In
1997 J.M. Coetzee published Boyhood, a fictionalized memoir of
his childhood in South Africa, to great acclaim. In 2005 he published Youth,
which traced the years he spent in England, in the 1960s. Both Boyhood
and Youth were intense, brooding, at times dark, works of
autobiographical fiction. If Boyhood had a kind of mystic quality
to it, perhaps because of the strong emotions which, you suspected, were agitating to
break through the patina of cool, elegant prose, Youth was a detached
contemplation on the fluffing of one’s hopes and ambitions of youth.
In 2009 Coetzee published Summertime,
the next instalment of his fictionalized memoirs.
The
premise of Summertime is as follows: an English biographer is working on
the biography of a writer called John (J M) Coetzee who has passed on a few
years ago. The fictional Coetzee, prior to his death, was a renowned novelist
of international reputation and was also awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.
The biographer is, however, interested in the early years when Coetzee was
finding his feet as a writer. He is planning to focus on the years between 1972
and 1977. During this period, the fictional Coetzee was living with his widowed
father in a run down cottage in the suburb of Cape Town, South Africa, and was
working as a supply teacher of English (although I am not sure whether this
term existed in the South Africa of the 1970s). This was also the period when
‘fictional’ Coetzee published his first novel entitled ‘Duskland’ (also the
title of the real life Coetzee’s debut novel). The biographer has never met
Coetzee, who, by all accounts, was a recluse when he was alive. The biographer has
at his disposal a few dated as well as undated entries Coetzee made during this
period. Most of the entries relate to public events, but there are a few
personal entries. The biographer interviews a total of five individuals who were
close or important to ‘dead’ Coetzee at some time or the other during this
period. These include: a married woman (Julia) with whom Coetzee had had an affair,
a cousin (Margot) to whom he was close, a Brazilian dancer (Adriana) to whose
adolescent daughter Coetzee taught English, and two colleagues at the
University where Coetzee had taught—a male (Martin) and a female (Sophie).
Coetzee most probably had an affair with Sophie.
The
picture of fictional Coetzee that emerges out of these interviews is not very flattering. Julia, who
lived in the same area as Coetzee in the 1970s, admits to having an affair with
him not so much because she was swept off her feet by the future Nobel laureate
as because of her desire to teach her philandering husband (who had been having
it off with his colleague) a lesson and salvage her own amor propre. The sex, she feels obliged to inform, was not earth
shaking, except perhaps on one occasion. She remembers Coetzee as socially
inept, a loner, and repressed in the ‘wider sense of the word’. She remembers
their first meeting: it was in a supermarket when he retrieved a Christmas roll
she had dropped and, while returning it, either inadvertently or
deliberately—she is still not sure after so many years—prodded her breasts with
it. Julia did not find Coetzee particularly attractive: he was scrawny, he had
a straggly beard, he wore horn-rimmed spectacles, and had an air of seediness
and failure about him. He was the outsider. She does not think he loved his
father, either, with whom, she suspects, he was obliged to live because of his
financial problems. She tells the biographer that she did not know at the time
that he was a budding writer, and was surprised when he turned up at her doorstep one day with a copy of his novel, ‘Dusklands’.
She confesses that she does not like ‘Dusklands’ as she prefers her
books to have proper heroes and heroines.
She reads the book as an expose of the cruelty involved in various
conquests, the locus of which, she feels, lies within the writer. She is
surprised when the biographer informs her that Coetzee probably considered her
an important figure in his life. She is under the impression that she was
important to him in an unimportant way, and never entered his books, never
quite flowered within him. She remembers him as a man who was afraid to expose
his desire, who found it hard to court women and open himself to rebuff.
Margot
is the late J M Coetzee’s cousin and was close to him as a child. She tells the
biographer about a family reunion one Christmas in the early 1970s, which
Coetzee attended with his father. Coetzee had returned from America under a cloud
and the wider family suspected that he might even have spent some time in jail
in America. Coetzee was not exactly the flavour of the month with the family,
Margot excepted. Her sister, Carol, for example, felt that John Coetzee was
stuck up, thought too much of himself, and couldn't bear to lower himself to
talk to ordinary people. One afternoon
Coetzee and Margot went out for a drive and drove all the way to the dying town
of Merweville of which their grandfather was a mayor years ago. Coetzee
informed Mergot that he was thinking of buying a house in Merweville where he was
hoping his father would live and he would drive from Cape Town (a seven hour
drive) every weekend to give him company. Margot was scandalized: she could not
see old Coetzee coping on his own in a town in the middle of nowhere; Carol,
her sister, accused John (on his back) of simply wanting to be rid of the old
man whom he had never loved. Margot remembers John Coetzee as a mess, with his
unkempt hair and beard sticking out at all angles. He also seemed to have very
naïve and romantic ideas about the Black emancipation. After the family
reunion, Margot wrote Coetzee a long, heartfelt letter, urging him not send his
father to Merweville. Coetzee replied, informing her that he had taken on board
her suggestions, and had abandoned the plan to buy a house in that town. Margot
was hurt by the cold, formal tone of Coetzee’s letter.
