Elizabeth Costello

by J. M. Coetzee

  ‘It has been a great honour to get to know you, Mrs Costello,’ Susan says, taking his mother’s hand.

  ‘Elizabeth,’ says his mother. ‘Excuse the throne.’

  ‘Elizabeth.’

  ‘I want to give you this,’ says Susan, and from her satchel produces a book. The cover shows a woman wearing antique Grecian costume, holding a scroll. Reclaiming a History: Women and Memory, says the title. Susan Kaye Moebius.

  ‘Thank you, I look forward to reading it,’ says his mother.

  He stays for the interview, sitting in a corner, watching as his mother transforms herself into the person television wants her to be. All the quaintnesses she refused to deliver last night are allowed to come out: pungent turns of speech, stories of childhood in the Australian outback (‘You have to realize how vast Australia is. We are only fleas on Australia’s backside, we late settlers’), stories about the film world, about actors and actresses she has crossed paths with, about the adaptations of her books and what she thinks of them (‘Film is a simplifying medium. That is its nature; you may as well learn to accept it. It works in broad strokes’). Followed by a glance at the contemporary world (‘It does my heart good to see so many strong young women around who know what they want’). Even bird-watching gets a mention.

  After the interview Susan Moebius’s book almost gets left behind. He is the one who picks it up from under the chair.

  ‘I wish people wouldn’t give one books,’ she murmurs. ‘Where am I going to find space for it?’

  ‘I have space.’

  ‘Then you take it. Keep it. You’re the one she was really after, not me.’

  He reads the inscription: To Elizabeth Costello, with gratitude and admiration. ‘Me?’ he says. ‘I don’t think so. I was just’ – his voice barely falters – ‘a pawn in the game. You are the one she loves and hates.’

  He barely falters; but the word that first came to mind was not pawn, it was clipping. A toenail clipping, that one steals and wraps in a tissue and takes away, for one’s own purposes.

  His mother does not reply. But she does give him a smile, a quick, sudden smile of – he cannot see it in any other way – triumph.

  Their duties in Williamstown are over. The television crew are packing up. In half an hour a taxi will take them to the airport. She has won, more or less. On foreign turf too. An away win. She can come home with her true self safe, leaving behind an image, false, like all images.

  What is the truth of his mother? He does not know, and at the deepest level does not want to know. He is here simply to protect her, to bar the way against the relic-hunters and the contumelists and the sentimental pilgrims. He has opinions of his own, but he will not speak them. This woman, he would say if he were to speak, whose words you hang on as if she were the sibyl, is the same woman who, forty years ago, hid day after day in her bedsitter in Hampstead, crying to herself, crawling out in the evenings into the foggy streets to buy the fish and chips on which she lived, falling asleep in her clothes. She is the same woman who later stormed around the house in Melbourne, hair flying in all directions, screaming at her children, ‘You are killing me! You are tearing the flesh from my body!’ (He lay in the dark with his sister afterwards, comforting her while she sobbed; he was seven; it was his first taste of fathering.) This is the secret world of the oracle. How can you hope to understand her before you know what she is really like?

  He does not hate his mother. (As he thinks these words, other words echo at the back of his mind: the words of one of William Faulkner’s characters insisting with mad repetitiveness that he does not hate the South. Who is the character?) Quite the contrary. If he hated her he would long ago have put the greatest possible distance between the two of them. He does not hate her. He serves at her shrine, cleaning up after the turmoil of theholy day, sweeping up the petals, collecting the offerings, putting the widows’ mites together, ready to bank. He may not share in the frenzy, but he worships too.

  A mouthpiece for the divine. But sibyl is not the right word for her. Nor is oracle. Too Greco-Roman. His mother is not in the Greco-Roman mould. Tibet or India more like it: a god incarnated in a child, wheeled from village to village to be applauded, venerated.

  Then they are in the taxi, driving through streets that already have the air of streets about to be forgotten.

  ‘So,’ says his mother. ‘A clean getaway.’

