Scenes from Provincial Life

by J. M. Coetzee

  Why? Because my informants are women?

  Because it is not in the nature of love affairs for the lovers to see each other whole and steady.

  [Silence.]

  I repeat, it seems to me strange to be putting together a biography of a writer that will ignore his writing. But perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps I am out of date. Perhaps that is what literary biography has become. I must go. One final thing: if you are planning to quote me, would you make sure I have a chance to check the text first?

  Of course.

  Interview conducted in Sheffield, England,

  in September 2007.

  Sophie

  MME DENOËL, TELL ME how you came to know John Coetzee.

  He and I were for years colleagues at the University of Cape Town. He was in the Department of English, I was in French. We collaborated to offer a course in African literature. This was in 1976. He taught the Anglophone writers, I the Francophone. That was how our acquaintance began.

  And how did you yourself come to be in Cape Town?

  My husband was sent there to run the Alliance Française. Before that we had been living in Madagascar. During our time in Cape Town our marriage broke up. My husband returned to France, I stayed on. I took a position at the University, a junior position teaching French language.

  And in addition you taught the joint course that you mention, the course in African literature.

  Yes. It may seem odd, two whites offering a course in black African literature, but that is how it was in those days. If we two had not offered it, no one would have.

  Because blacks were excluded from the University?

  No, no, by then the system had started to crack. There were black students, though not many; some black lecturers too. But very few specialists in Africa, the wider Africa. That was one of the surprising things I discovered about South Africa: how insular it was. I went back on a visit last year, and it was the same: little or no interest in the rest of Africa. Africa was a dark continent to the north, best left unexplored.

  And you? Where did your interest in Africa come from?

  From my education. From France. Remember, France was once a great colonial power. Even after the colonial era officially ended, France had other means at its disposal to maintain its influence – economic means, cultural means. La Francophonie was the new name we invented for the old empire. Writers from Francophonie were promoted, fêted, studied. For my agrégation I worked on Aimé Césaire.

  And the course you taught in collaboration with Coetzee – was that a success, would you say?

  Yes, I believe so. It was an introductory course, no more than that, but students found it, as you say in English, an eye-opener.

  White students?

  White students plus a few black. We did not attract the more radical black students. Our approach would have been too academic for them, not engagé enough. We thought it sufficient to offer students a glimpse of the riches of the rest of Africa.

  And you and Coetzee saw eye to eye on this approach?

  I believe so. Yes.

  You were a specialist in African literature, he was not. His training was in the literature of the metropolis. How did he come to be teaching African literature?

  It is true, he had no formal training in the field. But he had a good general knowledge of Africa, admittedly just book knowledge, not practical knowledge, he had not travelled in Africa, but book knowledge is not worthless – right? He knew the anthropological literature better than I did, including the francophone materials. He had a grasp of the history, the politics. He had read the important figures writing in English and in French (of course in those days the body of African literature was not large – things are different now). There were gaps in his knowledge – the Maghreb, Egypt, and so forth. And he didn’t know the diaspora, particularly the Caribbean, which I did.

  What did you think of him as a teacher?

  He was good. Not spectacular but competent. Always well prepared.

  Did he get on well with students?

  That I can’t say. Perhaps if you track down old students of his they will be able to help you.

  And yourself? Compared with him, did you get on well with students?

  [Laughs.] What is it you want me to say? Yes, I suppose I was the more popular one, the more enthusiastic. I was young, remember, and it was a pleasure for me to be talking about books for a change, after all the language classes. We made a good pair, I thought, he more serious, more reserved, I more open, more flamboyant.

  He was considerably older than you.

  Ten years. He was ten years older than me.

  [Silence.]

  Is there anything you would like to add on the subject? Other aspects of him you would like to comment on?

  We had a liaison. I presume you are aware of that. It did not endure.

  Why not?

  It was not sustainable.

  Would you like to say more?

  Would I like to say more for your book? Not before you tell me what kind of book it is. Is it a book of gossip or a serious book? Do you have authorization for it? Who else are you speaking to besides me?

  Does one need authorization to write a book? If one wanted authorization, where would one seek it? From the executors of Coetzee’s estate? I don’t think so. But I can give you my assurance, the book I am writing is a serious book, a seriously intended biography. I concentrate on the years from Coetzee’s return to South Africa in 1971/72 until his first public recognition in 1977. That seems to me an important period of his life, important yet neglected, a period when he was still finding his feet as a writer.

  As for whom I have chosen to interview, let me put the situation before you candidly. I made two trips to South Africa, one last year, one the year before. Those trips were not as fruitful as I had hoped they would be. Of the people who knew Coetzee best, a number had died. In fact, the whole generation to which he belonged was on the point of dying out. And the memories of the survivors were not always to be trusted. In one or two cases, people who claimed to have known him turned out, after a little scratching, to have the wrong Coetzee (as you are aware, the name Coetzee is not uncommon in that country). The upshot is, the biography will rest on interviews with a handful of friends and colleagues, including, I would hope, yourself. Is that enough to reassure you?

