Elizabeth Costello

by J. M. Coetzee

  Less than ideal, she thinks, withdrawing and covering old Mr Phillips up and giving him a smile and patting his hand. The ideal would be to send in a young beauty to do it for him, a fille de joie with the plump new breasts old men dream about. About paying for the visit she would have no qualms. A birthday present, she could call it, if the girl wanted an explanation, if going-away present were too chilling a name. But then, once you are past a certain age everything is less than ideal; Mr Phillips might as well get used to that. Only the gods are for ever young, the inhuman gods. The gods and the Greeks.

  As for her, Elizabeth, crouched over the old bag of bones with her breasts dangling, working away on his nearly extinct organ of generation, what name would the Greeks give to such a spectacle? Not eros, certainly – too grotesque for that. Agape? Again, perhaps not. Does that mean the Greeks would have no word for it? Would one have to wait for the Christians to come along with the right word: caritas?

  For that, in the end, is what she is convinced it is. From the swelling of her heart she knows it, from the utter, illimitable difference between what is in her heart and what Nurse Naidoo would see, if by some mischance Nurse Naidoo, using her pass key, were to fling open the door and stride in.

  That is not what is uppermost in her mind, however – what Nurse Naidoo would make of it, what the Greeks would make of it, what her mother on the next floor up would make of it. What is uppermost is what she herself will make it of, in the car on the way home, or when she wakes up tomorrow morning, or in a year’s time. What can one make of episodes like this, unforeseen, unplanned, out of character? Are they just holes, holes in the heart, into which one steps and falls and then goes on falling?

  Blanche, dear Blanche, she thinks, why is there this bar between us? Why can we not speak to each other straight and bare, as people ought who are on the brink of passing? Mother gone; old Mr Phillips burned to a powder and scattered to the winds; of the world we grew up in, just you and I left. Sister of my youth, do not die in a foreign field and leave me without an answer!

  6

  The Problem of Evil

  She has been invited to speak at a conference in Amsterdam, a conference on the age-old problem of evil: why there is evil in the world, what if anything can be done about it.

  She can make a shrewd guess why the organizers picked on her: because of a talk she gave last year at a college in the United States, a talk for which she was attacked in the pages of Commentary (belittling the Holocaust, that was the charge) and defended by people whose support for the most part embarrassed her: covert anti-Semites, animal-rights sentimentalists.

  She had spoken on that occasion on what she saw and still sees as the enslavement of whole animal populations. A slave: a being whose life and death are in the hands of another. What else are cattle, sheep, poultry? The death camps would not have been dreamed up without the example of the meat-processing plants before them.

  That and more she had said: it had seemed to her obvious, barely worth pausing over. But she had gone a step further, a step too far. The massacre of the defenceless is being repeated all around us, day after day, she had said, a slaughter no different in scale or horror or moral import from what we call the holocaust; yet we choose not to see it.

  Of equal moral import: that they had baulked at. There had been a protest by students from the Hillel Centre. Appleton College should as an institution distance itself from her utterances, they demanded. In fact, the college should go further and apologize for having offered her a platform.

  Back home the newspapers had picked up the story with glee. The Age ran a report under the headline PRIZE-WINNING NOVELIST ACCUSED OF ANTI-SEMITISM and reprinted the offending paragraphs from her talk, riddled with faulty punctuation. The phone started to ring at all hours: journalists, for the most part, but strangers too, including a nameless woman who shouted down the line, ‘You Fascist bitch!’ After that she stopped answering the phone. It was she, all at once, who was on trial.

  It was an entanglement she might have foreseen and should have avoided. So what is she doing on the lecture platform again? If she had any sense she would keep out of the limelight. She is old, she feels tired all the time, she has lost what appetite she ever had for disputation, and anyhow what hope is there that the problem of evil, if problem is indeed the right word for evil, big enough to contain it, will be solved by more talk?

