John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

They arrive at the house in St James as dawn is breaking. He falls asleep at once on a sofa, and sleeps until noon, when Paul’s mother wakes them and serves breakfast on a sun porch with a view over the whole sweep of False Bay.

Between Paul and his mother there is a flow of conversation in which he is easily included. His mother is a photographer with a studio of her own. She is petite and well-dressed, with a smoker’s husky voice and a restless air. After they have eaten she excuses herself: she has work to do, she says.

He and Paul walk down to the beach, swim, come back, play chess. Then he catches a train home. It is his first glimpse of Paul’s home life, and he is full of envy. Why can he not have a nice, normal relationship with his own mother? He wishes his mother were like Paul’s, wishes she had a life of her own outside their narrow family.

It was to escape the oppressiveness of family that he left home. Now he rarely sees his parents. Though they live only a short walk away, he does not visit. He has never brought Paul to see them, or any of his other friends, to say nothing of Jacqueline. Now that he has his own income, he uses his independence to exclude his parents from his life. His mother is distressed by his coldness, he knows, the coldness with which he has responded to her love all his life. All his life she has wanted to coddle him; all his life he has been resisting. Even though he insists, she cannot believe he has enough money to live on. Whenever she sees him she tries to slip money into his pocket, a pound note, two pounds. ‘Just a little something,’ she calls it. Given half a chance, she would sew curtains for his flat, take in his laundry. He must harden his heart against her. Now is not the time to let down his guard.

He is reading The Letters of Ezra Pound . Ezra Pound was dismissed from his job at Wabash College, Indiana, for having a woman in his rooms. Infuriated by such provincial smallmindedness, Pound quit America. In London he met and married the beautiful Dorothy Shakespear, and went to live in Italy. After World War II he was accused of aiding and abetting the Fascists. To escape the death sentence he pleaded insanity and was locked up in a mental asylum.

Now, in 1959, having been set free, Pound is back in Italy, still working on his life’s project, the Cantos . All of the Cantos that have been published thus far are in the University of Cape Town library, in Faber editions in which the procession of lines in elegant dark typeface is interrupted now and again, like strokes of a gong, by huge Chinese characters. He is engrossed by the Cantos ; he reads and rereads them (guiltily skipping the dull sections on Van Buren and the Malatestas), using Hugh Kenner’s book on Pound as a guide. T. S. Eliot magnanimously called Pound il miglior fabbro , the better craftsman. Much as he admires Eliot’s own work, he thinks Eliot is right.

Ezra Pound has suffered persecution most of his life: driven into exile, then imprisoned, then expelled from his homeland a second time. Yet despite being labelled a madman Pound has proved he is a great poet, perhaps as great as Walt Whitman. Obeying his daimon, Pound has sacrificed his life to his art. So has Eliot, though Eliot’s suffering has been of a more private nature. Eliot and Pound have lived lives of sorrow and sometimes of ignominy. There is a lesson for him in that, driven home on every page of their poetry — of Eliot’s, with which he had his first overwhelming encounter while he was still at school, and now of Pound’s. Like Pound and Eliot, he must be prepared to endure all that life has stored up for him, even if that means exile, obscure labour, and obloquy. And if he fails the highest test of art, if it turns out that after all he does not have the blessed gift, then he must be prepared to endure that too: the incontestable verdict of history, the fate of being, despite all his present and future sufferings, minor. Many are called, few are chosen. For every major poet a cloud of minor poets, like gnats buzzing around a lion.

His passion for Pound is shared by only one of his friends, Norbert. Norbert was born in Czechoslovakia, came to South Africa after the War, and speaks English with a faint German lisp. He is studying to be an engineer, like his father. He dresses with elegant European formality and is conducting a highly respectable courtship of a beautiful girl of good family with whom he goes walking once a week. He and Norbert have meetings in a tea room on the slopes of the mountain at which they comment on each other’s latest poems and read aloud to each other favourite passages from Pound.

It strikes him as interesting that Norbert, an engineer to be, and he, a mathematician to be, should be disciples of Ezra Pound, while the other student poets he knows, those studying literature and running the university’s literary magazine, follow Gerard Manley Hopkins. He himself went through a brief Hopkins phase at school, during which he crammed lots of stressed monosyllables into his verses and avoided words of Romance origin. But in time he lost his taste for Hopkins, just as he is in the process of losing his taste for Shakespeare. Hopkins’s lines are packed too tight with consonants, Shakespeare’s too tight with metaphors. Hopkins and Shakespeare also set too much store on uncommon words, particularly Old English words: maw, reck, pelf . He does not see why verse has always to be rising to a declamatory pitch, why it cannot be content to follow the flexions of the ordinary speaking voice — in fact, why it has to be so different from prose.

He has begun to prefer Pope to Shakespeare, and Swift to Pope. Despite the cruel precision of his phrasing, of which he approves, Pope strikes him as still too much at home among petticoats and periwigs, whereas Swift remains a wild man, a solitary.

He likes Chaucer too. The Middle Ages are boring, obsessed with chastity, overrun with clerics; medieval poets are for the most part timid, for ever scuttling to the Latin fathers for guidance. But Chaucer keeps a nice ironic distance from his authorities. And, unlike Shakespeare, he does not get into a froth about things and start ranting.

As for the other English poets, Pound has taught him to smell out the easy sentiment in which the Romantics and Victorians wallow, to say nothing of their slack versifying. Pound and Eliot are trying to revitalize Anglo-American poetry by bringing back to it the astringency of the French. He is fully in accord. How he could once have been so infatuated with Keats as to write Keatsian sonnets he cannot comprehend. Keats is like watermelon, soft and sweet and crimson, whereas poetry should be hard and clear like a flame. Reading half a dozen pages of Keats is like yielding to seduction.

He would be more secure in his discipleship to Pound if he could actually read French. But all his efforts to teach himself lead nowhere. He has no feel for the language, with its words that start out boldly only to tail off in a murmur. So he must take it on trust from Pound and Eliot that Baudelaire and Nerval, Corbière and Laforgue, point the way he must follow.

His plan, when he entered the university, was to qualify as a mathematician, then go abroad and devote himself to art. That is as far as the plan went, as far as it needed to go, and he has not thus far deviated from it. While perfecting his poetic skills abroad he will earn a living doing something obscure and respectable. Since great artists are fated to go unrecognized for a while, he imagines he will serve out his probationary years as a clerk humbly adding up columns of figures in a back room. He will certainly not be a Bohemian, that is to say, a drunk and a sponger and a layabout.

What draws him to mathematics, besides the arcane symbols it uses, is its purity. If there were a department of Pure Thought at the university he would probably enrol in Pure Thought too; but pure mathematics appears to be the closest approach the academy affords to the realm of the forms.