Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [219]
He told me once that he had missed his calling, that he should have been a librarian. I can see the sense in that.
I haven’t been able to lay my hands on course descriptions from the 1970s – the University of Cape Town doesn’t seem to archive material like that – but among Coetzee’s papers I did come across an advertisement for a course that you and he offered jointly in 1976, to extramural students. Do you remember that course?
Yes, I do. It was a poetry course. I was working on Hugh McDiarmid at the time, so I used the occasion to give McDiarmid a close reading. John had the students read Pablo Neruda in translation. I had never read Neruda, so I sat in on his sessions.
A strange choice, don’t you think, for someone like him: Neruda?
No, not at all. John had a fondness for lush, expansive poetry: Neruda, Whitman, Stevens. You must remember that he was, in his way, a child of the 1960s.
In his way – what do you mean by that?
I mean within the confines of a certain rectitude, a certain rationality. Without being a Dionysian himself, he approved in principle of Dionysianism. Approved in principle of letting oneself go, though I don’t recall that he ever let himself go – he would probably not have known how to. He had a need to believe in the resources of the unconscious, in the creative force of unconscious processes. Hence his inclination towards the more vatic poets.
You must have noted how rarely he discussed the sources of his own creativity. In part that came out of the native secretiveness I mentioned. But in part it also suggests a reluctance to probe the sources of his inspiration, as if being too self-aware might cripple him.
Was the course a success – the course you and he taught together?
I certainly learned from it – learned about the history of surrealism in Latin America, for instance. As I said, John knew a little about a lot of things. As for what our students came away with, that I can’t say. Students, in my experience, soon work out whether what you are teaching matters to you. If it does, then they are prepared to consider letting it matter to them too. But if they conclude, rightly or wrongly, that it doesn’t, then, curtains, you may as well go home.
And Neruda didn’t matter to him?
No, I’m not saying that. Neruda may have mattered a great deal to him. Neruda may even have been a model – an unattainable model – of how a poet can respond creatively to injustice and repression. But – and this is my point – if you treat your connection with the poet as a personal secret to be closely guarded, and if moreover your classroom manner is somewhat stiff and formal, you are never going to acquire a following.
You are saying he never acquired a following?
Not as far as I am aware. Perhaps he smartened up his act in his later years. I just don’t know.
At the time when you met him, in 1972, he had a rather precarious position teaching at a high school. It wasn’t until some time later that he was actually offered a position at the University. Even so, for almost all of his working life, from his mid-twenties until his mid-sixties, he was employed as a teacher of one kind or another. I come back to my earlier question: Doesn’t it seem strange to you that a man who had no talent as a teacher should have made teaching his career?
Yes and no. The ranks of the teaching profession are, as you must know, full of refugees and misfits.
And which was he: a refugee or a misfit?
He was a misfit. He was also a cautious soul. He liked the security of a monthly salary cheque.
You sound critical.
I am only pointing to the obvious. If he hadn’t wasted so much of his life correcting students’ grammar and sitting through boring meetings, he might have written more, perhaps even written better. But he was not