Elizabeth Costello

by J. M. Coetzee

  A man with a dark beard has his hand up. ‘How do you know?’ he says. ‘How do you know that Mr West – we seem to be talking a lot about Mr West today, I hope Mr West will have a right of reply, it will be interesting to hear his reaction’ – there are smiles in the audience – ‘has been harmed by what he has written? If I understand you correctly, you are saying that if you yourself had written this book about von Stauffenberg and Hitler you would have been infected with the Nazi evil. But perhaps all that says is that you are, so to speak, a weak vessel. Perhaps Mr West is made of sterner stuff. And perhaps we, his readers, are made of sterner stuff too. Perhaps we could read what Mr West writes and learn from it, and come out stronger rather than weaker, more determined never to let the evil return. Would you care to comment?’

  She should never have come, never have accepted the invitation, she knows it now. Not because she has nothing to say about evil, the problem of evil, the problem of calling evil a problem, not even because of the ill luck of West’s presence, but because a limit has been reached, the limit of what can be achieved with a body of balanced, well-informed modern folk in a clean, well-lit lecture venue in a well-ordered, well-run European city in the dawn of the twenty-first century.

  ‘I am not, I believe,’ she says slowly, the words coming out one by one, like stones, ‘a weak vessel. Nor, would I guess, is Mr West. The experience that writing offers, or reading – they are the same thing, for my purposes, here, today –’ (but are they the same thing, really? – she is losing her track, what is her track?) ‘real writing, real reading, is not a relative one, relative to the writer and the writer’s capacities, relative to the reader’ (she has not slept in God knows how long, what passed for sleep on the plane was not sleep). ‘Mr West, when he wrote those chapters, came in touch with something absolute. Absolute evil. His blessing and his curse, I would say. Through reading him that touch of evil was passed on to me. Like a shock. Like electricity.’ She glances at Badings, standing in the wings. Help me, her glance says. Put an end to this. ‘It is not something that can be demonstrated,’ she says, returning a last time to her questioner. ‘It is something that can only be experienced. However, I am recommending to you that you do not try it out. You will not learn from such an experience. It will not be good for you. That is what I wanted to say today. Thank you.’

  As the audience rises and disperses (time for a cup of coffee, enough of this strange woman from Australia of all places, what do they know about evil there?), she tries to keep an eye on Paul West in the back row. If there is any truth in what she has said (but she is full of doubt, and desperate too), if the electricity of evil did indeed leap from Hitler to Hitler’s butcherman and thence to Paul West, surely he will give off some sign. But there is no sign she can detect, not at this distance, just a short man in black on his way to the coffee machine.

  Badings is at her elbow. ‘Very interesting, Mrs Costello,’ he murmurs, doing his hostly duty. She shakes him off, she has no wish to be soothed. Head down, meeting no one’s eye, she pushes her way to the ladies’ room and shuts herself in a cubicle.

  The banality of evil. Is that the reason why there is no longer any smell or aura? Have the grand Lucifers of Dante and Milton been retired for good, their place taken by a pack of dusty little demons that perch on one’s shoulder like parrots, giving off no fiery glow but on the contrary sucking light into themselves? Or has everything she has said, all her finger-pointing and accusing, been not only wrong-headed but mad, completely mad? What is the business of the novelist, after all, what has been her own lifetime business, but to bring inert matter to life; and what has Paul West done, as the man with the beard pointed out, but bring to life, bring back to life, the history of what happened in that cellar in Berlin? What has she conveyed to Amsterdam to display to these puzzled strangers but an obsession, an obsession that is hers alone and that she clearly does not understand?

  Obscene. Go back to the talismanic word, hold fast to it. Hold fast to the word, then reach for the experience behind it: that has always been her rule for when she feels herself slipping into abstraction. What was her experience? What was it that happened as she sat reading the accursed book on the lawn that Saturday morning? What was it that upset her so much that a year later she is still grubbing after its roots? Can she find her way back?

  She knew, before she began the book, the story of the July plotters, knew that within days of their attempt on Hitler’s life they were tracked down, most of them, and tried and executed. She even knew, in a general way, that they were put to death with the malicious cruelty in which Hitler and his cronies specialized. So nothing in the book had come as a real surprise.

