Summertime_ Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [81]
Sophie I knew, but not the others. How did you choose us?
Basically I let Coetzee himself do the choosing. I simply followed up on clues he dropped in his notebooks – clues as to who was important to him at the time. The other criterion you had to meet was to be alive. Most of the people who knew him well are, as you must know, dead by now.
It sounds a peculiar way of selecting biographical sources, if you don't mind my saying so.
Perhaps. But I am not interested in coming to a final judgment on Coetzee. I leave that to history. What I am doing is telling the story of a stage in his life, or if we can't have a single story then several stories from several perspectives.
And the sources you have selected have no axes to grind, no ambitions of their own to pronounce final judgment on Coetzee?
[Silence.]
Leaving aside Sophie, leaving aside his cousin, was either of the women you mentioned emotionally involved with Coetzee?
Yes. Both.
Shouldn't that give you pause? Are you not inevitably going to come out with an account that is slanted toward the personal and the intimate at the expense of the man's actual achievements as a writer? Will it amount to anything more than – forgive me for putting it this way – anything more than women's gossip?
Because my informants are women?
Because it is not in the nature of love affairs for the lovers to see each other whole and steady.
[Silence.]
I repeat, it seems to me strange to be doing the biography of a writer while ignoring his writing. But perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps I am out of date. I must go. One final thing: if you are planning to quote me, would you make sure I have a chance to check the text first?
Of course.
Interview conducted in Sheffield, England,
in September 2007.
Sophie
MME DENOËL, TELL me how you came to know John Coetzee.
He and I were for years colleagues at the University of Cape Town. He was in the Department of English, I was in French. We collaborated to offer a course in African literature. This was in 1976. He taught the Anglophone writers, I the Francophone. That was how our acquaintance began.
And how did you yourself come to be in Cape Town?
My husband was sent there to run the Alliance Française. Before that we had been living in Madagascar. During our time in Cape Town our marriage broke up. My husband returned to France, I stayed on. I took a position at the University, a junior position teaching French language.
And in addition you taught this joint course that you mention, in African literature.
Yes. It may seem odd, two whites offering a course in black African literature, but that is how it was in those days. If we had not offered it, no one would have.
Because blacks were excluded from the University?
No, no, by then the system had started to crack. There were black students, though not many; some black lecturers too. But very few specialists in Africa, the wider Africa. That was one of the surprising things I discovered about South Africa: how insular it was. I went back on a visit last year, and it was the same: little or no interest in the rest of Africa. Africa was a dark continent to the north, best left unexplored.
And you? Where did your interest in Africa come from?
From my education. From France. Remember, France had been a major colonial power. Even after the colonial era officially ended, France had other means at its disposal to maintain its influence – economic means, cultural means. La Francophonie was the new name we invented for the old empire. Writers from Francophonie were promoted, fêted, studied. For my agrégation I worked on Aimé Césaire.
And the course