  But at the time the invitation came she was under the malign spell of a novel she was reading. The novel was about depravity of the worst kind, and it had sucked her into a mood of bottomless dejection. Why are you doing this to me? she wanted to cry out as she read, to God knows whom. The same day there arrived the letter of invitation. Would Elizabeth Costello, the esteemed writer, grace a gathering of theologians and philosophers with her presence, speaking, if she so pleases, under the general rubric ‘Silence, Complicity and Guilt’?

  The book she was reading that day was by Paul West, an Englishman, but one who seemed to have freed himself of the more petty concerns of the English novel. His book was about Hitler and Hitler’s would-be assassins in the Wehrmacht, and all was going well enough until she came to the chapters describing the execution of the plotters. Where could West have got his information? Could there really have been witnesses who went home that night and, before they forgot, before memory, to save itself, went blank, wrote down, in words that must have scorched the page, an account of what they had seen, down to the words the hangman spoke to the souls consigned to his hands, fumbling old men for the most part, stripped of their uniforms, togged out for the final event in prison cast-offs, serge trousers caked with grime, pullovers full of moth-holes, no shoes, no belts, their false teeth and their glasses taken from them, exhausted, shivering, hands in their pockets to hold up their pants, whimpering with fear, swallowing their tears, having to listen to this coarse creature, this butcher with last week’s blood caked under his fingernails, taunt them, telling them what would happen when the rope snapped tight, how the shit would run down their spindly old-man’s legs, how their limp old-man’s penises would quiver one last time? One after the other to the scaffold they went, in a nondescript space that could have been a garage or equally well an abattoir, under carbon-arc lights so that back in his lair in the forest Adolf Hitler, commander-in-chief, would be able to watch on film their sobbings and then their writhings and then their stillness, the slack stillness of dead meat, and be satisfied he had had his revenge.

  That is what Paul West, novelist, had written about, page after page after page, leaving nothing out; and that is what she read, sick with the spectacle, sick with herself, sick with a world in which such things took place, until at last she pushed the book away and sat with her head in her hands. Obscene! she wanted to cry but did not cry because she did not know at whom the word should be flung: at herself, at West, at the committee of angels that watches impassively over all that passes. Obscene because such things ought not to take place, and then obscene again because having taken place they ought not to be brought into the light but covered up and hidden for ever in the bowels of the earth, like what goes on in the slaughterhouses of the world, if one wishes to save one’s sanity.

  The letter of invitation came while the obscene touch of West’s book was still rank upon her. And that, in short, is why she is here in Amsterdam, with the word obscene still welling up in her throat. Obscene: not just the deeds of Hitler’s executioners, not just the deeds of the blockman, but the pages of Paul West’s black book too. Scenes that do not belong in the light of day, that the eyes of maidens and children deserve to be shielded from.

  How will Amsterdam react to Elizabeth Costello in her present state? Does the sturdy Calvinist word evil still have any power among these sensible, pragmatic, well-adjusted citizens of the New Europe? Over half a century since the devil last swaggered brazenly through their streets, yet surely they cannot have forgotten. Adolf and his cohorts still grip the popular imagin
ation. A curious fact, considering that Koba the Bear, his older brother and mentor, by any measure more murderous, more vile, more appalling to the soul, has almost dwindled away. A measuring of vileness against vileness in which the very act of measuring leaves a vile taste in the mouth. Twenty million, six million, three million, a hundred thousand: at a certain point the mind breaks down before quanta; and the older you get – this at any rate is what has happened to her – the sooner comes the breakdown. A sparrow knocked off a branch by a slingshot, a city annihilated from the air: who dare say which is the worse? Evil, all of it, an evil universe invented by an evil god. Dare she say that to her kind Dutch hosts, her kind, intelligent, sensible auditors in this enlightened, rationally organized, well-run city? Best to keep her peace, best not to cry out too much. She can imagine the next headline in the Age: UNIVERSE EVIL, OPINES COSTELLO.