  She goes back to the hangman, whatever his name was. In his gibes at the men about to die at his hands there was a wanton, an obscene energy that exceeded his commission. Where did that energy come from? To herself she has called it satanic, but perhaps she should let go of that word now. For the energy came, in a certain sense, from West himself. It was West who invented the gibes (English gibes, not German), put them in the hangman’s mouth. Fitting speech to character: what is satanic about that? She does it herself all the time.

  Go back. Go back to Melbourne, to that Saturday morning when she felt, she could have sworn, the brush of Satan’s hot, leathery wing. Was she deluded? I do not want to read this, she said to herself; yet she had gone on reading, excited despite herself. The devil is leading me on: what kind of excuse is that?

  Paul West was only doing his writerly duty. In the person of his hangman he was opening her eyes to human depravity in another of its manifold forms. In the persons of the hangman’s victims he was reminding her of what poor, forked, quivering creatures we all are. What is wrong with that?

  What had she said? I do not want to read this. But what right had she to refuse? What right had she not to know what, in all too clear a sense, she already knew? What was it in her that wanted to resist, to refuse the cup? And why did she nonetheless drink – drink so fully that a year later she is still railing against the man who put it to her lips?

  If there were a mirror on the back of this door instead of just a hook, if she were to take off her clothes and kneel before it, she, with her sagging breasts and knobbly hips, would look much like the women in those intimate, over-intimate photographs from the European war, those glimpses into hell, who knelt naked at the lip of the trench into which they would, in the next minute, the next second, tumble, dead or dying with a bullet to the brain, except that those women were in most cases not as old as she, merely haggard from malnutrition and fright. She has a feeling for those dead sisters, and for the men too who died at the hands of the butchermen, men old and ugly enough to be her brothers. She does not like to see her sisters and brothers humiliated, in ways it is so easy to humiliate the old, by making them strip, for example, taking away their dentures, making fun of their private parts. If her brothers, that day in Berlin, are going to be hanged, if they are going to jerk at the end of a rope, their faces going red, their tongues and eyeballs protruding, she does not want to see. A sister’s modesty. Let me turn my eyes away.

  Let me not look. That was the plea she breathed to Paul West (except that she did not know Paul West then, he was just a name on the cover of a book). Do not make me go through with it! But Paul West did not relent. He made her read, excited her to read. For that she will not easily forgive him. For that she has pursued him across the seas all the way to Holland.

  Is that the truth? Will that do as an explanation?

  Yet she does the same kind of thing, or used to. Until she thought better of it, she had no qualms about rubbing people’s faces in, for instance, what went on in abattoirs. If Satan is not rampant in the abattoir, casting the shadow of his wings over the beasts who, their nostrils already filled with the smell of death, are prodded down the ramp towards the man with the gun and the knife, a man as merciless and as banal (though she has begun to feel that that
word too should be retired, it has had its day) as Hitler’s own man (who learned his trade, after all, on cattle) – if Satan is not rampant in the abattoir, where is he? She, no less than Paul West, knew how to play with words until she got them right, the words that would send an electric shock down the spine of the reader. Butcherfolk in our own way.

  So what has happened to her now? Now, all of a sudden, she has grown prim. Now she no longer likes to see herself in the mirror, since it puts her in mind of death. Ugly things she prefers wrapped up and stored away in a drawer. An old woman turning back the clock, back to the Irish-Catholic Melbourne of her childhood. Is that all it amounts to?

  Go back to the experience. The flap of Satan’s leathery wing: what was it that convinced her she felt it? And how much longer can she occupy one of the two cubicles in this cramped little women’s room before some well-intentioned person decides she has had a collapse and calls in the janitor to break the lock?

  The twentieth century of Our Lord, Satan’s century, is over and done with. Satan’s century and her own too. If she happens to have crept over the finish line into the new age, she is certainly not at home in it. In these unfamiliar times Satan is still feeling his way, trying out new contrivances, making new accommodations. He pitches his tent in odd places – for example in Paul West, a good man, for all she knows, or as good as a man can be who is also a novelist, that is to say, perhaps not good at all, but tending nevertheless to the good, in some ultimate sense, otherwise why write? Takes up residence in women too. Like the liver fluke, like the pinworm: one can live and die ignorant that one has been host to generations of them. In whose liver, in whose gut was Satan, that fateful day last year when again, indubitably, she felt his presence: in West’s or in her own?

