John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

His involvement with Mr Pomfret in the IBM days, and his part in furthering the development of the TSR-2 bomber, seem in retrospect so trivial, even comic, that his conscience is easily set at rest. Aldermaston is a different kettle of fish. He spends a total of ten days there, over a period of weeks. By the time he is finished, the tape-scheduling routines are working as well as they work at Cambridge. His task is done. Doubtless there are other people who could have installed the routines, but not as well as he, who wrote them and knows them inside out. Other people could have done the job, but other people did not. Though he could have made a case for being excused (he could, for instance, have pointed to the unnatural circumstance of being observed in all his actions by a poker-faced guard, and the effect of that on his state of mind), he did not make such a case. Mr Pomfret may have been a joke, but he cannot pretend Aldermaston is a joke.

He has never known a place like Aldermaston. In atmosphere it is quite unlike Cambridge. The cubicle where he works, as with every other cubicle and everything inside them, is cheap, functional, and ugly. The whole base, made up of low, scattered brick buildings, is ugly with the ugliness of a place that knows no one will look at it or care to look at it; perhaps with the ugliness of a place that knows, when war comes, it will be blown off the face of the earth.

No doubt there are clever people here, as clever as the Cambridge mathematicians, or nearly so. No doubt some of the people he glimpses in the corridors, Operations Supervisors, Research Officers, Technical Officers Grades I, II and III, Senior Technical Officers, people he is not allowed to speak to, are themselves graduates of Cambridge. He has written the routines he is installing, but the planning behind them was done by Cambridge people, people who could not have been unaware that the machine in the Mathematical Laboratory had a sinister sister at Aldermaston. The hands of the people at Cambridge are not a great deal cleaner than his own hands. Nevertheless, by passing through these gates, by breathing the air here, he has aided the arms race, become an accomplice in the Cold War, and on the wrong side too.

Tests no longer seem to come with fair warning these days, as they did when he was a schoolboy, or even to announce themselves as tests. But in this case it is hard to plead unpreparedness as an excuse. From the moment the word Aldermaston was first uttered he knew Aldermaston would be a test and knew he was not going to pass, was going to lack what it took to pass. By working at Aldermaston he has lent himself to evil, and, from a certain point of view, lent himself more culpably than his English colleagues, who if they had refused to participate would have risked their careers far more seriously than he, a transient and an outsider to this quarrel between Britain and America on the one hand and Russia on the other.

Experience . That is the word he would like to fall back on to justify himself to himself. The artist must taste all experience, from the noblest to the most degraded. Just as it is the artist’s destiny to experience supreme creative joy, so he must be prepared to take upon himself all in life that is miserable, squalid, ignominious. It was in the name of experience that he underwent London — the dead days of IBM, the icy winter of 1962, one humiliating affair after another: stages in the poet’s life, all of them, in the testing of his soul. Similarly Aldermaston — the wretched cubicle in which he works, with its plastic furniture and its view on to the back of a furnace, the armed man at his back — can be regarded simply as experience, as a further stage in his journey into the depths.

It is a justification that does not for a moment convince him. It is sophistry, that is all, contemptible sophistry. And if he is further going to claim that, just as sleeping with Astrid and her teddy bear was getting to know moral squalor, so telling self-justifying lies to oneself is getting to know intellectual squalor at first hand, then the sophistry will only become more contemptible. There is nothing to be said for it; nor, to be ruthlessly honest, is there anything to be said for its having nothing to be said for it. As for ruthless honesty, ruthless honesty is not a hard trick to learn. On the contrary, it is the easiest thing in the world. As a poisonous toad is not poison to itself, so one soon develops a hard skin against one’s own honesty. Death to reason, death to talk! All that matters is doing the right thing, whether for the right reason or the wrong reason or no reason at all.

Working out the right thing to do is not difficult. He does not need to think overlong to know what the right thing is. He could, if he chose, do the right thing with near infallible accuracy. What gives him pause is the question of whether he can go on being a poet while doing the right thing. When he tries to imagine what sort of poetry would flow from doing the right thing time after time after time, he sees only blank emptiness. The right thing is boring. So he is at an impasse: he would rather be bad than boring, has no respect for a person who would rather be bad than boring, and no respect either for the cleverness of being able to put his dilemma neatly into words.

Despite cricket and books, despite the ever-cheerful birds greeting the sunrise with chirrups from the apple tree beneath his window, weekends remain hard to get through, particularly Sundays. He dreads waking up on Sunday mornings. There are rituals to help one through Sunday, principally going out and buying the newspaper and reading it on the sofa and clipping out the chess problems. But the newspaper will not take one much beyond eleven in the morning; and anyhow, reading the Sunday supplements is too transparently a way of killing time.

He is killing time, he is trying to kill Sunday so that Monday will come sooner, and with Monday the relief of work. But in a larger sense work is a way of killing time too. Everything he has done since he stepped ashore at Southampton has been a killing of time while he waits for his destiny to arrive. Destiny would not come to him in South Africa, he told himself; she would come (come like a bride!) only in London or Paris or perhaps Vienna, because only in the great cities of Europe does destiny reside. For nearly two years he waited and suffered in London, and destiny stayed away. Now, having not been strong enough to bear London, he has beaten a retreat into the countryside, a strategic retreat. Whether destiny pays visits to the countryside is not certain, even if it is the English countryside, and even if it is barely an hour by train from Waterloo.

Of course in his heart he knows destiny will not visit him unless he makes her do so. He has to sit down and write, that is the only way. But he cannot begin writing until the moment is right, and no matter how scrupulously he prepares himself, wiping the table clean, positioning the lamp, ruling a margin down the side of the blank page, sitting with his eyes shut, emptying his mind in readiness — in spite of all this, the words will not come to him. Or rather, many words will come, but not the right words, the sentence he will recognize at once, from its weight, from its poise and balance, as the destined one.

He hates these confrontations with the blank page, hates them to the extent of beginning to avoid them. He cannot bear the weight of despair that descends at the end of each fruitless session, the realization that again he has failed. Better not to wound oneself in this way, over and over. One might cease to be able to respond to the call when it comes, might become too weak, too abject.

He is well aware that his failure as a writer and his failure as a lover are so closely parallel that they might as well be the same thing. He is the man, the poet, the maker, the active principle, and the man is not supposed to wait for the woman’s approach. On the contrary, it is the woman who is supposed to wait for the man. The woman is the one who sleeps until aroused by the prince’s kiss; the woman is the bud that unfolds under the caress of the sun’s rays. Unless he wills himself to act, nothing will happen, in love or in art. But he does not trust the will. Just as he cannot will himself to write but must wait for the aid of some force from outside, a force that used to be called the Muse, so he cannot simply will himself to approach a woman without some intimation (from where? — from her? from within him? from above?) that she is his destiny. If he approaches a woman in any other spirit, the result is an entanglement like the wretched one with Astrid, an entanglement he was trying to escape from almost before it began.