Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999

by J. M. Coetzee

  5 Eliot made no major public statement on his decision to leave the United States. However, in a 1928 letter to Herbert Read he did, somewhat plaintively, articulate his sense of rootlessness within the country of his birth: ‘Some day I want to write an essay about the point of view of an American who wasn’t an American, because he was born in the South and went to school in New England as a small boy with a nigger drawl, but who wasn’t a southerner in the South because his people were northerners in a border state and looked down on all southerners and Virginians, and so who was never anything anywhere and who therefore felt himself to be more a Frenchman than an American and more an Englishman than a Frenchman and yet felt that the U.S.A. up to a hundred years ago was a family extension.’ ‘T.S. Eliot – A Memoir’, in T.S. Eliot: The Man and his Work, ed. Allen Tate (New York: Delacorte, 1966), p. 15.

  Three years later, in the Criterion, he saw the plight of the American intellectual as follows: ‘The American intellectual of today has almost no chance of continuous development upon his own soil and in the environment which his ancestors, however humble, helped to form. He must be an expatriate: either to languish in a provincial university, or abroad, or, the most complete expatriation of all, in New York.’ Quoted in William M. Chace, The Political Identities of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973), p. 155. Eliot does concede, however, that this enforced deracination is more a feature of modern life than of specifically American circumstances.

  6 ‘East Coker’, in Four Quartets (London: Faber, 1944), pp. 22, 15, 20.

  7 ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.’ ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), in Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), p. 30.

  8 Reeves quotes the address of the Cumaean Sibyl to Aeneas (Aeneid, VI, 93–4): ‘The cause of all this Trojan woe is again an alien bride [coniunx hospita], again a foreign marriage.’ The alien brides who cause woe to Troy are Menelaus’s wife Helen, Phoenician Dido and Latin Lavinia. Reeves writes, ‘Is not at least a portion of Eliot’s woe his marriage to Vivien, an Englishwoman, a coniunx hospita?’ (p. 47)

  Eliot’s reading of the meeting of Dido and Aeneas in the Underworld as, in the first place, ‘civilised’ is hard to understand. After Aeneas has addressed her, Dido

  fixed her eyes on the ground.

  Her features were not more stirred by his speech

  Than if they were made of hard flint or Marpesian marble.

  Then she flung herself off [sese corripuit] and fled back to the shadowy grove,

  Still hostile [inimica].

  Aeneid, VI, 469–73, trans. L.R. Lind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), p. 117.

  9 In ‘Virgil and the Christian World’ (1951) Eliot distinguishes Virgil’s ‘conscious mind’ from an aspect of his mind that remains discreetly unnamed but that may be responding to higher direction. On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber, 1957), p. 129. See also Reeves, T. S. Eliot, p. 102.

  10 Notes Toward a Definition of Culture, completed in 1948, is in effect a response to Karl Mannheim, who in Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction argued that the problems of the industrial Europe of the future could be solved only by a shift to conscious social planning, and more generally by the encouragement of new modes of thought. Direction would have to be given by an elite which had transcended class constraints.

  Eliot opposed social engineering, future planning, and dirigisme in general. He foresaw that the cultivation of elites would foster class mobility and thereby transform society. It was better, he said, ‘that the great majority of human beings should go on living in the place where they were born’. The self-consciousness Mannheim envisaged should remain a faculty of some form of aristocracy or presiding class. (Quoted in Chace, Political Identities, p. 197.)

  Eliot’s response to the moves toward European unity represented by the Hague conference of 1948 (which mooted the idea of a European Parliament) and the founding of the Council of Europe in 1949 is contained in a public letter of 1951, in which, distinguishing cultural questions from political decisions, he advocates a long-term effort to convince the people of Western Europe of their common culture and to conserve and cultivate regions, races, languages, each having a ‘vocation’ in relation to the others. See also Eliot’s ‘The Man of Letters and the Future of Europe’ (1944), quoted in Roger Kojecky, T.S. Eliot’s Social Critidsm (London: Faber, 1971), p. 202.

  11 Certain pieces did keep their place in specialised repertoires – some of the motets, for instance, remained in the repertory of the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, where Mozart heard ‘Singet dem Herrn’ in 1789.

  12 Friedrich Blume, Two Centuries of Bach, trans. Stanley Godman (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 12. I have amended Godman’s translation slightly.

