Scenes from Provincial Life

by J. M. Coetzee

  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.

  There is, unfortunately, an obstacle to his plan of study: regulations do not permit one to study pure mathematics to the exclusion of everything else. Most of the students in his class do a mix of pure mathematics, applied mathematics, and physics. This is not a direction he finds himself able to follow. Though as a child he had a desultory interest in rocketry and nuclear fission, he has no feel for what is called the real world, fails to understand why things in physics are as they are. Why, for instance, does a bouncing ball eventually stop bouncing? His fellow students have no difficulty with the question: because its coefficient of elasticity is less than one, they say. But why does it have to be so, he asks? Why can the coefficient not be exactly one, or more than one? They shrug their shoulders. We live in the real world, they say: in the real world the coefficient of elasticity is always less than one. It does not sound to him like an answer.

  Since he would appear to have no sympathy with the real world, he avoids the sciences, filling in the empty slots in his curriculum with courses in English, philosophy, classical studies. He would like to be thought of as a mathematics student who happens to take a few arts courses; but among the science students he is, to his chagrin, viewed as an outsider, a dilettante who turns up for mathematics lectures and then disappears, God knows where.

  Since he is going to be a mathematician, he ought to spend most of his time on mathematics. But mathematics is easy, whereas Latin is not. Latin is his weakest subject. Years of drilling at his Catholic school have embedded in him the logic of Latin syntax; he can write correct if plodding Ciceronian prose; but Virgil and Horace, with their haphazard word order and rebarbative word-stock, continue to baffle him.

  He is assigned to a Latin tutorial group in which most of the other students take Greek as well. Knowing Greek makes Latin easy for them; he has to struggle to keep up, not to make a fool of himself. He wishes he had gone to a school that taught Greek.

  One of the attractions of mathematics is that it uses the Greek alphabet. Though he knows no Greek words beyond hubris and areté and eleutheria, he spends hours perfecting his Greek script, pressing harder on the downstrokes to give the effect of a Bodoni typeface.

  Greek and pure mathematics are in his eyes the noblest subjects one can study at a university. From afar he reveres the lecturers in Greek, whose courses he cannot take: Anton Paap, papyrologist; Maurice Pope, translator of Sophocles; Maurits Heemstra, commentator on Heraclitus. Together with Douglas Sears, Professor of Pure Mathematics, they inhabit an exalted realm.

  Despite his best efforts, his marks for Latin are never high. It is Roman history that brings him down every time. The lecturer assigned to teach Roman history is a pale, unhappy young Englishman whose real interest is Digenis Akritas. The law students, taking Latin under compulsion, sense his weakness and torment him. They come in late and leave early; they throw paper aeroplanes; they whisper loudly while he is talking; when he produces one of his limp witticisms they laugh raucously and drum with their feet and will not stop.

  The truth is, he is as bored as the law students, and perhaps their lecturer too, by fluctuations in the price of wheat during the reign of Commodus. Without facts there is no history, and he has never had a head for facts: when examinations come around and he is invited to offer his thoughts on what caused what in the late Empire, he stares at the blank page in misery.

  They read Tacitus in translation: dry recitals of the crimes and excesses of the emperors in which only the puzzling hurry of sentence after sentence hints at irony. If he is going to be a poet he ought to be taking lessons from Catullus, poet of love, whom they are translating in tutorials; but it is Tacitus the historian, whose Latin is so difficult that he cannot follow it in the original, who truly grips him.

  Following Pound’s recommendation he has read Flaubert, first Madame Bovary, then Salammbô, Flaubert’s novel of ancient Carthage. Sternly he has refrained from reading Victor Hugo. Hugo is a windbag, says Pound, whereas Flaubert brings to the writing of prose the hard, jeweller’s craft of poetry. Out of Flaubert come first Henry James, then Conrad and Ford Madox Ford.

  He likes Flaubert. Emma Bovary in particular, with her dark eyes, her restless sensuality, her readiness to give herself, has him in her thrall. He would like to go to bed with Emma, hear the famous belt whistle like a snake as she undresses. But would Pound approve? He is not sure that itching to meet Emma is a good enough reason for admiring Flaubert. In his sensibility there is still, he suspects, something rotten, something Keatsian.

  Of course Emma Bovary is a fictional creation, he will never run into her in the street. But Emma was not created out of nothing: she had her origin in the flesh and blood experiences of her author, experiences that were then subjected to the transfiguring fire of art. If Emma had an original, or several originals, then it follows that women like Emma and Em
ma’s original should exist in the real world. And even if this is not so, even if no woman in the real world is quite like Emma, there must be many women so deeply affected by their reading of Madame Bovary that they fall under Emma’s spell and are transformed into versions of her. They may not be the real Emma but in a sense they have become her living embodiment.