  No. What of his diaries? What of his letters? What of his notebooks? Why so much reliance on interviews?

  Mme Denoël, I have been through the letters and diaries that are available to me. What Coetzee writes there cannot be trusted, not as a factual record – not because he was a liar but because he was a fictioneer. In his letters he is making up a fiction of himself for his correspondents; in his diaries he is doing much the same for his own eyes, or perhaps for posterity. As documents they have their value, of course; but if you want the truth, the full truth, then surely you need to set beside them the testimony of people who knew him in the flesh, who participated in his life.

  Yes; but what if we are all fictioneers, as you call Coetzee? What if we are all continually making up the stories of our lives? Why should what I tell you about Coetzee be any more worthy of credence than what he writes in his own person?

  Of course we are all fictioneers, more or less, I do not deny that. But which would you rather have: a range of independent reports from independent perspectives, from which you can then attempt to synthesize a whole; or the massive, unitary self-projection comprised by his oeuvre? I know which I would prefer.

  Yes, I can see that. There remains the other question I raised, the question of discretion. I am not one of those who believe that once a person is dead all restraint falls away. What existed between myself and John Coetzee I am not necessarily prepared to share with the world.

  I accept that. Discretion is your privilege, your right. Nevertheless, I ask you to pause and reflect. A great writer is the property of all the world. You knew John Coetzee closely. One of these days you too will no longer be with us. Do you
think it good that your memories should pass away with you?

  A great writer? How John would laugh if he could hear you! The day of the great writer is long gone, he would say.

  The day of the writer as oracle – yes, I would agree, that day is past. But would you not accept that a well-known writer – let us call him that instead – a well-known figure in our common cultural life, is to some extent public property?

  On that subject my opinion is irrelevant. What is relevant is what he himself believed. And there the answer is clear. He believed our life-stories are ours to construct as we wish, within or even against the constraints imposed by the real world – as you yourself acknowledged a moment ago. That is why I specifically used the term authorization. It was not the authorization of his family or his executors that I had in mind, it was his own authorization. If you were not authorized by him to expose the private side of his life, then I will certainly not assist you.

  Coetzee cannot have authorized me for the simple reason that he and I never had any contact. But on that point let us agree to differ, and move on. I return to the course you mentioned, the course on African literature that you and he taught together. One remark you made intrigues me. You said you and he did not attract the more radical African students. Why do you think that was so?

  Because we were not radicals ourselves, not by their standards. We had both, obviously, been affected by 1968. In 1968 I was still a student at the Sorbonne, where I took part in the manifestations, the days in May. John was in the United States at the time, and fell foul of the American authorities, I don’t remember all the details, but I know it became a turning point in his life. Yet I stress we were not Marxists, either of us, and certainly not Maoists. I was probably to the left of him, but I could afford that because I was shielded by my status within the French diplomatic enclave. If I had gotten into trouble with the South African security police I would have been discreetly put on a plane to Paris, and that would have been the end of the matter. I would not have ended up in a prison cell.

  Whereas Coetzee…

  Coetzee would not have ended up in a prison cell either. He was not a militant. His politics were too idealistic, too Utopian for that. In fact he was not political at all. He looked down on politics. He didn’t like political writers, writers who espoused a political programme.

  Yet he published some quite left-leaning commentary in the 1970s. I think of his essays on Alex La Guma, for example. He was sympathetic to La Guma, and La Guma was a communist.

  La Guma was a special case. He was sympathetic to La Guma because La Guma was from Cape Town, not because he was a communist.

  You say he was not political. Do you mean that he was apolitical? Because some people would say that the apolitical is just one variety of the political.

  No, not apolitical, I would rather say anti-political. He thought that politics brought out the worst in people. It brought out the worst in people and also brought to the surface the worst types in society. He preferred to have nothing to do with it.

  Did he preach this anti-political politics in his classes?

  Of course not. He was very scrupulous about not preaching. His political beliefs you discovered only after you got to know him better.

  You say his politics were Utopian. Are you implying they were unrealistic?

  He looked forward to the day when politics and the state would wither away. I would call that Utopian. On the other hand, he did not invest a great deal of himself in these Utopian longings. He was too much of a Calvinist for that.

  Please explain.

  You want me to say what lay behind Coetzee’s politics? You can best get that from his books. But let me try anyway.

  In Coetzee’s eyes, we human beings will never abandon politics because politics is too convenient and too attractive as a theatre in which to give rein to our baser emotions. Baser emotions meaning hatred and rancour and spite and jealousy and bloodlust and so forth. In otherwords, politics as we know it is a symptom of our fallen state and expresses that fallen state.

  Even the politics of liberation?

