Scenes from Provincial Life

by J. M. Coetzee

  Interview conducted in São Paulo, Brazil,

  in December 2007.

  Martin

  IN ONE OF HIS late notebooks Coetzee gives an account of his first meeting with you, on the day in 1972 when you were both being interviewed for a position at the University of Cape Town. The account is only a few pages long – I’ll read it to you if you like. I suspect it was intended to fit into the third memoir, the one that never saw the light of day. As you will hear, he follows the same convention as in Boyhood and Youth, where the subject is called ‘he’ rather than ‘I’.

  This is what he writes.

  ‘He has had his hair cut for the interview. He has trimmed his beard. He has put on a jacket and tie. If he is not yet Mr Sobersides, at least he no longer looks like the Wild Man of Borneo.

  ‘In the waiting room are the two other candidates for the job. They stand side by side at the window overlooking the gardens, conversing softly. They seem to know each other, or at least to have struck up an acquaintance.’

  You don’t recall who this third person was, do you?

  He was from the University of Stellenbosch, but I don’t remember his name.

  He goes on: ‘This is the British way: to drop the contestants into the pit and watch to see what will happen. He will have to reaccustom himself to British ways of doing things, in all their brutality. A tight ship, Britain, crammed to the gunwales. Dog eat dog. Dogs snarling and snapping at one another, each guarding its little territory. The American way, by comparison, decorous, even gentle. But then there is more space in America, more room for urbanity.

  ‘The Cape may not be Britain, may be drifting further from Britain every day, yet what is left of British ways it clutches tight to its chest. Without that saving connection, what would the Cape be? A minor landing on the way to nowhere; a place of savage idleness.

  ‘In the order paper pinned to the door, he is Number Two to appear before the committee. Number One, when summoned, rises calmly, taps out his pipe, stores it away in what must be a pipe case, and passes through the portal. Twenty minutes later he re-emerges, his face inscrutable.

  ‘It is his turn. He enters and is waved to a seat at the foot of a long table. At the far end sit his inquisitors, five in number, all men. Because the windows are open, because the room is above a street where cars are continually passing by, he has to strain to hear them, and raise his own voice to make himself heard.

  ‘Some polite feints, then the first thrust: If appointed, what authors would he most like to teach?

  “‘I can teach pretty much across the board,” he replies. “I am not a specialist. I think of myself as a generalist.”

  ‘As an answer it is at least defensible. A small department in a small university might be happy to recruit a jack of all trades. But from the silence that falls he gathers he has not answered well. He has taken the question too literally. That has always been a fault of his: taking questions too literally, responding too briefly. These people don’t want brief answers. They want something more leisurely, more expansive, something that will allow them to work out what kind of fellow they have before them, what kind of junior colleague he would make, whether he would fit in in a provincial university that is doing its best to maintain standards in difficult times, to keep the flame of civilization burning.

  ‘In America, where they take job-hunting seriously, people like him, people who don’t know how to read the agenda behind a question, can’t speak in rounded paragraphs, don’t put themselves over with conviction – in short, people deficient in people skills – attend training sessions where they learn to look the interrogator in the eye, smile, respond to questions fully and with every appearance of sincerity. Presentation of the self: that is what they call it in America, without irony.

  ‘What authors would he prefer to teach? What research is he currently engaged in? Would he feel competent to offer tutorials in Middle English? His answers sound more and more hollow. The truth is, he does not really want this job. He does not want it because in his heart he knows he is not cut out to be a teacher. Lacks the temperament. Lacks zeal.

  ‘He emerges from the interview in a state of black dejection. He wants to get away from this place at once, without delay. But no, first there are forms to be filled in, travel expenses to be collected.

  “‘How did it go?”

  ‘The speaker is the candidate who was interviewed first, the pipe-smoker.’ That is you, if I am not mistaken.

  Yes. But I have given up the pipe.

  ‘He shrugs. “Who knows?” he says. “Not well.”

  “‘Shall we get a cup of tea?”

  ‘He is taken aback. Are the two of them not supposed to be rivals? Is it permitted for rivals to fraternize?

  ‘It is late afternoon, the campus is deserted. They make for the Student Union in quest of their cup of tea. The Union is closed. MJ’ – that is what he calls you – ‘takes out his pipe. “Ah well,” he says. “Do you smoke?”

  ‘How surprising: he is beginning to like this MJ, with his easy, straightforward manner! His gloom is fading fast. He likes MJ and, unless it is all just an exercise in self-presentation, MJ seems inclined to like him too. And this mutual liking has grown up in a flash!

  ‘Yet should he be surprised? Why have the two of them (or the three of them, if the shadowy third is included) been selected to be interviewed for a lectureship in English literature, if not because they are the same kind of person, with the same formation behind them (formation: not the customary English word, he must remember that); and because both, finally and most obviously, are South Africans, white South Africans?’

  That is where the fragment ends. It is undated, but I am pretty sure he wrote it in 1999 or 2000. So…a couple of questions relating to it. First question: You were the successful candidate, the one who was awarded the lectureship, while Coetzee was passed over. Why do you think he was passed over? And did you detect any resentment on his part?