  His ambition is to read everything worth reading before he goes overseas, so that he will not arrive in Europe a provincial bumpkin. As guides to reading he relies upon Eliot and Pound. On their authority he dismisses without a glance shelf after shelf of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Meredith. Nor is anything that comes out of nineteenth-century Germany or Italy or Spain or Scandinavia worthy of attention. Russia may have produced some interesting monsters, but as artists the Russians have nothing to teach us. Civilization since the eighteenth century has been an Anglo-French affair.

  On the other hand, there are pockets of high civilization in remoter times that one cannot afford to neglect: not only Athens and Rome but also the Germany of Walther von der Vogelweide, the Provence of Arnaut Daniel, the Florence of Dante and Guido Cavalcanti, to say nothing of Tang China and Moghul India and Almoravid Spain. So unless he learns Chinese and Persian and Arabic, or at least enough of the languages to read their classics with a crib, he might as well be a barbarian. Where will he find the time?

  *

  In his English courses he did not at first fare well. His tutor in literature was a young Welshman named Mr Jones. Mr Jones was new to South Africa; this was his first proper job. The law students, enrolled only because English, like Latin, was a required subject, had sniffed out his uncertainty at once: they yawned in his face, played stupid, parodied his speech, until sometimes he grew visibly desperate.

  Their first tutorial assignment was to write a critical analysis of a poem by Andrew Marvell. Though not sure what exactly was meant by critical analysis, he did his best. Mr Jones gave him a gamma. Gamma was not the lowest mark on the scale – there was still gamma-minus, to say nothing of the varieties of delta – but it was not good. Numbers of students, including law students, were awarded betas; there was even a solitary alpha-minus. Indifferent to poetry though they might be, there was something these classmates of his knew that he did not. But what was it? How did one get to be good at English?

  Mr Jones, Mr Bryant, Miss Wilkinson: all his teachers were young and, it seemed to him, helpless, suffering the persecutions of the law students in helpless silence, hoping against hope that they would grow tired and relent. For his part, he felt little sympathy for their plight. What he wanted from his teachers was authority, not revelations of vulnerability.

  In the three years since Mr Jones, his marks for English have slowly crept up. But he has never been at the top of the class, has always, in a certain sense, been struggling, unsure of what the study of literature ought to be. Compared with literary criticism, the philological side of English studies has been a relief. At least, with Old English verb conjugations or sound changes in Middle English, one knows where one is.

  Now, in his fourth year, he has enrolled for a course in early English prose writers taught by Professor Guy Howarth. He is the only student. Howarth has a reputation for being dry, pedantic, but he does not mind that. He has nothing against pedants. He prefers them to showmen.

  They meet once a week in Howarth’s office. Howarth reads his lecture aloud while he takes notes. After a few meetings Howarth simply lends him the text of the lecture to take home and read.

  The lectures, which are typed in faint ribbon on crisp, yellowing paper, come out of a cabinet in which there seems to be a file on every English-language author from Austen to Yeats. Is that what one has to do to become a professor of English: read the canonical authors and write a lecture on each? How many years of one’s life will that eat up? And what will it do to one’s spirit?

  Howarth, who is an Australian, seems to have taken a liking to him, he cannot see why. For his part, though he cannot say he likes Howarth, he does feel protective of him for his gaucherie, for his delusion that South African students care in the least what his opinion is of Gascoigne or Lyly or for that matter Shakespeare.

  On the last day of term, after their final session together, Howarth issues an invitation. ‘Come by the house tomorrow evening for a drink.’

  He obeys, but with a sinking heart. Beyond their exchanges on the Elizabethan prosaists, he has nothing to say to Howarth. In addition, he does not like drinking. Even wine, after the first sip, tastes sour to him, sour and heavy and unpleasant. He cannot see why people pretend to enjoy it.

  They sit in the dim, high-ceilinged living room of the Howarths’ home in the Gardens. He appears to be the only one invited. Howarth talks about Australian poetry, about Kenneth Slessor and A. D. Hope. Mrs Howarth breezes in, breezes out. He senses that she does not like him, finds him a prig, lacking in joie de vivre, lacking in repartee. Lilian Howarth is Howarth’s second wife. No doubt she was a beauty in her day, but now she is simply a squat little woman with spindly legs and too much powder on her face. She is also, according to report, a lush, given to embarrassing scenes when drunk.

