Summertime (25 page)

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 of history, 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 toward 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 the Coloured people were rooted, and to a lesser extent the Afrikaners too, but Africans were aliens, latecomers, 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 toward 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 some 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 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.

This was around the time when he was writing
In the Heart of the Country.

He was just completing
In the Heart of the Country.

Did you know that
In the Heart of the Country
would be about madness and parricide and so forth?

I had absolutely no idea.

Did you read it before it was published?

Yes.

What did you think of it?

[Laughs.] I must tread carefully. I presume you do not mean, what was my considered critical judgment, I presume you mean how did I respond? Frankly, I was at first nervous. I was nervous that I would find myself in the book in some embarrassing guise.

Why did you think that might be so?

Because – so it seemed to me at the time, now I realize how naive this was – I believed you could not be closely involved with another person and yet exclude her from your imaginative universe.

And did you find yourself in the book?

No.

Were you upset?

What do you mean – was I upset not to find myself in his book?

Were you upset to find yourself excluded from his imaginative universe?

No. It was part of my education. Shall we leave it at that? I think I have given you enough.

Well, I am certainly grateful to you. But, Mme Denoël, let me make one further appeal. Coetzee was never a popular writer. By that I do not simply mean that his books did not sell well. I also mean that the public never took him to their collective heart. There was an image of him in the public realm as a cold and supercilious intellectual, an image he did nothing to dispel. Indeed one might even say he encouraged it.

Now, I don't believe that image does him justice. The conversations I have had with people who knew him well reveal a very different person – not necessarily a warmer person, but someone more uncertain of himself, more confused, more human, if I can use that word.

I wonder if you would be prepared to comment on the human side of him. I value what you have said about his politics, but are there any more personal stories from your time together that you would be prepared to share?

Stories that will reveal him in a warmer light, you mean? Stories of his kindness toward animals – animals and women? No, those stories I will be saving for my own memoirs.

[Laughter.]

All right, I will tell you one story. It may not seem personal, it may again seem to be political, but you must remember, in those days politics pushed its way into everything.

A journalist from
Libération
, the French newspaper, came on an assignment to South Africa, and asked whether I could set up an interview with John. I went back to John and persuaded him to accept: I told him
Libération
was a good paper, I told him French journalists were not like South African journalists, they would never arrive for an interview unprepared. And this was of course in the days before the Internet, so journalists could not simply copy their stories one from another.

We held the interview in my office on the campus. I thought I would assist in case there were language problems, John's French was not good.

Well, it soon became clear that the journalist was not interested in John himself but in what John could tell him about Brey-ten Breytenbach, who was at the time in trouble with the South African authorities. Because in France there was a lively interest in Breytenbach – he was a romantic figure, he had lived in France for many years, he had connections in the French intellectual world.

John's response was that he could not help: he had read Breytenbach but that was all, he did not know him personally, had never even met him. All of which was true.

But the journalist, who was used to literary life in France, where everything is so much more incestuous, would not believe him. Why would one writer refuse to comment on another writer from the same little tribe, the Afrikaner tribe, unless there was some personal grudge between them, or some political animosity?

So he kept pressing John, and John kept trying to explain how hard it was for an outsider to appreciate Breytenbach's standing as an Afrikaans poet, since his poetry was so deeply rooted in the
volksmond
, the language of the people.

'Are you referring to his dialect poems?' said the journalist. And then, when John failed to understand, he remarked, very disparagingly, 'Surely one cannot write great poetry in dialect.'

That remark really angered John. But, since his way of being angry was, rather than raising his voice, to turn cold and withdraw into silence, the man from
Libération
was simply confused. He had no idea of what was going on.

Afterwards, when John had left, I tried to explain that Afrikaners became very emotional when their language was insulted, that Breytenbach would probably have responded in the same way. But the journalist just shrugged. It made no sense, he said, to write in dialect when one had a world language at one's disposal (actually he didn't say a dialect, he said an obscure dialect, and he didn't say a world language, he said a proper language,
une vraie langue
). At which point it began to dawn on me that he was putting Breytenbach and John in the same category, as vernacular or dialect writers.

Well, of course John did not write in Afrikaans at all, he wrote in English, very good English, and had written in English all his life. Even so, he responded in very prickly fashion to what he saw as an insult to the dignity of Afrikaans.