John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

Did you ever find yourself at odds with him over questions of politics?

That is a difficult question. Where, after all, does character end and politics begin? At a personal level, I saw him as rather too fatalistic and therefore too passive. Did his mistrust of political activism express itself in passivity in the conduct of his life, or did an innate fatalism express itself in mistrust of political action? I cannot decide. But yes, at a personal level there was a certain tension between us. I wanted our relationship to grow and develop, whereas he wanted it to remain the same, without change. That was what caused the breach, in the end. Because between a man and a woman there is no standing still, in my view. Either you are going up or you are going down.

When did the breach occur?

In 1980. I left Cape Town and returned to France.

Did you and he have no further contact?

For a while he wrote to me. He sent me his books as they came out. Then the letters stopped coming. I presumed he had found someone else.

And when you look back over the relationship, how do you see it?

How do I see our relationship? John was a marked Francophile of the kind who believes that if he can acquire for himself a French mistress then supreme felicity will be his. Of the French mistress it will be expected that she recite Ronsard and play Couperin on the clavecin while simultaneously inducting her lover into the amatory mysteries, French style. I exaggerate, of course.

Was I the French mistress of his fantasy? I doubt it very much. Looking back, I now see our relationship as comical in its essence. Comico-sentimental. Based on a comic premise. Yet with a further element that I must not minimize, namely, that he helped me escape from a bad marriage, for which I remain grateful to this day.

Comico-sentimental … You make it sound rather light. Did Coetzee not leave a deeper imprint on you, and you on him?

As to what imprint I may have left on him, that I am not in a position to judge. But in general I would say that unless you have a strong presence you do not leave a deep imprint; and John did not have a strong presence. I don’t mean to sound flippant. I know he had many admirers; he was not awarded the Nobel Prize for nothing; and of course you would not be here today, pursuing these researches, if you did not think he was important as a writer. But — to be serious for a moment — in all the time I was with him I never had the feeling I was with an exceptional person, a truly exceptional human being. It is a cruel thing to say, I know, but regrettably it is true. I experienced no flash of lightning from him that suddenly illuminated the world. Or if there were flashes, I was blind to them.

I found John clever, I found him knowledgeable, I admired him in many ways. As a writer he knew what he was doing, he had a certain style, and in style lies the beginning of distinction. But he had no special sensitivity that I could detect, no original insight into the human condition. He was just a man, a man of his time, talented, maybe even gifted, but, frankly, not a giant. I am sorry if I disappoint you. From other people who knew him you will get a different picture, I am sure.

Turning to his writings: speaking objectively, as a critic, what is your estimation of his books?

I liked the early work best. In a book like In the Heart of the Country there is a certain daring, a certain wildness, that I can still admire. In Foe as well, which is not so early. But after that he became more respectable, and in my view more tame. After Disgrace I lost interest. I did not read the later stuff.

In general I would say his work lacks ambition. Control over the elements of the fiction is too tight. You do not sense you are in the presence of a writer who is deforming his medium in order to say what has never been said before, which is to me the mark of great writing. Too cool, too neat, I would say. Too easy. Too lacking in passion, creative passion. That’s all.

Interview conducted in Paris in January 2008.

Undated fragment

IT IS A SATURDAY afternoon in winter, ritual time for the game of rugby. With his father he catches a train to Newlands in time for the 2.15 curtain-raiser. The curtain-raiser will be followed at 4.00 by the main match. After the main match they will catch a train home again.

He goes with his father to Newlands because sport — rugby in winter, cricket in summer — is the strongest surviving bond between them, and because it went through his heart like a knife, the first Saturday after his return to the country, to see his father put on his coat and without a word go off to Newlands like a lonely child.

His father has no friends. Nor has he, though for a different reason. He had friends when he was younger; but these old friends are by now dispersed all over the world, and he seems to have lost the knack, or perhaps the will, to make new ones. So he is cast back on his father, as his father is cast back on him. As they live together, so on Saturdays they take their pleasure together. That is the law of the family.

It surprised him, when he came back, to discover that his father knew no one. He had always thought of his father as a convivial man. But either he was wrong about that or his father has changed. Or perhaps it is simply one of the things that happen to men as they grow older: they withdraw into themselves. On Saturdays the stands at Newlands are full of them, solitary men in grey gabardine raincoats in the twilight of their lives, keeping to themselves as if their loneliness were a shameful disease.

He and his father sit side by side on the north stand, watching the curtain-raiser. Over the day’s proceedings hangs an air of melancholy. This is the last season when the stadium will be used for club rugby. With the belated arrival of television in the country, interest in club rugby has dwindled away. Men who used to spend their Saturday afternoons at Newlands now prefer to stay at home and watch the game of the week. Of the thousands of seats in the north stand no more than a dozen are occupied. The railway stand is entirely empty. In the south stand there is still a bloc of diehard Coloured spectators who come to cheer for UCT and Villagers and boo Stellenbosch and Van der Stel. Only the grandstand holds a respectable number, perhaps a thousand.

A quarter of a century ago, when he was a child, it was different. On a big day in the club competition — the day when Hamiltons played Villagers, say, or UCT played Stellenbosch — one would struggle to find standing-room. Within an hour of the final whistle Argus vans would be racing through the streets dropping off bundles of the Sports Edition for the vendors on the street corners, with eyewitness accounts of all the first-league games, even the games played in far-off Stellenbosch and Somerset West, together with scores from the lesser leagues, 2A and 2B, 3A and 3B.

Those days are gone. Club rugby is on its last legs. One can sense it today not just in the stands but on the field itself. Depressed by the booming space of the empty stadium, the players seem merely to be going through the motions. A ritual is dying out before their eyes, an authentic petit-bourgeois South African ritual. Its last devotees are gathered here today: sad old men like his father; dull, dutiful sons like himself.

A light rain begins to fall. Over the two of them he raises an umbrella. On the field thirty half-hearted young men blunder about, groping for the wet ball.

The curtain-raiser is between Union, in sky-blue, and Gardens, in maroon and black. Union and Gardens are at the bottom of the first-league table and in danger of relegation. It used not to be like that. Once upon a time Gardens was a force in Western Province rugby. At home there is a framed photograph of the Gardens third team as it was in 1938, with his father seated in the front row in his freshly laundered hooped jersey with its Gardens crest and its collar turned up fashionably around his ears. But for certain unforeseen events, World War II in particular, his father might even — who knows? — have made it into the second team.