Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [125]
At least the episode is closed, closed off, consigned to the past, sealed away in memory. But that is not true, not quite. A letter arrives postmarked Lucerne. Without second thought he opens it and begins to read. It is in Afrikaans. ‘Dear John, I thought I should let you know that I am OK. Marianne is OK too. At first she did not understand why you did not phone, but after a while she cheered up, and we have been having a good time. She doesn’t want to write, but I thought I would write anyway, to say I hope you don’t treat all your girls like that, even in London. Marianne is a special person, she doesn’t deserve that kind of treatment. You should think twice about the life you lead. Your cousin, Ilse.’
Even in London. What does she mean? That even by the standards of London he has behaved disgracefully? What do Ilse and her friend, fresh from the wastes of the Orange Free State, know about London and its standards? London gets worse, he wants to say. If you would stay on for a while, instead of running away to the cowbells and the meadows, you might find that out for yourself. But he does not really believe the fault is London’s. He has read Henry James. He knows how easy it is to be bad, how one has only to relax for the badness to emerge.
The most hurtful moments in the letter are at the beginning and the end. Beste John is not how one addresses a family member, it is the way one addresses a stranger. And Your cousin, Ilse: who would have thought a farm girl capable of such a telling thrust!
For days and weeks, even after he has crumpled it up and thrown it away, his cousin’s letter haunts him – not the actual words on the page, which he soon manages to blank out, but the memory of the moment when, despite having noticed the Swiss stamp and the childishly rounded handwriting, he slit open the envelope and read. What a fool! What was he expecting: a paean of thanks?
He does not like bad news. Particularly he does not like bad news about himself. I am hard enough on myself, he tells himself; I do not need the help of others. It is a sophistical trick that he falls back on time and again when he wants to block his ears to criticism. He learned its usefulness when Jacqueline, from the perspective of a woman of thirty, gave him her opinion of him as a lover. Now, as soon as an affair begins to run out of steam, he withdraws. He abominates scenes, angry outbursts, home truths (‘Do you want to know the truth about yourself?’), and does all in his power to evade them. What is truth anyway? If he is a mystery to himself, how can he be anything but a mystery to others? There is a pact he is ready to offer the women in his life: if they will treat him as a mystery, he will treat them as a closed book. On that basis and that alone will commerce be possible.
He is not a fool. As a lover his record is undistinguished, and he knows it. Never has he provoked in the heart of a woman what he would call a grand passion. In fact, looking back, he cannot recall having been the object of a passion, a true passion, of any degree. That must say something about him. As for sex itself, narrowly understood, what he provides is, he suspects, rather meagre; and what he gets in return is meagre too. If the fault is anyone’s, it is his own. For as long as he lacks heart and holds himself back, why should the woman not hold herself back too?
Is sex the measure of all things? If he fails in sex, does he fail the whole test of life? Things would be easier if that were not true. But when he looks around, he can see no one who does not stand in awe of the god of sex, except perhaps for a few dinosaurs, holdovers from Victorian times. Even Henry James, on the surface so proper, so Victorian, has pages where he darkly hints that everything, finally, is sex.
Of all the writers he follows, he trusts Pound the most. There is passion aplenty in Pound – the ache of longing, the fire of consummation – but it is passion untroubled, without a darker side. What is the