  13 The historical sense of Bach’s musician sons Wilhelm Friedemann, Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian was accurate too: not only did they do nothing after their father’s death to promote his music or keep it alive, but they established themselves swiftly as leading exponents of the new music of reason and feeling.

  During his later years in Leipzig Bach was regarded as what Blume calls ‘an intractable oddity, a sarcastic old fogey’. The authorities of the St Thomas Church in Leipzig, where he was Cantor, were all too visibly relieved when he died and they could hire a younger man more in tune with the times. Of his two most famous contemporaries, one (Telemann) expressed the verdict that Bach’s sons, particularly Carl Philipp Emanuel, were his greatest gift to the world, while the other (Handel) took not the slightest notice of him. See Blume, Two Centuries of Bach, pp. 15–16, 23, 25–6.

  14 The author was J.N. Forkel, director of music at the University of Göttingen. Quoted in ibid., p. 38.

  15 Ibid., pp. 52–3, 56.

  2 Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

  1 The Brevities, ed. Burton R. Pollin (New York: Gordian Press, 1985), p. 547.

  2 History of English Literature, vol. 2, trans. Henry van Laun (London: Colonial Press, 1900), p. 404.

  3 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa

  1 Clarissa, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 913. Ross’s text is based on the first edition of 1747–8.

  2 Marsilio Ficino, El Libro dell’amore, ed. Sandra Niccoli (Florence: Olschki Editore, 1987), p. 34.

  3 Commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, quoted in Mary Daly, The Church and the Second Sex (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), p. 85.

  4 Marina Warner, Alone of All her Sex (London: Picador, 1985), p. 47; Giulia Sissa, Greek Virginity, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 116.

  5 Nancy Miller, The Heroine’s Text (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 84.

  6 ‘My will is unviolated. The evil . . . is merely personal . . . I have, through grace, triumphed.’ (p. 1254)

  7 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), p. 184.

  8 Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 61.

  5 Harry Mulisch, The Discovery of Heaven

  1 Harry Mulisch, The Discovery of Heaven (New York: Viking, 1996), p. 729.

  2 Voer voor psychologen (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1974), pp. 13–14.

  3 Een spookgeschiedenis / Eine Gespenstergeschichte / A Ghost Story (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1993), pp. 53–4.

  4 The Stone Bridal Bed, trans. Adrienne Dixon (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1962), p. 96.

  5 De Zuilen van Hercules (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1990), p. 43.

  6 Cees Nooteboom, Novelist and Traveller

  1 In the Dutch Mountains, trans. Adrienne Dixon (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997), p. 121. Dixon mistranslates ‘irrepressible desire’ as ‘irresponsible desire’.

  2 Philip and the Others (1955; English translation, 1988) and The Knight Has Died (1963; English translation, 1990)
have both been brought out by Louisiana State University Press, Nooteboom’s main champion in the English-speaking world.

  3 De zucht naar het Westen (Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 1985), p. 184.

  4 Roads to Santiago: Detours and Riddles in the Lands and History of Spain, trans. Ina Rilke (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997), p. 5.

  5 See Daan Cartens (ed.), Over Cees Nooteboom: beschouwingen en interviews (The Hague: Bezige Bij, 1984), p. 23.

  7 William Gass’s Rilke

  1 William H. Gass, Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation (New York: Knopf, 1999).

  2 The Essential Rilke, ed. and trans. Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann (New York: Ecco Press, 1999); Duino Elegies: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Edward Snow (San Francisco: North Point Press, 2000).

  3 Quoted in Eudo C. Mason, Rilke, Europe and the English-Speaking World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), p. 11.

  4 ‘The Poet in the Age of Prose’, in Gerald Chapple and Hans H. Schulte (ed.), The Turn of the Century (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1981), p. 11.

  5 Letter of 13 November 1925. Briefe, vol. 2 (Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, 1950). pp. 482–3. The translation is taken, in part, from Mason, Rilke, p. 163.

  6 Letter of 11 February 1922, Briefe, vol. 2, p. 309.

  7 Quoted in H.F. Peters, Rainer Maria Rilke (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1960), p. 125.

  8 Letters of 23 September 1911 and 9 October 1915, quoted in Mason, Rilke, p. 177.

  9 Rainer Maria Rilke: Selected Works, 2 vols, trans. J.B. Leishman (New York: New Directions, 1960); Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. André Poulin Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977); The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1982).

