Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [216]
He wrote about men and he wrote about women too. For example – this may interest you – there is a book named Foe in which the heroine spends a year shipwrecked on an island off the coast of Brazil. In the final version she is an Englishwoman, but in the first draft he made her a Brasileira.
And what kind of woman is this Brasileira of his?
What shall I say? She has many good qualities. She is attractive, she is resourceful, she has a will of steel. She hunts all over the world to find her young daughter, who has disappeared. That is the substance of the novel: her quest to recover her daughter, which overrides all other concerns. To me she seems an admirable heroine. If I were the original of a character like that, I would feel proud.
I will read this book and see for myself. What is the title again?
Foe, spelled F-O-E. It was translated into Portuguese, but the translation is probably out of print by now. I can send you a copy in English if you like.
Yes, send it. It is a long time since I read an English book, but I am interested to see what this man of wood made of me.
[Laughter.]
Interview conducted in São Paulo, Brazil,
in December 2007.
Martin
IN ONE OF HIS late notebooks Coetzee gives an account of his first meeting with you, on the day in 1972 when you were both being interviewed for a position at the University of Cape Town. The account is only a few pages long – I’ll read it to you if you like. I suspect it was intended to fit into the third memoir, the one that never saw the light of day. As you will hear, he follows the same convention as in Boyhood and Youth, where the subject is called ‘he’ rather than ‘I’.
This is what he writes.
‘He has had his hair cut for the interview. He has trimmed his beard. He has put on a jacket and tie. If he is not yet Mr Sobersides, at least he no longer looks like the Wild Man of Borneo.
‘In the waiting room are the two other candidates for the job. They stand side by side at the window overlooking the gardens, conversing softly. They seem to know each other, or at least to have struck up an acquaintance.’
You don’t recall who this third person was, do you?
He was from the University of Stellenbosch, but I don’t remember his name.
He goes on: ‘This is the British way: to drop the contestants into the pit and watch to see what will happen. He will have to reaccustom himself to British ways of doing things, in all their brutality. A tight ship, Britain, crammed to the gunwales. Dog eat dog. Dogs snarling and snapping at one another, each guarding its little territory. The American way, by comparison, decorous, even gentle. But then there is more space in America, more room for urbanity.
‘The Cape may not be Britain, may be drifting further from Britain every day, yet what is left of British ways it clutches tight to its chest. Without that saving connection, what would the Cape be? A minor landing on the way to nowhere; a place of savage idleness.
‘In the order paper pinned to the door, he is Number Two to appear before the committee. Number One, when summoned, rises calmly, taps out his pipe, stores it away in what must be a pipe case, and passes through the portal. Twenty minutes later he re-emerges, his face inscrutable.
‘It is his turn. He enters and is waved to a seat at the foot of a long table. At the far end sit his inquisitors, five in number, all men. Because the windows are open, because the room is above a street where cars are continually passing by, he has to strain to hear them, and raise his own voice to make himself heard.
‘Some polite feints, then the first thrust: If appointed, what authors would he most like to teach?
“‘I can teach pretty much across the board,” he replies. “I am not a specialist. I think of myself as a generalist.”
‘As an answer it is at least defensible. A small department in a small university might be happy to recruit a jack of all trades. But