  ‘I do believe so. Have you got the cheque safe?’

  ‘The cheque, the medal, everything.’

  A gap. They are at the airport, at the gate, waiting for the flight to be called that will take them on the first stage of their journey home. Faintly, over their heads, with a crude, driving beat, a version of Eine kleine Nachtmusik is playing. Opposite them sits a woman eating popcorn out of a paper bucket, so fat that her toes barely reach the floor.

  ‘Can I ask you one thing?’ he says. ‘Why literary history? And why such a grim chapter in literary history? Realism: no one in this place wanted to hear about realism.’

  Fiddling in her purse, she makes no reply.

  ‘When I think of realism,’ he goes on, ‘I think of peasants frozen in blocks of ice. I think of Norwegians in smelly underwear. What is your interest in it? And where does Kafka fit in? What has Kafka to do with it all?’

  ‘With what? With smelly underwear?’

  ‘Yes. With smelly underwear. With people picking their noses. You don’t write about that kind of thing. Kafka didn’t write about it.’

  ‘No, Kafka didn’t write about people picking their noses. But Kafka had time to wonder where and how his poor educated ape was going to find a mate. And what it was going to be like when he was left in the dark with the bewildered, half-tamed female that his keepers eventually produced for his use. Kafka’s ape is embedded in life. It is the embeddedness that is important, not the life itself. His ape is embedded as we are embedded, you in me, I in you. That ape is followed through to the end, to the bitter, unsayable end, whether or not there are traces left on the page. Kafka stays awake during the gaps when we are sleeping. That is where Kafka fits in.’

  The fat woman is observing them frankly, her little eyes flicking from the one to the other: the old woman in the raincoat and the man with the bald patch who could be her son, having a fight in their funny accents.

  ‘Well,’ he says, ‘if what you say is true, it is repulsive. It is zookeeping, not writing.’

  ‘What would you prefer? A zoo without keepers, where the animals fall into a trance when you stop looking at them? A zoo of ideas? A gorilla cage with the idea of a gorilla in it, an elephant cage with the idea of elephants in it? Do you know how many kilograms of solid waste an elephant drops in twenty-four hours? If you want a real elephant cage with real elephants then you need a zookeeper to clean up after them.’

  ‘You are off the point, Mother. And don’t get so excited.’ He turns to the fat woman. ‘We are discussing literature, the claims of realism versus the claims of idealism.’

  Without ceasing to chew, the fat woman removes her eyes from them. He thinks of the cud of mashed corn and saliva in her mouth and shudders. Where does it all end?

  ‘There is a difference between cleaning up after animals and watching them while they do their business,’ he starts again. ‘I am asking about the latter, not the former. Don’t animals deserve a private life as much as we do?’

  ‘Not if they are in a zoo,’ she says. ‘Not if they are on show. Once you are on show, you have no private life. Anyway, do you ask permission from the stars before you peek at them through your telescope? What about the private lives of the stars?’

  ‘Mother, the stars are lumps of rock.’

  ‘Are they? I thought they were traces of light millions of years old.’

  ‘Boarding will now commence on United Airlines flight 323 non-stop to Los Angeles,’ says a voice above their heads. ‘Passengers r
equiring assistance, as well as families with young children, may step forward.’

  On the flight she barely touches her food. She orders two brandies, one after the other, and falls asleep. When, hours later, they begin the descent to Los Angeles, she is still asleep. The flight attendant taps her on the shoulder. ‘Ma’am, your seat belt.’ She does not stir. They exchange looks, he and the flight attendant. He leans over and clips the belt across her lap.

  She lies slumped deep in her seat. Her head is sideways, her mouth open. She is snoring faintly. Light flashes from the windows as they bank, the sun setting brilliantly over southern California. He can see up her nostrils, into her mouth, down the back of her throat. And what he cannot see he can imagine: thegullet, pink and ugly, contracting as it swallows, like a python, drawing things down to the pear-shaped belly-sac. He draws away, tightens his own belt, sits up, facing forward. No, he tells himself, that is not where I come from, that is not it.

