Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [227]
So he preferred to remain an outsider.
I think he was happiest in the role of outsider. He was not a joiner. He was not a team player.
You say you were never introduced to his family. Did you not find that strange?
No, not at all. His mother had passed away by the time he and I met, his father was not well, his brother had left the country, he was on strained terms with the wider family. As for me, I was a married woman, therefore our relationship, as far as it went, had to be clandestine.
But he and I talked, of course, about our families, our origins. What distinguished his family, I would say, is that they were cultural Afrikaners but not political Afrikaners. What do I mean by that? Reflect for a moment on the Europe of the nineteenth century. All over the continent you see ethnic or cultural identities transforming themselves into political identities. That process commences in Greece and spreads rapidly through the Balkans and central Europe. Before long the wave hits the colonies. In the Cape Colony, Dutch-speaking Creoles begin to reinvent themselves as a separate nation, the Afrikaner nation, and to agitate for national independence.
Well, somehow or other that wave of romantic nationalist enthusiasm passed John’s family by. Or else they decided not to swim with it.
They kept their distance because of the politics associated with nationalist enthusiasm – I mean, the anti-imperialist, anti-English politics?
Yes. First they were disturbed by the whipped-up hostility to everything English, by the mystique of Blut und Boden; then later they recoiled from the ideological baggage that the nationalists took over from the radical right in Europe – scientific racism, for example – and the policies that went with it: the policing of culture, militarization of the youth, a state religion, and so forth.
So, all in all, you see Coetzee as a conservative, an anti-radical.
A cultural conservative, yes, as many of the modernists were cultural conservatives – I mean the modernist writers from Europe who were his models. He was deeply attached to the South Africa of his youth, a South Africa which by 1976 was starting to look like a never-never land. For proof you have only to turn to the book I mentioned, Boyhood, where you find a palpable nostalgia for the old feudal relations between white and Coloured. To people like him, the National Party with its policy of apartheid represented not backwoods conservatism but on the contrary new-fangled social engineering. He was all in favour of the old, complex, feudal social textures which so offended the tidy minds of the dirigistes of apartheid.
Did you ever find yourself at odds with him over questions of politics?
That is a difficult question. Where, after all, does character end and politics begin? At a personal level, I saw him as rather too fatalistic and therefore too passive. Did his mistrust of political activism express itself in passivity in the conduct of his life, or did an innate fatalism express itself in mistrust of political action? I cannot decide. But yes, at a personal level there was a certain tension between us. I wanted our relationship to grow and develop, whereas he wanted it to remain the same, without change. That was what caused the breach, in the end. Because between a man and a woman there is no standing still, in my view. Either you are going up or you are going down.
When did the breach occur?
In 1980. I left Cape Town and returned to France.
Did you and he have no further contact?
For a while he wrote to me. He sent me his books as they came out. Then the letters stopped coming. I presumed he had found someone else.
And when you look back over the relationship,