J. Coetzee - Elizabeth Costello

That is what Paul West, novelist, had written about, page after page after page, leaving nothing out; and that is what she read, sick with the spectacle, sick with herself, sick with a world in which such things took place, until at last she pushed the book away and sat with her head in her hands. Obscene! she wanted to cry but did not cry because she did not know at whom the word should be flung: at herself, at West, at the committee of angels that watches impassively over all that passes. Obscene because such things ought not to take place, and then obscene again because having taken place they ought not to be brought into the light but covered up and hidden for ever in the bowels of the earth, like what goes on in the slaughterhouses of the world, if one wishes to save one's sanity.

The letter of invitation came while the obscene touch of West's book was still rank upon her. And that, in short, is why she is here in Amsterdam, with the word obscene still welling up in her throat. Obscene: not just the deeds of Hitler's executioners, not just the deeds of the blockman, but the pages of Paul West's black book too. Scenes that do not belong in the light of day, that the eyes of maidens and children deserve to be shielded from.

How will Amsterdam react to Elizabeth Costello in her present state? Does the sturdy Calvinist word evil still have any power among these sensible, pragmatic, well-adjusted citizens of the New Europe? Over half a century since the devil last swaggered brazenly through their streets, yet surely they cannot have forgotten. Adolf and his cohorts still grip the popular imagination. A curious fact, considering that Koba the Bear, his older brother and mentor, by any measure more murderous, more vile, more appalling to the soul, has almost dwindled away. A measuring of vileness against vileness in which the very act of measuring leaves a vile taste in the mouth. Twenty million, six million, three million, a hundred thousand: at a certain point the mind breaks down before quanta; and the older you get – this at any rate is what has happened to her – the sooner comes the breakdown. A sparrow knocked off a branch by a slingshot, a city annihilated from the air: who dare say which is the worse? Evil, all of it, an evil universe invented by an evil god. Dare she say that to her kind Dutch hosts, her kind, intelligent, sensible auditors in this enlightened, rationally organized, well-run city? Best to keep her peace, best not to cry out too much. She can imagine the next headline in the Age: universe

EVIL, OPINES COSTELLO.

From her hotel she wanders out along the canal, an old woman in a raincoat, still slightly light-headed, slightly wobbly on her feet, after the long flight from the Antipodes. Disoriented: is it simply because she has lost her bearings that she is thinking these black thoughts? If so, perhaps she ought to travel less. Or more.

The topic she is to speak on, the topic negotiated between her and her hosts, is 'Witness, Silence, and Censorship'. The paper itself, or most of it, was not difficult to write. After her years on the executive of PEN Australia she can discourse on censorship in her sleep. If she wanted to make things easy for herself, she could read them her routine censorship paper, spend a few hours in the Rijksmuseum, then catch the train to Nice, where, conveniently, her daughter is staying as the guest of a foundation.

The routine censorship paper is liberal in its ideas, with perhaps a touch of the Kulturpessimismus that has marked her thinking of late: the civilization of the West is based on belief in unlimited and illimitable endeavour, it is too late for us to do anything about that, we must simply hold on tight and go wherever the ride takes us. It is on the subject of the illimitable that her opinions seem to be undergoing a quiet change. Reading West's book has contributed to that change, she suspects, though it is possible the change would have happened anyway, for reasons that are more obscure to her. Specifically, she is no longer sure that people are always improved by what they read. Furthermore, she is not sure that writers who venture into the darker territories of the soul always return unscathed. She has begun to wonder whether writing what one desires, any more than reading what one desires, is in itself a good thing.

That, in any event, is what she plans to say here in Amsterdam. As her principal example she plans to set before the conference The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, which came to her in a packet of books, some of them new, some reissues, sent for her consideration by an editor friend in Sydney. The Very Rich Hours was the only one that had really engaged her; her response was set out in a review that she withdrew at the last minute and has never published.

When she arrived at her hotel there had been an envelope waiting for her: a letter of welcome from the organizers, a conference programme, maps. Now, sitting on a bench on the Prinsengracht in the tentative warmth of the northern sun, she glances over the programme. She is scheduled to speak the next morning, the first day of the conference. She flips to the notes at the end of the programme.'Elizabeth Costello, noted Australian novelist and essayist, author of The House on Eccles Street and many other books.' Not the way she would have billed herself, but they did not ask her. Frozen in the past, as usual; frozen in the achievements of her youth.

Her eye drifts down the list. Most of her fellow conferees she has not heard of. Then her eye is caught by the last name on the list, and her heart misses a beat. 'Paul West, novelist and critic.' Paul West: the stranger on the state of whose soul she spends so many pages. Can anyone, she asks in her lecture, wander as deep as Paul West does into the Nazi forest of horrors and emerge unscathed? Have we considered that the explorer enticed into that forest may come out not better and stronger for the experience but worse? How can she give the talk, how can she ask such a question, with Paul West himself sitting in the audience? It will seem like an attack, a presumptuous, unprovoked, and above all personal attack on a fellow writer. Who will believe the truth: that she has never had any dealings with Paul West, has never met him, has read only this one book of his? What is to be done?

Of the twenty pages of her text, fully half are devoted to the von Stauffenberg book. With luck the book will not have been translated into Dutch; with extreme luck no one else in the audience will have read it. She could cut out West's name, refer to him only as 'the author of a book on the Nazi period'. She could even make the book itself hypothetical: a hypothetical novel about the Nazis, the writing of which would have scarred the soul of its hypothetical author. Then no one will know, except of course West himself, if he is present, if he bothers to come to the talk by the lady from Australia.

It is four in the afternoon. Usually, on long flights, she sleeps only fitfully. But on this flight she experimented with a new pill, and it seems to have worked. She feels well, ready to plunge into work. There is time enough to rewrite the talk, removing Paul West and his novel into the deep background, leaving only the thesis visible, the thesis that writing itself, as a form of moral adven-turousness, has the potential to be dangerous. But what kind of talk would that be – a thesis with no examples?

Is there someone she can put in the place of Paul West – Céline for instance? One of Celine's novels, its name evades her, flirts with sadism, fascism, anti-Semitism. Years since she read it. Can she lay her hands on a copy, preferably not in Dutch, and write Céline into the talk?

But Paul West is not Céline, is nothing like him. Flirting with sadism is exactly what West does not do; furthermore, his book barely mentions the Jews. The horrors he unveils are sui generis. That must have been his wager with himself: to take as his subject a handful of bumbling German career officers unfitted by the very code of their upbringing to plotting and carrying out an assassination, to tell the story of their ineptitude and its consequences from beginning to end, and to leave one feeling, to one's surprise, authentic pity, authentic terror.