  It emerges that he has been invited for a purpose. The Howarths are going abroad for six months. Would he be prepared to stay in their house and look after it? There will be no rent to pay, no bills, few responsibilities.

  He accepts on the spot. He is flattered to be asked, even if it is only because he seems dull and dependable. Also, if he gives up his flat in Mowbray, he can save more quickly towards a boat ticket to England. And the house – a huge, rambling pile on the lower slopes of the mountain with dark passages and musty, unused rooms – has an allure of its own.

  There is one catch. For the first month he will have to share the house with guests of the Howarths, a woman from New Zealand and her three-year-old daughter.

  The woman from New Zealand turns out to be another drinker. Shortly after he has moved in, she wanders into his room in the middle of the night and into his bed. She embraces him, presses against him, gives him wet kisses. He does not know what to do. He does not like her, does not desire her, is repelled by her slack lips seeking out his mouth. First a cold shiver runs through him, then panic. ‘No!’ he cries out. ‘Go away!’ And he curls himself up in a ball.

  Unsteadily she clambers out of his bed. ‘Bastard!’ she hisses, and is gone.

  They continue to share the big house until the end of the month, avoiding each other, listening for the creak of a floorboard, averting their gaze when their paths happen to cross. They have made fools of themselves, but at least she was a reckless fool, which is forgivable, while he was a prude and a dummy.

  He has never been drunk in his life. He abhors drunkenness. He leaves parties early to escape the stumbling, inane talk of people who have drunk too much. In his opinion, drunken drivers ought to have their sentences doubled instead of halved. But in South Africa every excess committed under the influence of liquor is looked on indulgently. Farmers can flog their labourers to death as long as they are drunk when they do so. Ugly men can force themselves on women, ugly women make overtures to men; if one resists, one is not playing the game.

  He has read Henry Miller. If a drunken woman had slipped into bed with Henry Miller, the fucking and no doubt the drinking would have gone on all night. Were Henry Miller merely a satyr, a monster of indiscriminate appetite, he could be ignored. But Henry Miller is an artist, and his stories, outrageous though they may be and probably full of lies, are stories of an artist’s life. Henry Miller writes about the Paris of the 1930s, a city of artists and women who loved artists. If women threw themselves at Henry Miller, then, mutatis mutandis, they must have thrown themselves at Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford and Ernest Hemingway and all the other great artists who lived in Paris in those years, to say nothing of Pablo Picasso. What is he going to do once he is in Paris or London? Is he going to persist in not playing the game?

  Besides his horror of drunkenness he has a horror
of physical ugliness. When he reads Villon’s Testament, he can think only of how ugly the belle heaumière sounds, wrinkled and unwashed and foulmouthed. If one is to be an artist, must one love women indiscriminately? Does an artist’s life entail sleeping with anyone and everyone, in the name of life? If one is finicky about sex, is one rejecting life?

  Another question: What made Marie, from New Zealand, decide he was worth getting into bed with? Was it simply because he was there, or had she heard from Howarth that he was a poet, a poet to be? Women love artists because they burn with an inner flame, a flame that consumes yet paradoxically renews all that it touches. When she slipped into his bed, Marie might perhaps have thought she would be licked by the flame of art, and experience an ecstasy beyond words. Instead she found herself being pushed away by a panic-stricken boy. Surely, one way or another, she will have her revenge. Surely, in the next letter from her, her friends the Howarths will get a version of events in which he will come out looking like a nincompoop.

  He knows that to condemn a woman for being ugly is morally despicable. But fortunately, artists do not have to be morally admirable people. All that matters is that they create great art. If his own art is to come out of the more contemptible side of himself, so be it. Flowers grow best on dungheaps, as Shakespeare never tires of saying. Even Henry Miller, who presents himself as such a straightforward fellow, ready to make love to any woman no matter her shape or size, probably has a dark side which he is prudent enough to conceal.

  Normal people find it hard to be bad. Normal people, when they feel badness flare up within them, drink, swear, commit violence. Badness is to them like a fever: they want it out of their system, they want to go back to being normal. But artists have to live with their fever, whatever its nature, good or bad. The fever is what makes them into artists; the fever must be kept alive. That is why artists can never be wholly present to the world: one eye has always to be turned inward. As for women who flock after artists, they cannot wholly be trusted. For just as the spirit of the artist is both flame and fever, so the woman who yearns to be licked by tongues of flame will at the same time do her best to quench the fever and bring down the artist to common ground. Therefore women have to be resisted even when they are loved. They cannot be allowed close enough to the flame to nip it out.