  Old men, brothers, hanging dead with their trousers around their ankles, executed. In Rome it would have been different. In Rome they made a spectacle of executions: hauled their victims through howling mobs to the place of skulls and impaled them or flayed them or coated them with pitch and set them on fire. The Nazis, by comparison, mean, cheap, machine-gunning people in a field, gassing them in a bunker, strangling them in a cellar. So what was too much about death at the hands of the Nazis that was not too much in Rome, when all the striving of Rome was to wring from death as much cruelty, as much pain as possible? Is it just the grubbiness of that cellar in Berlin, a grubbiness that is too much like the real thing, the modern thing, for her to bear?

  It is like a wall that she comes up against time and again. She did not want to read but she read; a violence was done to her but she conspired in the violation. He made me do it, she says, yet she makes others do it.

  She should never have come. Conferences are for exchanging thoughts, at least that is the idea behind conferences. You cannot exchange thoughts when you do not know what you think.

  There is a scratching at the door, a child’s voice. ‘Mammie, er zit een vrouw erin, ik kan haar schoenen zien!’

  Hurriedly she flushes the bowl, unlocks the door, emerges. ‘Sorry,’ she says, evading the eyes of mother and daughter.

  What was the child saying? Why is she taking so long? If she spoke the language she could enlighten the child. Because the older you get the longer it takes. Because sometimes you need to be alone. Because there are things we do not do in public, not any more.

  Her brothers: did they let them use the toilet one last time, or was shitting themselves part of the punishment? That, at least, Paul West drew a veil over, for which small mercy, thanks.

  No one to wash them, afterwards. Women’s work since time immemorial. No womanly presence in the cellar business. Admission reserved; men only. But perhaps when it was all over, when dawn’s rosy fingers touched the eastern skies, the women arrived, indefatigable German cleaning women out of Brecht, and set to work cleaning up the mess, washing the walls, scrubbing the floor, making everything spick and span, so that you would never guess, by the time they had done, what games the boys had got up to during the night. Would never guess until Mr West came along and threw it all open again.

  It is eleven o’clock. The next session, the next lecture, must already be in progress. She has a choice. Either she can go to the hotel and hide in her room and go on with her grieving; or she can tiptoe into the auditorium, take a seat in the back row, and do the second thing they brought her to Amsterdam for: hear what other folk have to say about the problem of evil.

  There ought to be a third alternative, some way of rounding off the morning and giving it shape and meaning: some confrontation leading to some final word. There ought to be an arrangement such that she bumps into someone in the corridor, perhaps Paul West himself; something should pass between them, sudden as lightning, that will illuminate the landscape for her, even if afterwards it returns to its native darkness. But the corridor, it seems, is empty.

  7

  Eros

  She met Robert Duncan only once, in 1963, soon after her return from Europe. Duncan and another, less interesting poet named Philip Whalen had been brought out on a tour by the US Information Service: the Cold War was on, there was money for cultural propaganda. Duncan and Whalen gave a reading at the University of Melbourne; after the reading they all went off to a bar, the two poets and the man from the consulate and half a dozen Australian writers of all ages, including herself.

  Duncan had read his long ‘Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar’ that night, and it had impressed her, moved her. She was attracted to Duncan, with his severely handsome Roman profile; she would not have minded having a fling with him, would not even, in the mood she was in in those days, have minded having his love child, like one of those mortal women of myth impregnated by a passing god and left to bring up semi-divine offspring.

  She is reminded of Duncan because in a book sent by an American friend she has just come across another telling of the Eros and Psyche story, by one Susan Mitchell, whom she has not read before. Why the interest in Psyche among American poets, she wonders? Do they find something American in her, the girl who, not content with the ecstasies provided night after night by the visitor to her bed, must light a lamp, peel back the darkness, gaze on him naked? In her restlessness, her inability to leave well alone, do they see something of themselves?