  If you refer to the politics of the South African liberation struggle, the answer is yes. As long as liberation meant national liberation, the liberation of the black nation of South Africa, John had no interest in it.

  Was he then hostile to the liberation struggle?

  Was he hostile? No, he was not hostile. Hostile, sympathetic – as a biographer you above all ought to be wary of putting people in neat little boxes with labels on them.

  I hope I am not putting Coetzee in a box.

  Well, that is how it sounds to me. No, he was not hostile to the liberation struggle. If you are a fatalist, as he tended to be, there is no point in being hostile to the course that history takes, however much you may regret it. To the fatalist, history is fate.

  Very well, did he then regret the liberation struggle? Did he regret the form the liberation struggle took?

  He accepted that the liberation struggle was just. The struggle was just, but the new South Africa towards which it strove was not Utopian enough for him.

  What would have been Utopian enough for him?

  The closing down of the mines. The ploughing under of the vineyards. The disbanding of the armed forces. The abolition of the automobile. Universal vegetarianism. Poetry in the streets. That sort of thing.

  In other words, poetry and the horse-drawn cart and vegetarianism are worth fighting for, but not liberation from apartheid?

  Nothing is worth fighting for. You compel me into the role of defending his position, a position I do not happen to share. Nothing is worth fighting for because fighting only prolongs the cycle of aggression and retaliation. I merely repeat what Coetzee says loud and clear in his writings, which you say you have read.

  Was he at ease with his black students – with black people in general?

  Was he at ease with anyone? He was not an at-ease person (can you say that in English?). He never relaxed. I witnessed that with my own eyes. So: Was he at ease with black people? No. He was not at ease among people who were at ease. The ease of others made him ill at ease. Which sent him off – in my opinion – in the wrong direction.

  What do you mean?

  He saw Africa through a romantic haze. He thought of Africans as embodied, in a way that had been lost long ago in Europe. What do I mean? Let me try to explain. In Africa, he used to say, body and soul were indistinguishable, the body was the soul. He had a whole philosophy of the body, of music and dance, which I can’t reproduce, but which seemed to me, even then – how shall I say? – unhelpful. Politically unhelpful.

  Please continue.

  His philosophy ascribed to Africans the role of guardians of the truer, deeper, more primitive being of humankind. He and I argued quite strenuously about this. What his position boiled down to, I said, was old-fashioned Romantic primitivism. In the context of the 1970s, of the liberation struggle and the apartheid state, it was unhelpful to look at Africans in his way. And anyway, it was a role they were no longer prepared to fulfil.

  Was this the reason why black students avoided his course, your joint course, in African literature?

  It was a viewpoint that he did not openly propagate. He was always very careful in that respect, very correct. But if you listened carefully it must have come across.

  There was one further circumstance, one further bias to his thinking, that I must mention. Like many whites, he regarded the Cape, the western Cape and perhaps the northern Cape along with it, as standing apart from the rest of South Africa. The Cape was a country of its own, with its own geography, its own history, its own languages and culture. In this mythical Cape, haunted by the ghosts of what we used to call the Hottentots, the Coloured people were rooted, and to a lesser extent the Afrikaners too, but black Africans were aliens, latecomers, outsiders, as were the English.

  Why do I mention this? Because it suggests how he could justify the rather abstract, rather anthropological attitude he took
up towards black South Africa. He had no feeling for black South Africans. That was my private conclusion. They might be his fellow citizens but they were not his countrymen. History – or fate, which was to him the same thing – might have cast them in the role of inheritors of the land, but at the back of his mind they continued to be they as opposed to us.

  If Africans were they, who were us? The Afrikaners?

  No. Us was principally the Coloured people. It is a term I use only reluctantly, as shorthand. He – Coetzee – avoided it as far as he could. I mentioned his Utopianism. This avoidance was another aspect of his Utopianism. He longed for the day when everyone in South Africa would call themselves nothing, neither African nor European nor white nor black nor anything else, when family histories would have become so tangled and intermixed that people would be ethnically indistinguishable, that is to say – I utter the tainted word again – Coloured. He called that the Brazilian future. He approved of Brazil and the Brazilians. He had of course never been to Brazil.

  But he had Brazilian friends.

  He had met a few Brazilian refugees in South Africa.

  [Silence.]

  You mention an intermixed future. Are we talking here about biological mixture? Are we talking about intermarriage?

  Don’t ask me. I am just delivering a report.

  Then why, instead of contributing to the future by – legitimately or illegitimately – fathering Coloured children – why was he having a liaison with a young white colleague from France?

  [Laughs.] Don’t ask me.

  What did you and he talk about?

  About our teaching. About colleagues and students. In other words, we talked shop. We also talked about ourselves.

  Go on.

  You want me to tell you if we discussed his writing? The answer is no. He never spoke to me about what he was writing, nor did I press him.