  8 Translating Kafka

  1 Edwin Muir, An Autobiography (London: Hogarth Press, 1954), pp. 222, 227.

  2 Selected Letters, ed. P.H. Butter (London: Hogarth Press, 1974), p. 67.

  3 ‘Introduction’, The Castle, trans. Edwin and Willa Muir (New York: Knopf, 1930), p. x.

  4 Edwin and Willa Muir, ‘Translating from the German’, in On Translation, ed. Reuben Brower (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 93.

  5 The Trial, trans. Edwin and Willa Muir (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), p. 19.

  6 Edwin Muir, ‘Franz Kafka’, in Essays on Literature and Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 123.

  7 Stephen D. Dowden, Kafka’s Castle and the Critical Imagination (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1995), p. 8.

  8 The Castle, trans. Mark Harman (New York: Schocken, 1998).

  9 Dieter Jakobs, ‘Das Kafka-Bild in England’, Oxford German Studies, 5 (1970), p. 105.

  10 Testaments Betrayed, trans. Linda Asher (London: Faber, 1995), p. 42.

  11 Brod, ‘Epilogue’, The Trial, trans. Muir and Muir, p. 253.

  12 Ibid., p. 252.

  13 Testaments Betrayed, pp. 101–20.

  14 ‘Digging the Pit of Babel’, New Literary History, 27 (1996), pp. 291–311.

  9 Robert Musil’s Diaries

  1 Diaries, 1899–1941, selected, translated and annotated by Philip Payne; preface by Philip Payne; edited and with an introduction by Mark Mirsky (New York: Basic Books, 1998). The quotation is from p. 384.

  2 The Man without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins, with additional material ed. and trans. Burton Pike (New York: Knopf, 1995), vol. 2, p. 1761.

  3 Werner Mittenzwei, Exil in der Schweiz (Leipzig: Reclam, 1978), pp. 19, 22–3.

  4 Ignazio Silone, ‘Begegnungen mit Musil’, in Karl Dinklage (ed.), Robert Musil: Studien zu seinem Werk (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1970), p. 355.

  5 Quoted in Karl Dinklage, ‘Musil’s Definition des Mannes ohne Eigenschaften’, in ibid., p. 114.

  6 Quoted in David S. Luft, Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture, 1880–1942 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 108.

  7 Rolf Kieser, Erzwungene Symbiose: Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Georg Kaiser und Bertolt Brecht im Schweizer Exil (Bern: Paul Haupt, 1984), pp. 89, 93.

  8 Christian Rogowski, Distinguished Outsider: Robert Musil and His Critics (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994), pp. 20, 23.

  9 Sophie Wilkins, ‘Einige Notizen zum Fall der Übersetzerin der Knopf-Auflage des MoE: The Man without Qualities’, in Annette Daigger and Gerti Milizer (ed.), Die Übersetzung literarischer Texte am Beispiel Robert Musil (Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag, 1988), pp. 222, 225.

  10 Josef Skvorecky

  1 Quoted in The Achievement of Josef Skvorecky, ed. Sam Solecki (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), p. 155.

  2 The Bride of Texas, trans. Kacá Polácková Henley (New York: Knopf, 1996), p. 294.

  3 Solecki (ed.), Achievement, p. 29.

  4 Headed for the Blues: A Memoir, trans. Káca Polácková Henley (New York: Ecco Press, 1996), p. 16.

  11 Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years

  1 Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–71 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

  2 Fathers and Sons, trans. Constance Garnett, translation revised Ralph E. Matlaw (New York: Norton, 1966), p. 39.

  3 Edward Wasiolek (ed.), The Notebooks for The Idiot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); Robin Feuer Miller, Dostoevsky and The Idiot (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).

  4 There is fuller discussion of Bakhtin’s thought, both judicious and generous, in Frank’s own Through the Russian Prism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

  5 Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–49 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. x; Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850–9 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. xiii.