The
next person the biographer interviews is a Brazilian dancer called Adriana, who
lived in Cape Town for three years with her two daughters, and was forced to
earn her living—after her husband, who worked as a security guard, was attacked
and killed by robbers—as a dancer as well as dance teacher. Adriana had high
hopes for her younger daughter, Maria Regina, who at that time was in her late
adolescence. Adriana was paying the school extra fees for English tuition, and
was concerned when she learnt that the teacher was an Afrikaner called Coetzee.
Adriana had never liked Afrikaners, many of whom she had come across in Angola
where she lived with her husband prior to coming to South Africa, and saw how
they treated Black people. Coetzee was summoned to Adriana’s house for tea during
the course of which she was further concerned to learn that Coetzee was just a
supply teacher and did not have proper teaching qualifications. Coetzee on his
part tried in his gauche way to ingratiate himself with Adriana and her family
(inviting them for a picnic, with his father, in the middle of winter), which
only confirmed Adriana’s suspicions that he was letching after her vivacious
daughter. It was, however, not the daughter, but the mother, who was the object
of the late Coetzee’s sexual desire. He started writing letters to Adriana that
made little sense to her as he expatiated on Schubert’s music through which, he
claimed, one could sublime music. To her disgust, Coetzee enrolled himself in
her dancing classes. This, she decided, amounted to stalking, and complained to the school principal. Finally, she removed
her daughter from Coetzee’s class. Adriana does not remember John Coetzee fondly; she
remembers him as an awkward man who made a nuisance of himself for a short
period when she lived in South Africa in the 1970s. She describes Coetzee as celibataire—not a homosexual, not sexless, but solitary—not made for
conjugal life, not made for the company of women.
The
final two interviews are with Coetzee’s colleagues in the university where he
taught for many years. The male colleague, Martin, had generally got on well
with Coetzee and the two had jointly run a poetry course for many years. He
remembers Coetzee as someone who knew a fair amount about a range of things but
not a great deal about anything in particular. Coetzee, Martin opines, was a
perfectly adequate academic, but not a notable teacher. He was a dry, reserved
man, whose passion of literature—for example nineteenth century Russian
novelists—never quite translated itself in his teaching; something always
seemed to hold him back. A strain of secretiveness was ingrained in him. The
female colleague, a Frenchwoman called Sophie, who admits to having had liaison
with Coetzee (but refuses to give details), comments on Coetzee’s political
leanings. Coetzee’s politics, she
informs the biographer, tended to be left-wing, but he was not a Marxist. He
was not a militant. Indeed he looked down on politics, and his political ideas
were too idealistic, too Utopian for him to end up in a prison cell. He was not
hostile for the South African liberation struggle, but as long as liberation
meant national liberation, he had no interest in it. He accepted the struggle
as just, but the new South Africa towards which it strove was not Utopian
enough for him. She remembers an informal interview she had arranged for him
with a French journalist and Coetzee became prickly when he felt that the
Frenchman was insulting Afrikaans—and, by extension, his identity as an
Afrikaner—by dismissing it as just a dialect, even though he never wrote in
Afrikaans, and had written in English all his life. The late John Coetzee,
Sophie remembers, was a passive man who was convinced that supreme felicity
would be his if only he could acquire a French mistress who would recite
Ronsard to him while simultaneously inducting him into the mysteries of love,
French style.
The
final section of the novel consists of Coetzee’s undated diary entries which
record his father’s cancer and the novel ends on the note of Coetzee facing
with extreme dread and reluctance the prospect of nursing his aged and
debilitated father.
It
is difficult to make out what it is that J.M. Coetzee is trying to do in Summertime.
The publishers described it as a ‘fictionalized memoir’. Quite why Coetzee felt the need to fictionalize
his memoirs is not clear to me; however, one supposes that it is entirely in
keeping with his reputation as an elusive and reclusive writer. This is after
all a man who did not bother to turn up to collect his two Booker wins
(although he had presumably no objections to his publishers entering his novels
in the draw). He did arrive to accept the Nobel Prize in literature which he
was awarded in 2003; however, instead of giving a lecture or a talk as might
have been expected, he read out a story.
All
of Coetzee’s published work save one, since the Nobel award, has been
autobiographical. Or is it? Perhaps what Coetzee is trying to tell the world of
literature is that it is impossible to know the real J.M. Coetzee—even he is not
sure that he can record his life faithfully as it really happened— and the best he can do is create a simulacrum in the form of a fictionalized memoir. If that is the case, it is one hell of a convoluted way
to make the point, although it has to be said that in Summertime (as in Youth,
the second instalment in the fictionalized memoir) Coetzee excels in this literary ambiguity. Because the memoir is fictionalized, it is impossible—and probably not even necessary—to tease out what in Summertime is a fact and
what is fiction.
Based on the evidence furnished (Coetzee
portrayed through the eyes of his one-time colleagues, lovers, relatives, and
acquaintances), J.M. Coetzee was a creep and a snob, his head full of airy-fairy
ideas about politics, and urgently requiring bottles of HP sauce to go with the
chips on each of his shoulders. Coetzee seems at pains to portray himself in
the fictionalized memoirs as a social misfit, but there is the underlying
assumption that people would want to know about his life. This need not be as
conceited as it may sound at first. Coetzee is a superb writer, and a Nobel laureate; people far less gifted than he have been driven by the desire to tell the world about their lives.
Summertime,
despite its mournful tone, is a riveting read, not least for Coetzee’s
prose—ice-cool and razor-sharp. Recommended.
