Summertime_ Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [21]
Would relations with Coetzee have been any different, do you think, if you had been trained in psychology rather than in literature?
What a curious question! The answer is no. If I had studied psychology in the South Africa of the 1960s I would have had to immerse myself in the neurological processes of rats and octopi, and John wasn't a rat or an octopus.
What kind of animal was he?
What odd questions you ask! He wasn't any kind of animal, and for a very specific reason: his mental capacities, and specifically his ideational faculties, were overdeveloped, at the cost of his animal self. He was Homo sapiens, or even Homo sapiens sapiens.
Which leads me back to Dusklands. As a piece of writing I don't say Dusklands is lacking in passion, but the passion behind it is obscure. I read it as a book about cruelty, an exposé of the cruelty involved in various forms of conquest. But what is the actual source of that cruelty? Its locus, it seems to me, lies within the author himself. The best interpretation I can give the book is that writing it was a project in self-administered therapy. Which casts a certain light back over our time together, our conjoint time.
I am not sure I understand. Can you say more?
What don't you understand?
Are you saying he took out his cruelty on you?
No, not at all. John never behaved toward me with anything but the utmost gentleness. He was what I would call a gentle person, a gentleperson. That was part of his problem. His life project was to be gentle. Let me start again. In Dusklands you must recall how much killing there is – killing not only of human beings but of animals. Well, at about the time the book appeared, John announced to me he was becoming a vegetarian. I don't know how long he persisted in it, but I interpreted the vegetarian move as part of a larger project of self-reformation. He had decided he was going to block cruel and violent impulses in every arena of his life – including his love life, I might say – and channel them into his writing, which as a consequence was going to become a sort of unending cathartic exercise.
How much of this was visible to you at the time, and how much do you owe to later insights as a therapist?
I saw it all – it was on the surface, you didn't need to dig – but at that time I did not have the language to describe it. Besides, I was having an affair with the man. You can't be too analytic in the middle of a love affair.
A love affair. You haven't used that expression before.
Then let me correct myself. An erotic entanglement. Because, young and self-centred as I was then, it would have been hard for me to love, really love, someone as radically incomplete as John. So: I was in the midst of an erotic entanglement with two men, in one of whom I had made a deep investment – I had married him, he was the father of my child – and in the other of whom I had made no investment at all.
Why I made no deeper investment in John has much to do, I now suspect, with his project of turning himself into what I described to you, a gentle man, the kind of man who would do no harm, not even to dumb animals, not even to a woman. I should have been clearer with him, I now think: If for some reason you are holding yourself back, don't, there is no need! If I had told him that, if he had taken it to heart, if he had allowed himself to be a little more impetuous, a little more imperious, a little less thoughtful, then he might actually have yanked me out of a marriage that was bad for me then and would become worse later. He might actually have saved me, or saved the best years of my life for me, which, as it turned out, were wasted.
[Silence.]
I've lost track. What were we talking about?
Dusklands.
Yes, Dusklands. A word of caution. That book was actually written before he met me. Check the chronology. So don't be tempted