  2

  The Novel in Africa

  At a dinner party she meets X, whom she has not seen in years. Is he still teaching at the University of Queensland, she asks? No, he replies, he has retired and now works the cruise ships, travelling the world, screening old movies, talking about Bergman and Fellini to retired people. He has never regretted the move. ‘The pay is good, you get to see the world, and – do you know what? – people that age actually listen to what you have to say.’ He urges her to give it a try: ‘You are a prominent figure, a well-known writer. The cruise line I work for will jump at the opportunity to take you on. You will be a feather in their cap. Say but the word and I’ll bring it up with my friend the director.’

  The proposal interests her. She was last on a ship in 1963, when she came home from England, from the mother country. Soon after that they began to retire the great ocean-going liners, one by one, and scrap them. The end of an era. She would not mind doing it again, going to sea. She would like to call at Easter Island and St Helena, where Napoleon languished. She would like to visit Antarctica – not just to see with her own eyes those vast horizons, that barren waste, but to set foot on the seventh and last continent, feel what it is like to be a living, breathing creature in spaces of inhuman cold.

  X is as good as his word. From the headquarters of Scandia Lines in Stockholm comes a fax. In December the SS Northern Lights will be sailing from Christchurch on a fifteen-day cruise to the Ross Ice Shelf, and thence onward to Cape Town. Might she be interested in joining the education and entertainment staff? Passengers on Scandia’s cruise ships are, as the letter puts it, ‘discriminating persons who take their leisure seriously’. The emphasis of the on-board programme will be on ornithology and cold-water ecology, but Scandia would be delighted if the noted writer Elizabeth Costello could find the time to offer a short course on, say, the contemporary novel. In return for which, and for making herself accessible to passengers, she will be offered an A-class berth, all expenses paid, with air connections to Christchurch and from Cape Town, and a substantial honorarium to boot.

  It is an offer she cannot refuse. On the morning of 10 December she joins the ship in Christchurch harbour. Her cabin, she finds, is small but otherwise quite satisfactory; the young man who coordinates the entertainment and self-development programme is respectful; the passengers at her table at lunchtime, in the main retired people, people of her own generation, are pleasant and unostentatious.

  On the list of her co-lecturers there is only one name she recognizes: Emmanuel Egudu, a writer from Nigeria. Their acquaintance goes back more years than she cares to remember, to a PEN conference in Kuala Lumpur. Egudu had been loud and fiery then, political; her first impression was that he was a poseur. Reading him later on, she had not changed her mind. But a poseur, she now wonders: what is that? Someone who seems to be what he is not? Which of us is what he seems to be, she seems to be? And anyway, in Africa things may be different. In Africa what one takes to be posing, what one takes to be boasting, may just be manliness. Who is she to say?

  Towards men, including Egudu, she has, she notices, mellowed as she has grown older. Curious, because in other respects she has become more (she chooses the word carefully) acidulous.

  She runs into Egudu at the captain’s cocktail party (he has come aboard late). He is wearing a vivid green dashiki, suave Italian shoes; his beard is spotted with grey, but he is still a fine figure of a man. He gives her a huge smile, enfolds her in an embrace. ‘Elizabeth!’ he exclaims. ‘How good to see you! I had no idea! We have so much catching up to do!’

  In his lexicon, it appears, catching up means talking about his own activities. He no longer spends much time in his home country, he informs her. He has become, as he puts it, ‘an habitual exile, like an habitual criminal’. He has acquired American papers; he makes his living on the lecture circuit, a circuit that would appear to have expanded to encompass the cruise ships. This will be his third trip on the Northern Lights. Very restful, he finds it; very relaxing. Who would have guessed, he says, that a country boy from Africa would end up like this, in the lap of luxury? And he treats her again to his big smile, the special one.

  I’m a country girl myself, she would like to say, but does not, though it is true, in part. Nothing exceptional about being from the country.