  She too is not without curiosity about the intercourse of gods and mortals, though she has never written about it, not even in her book about Marion Bloom and her god-haunted husband Leopold. What intrigues her is less the metaphysics than the mechanics, the practicalities of congress across a gap in being. Bad enough to have a full-grown male swan jabbing webbed feet into your backside while he has his way, or a one-ton bull leaning his moaning weight on you; how, when the god does not care to change shape but remains his awesome self, does the human body accommodate itself to the blast of his desire?

  Let it be said for Susan Mitchell that she does not shrink from such questions. In her poem, Eros, who seems to have made himself man-sized for the occasion, lies in bed on his back with his wings drooping on either side, the girl (one presumes) on top of him. The seed of gods would seem to gush hugely (this must have been Mary of Nazareth’s experience too, waking from her dream still slightly trembly with the issue of the Holy Ghost running down her thighs). When Psyche’s lover comes, his wings are left drenched; or perhaps the wings drip seed, perhaps they become organs of consummation themselves. On occasions when he and she reach a climax together, he breaks apart like (Mitchell’s words, more or less) a bird shot in flight. (What about the girl, she wants to ask the poet – if you can say what it was like for him, why not tell us how it was for her?)

  What she had really wanted to talk about to Robert Duncan, however, that night in Melbourne when he indicated so firmly that whatever she offered did not interest him, was not girls visited by gods but the much rarer phenomenon of men condescended to by goddesses. Anchises, for instance, lover of Aphrodite and father of Aeneas. One would have thought that, after that unfor
eseen and unforgettable episode in his hut on Mount Ida, Anchises – a good-looking boyo, if one is to believe the Hymn, but otherwise just a cattle herder – would have wanted to talk about nothing else, to whoever would listen: how he had fucked a goddess, the most succulent in the whole stable, fucked her all night long, got her pregnant too.

  Men and their leering talk. She has no illusions about how mortal beings treat whatever gods, true or feigned, ancient or modern, have the misfortune to fall into their hands. She thinks of a film she saw once, that might have been written by Nathanael West though in fact it wasn’t: Jessica Lange playing a Hollywood sex goddess who has a breakdown and ends up in the common ward of a madhouse, drugged, lobotomized, strapped to her bed, while orderlies sell tickets for ten minutes a time with her. ‘I wanna fuck a movie star!’ pants one of their customers, shoving his dollars at them. In his voice the ugly underside of idolatry: malice, murderous resentment. Bring an immortal down to earth, show her what life is really like, bang her till she is raw. Take that! Take that! A scene they excised from the televised version, so close to the bone of America does it cut.

  But in Anchises’ case the goddess, when she rose from his bed, warned her sweetheart pretty plainly to keep his mouth shut. So there was nothing left for a prudent fellow to do but lose himself, last thing at night, in drowsy memories: how it had felt, man’s flesh lapped in god flesh; or else, when he was in a more sober, more philosophically inclined mood, to wonder: since the physical mingling of two orders of being, and in specific the interplay of human organs with whatever stands in for organs in the biology of gods, is strictly speaking not possible, not while the laws of nature continue to hold, what kind of being, what hybrid of slave body and god soul, must it have been that laughter-loving Aphrodite transformed herself into, for the space of a night, in order to consort with him? Where was the mighty soul when he took in his arms the incomparable body? Tucked away in some out-of-the-way compartment, in a tiny gland in the skull, for instance; or spread harmlessly through the physical whole as a glow, an aura? Yet even if, for his sake, the soul of the goddess was hidden, how could he not, when her limbs gripped him, have felt the fire of godly appetite – felt it and been scorched by it? Why did it have to be spelled out to him, the next morning, what had really happened (‘Her head touched the roof-beam, her face shone with immortal beauty, Wake up, she said, behold me, do I look like the one who knocked at your door last night?’)? How could any of it have taken place unless he, the man, was under a spell from beginning to end, a spell like an anaesthetic to blanket the fearful knowledge that the maiden he had disrobed, embraced, parted the thighs of, penetrated, was an immortal, a trance to protect him from the unendurable pleasure of godlike lovemaking, allowing him only the duller sensations of a mortal? Yet why would a god, having chosen for herself a mortal lover, put that same lover under such a spell that for the duration he was not himself?