Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [222]
He was considerably older than you.
Ten years. He was ten years older than me.
[Silence.]
Is there anything you would like to add on the subject? Other aspects of him you would like to comment on?
We had a liaison. I presume you are aware of that. It did not endure.
Why not?
It was not sustainable.
Would you like to say more?
Would I like to say more for your book? Not before you tell me what kind of book it is. Is it a book of gossip or a serious book? Do you have authorization for it? Who else are you speaking to besides me?
Does one need authorization to write a book? If one wanted authorization, where would one seek it? From the executors of Coetzee’s estate? I don’t think so. But I can give you my assurance, the book I am writing is a serious book, a seriously intended biography. I concentrate on the years from Coetzee’s return to South Africa in 1971/72 until his first public recognition in 1977. That seems to me an important period of his life, important yet neglected, a period when he was still finding his feet as a writer.
As for whom I have chosen to interview, let me put the situation before you candidly. I made two trips to South Africa, one last year, one the year before. Those trips were not as fruitful as I had hoped they would be. Of the people who knew Coetzee best, a number had died. In fact, the whole generation to which he belonged was on the point of dying out. And the memories of the survivors were not always to be trusted. In one or two cases, people who claimed to have known him turned out, after a little scratching, to have the wrong Coetzee (as you are aware, the name Coetzee is not uncommon in that country). The upshot is, the biography will rest on interviews with a handful of friends and colleagues, including, I would hope, yourself. Is that enough to reassure you?
No. What of his diaries? What of his letters? What of his notebooks? Why so much reliance on interviews?
Mme Denoël, I have been through the letters and diaries that are available to me. What Coetzee writes there cannot be trusted, not as a factual record – not because he was a liar but because he was a fictioneer. In his letters he is making up a fiction of himself for his correspondents; in his diaries he is doing much the same for his own eyes, or perhaps for posterity. As documents they have their value, of course; but if you want the truth, the full truth, then surely you need to set beside them the testimony of people who knew him in the flesh, who participated in his life.
Yes; but what if we are all fictioneers, as you call Coetzee? What if we are all continually making up the stories of our lives? Why should what I tell you about Coetzee be any more worthy of credence than what he writes in his own person?
Of course we are all fictioneers, more or less, I do not deny that. But which would you rather have: a range of independent reports from independent perspectives, from which you can then attempt to synthesize a whole; or the massive, unitary self-projection comprised by his oeuvre? I know which I would prefer.
Yes, I can see that. There remains the other question I raised, the question of discretion. I am not one of those who believe that once a person is dead all restraint falls away. What existed between myself and John Coetzee I am not necessarily prepared to share with the world.
I accept that. Discretion is your privilege, your right. Nevertheless, I ask you to pause and reflect. A great writer is the property of all the world. You knew John Coetzee closely. One of these days you too will no longer be with us. Do you think it good that your memories should pass away with you?
A great writer? How John would laugh if he could hear you! The day of the great writer is long gone, he would say.
The day of the writer as oracle – yes, I would agree, that day is past. But would you not accept that a well-known writer – let us call him that instead – a well-known figure in our common cultural life, is