Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [96]
Eight
Does his first venture into prose herald a change of direction in his life? Is he about to renounce poetry? He is not sure. But if he is going to write prose then he may have to go the whole hog and become a Jamesian. Henry James shows one how to rise above mere nationality. In fact, it is not always clear where a piece by James is set, in London or Paris or New York, so supremely above the mechanics of daily life is James. People in James do not have to pay the rent; they certainly do not have to hold down jobs; all they are required to do is to have supersubtle conversations whose effect is to bring about tiny shifts of power, shifts so minute as to be invisible to all but a practised eye. When enough such shifts have taken place, the balance of power between the personages of the story is (Voilà!) revealed to have suddenly and irreversibly changed. And that is that: the story has fulfilled its charge and can be brought to an end.
He sets himself exercises in the style of James. But the Jamesian manner proves less easy to master than he had thought. Getting the characters he dreams up to have supersubtle conversations is like trying to make mammals fly. For a moment or two, flapping their arms, they support themselves in thin air. Then they plunge.
Henry James’s sensibility is finer than his, there can be no doubt about that. But that does not explain the whole of his failure. James wants one to believe that conversations, exchanges of words, are all that matters. Though it is a credo he is ready to accept, he cannot actually follow it, he finds, not in London, the city on whose grim cogs he is being broken, the city from which he must learn to write, otherwise why is he here at all?
Once upon a time, when he was still an innocent child, he believed that cleverness was the only yardstick that mattered, that as long as he was clever enough he would attain everything he desired. Going to university put him in his place. The university showed him he was not the cleverest, not by a long chalk. And now he is faced with real life, where there are not even examinations to fall back on. In real life all that he can do well, it appears, is be miserable. In misery he is still top of the class. There seems to be no limit to the misery he can attract to himself and endure. Even as he plods around the cold streets of this alien city, heading nowhere, just walking to tire himself out, so that when he gets back to his room he will at least be able to sleep, he does not sense within himself the slightest disposition to crack under the weight of misery. Misery is his element. He is at home in misery like a fish in water. If misery were to be abolished, he would not know what to do with himself.
Happiness, he tells himself, teaches one nothing. Misery, on the other hand, steels one for the future. Misery is a school for the soul. From the waters of misery one emerges on the far bank purified, strong, ready to take up again the challenges of a life of art.
Yet misery does not feel like a purifying bath. On the contrary, it feels like a pool of dirty water. From each new bout of misery he emerges not brighter and stronger but duller and flabbier. How does it actually work, the cleansing action that misery is reputed to have? Has he not swum deep enough? Will he have to swim beyond mere misery into melancholia and madness? He has never yet met anyone who could be called properly mad, but he has not forgotten Jacqueline, who was, as she herself put it, ‘in therapy’, and with whom he spent six months, on and off, sharing a one-room flat. At no time did Jacqueline blaze with the divine and exhilarating fire of creativity. On the contrary, she was self-obsessed, unpredictable, fatiguing to be with. Is that the kind of person he must descend to being before he can be an artist? And anyway, whether mad or miserable, how can one write when tiredness is like a gloved hand gripping one’s brain and squeezing? Or is what he likes to call tiredness in fact a test, a disguised