  6 Reprinted in Joseph Frank, The Widening Gyre (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1963), pp. 3–62.

  12 The Essays of Joseph Brodsky

  1 On Grief and Reason: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1995), p. 14.

  2 Ezra Pound, Letters 1907–41, ed. D.D. Paige (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950), p. 264.

  3 Less than One (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1986), p. 52.

  4 Brodsky Through the Eyes of his Contemporaries (London: St Martin’s Press, 1992).

  5 Joseph Brodsky and the Creation of Exile (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 234.

  13 J. L. Borges, Collected Fictions

  1 Quoted in Jaime Alazraki, Borges and the Kabbalah (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 156.

  2 (New York: Viking, 1998); hereafter referred to as CF.

  3 The other two volumes are Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger and Selected Poems, ed. Alexander Coleman.

  4 James Woodall, The Man in the Mirror of the Book (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996), p. 278.

  5 Quoted in James E. Irby, ‘Borges and the Idea of Utopia’, in Harold Bloom (ed.), Jorge Luis Borges (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), p. 102.

  6 ‘Nathaniel Hawthorne’, in Other Inquisitions, 1937–52 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968), p. 60.

  7 1967 interview, quoted in Carter Wheelock, ‘Borges’ New Prose’, in Bloom (ed.), Borges, p. 108.

  8 Harold Bloom, ‘Introduction’, in ibid., pp. 2–3.

  9 Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, ed. Jean-Pierre Bernés (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), p. 272.

  10 Quoted in Beatriz Sarlo, Jorge Luis Borges, ed. John King (London: Verso, 1993), p. 20.

  11 Foreword to In Praise of Darkness (1969), CF, p. 333.

  12 Doctor Brodie’s Report, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni in collaboration with the author (New York: Dutton, 1972), p. 40; CF, p. 390.

  13 Preface to El Aleph (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971).

  14 A. S. Byatt

  1 Babel Tower (New York: Knopf, 1995), p. 102.

  2 Still Life (London: Hogarth Press, 1985), p. 323.

  3 Women Writers Talking, ed. Janet Todd (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1983), pp. 187–8.

  15 Caryl Phillips

  1 The Middle Passage (London: André Deutsch, 1962
), p. 68.

  2 Capitalism and Slavery (London: André Deutsch, 1964), p. 7.

  3 Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1988), p. 31.

  4 ‘Living and Writing in the Caribbean’, Kunapipi, 11/2 (1989), p. 48.

  5 The European Tribe (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1987), p. 9.

  6 The Final Passage (London: Faber, 1985), p. 199.

  7 Crossing the River (New York: Knopf, 1994), p. 164.

  8 Ibid., pp. 18, 64.

  9 The Higher Ground (New York: Viking, 1989), pp. 103, 84.

  10 The European Tribe, p. 126.

  11 Quoted in ibid., p. 54.

  12 Ibid., pp. 47, 49.

  13 The Nature of Blood (New York: Knopf, 1997), p. 201.

  14 Carol Davidson, interview with Caryl Phillips, Ariel, 25/4 (1994), p. 94.

  16 Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh

  1 Midnight’s Children (New York: Knopf, 1981), p. 370.

  2 The Moor’s Last Sigh (New York: Pantheon, 1995), p. 164.

  17 Aharon Appelfeld, The Iron Tracks

  1 Beyond Despair, trans. Jeffrey M. Green (New York: Fromm International, 1994), pp. ix, 35.

  2 Quoted in Gila Ramras-Rauch, Aharon Appelfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 16.

  3 Beyond Despair, p. 39.

  4 Aharon Appelfeld, The Iron Tracks, trans. Jeffrey M. Green (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), pp. 13, 14.

  5 See Appelfeld’s ‘A Personal Statement’, in Tradition and Trauma: Studies in the Fiction of S.J. Agnon, ed. David Patterson and Glenda Abramson (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), p. 212.

  6 Beyond Despair, pp. 77–8.

  7 See Gershon Shaked, ‘Appelfeld and his Times’, Hebrew Studies, 36 (1995), pp. 98–100.

  8 Beyond Despair, p. 66.

  18 Amos Oz

  1 Panther in the Basement, trans. Nicholas de Lange (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997), p. 35.

  2 Under This Blazing Light: Essays, trans. Nicholas de Lange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 159.

  3 From an interview: ‘I am sitting in a room full of books, writing even more books, which is probably exactly what my father hoped from me.’ Some of the best pages of Panther in the Basement are given over to Proffy’s explorations in his father’s library. Interview with Eleanor Wachtel, Queens Quarterly, 98/2 (1991), p. 425.