John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

Happiness, he tells himself, teaches one nothing. Misery, on the other hand, steels one for the future. Misery is a school for the soul. From the waters of misery one emerges on the far bank purified, strong, ready to take up again the challenges of a life of art.

Yet misery does not feel like a purifying bath. On the contrary, it feels like a pool of dirty water. From each new bout of misery he emerges not brighter and stronger but duller and flabbier. How does it actually work, the cleansing action that misery is reputed to have? Has he not swum deep enough? Will he have to swim beyond mere misery into melancholia and madness? He has never yet met anyone who could be called properly mad, but he has not forgotten Jacqueline, who was, as she herself put it, ‘in therapy’, and with whom he spent six months, on and off, sharing a one-room flat. At no time did Jacqueline blaze with the divine and exhilarating fire of creativity. On the contrary, she was self-obsessed, unpredictable, fatiguing to be with. Is that the kind of person he must descend to being before he can be an artist? And anyway, whether mad or miserable, how can one write when tiredness is like a gloved hand gripping one’s brain and squeezing? Or is what he likes to call tiredness in fact a test, a disguised test, a test he is moreover failing? After tiredness, are there further tests to come, as many as there are circles in Dante’s Hell? Is tiredness simply the first of the tests that the great masters had to pass, Hölderlin and Blake, Pound and Eliot?

He wishes it could be granted to him to come alive and just for a minute, just for a second, know what it is to burn with the sacred fire of art.

Suffering, madness, sex: three ways of calling down the sacred fire upon oneself. He has visited the lower reaches of suffering, he has been in touch with madness; what does he know of sex? Sex and creativity go together, everyone says so, and he does not doubt it. Because they are creators, artists possess the secret of love. The fire that burns in the artist is visible to women, by means of an instinctive faculty. Women themselves do not have the sacred fire (there are exceptions: Sappho, Emily Brontë). It is in quest of the fire they lack, the fire of love, that women pursue artists and give themselves to them. In their lovemaking artists and their mistresses experience briefly, tantalizingly, the life of gods. From such lovemaking the artist returns to his work enriched and strengthened, the woman to her life transfigured.

What of him then? If no woman has yet detected, behind his woodenness, his clenched grimness, any flicker of the sacred fire; if no woman seems to give herself to him without the severest qualms; if the lovemaking he is familiar with, the woman’s as well as his own, is either anxious or bored or both anxious and bored — does it mean that he is not a real artist, or does it mean that he has not suffered enough yet, not spent enough time in a purgatory that includes by prescription bouts of passionless sex?

With his lofty unconcern for mere living, Henry James exerts a strong pull on him. Yet, try though he may, he cannot feel the ghostly hand of James extended to touch his brow in blessing. James belongs to the past: by the time he himself was born, James had been dead for twenty years. James Joyce was still alive, though only by a whisker. He admires Joyce, he can even recite passages from Ulysses by heart. But Joyce is too bound up with Ireland and Irish affairs to be in his pantheon. Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, tottering though they may be, and myth-shrouded, are still alive, the one in Rapallo, the other here in London. But if he is going to abandon poetry (or poetry is going to abandon him), what example can Pound or Eliot any longer offer?

Of the great figures of the present age, that leaves only one: D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence too died before he was born, but that can be discounted as an accident, since Lawrence died young. He first read Lawrence as a schoolboy, when Lady Chatterley’s Lover was the most notorious of all forbidden books. By his third year at university he had consumed the whole of Lawrence, save for the apprentice work. Lawrence was being absorbed by his fellow students too. From Lawrence they were learning to smash the brittle shell of civilized convention and let the secret core of their being emerge. Girls wore flowing dresses and danced in the rain and gave themselves to men who promised to take them to their dark core. Men who failed to take them there they impatiently discarded.

He himself had been wary of becoming a cultist, a Lawrentian. The women in Lawrence’s books made him uneasy; he imagined them as remorseless female insects, spiders or mantises. Under the gaze of the pale, black-clad, intent-eyed priestesses of the cult at the university he felt like a nervous, scurrying little bachelor insect. With some of them he would have liked to go to bed, that he could not deny — only by bringing a woman to her own dark core, after all, could a man reach his own dark core — but he was too scared. Their ecstasies would be volcanic; he would be too puny to survive them.

Besides, women who followed Lawrence had a code of chastity of their own. They fell into long periods of iciness during which they wished only to be by themselves or with their sisters, periods during which the thought of offering up their bodies was like a violation. From their icy sleep they could be awoken only by the imperious call of the dark male self. He himself was neither dark nor imperious, or at least his essential darkness and imperiousness had yet to emerge. So he made do with other girls, girls who had not yet become women and might never become women, since they had no dark core or none to speak of, girls who in their hearts didn’t want to do it, just as in his heart of hearts he could not have been said to want to do it either.

In his last weeks in Cape Town he had begun an affair with a girl named Caroline, a drama student with stage ambitions. They had gone to the theatre together, they had stayed up all night arguing the merits of Anouilh as against Sartre, Ionesco as against Beckett; they had slept together. Beckett was his favourite but not Caroline’s: Beckett was too gloomy, she said. Her real reason, he suspected, was that Beckett did not write parts for women. At her prodding he had even embarked on a play himself, a verse drama about Don Quixote. But he soon found himself at a dead end — the mind of the old Spaniard was too remote, he could not think his way into it — and gave up.

Now, months later, Caroline turns up in London and gets in touch with him. They meet in Hyde Park. She still has a southern-hemisphere tan, she is full of vitality, elated to be in London, elated too to see him. They stroll through the park. Spring has arrived, the evenings are growing longer, there are leaves on the trees. They catch a bus back to Kensington, where she lives.

He is impressed by her, by her energy and enterprise. A few weeks in London and she has already found her feet. She has a job; her CV has gone out to all the theatrical agents; and she has a flat in a fashionable quarter, which she shares with three English girls. How did she meet her flatmates, he asks? Friends of friends, she replies.

They resume their affair, but it is difficult from the start. The job she has found is as a waitress in a nightclub in the West End; the hours are unpredictable. She prefers that he meet her at her flat, not fetch her at the club. Since the other girls object to strangers having keys, he has to wait outside in the street. So at the end of his own working day he catches a train back to Archway Road, has a supper of bread and sausages in his room, reads for an hour or two or listens to the radio, then catches the last bus to Kensington and begins his wait. Sometimes Caroline comes back from the club as early as midnight, sometimes as late as 4 a.m. They have their time together, fall asleep. At seven o’clock the alarm clock rings: he must be out of the flat before her friends wake up. He catches the bus back to Highgate, has breakfast, dons his black uniform, and sets off for the office.