  From her hotel she wanders out along the canal, an old woman in a raincoat, still slightly light-headed, slightly wobbly on her feet, after the long flight from the Antipodes. Disoriented: is it simply because she has lost her bearings that she is thinking these black thoughts? If so, perhaps she ought to travel less. Or more.

  The topic she is to speak on, the topic negotiated between her and her hosts, is ‘Witness, Silence, and Censorship’. The paper itself, or most of it, was not difficult to write. After her years on the executive of PEN Australia she can discourse on censorship in her sleep. If she wanted to make things easy for herself, she could read them her routine censorship paper, spend a few hours in the Rijksmuseum, then catch the train to Nice, where, conveniently, her daughter is staying as the guest of a foundation.

  The routine censorship paper is liberal in its ideas, with perhaps a touch of the Kulturpessimismus that has marked her thinking of late: the civilization of the West is based on belief in unlimited and illimitable endeavour, it is too late for us to do anything about that, we must simply hold on tight and go wherever the ride takes us. It is on the subject of the illimitable that her opinions seem to be undergoing a quiet change. Reading West’s book has contributed to that change, she suspects, though it is possible the change would have happened anyway, for reasons that are more obscure to her. Specifically, she is no longer sure that people are always improved by what they read. Furthermore, she is not sure that writers who venture into the darker territories of the soul always return unscathed. She has begun to wonder whether writing what one desires, any more than reading what one desires, is in itself a good thing.

  That, in any event, is what she plans to say here in Amsterdam. As her principal example she plans to set before the conference The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, which came to her in a packet of books, some of them new, some reissues, sent for her consideration by an editor friend in Sydney. The Very Rich Hours was the only one that had really engaged her; her response was set out in a review that she withdrew at the last minute and has never published.

  When she arrived at her hotel there had been an envelope waiting for her: a letter of welcome from the organizers, a conference programme, maps. Now, sitting on a bench on the Prinsengracht in the tentative warmth of the northern sun, she glances over the programme. She is scheduled to speak the next morning, the first day of the conference. She flips to the notes at the end of the programme. ‘Elizabeth Costello, noted Australian novelist and essayist, author of The House on Eccles Street and many other books.’ Not the way she would have billed herself, but they did not ask her. Frozen in the past, as usual; frozen in the achievements of her youth.

  Her eye drifts down the list. Most of her fellow conferees she has not heard of. Then her eye is caught by the last name on the list, and her heart misses a beat. ‘Paul West, novelist and critic.’ Paul West: the stranger on the state of whose soul she spends so many pages. Can anyone, she asks in her lecture, wander as deep as Paul West does into the Nazi forest of horrors and emerge unscathed? Have we considered that the explorer enticed into that forest may come out not better and stronger for the experience but worse? How can she give the talk, how can she ask such a question, with Paul West himself sitting in the audience? It will seem like an attack, a presumptuous, unprovoked, and above all personal attack on a fellow writer. Who will believe the truth: that she has never had any dealings with Paul West, has never met him, has read only this one book of his? What is to be done?

  Of the twenty pages of her text, fully half are devoted to the von Stauffenberg book. With luck the book will not have been translated into Dutch; with extreme luck no one else in the audience will have read it. She could cut out West’s name, refer to him only as ‘the author of a book on the Nazi period’. She could even make the book itself hypothetical: a hypothetical novel about the Nazis, the writing of which would have scarred the soul of its hypothetical author. Then no one will know, except of course West himself, if he is present, if he bothers to come to the talk by the lady from Australia.

  It is four in the afternoon. Usually, on long flights, she sleeps only fitfully. But on this flight she experimented with a new pill, and it seems to have worked. She feels well, ready to plunge into work. There is time enough to rewrite the talk, removing Paul West and his novel into the deep background, leaving only the thesis visible, the thesis that writing itself, as a form of moral adventurousness, has the potential to be dangerous. But what kind of talk would that be – a thesis with no examples?