  None at all. I was from inside the system – the colonial university system as it was in those days – while he was from outside, insofar as he had gone off to America for his graduate education. Given the nature of all systems, namely to reproduce themselves, I was always going to have the edge over him. He understood that, in theory and in practice. He certainly didn’t put the blame on me.

  Very well. Another question: He suggests that in you he has found a new friend, and goes on to list traits that you and he have in common. But when he gets to your white South Africanness he stops and writes no more. Have you any idea why he should have stopped just there?

  Why he should have raised the topic of white South African identity and then dropped it? There are two explanations I can offer. One is that it might have seemed too complex a topic to be explored in a memoir or diary – too complex or too close to the bone. The other is simpler: that the story of his adventures in the academy was becoming too boring to go on with, too short of narrative interest.

  And which explanation do you incline towards?

  Probably the first, with an admixture of the second. John left South Africa in the 1960s, came back in the 1970s, for decades hovered between South Africa and the United States, then finally decamped to Australia and died there. I left South Africa in the 1970s and never returned. Broadly speaking, he and I shared a common stance towards South Africa, namely that our presence there was illegitimate. We may have had an abstract right to be there, a birthright, but the basis of that right was fraudulent. Our existence was grounded in a crime, specifically colonial conquest, perpetuated by apartheid. Whatever the opposite is of native or rooted, that was what we felt ourselves to be. We thought of ourselves as sojourners, temporary residents, and to that extent without a home, without a homeland. I don’t think I am misrepresenting John. It was something he and I talked about a great deal. I am certainly not misrepresenting myself.

  Are you saying that you and he commiserated together?

  Commiserated is the wrong word. We had too mu
ch going for us to regard our fate as a miserable one. We had our youth – I was still in my twenties at the time, he was only slightly older – we had a not-bad education behind us, we even had modest material assets. If we had been whisked away and set down somewhere else in the world – the civilized world, the First World – we would have prospered, flourished. (About the Third World I would not be so confident. We were not Robinson Crusoes, either of us.)

  Therefore no, I did not regard our fate as tragic, and I am sure he did not either. If anything, it was comic. His ancestors in their way, and my ancestors in theirs, had toiled away, generation after generation, to clear a patch of wild Africa for their descendants, and what was the fruit of all their labours? Doubt in the hearts of those descendants about title to the land; an uneasy sense that it belonged not to them but, inalienably, to its original owners.

  Do you think that if he had gone on with the memoir, if he had not abandoned it, that is what he would have said?

  More or less. Let me elaborate a little further on our stance vis-à-vis South Africa. We both cultivated a certain provisionality in our feelings towards the country, he perhaps more so than I. We were reluctant to invest too deeply in the country, since sooner or later our ties to it would have to be cut, our investment in it annulled.

  And?

  That’s all. We had a certain style of mind in common, a style that I attribute to our origins, colonial and South African. Hence the commonality of outlook.

  In his case, would you say that the habit you describe, of treating feelings as provisional, of not committing himself emotionally, extended beyond relations with the land of his birth into personal relations too?

  I wouldn’t know. You are the biographer. If you find that train of thought worth following up, follow it.

  Can we now turn to his teaching? He writes that he was not cut out to be a teacher. Would you agree?

  I would say that one teaches best what one knows best and feels most strongly about. John knew a fair amount about a range of things, but not a great deal about anything in particular. I would count that as one strike against him. Second, though there were writers who mattered deeply to him – the nineteenth-century Russian novelists, for instance – the real depth of his involvement did not come out in his teaching, not in any obvious way. Something was always being held back. Why? I don’t know. All I can suggest is that a strain of secretiveness that seemed to be engrained in him, part of his character, extended to his teaching too.

  Do you feel then that he spent his working life, or most of it, in a profession for which he had no talent?

  That is a little too sweeping. John was a perfectly adequate academic. A perfectly adequate academic but not a notable teacher. Perhaps if he had taught Sanskrit it would have been different, Sanskrit or some other subject in which the conventions permit you to be a little dry and reserved.

  He told me once that he had missed his calling, that he should have been a librarian. I can see the sense in that.

  I haven’t been able to lay my hands on course descriptions from the 1970s – the University of Cape Town doesn’t seem to archive material like that – but among Coetzee’s papers I did come across an advertisement for a course that you and he offered jointly in 1976, to extramural students. Do you remember that course?

  Yes, I do. It was a poetry course. I was working on Hugh McDiarmid at the time, so I used the occasion to give McDiarmid a close reading. John had the students read Pablo Neruda in translation. I had never read Neruda, so I sat in on his sessions.

  A strange choice, don’t you think, for someone like him: Neruda?

  No, not at all. John had a fondness for lush, expansive poetry: Neruda, Whitman, Stevens. You must remember that he was, in his way, a child of the 1960s.

  In his way – what do you mean by that?

  I mean within the confines of a certain rectitude, a certain rationality. Without being a Dionysian himself, he approved in principle of Dionysianism. Approved in principle of letting oneself go, though I don’t recall that he ever let himself go – he would probably not have known how to. He had a need to believe in the resources of the unconscious, in the creative force of unconscious processes. Hence his inclination towards the more vatic poets.

