is what he himself believed. And there the answer is clear. He believed our life-stories are ours to construct as we wish, within or even against the constraints imposed by the real world — as you yourself acknowledged a moment ago. That is why I specifically used the term authorization . It was not the authorization of his family or his executors that I had in mind, it was his own authorization. If you were not authorized by him to expose the private side of his life, then I will certainly not assist you.

Coetzee cannot have authorized me for the simple reason that he and I never had any contact. But on that point let us agree to differ, and move on. I return to the course you mentioned, the course on African literature that you and he taught together. One remark you made intrigues me. You said you and he did not attract the more radical African students. Why do you think that was so?

Because we were not radicals ourselves, not by their standards. We had both, obviously, been affected by 1968. In 1968 I was still a student at the Sorbonne, where I took part in the manifestations, the days in May. John was in the United States at the time, and fell foul of the American authorities, I don’t remember all the details, but I know it became a turning point in his life. Yet I stress we were not Marxists, either of us, and certainly not Maoists. I was probably to the left of him, but I could afford that because I was shielded by my status within the French diplomatic enclave. If I had gotten into trouble with the South African security police I would have been discreetly put on a plane to Paris, and that would have been the end of the matter. I would not have ended up in a prison cell.

Whereas Coetzee …

Coetzee would not have ended up in a prison cell either. He was not a militant. His politics were too idealistic, too Utopian for that. In fact he was not political at all. He looked down on politics. He didn’t like political writers, writers who espoused a political programme.

Yet he published some quite left-leaning commentary in the 1970s. I think of his essays on Alex La Guma, for example. He was sympathetic to La Guma, and La Guma was a communist.

La Guma was a special case. He was sympathetic to La Guma because La Guma was from Cape Town, not because he was a communist.

You say he was not political. Do you mean that he was apolitical? Because some people would say that the apolitical is just one variety of the political.

No, not apolitical, I would rather say anti-political. He thought that politics brought out the worst in people. It brought out the worst in people and also brought to the surface the worst types in society. He preferred to have nothing to do with it.

Did he preach this anti-political politics in his classes?

Of course not. He was very scrupulous about not preaching. His political beliefs you discovered only after you got to know him better.

You say his politics were Utopian. Are you implying they were unrealistic?

He looked forward to the day when politics and the state would wither away. I would call that Utopian. On the other hand, he did not invest a great deal of himself in these Utopian longings. He was too much of a Calvinist for that.

Please explain.

You want me to say what lay behind Coetzee’s politics? You can best get that from his books. But let me try anyway.

In Coetzee’s eyes, we human beings will never abandon politics because politics is too convenient and too attractive as a theatre in which to give rein to our baser emotions. Baser emotions meaning hatred and rancour and spite and jealousy and bloodlust and so forth. In other words, politics as we know it is a symptom of our fallen state and expresses that fallen state.