  Is there someone she can put in the place of Paul West – Céline for instance? One of Céline’s novels, its name evades her, flirts with sadism, fascism, anti-Semitism. Years since she read it. Can she lay her hands on a copy, preferably not in Dutch, and write Céline into the talk?

  But Paul West is not Céline, is nothing like him. Flirting with sadism is exactly what West does not do; furthermore, his book barely mentions the Jews. The horrors he unveils are sui generis. That must have been his wager with himself: to take as his subject a handful of bumbling German career officers unfitted by the very code of their upbringing to plotting and carrying out an assassination, to tell the story of their ineptitude and its consequences from beginning to end, and to leave one feeling, to one’s surprise, authentic pity, authentic terror.

  Once upon a time she would have said, All honour to a writer who undertakes to follow such a story to its darkest recesses. Now she is not sure. That is what seems to have changed in her. In any event, Céline is not like that, Céline will not work.

  On the deck of a barge moored across from her two couples are seated at a table, chatting, drinking beer. Cyclists rattle past. An ordinary afternoon on an ordinary day in Holland. Having travelled thousands of miles to bathe in precisely this variety of the ordinary, must she forsake it to sit in a hotel room wrestling with a text for a conference that will be forgotten in a week’s time? And to what end? To save embarrassment to a man she has never met? In the greater scheme of things, what does a moment’s embarrassment amount to? She does not know how old Paul West is – the jacket of his book does not say, the photo could date from years ago – but she is sure he is not young. Might he and she, in their different ways, not be old enough to be beyond embarrassment?

  Back at the hotel there is a message to call Henk Badings, the man from the Free University with whom she has been corresponding. Did she have a good flight, Badings asks? Is she comfortably settled? Would she like to join him and one or two other guests for dinner? Thank you, she replies, but no: she would prefer an early night. A pause, then she asks her question. The novelist Paul West: has he arrived yet in Amsterdam? Yes, comes Badings’ reply: not only has Paul West arrived but, she will be glad to hear, is lodged at the same hotel as she.

  If anything is needed to spur her, this is it. Unacceptable that Paul West should find himself quartered with a woman who rants against him in public as a dupe of Satan. She must cut him out of the talk or she must withdraw, and that is that.

  She stays up all night wrestling with the lecture. First she tries leaving out West’
s name. A recent novel, she calls the book, coming out of Germany. But of course it does not work. Even if most of her auditors are taken in, West will know she means him.

  What if she tries softening her thesis? What if she suggests that, in representing the workings of evil, the writer may unwittingly make evil seem attractive, and thereby do more harm than good? Will that soften the blow? She strikes out the first paragraph on page eight, the first of the bad pages, then the second, then the third, begins to scribble revisions in the margins, then stares in dismay at the mess. Why did she not make a copy before she started?

  The young man at the reception desk sits with headphones on, jiggling his shoulders from side to side. When he sees her he springs to attention. ‘A photocopier,’ she says. ‘Is there a photocopier I can use?’

  He takes the wad of paper from her, glances at the heading. The hotel caters to many conferences, he must be used to distraught foreigners rewriting their lectures in the middle of the night. The lives of dwarf stars. Crop yields in Bangladesh. The soul and its manifold corruptions. All the same to him.

  Copy in hand, she proceeds with the task of watering down her paper, but with more and more doubt in her heart. The writer as dupe of Satan: what nonsense! Ineluctably she is arguing herself into the position of the old-fashioned censor. And what is the point of all this pussyfooting anyway? To forestall a petty scandal? Where does it come from, her reluctance to offend? Soon she is going to be dead. What will it matter then if once upon a time she ruffled the feathers of some stranger in Amsterdam?

  When she was nineteen, she remembers, she allowed herself to be picked up on the Spencer Street bridge near the Melbourne waterfront, then a rough area. The man was a docker, in his thirties, good-looking in a crude sort of way, who called himself Tim or Tom. She was an art student and a rebel, in rebellion principally against the matrix that had formed her: respectable, petit bourgeois, Catholic. In her eyes, in those days, only the working class and the values of the working class were authentic.