Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [218]
And which explanation do you incline towards?
Probably the first, with an admixture of the second. John left South Africa in the 1960s, came back in the 1970s, for decades hovered between South Africa and the United States, then finally decamped to Australia and died there. I left South Africa in the 1970s and never returned. Broadly speaking, he and I shared a common stance towards South Africa, namely that our presence there was illegitimate. We may have had an abstract right to be there, a birthright, but the basis of that right was fraudulent. Our existence was grounded in a crime, specifically colonial conquest, perpetuated by apartheid. Whatever the opposite is of native or rooted, that was what we felt ourselves to be. We thought of ourselves as sojourners, temporary residents, and to that extent without a home, without a homeland. I don’t think I am misrepresenting John. It was something he and I talked about a great deal. I am certainly not misrepresenting myself.
Are you saying that you and he commiserated together?
Commiserated is the wrong word. We had too much going for us to regard our fate as a miserable one. We had our youth – I was still in my twenties at the time, he was only slightly older – we had a not-bad education behind us, we even had modest material assets. If we had been whisked away and set down somewhere else in the world – the civilized world, the First World – we would have prospered, flourished. (About the Third World I would not be so confident. We were not Robinson Crusoes, either of us.)
Therefore no, I did not regard our fate as tragic, and I am sure he did not either. If anything, it was comic. His ancestors in their way, and my ancestors in theirs, had toiled away, generation after generation, to clear a patch of wild Africa for their descendants, and what was the fruit of all their labours? Doubt in the hearts of those descendants about title to the land; an uneasy sense that it belonged not to them but, inalienably, to its original owners.
Do you think that if he had gone on with the memoir, if he had not abandoned it, that is what he would have said?
More or less. Let me elaborate a little further on our stance vis-à-vis South Africa. We both cultivated a certain provisionality in our feelings towards the country, he perhaps more so than I. We were reluctant to invest too deeply in the country, since sooner or later our ties to it would have to be cut, our investment in it annulled.
And?
That’s all. We had a certain style of mind in common, a style that I attribute to our origins, colonial and South African. Hence the commonality of outlook.
In his case, would you say that the habit you describe, of treating feelings as provisional, of not committing himself emotionally, extended beyond relations with the land of his birth into personal relations too?
I wouldn’t know. You are the biographer. If you find that train of thought worth following up, follow it.
Can we now turn to his teaching? He writes that he was not cut out to be a teacher. Would you agree?
I would say that one teaches best what one knows best and feels most strongly about. John knew a fair amount about a range of things, but not a great deal about anything in particular. I would count that as one strike against him. Second, though there were writers who mattered deeply to him – the nineteenth-century Russian novelists, for instance – the real depth of his involvement did not come out in his teaching, not in any obvious way. Something was always being held back. Why? I don’t know. All I can suggest is that a strain of secretiveness that seemed to be engrained in him, part of his character, extended to his teaching too.
Do you feel then that he spent his working life, or most of it, in a profession for which he had no talent?
That is a little