  You must have noted how rarely he discussed the sources of his own creativity. In part that came out of the native secretiveness I mentioned. But in part it also suggests a reluctance to probe the sources of his inspiration, as if being too self-aware might cripple him.

  Was the course a success – the course you and he taught together?

  I certainly learned from it – learned about the history of surrealism in Latin America, for instance. As I said, John knew a little about a lot of things. As for what our students came away with, that I can’t say. Students, in my experience, soon work out whether what you are teaching matters to you. If it does, then they are prepared to consider letting it matter to them too. But if they conclude, rightly or wrongly, that it doesn’t, then, curtains, you may as well go home.

  And Neruda didn’t matter to him?

  No, I’m not saying that. Neruda may have mattered a great deal to him. Neruda may even have been a model – an unattainable model – of how a poet can respond creatively to injustice and repression. But – and this is my point – if you treat your connection with the poet as a personal secret to be closely guarded, and if moreover your classroom manner is somewhat stiff and formal, you are never going to acquire a following.

  You are saying he never acquired a following?

  Not as far as I am aware. Perhaps he smartened up his act in his later years. I just don’t know.

  At the time when you met him, in 1972, he had a rather precarious position teaching at a high school. It wasn’t until some time later that he was actually offered a position at the University. Even so, for almost all of his working life, from his mid-twenties until his mid-sixties, he was employed as a teacher of one kind or another. I come back to my earlier question: Doesn’t it seem strange to you that a man who had no talent as a teacher should have made teaching his career?

  Yes and no. The ranks of the teaching profession are, as you must know, full of refugees and misfits.

  And which was he: a refugee or a misfit?

  He was a misfit. He was also a cautious soul. He liked the security of a monthly salary cheque.

  You sound critical.

  I am only pointing to the obvious. If he hadn’t wasted so much of his life correcting students’ grammar and sitting through boring meetings, he might have written more, perhaps even written better. But he was not a child. He knew what he was doing. He made his accommodation with society and lived with the consequences.

  On the other hand, being a teacher allowed him contact with a younger generation. Which he might not have had, had he withdrawn from the world and devoted himself wholly to writing.

  True.

  Did he have any special friendships that you know of among students?

  Now you sound as if you are angling. What do you mean, special friendships? Do you mean, did he overstep the mark? Even if I knew, which I don’t, I would not comment.

  Yet the theme of the older man and the younger woman keeps coming back in his fiction.

  It would be very, very naïve to conclude that because the theme was present in his writing it had to be present in his life.

  In his inner life, then.

  His inner life. Who can say what goes on in people’s inner lives?

  Is there any other aspect of him that you would like to bring forward? Any stories worth recounting?

  Stories? I don’t think so. John and I were colleagues. We were friends. We got on well together. But I can’t say I knew him intimately. Why do you ask if I have stories?

  Because in biography one has to strike a balance between narrative and opinion. I have no shortage of opinion – people are more than ready to tell me what they think or thought of Coetzee – but one needs more than that to bring a life-story to life
.

  Sorry, I can’t help you. Perhaps your other sources will be more forthcoming. Who else will you be speaking to?

  I have five names on my list, including yours.

  Only five? Don’t you think that is a bit risky? Who are we lucky five? How did you come to choose us?

  I’ll give you the names. From here I travel to South Africa – it will be my second trip – to speak to Coetzee’s cousin Margot, with whom he was close. Then on to Brazil to meet a woman named Adriana Nascimento who lived in Cape Town for some years during the 1970s. After that – but the date isn’t fixed yet – I go to Canada to see someone named Julia Frankl, who in the 1970s would have gone under the name Julia Smith. And I will also be seeing Sophie Denoël in Paris.

  Sophie I knew, but not the others. How did you come up with these names?

  Basically I let Coetzee himself do the choosing. I followed up on clues he dropped in his notebooks – clues as to who was important to him at the time, in the 1970s.

  It seems a peculiar way of selecting biographical sources, if you don’t mind my saying so.

  Perhaps. There are other names I would have wanted to add, of people who knew him well, but alas they are dead now. You call it a peculiar way of going about a biography. Perhaps. But I am not interested in delivering a final judgment on Coetzee. I am not writing that kind of book. Final judgments I leave to history. What I am doing is telling the story of a stage in his life, or if we can’t arrive at a single story then several stories from different perspectives.

  And the sources you have selected have no axes to grind, no ambitions of their own to pronounce final judgment on Coetzee?

  [Silence.]

  Let me ask: Leaving aside Sophie, and leaving aside the cousin, was either of the women you mention emotionally involved with Coetzee?

  Yes. Both. In different ways. Which I have yet to explore.

  Shouldn’t that give you pause? With your very narrow roster of sources, will you not inevitably come out with an account or set of accounts that are slanted towards the personal and the intimate at the expense of the man’s actual achievements as a writer? Worse: do you not run the risk of allowing your book to become no more than – forgive me for putting it in this way – no more than a settling of scores, personal scores?