  Each of the entertainment staff is expected to give a short public talk. ‘Just to say who you are, where you come from,’ explains the young coordinator in carefully idiomatic English. His name is Mikael; he is handsome in his tall, blond, Swedish way, but dour, too dour for her taste.

  Her talk is advertised as ‘The Future of the Novel’, Egudu’s as ‘The Novel in Africa’. She is scheduled to speak on the morning of their first day out to sea; he will speak the same afternoon. In the evening comes ‘The Lives of Whales’, with sound recordings.

  Mikael himself does the introduction. ‘The famous Australian writer,’ he calls her, ‘author of The House on Eccles Street and many other novels, whom we are truly privileged to have in our midst.’ It vexes her to be billed once again as the author of a book from so far in the past, but there is nothing to be done about that.

  ‘The Future of the Novel’ is a talk she has given before, in fact many times before, expanded or contracted depending on the occasion. No doubt there are expanded and contracted versions of the novel in Africa and the lives of whales too. For the present occasion she has chosen the contracted version.

  ‘The future of the novel is not a subject I am much interested in,’ she begins, trying to give her auditors a jolt. ‘In fact the future in general does not much interest me. What is the future, after all, but a structure of hopes and expectations? Its residence is in the mind; it has no reality.

  ‘Of course, you might reply that the past is likewise a fiction. The past is history, and what is history but a story made of air that we tell ourselves? Nevertheless, there is something miraculous about the past that the future lacks. What is miraculous about the past is that we have succeeded – God knows how – in making thousands and millions of individual fictions, fictions created by individual human beings, lock well enough into one another to give us what looks like a common past, a shared story.

  ‘The future is different. We do not possess a shared story of the future. The creation of the past seems to exhaust our collective creative energies. Compared with our fiction of the past, our fiction of the future is a sketchy, bloodless affair, as visions of heaven tend to be. Of heaven and even of hell.’

  The novel, the traditional novel, she goes on to say, is an attempt to understand human fate one case at a time, to understand how it comes about that some fellow being, having started at point A and having undergone experiences B and C and D, ends up at point Z. Like history, the novel is thus an exercise in making the past coherent. Like history, it explores the respective contributions of character and circumstance to forming the present. By doing so, the novel suggests how we may explore the power of the present to produce
the future. That is why we have this thing, this institution, this medium called the novel.

  She is not sure, as she listens to her own voice, whether she believes any longer in what she is saying. Ideas like these must have had some grip on her when years ago she wrote them down, but after so many repetitions they have taken on a worn, unconvincing air. On the other hand, she no longer believes very strongly in belief. Things can be true, she now thinks, even if one does not believe in them, and conversely. Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run. As happens when one writes: believing whatever has to be believed in order to get the job done.

  If she has trouble believing in her argument, she has even greater trouble in preventing that absence of conviction from emerging in her voice. Despite the fact that she is the noted author of, as Mikael says, The House on Eccles Street and other books, despite the fact that her audience is by and large of her generation and ought therefore to share with her a common past, the applause at the end lacks enthusiasm.

  For Emmanuel’s talk she sits inconspicuously in the back row. They have in the meantime had a good lunch; they are sailing south on what are still placid seas; there is every chance that some of the good folk in the audience – numbering, she would guess, about fifty – are going to nod off. In fact, who knows, she might nod off herself; in which case it would be best to do so unnoticed.

  ‘You will be wondering why I have chosen as my topic the novel in Africa,’ Emmanuel begins, in his effortlessly booming voice. ‘What is so special about the novel in Africa? What makes it different, different enough to demand our attention today?

  ‘Well, let us see. We all know, to begin with, that the alphabet, the idea of the alphabet, did not grow up in Africa. Many things grew up in Africa, more than you might think, but not the alphabet. The alphabet had to be brought in, first by Arabs, then again by Westerners. In Africa writing itself, to say nothing of novel-writing, is a recent affair.