Book of the Month: Summertime (J.M. Coetzee)

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.

Book of the Month: Diary of A Bad Year (J.M. Coetzee)

In recent years, J.M. Coetzee, the 2003 recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature, seems to have dispensed with the traditional way of story-telling that we generally associate with a novel. Some of his novels (Boyhood, Youth) were so heavily autobiographical, you wondered why they were not marketed as memoirs. (The third part of the fictionalised memoir, Summertime, was published in 2009.) In 2003, the year he was awarded the Nobel, Coetzee published Elizabeth Costello. The novel consists of seven lectures delivered by its eponymous heroine, whose oeuvre resembles closely that of Coetzee, on subjects as varied as the novel and animal rights. Some of the ‘lectures’ were delivered by Coetzee himself in real life. Quite why Coetzee decided to publish these lectures in the novel form—there was little or no thematic continuity—instead of a non-fiction compendium was not clear to many. Costello gatecrashed into Coetzee’s next novel, too, Slow Man, when she turned up uninvited at the doorsteps of the protagonist, a man called Rayment, and tried to take over his life, much to his resentment. It was left to the readers to figure out why Costello, a famous novelist, decided to descend upon the protagonist who was not a writer and had never met her. If Costello was Coetzee’s literary alter ego, Rayment, a sixty-something man, who lived alone in Australia (Coetzee’s adopted country for the past decade) also had some shades of the real life Coetzee.

In Diary of A Bad Year, Coetzee has created another literary alter ego. He is a famous novelist, originally from South Africa (Coetzee’s country of birth) but now living alone in Australia, who is one of the six writers from all over the world invited by a German publishing company to contribute to a book entitled ‘Strong Opinions’. The writer is referred to, throughout the novel, by his initials, JC (also Coetzee’s initials). JC is a troubled soul. He is troubled about a lot of things which he feels are not right with the world we live in. Since he has been given a cart blanche by his publisher he expatiates on wide-ranging subjects such as the origin of state, anarchism, democracy, terrorism, Machiavelli, asylum in Australia, probability, numbers, intelligent designs, and even Toni Blair. As with the ‘lectures’ in Elizabeth Costello, these musings have little thematic coherence. The conventional novel happens at another level. In the laundry room of his apartment block JC meets a young half-Australian-half-Philippino woman called Anya who lives in the same apartment block with her boyfriend, Alan, who is an investment consultant. She is between jobs and JC hires her as his typist. His eye-sight is deteriorating—so he says—and he can’t type easily—he may or may not be showing the early signs of Parkinsonism. However JC is also attracted to her, a fact that has not gone unnoticed either by Anya or by her world-weary boyfriend. Allan is in no doubt that the only reason why JC has employed Anya without so much as inquiring whether she can type or asking to see recommendations from her previous employers is because he letches after her. Anya has little interest in the topics on which JC opines—indeed she finds his ‘strong opinions’ uninteresting—however, the opinions soon become a regular topics of after-dinner conversations between her and Allan. Allan abhors the socialist idealism of JC—which he dismisses as naive—preferring to see the world in the light of harsh everyday realities. In their conversations Allan alternates between severe criticism and mockery of JC’s view. As the work progresses, Anya begins to suspect that Allan has been secretly reading the manuscripts she has been typing when, in the course of their conversations, he starts referring to JC’s opinions which she has typed but not mentioned to him. When confronted Allan admits to spying: but not on her; he has been spying on JC himself, having introduced a Spyware programme on the hard drive of JC’s computer. If Anya was in two minds about throwing a hissy fit upon hearing this, her doubts are removed when Allan informs her that it is not JC’s opinions—for which he does not care in any case—but his money—3 million dollars—that he is after. Allan has found out about JC’s will according to which his estate would be bequeathed to his sister upon his death. However, the sister has died seven years ago, which means—since JC has not bothered to make a new will—that when JC dies, all the money would go to an obscure animal charity for which JC’s sister used to work. It is an arrant waste of money, according to Allan; and if the doddering fool is disinclined to do anything about it, Allan would do it for him. The investment consultant has cooked up a fiendish scheme (worthy of a Jeffrey Archer novel or a threequal of Ocean’s Eleven) which involves fictitious companies in Switzerland and off shore accounts in the Cayman Islands, and results in Allan (and Anya, if she joins hands with him) becoming very rich and JC not losing his money, provided the stock markets behaved—as Allan is planning to invest the siphoned of money into the stock market (and is confident of reaping a healthy dividend). It is what they call a win-win situation. (If Allan could only look into the future, he would desist from going ahead with the scheme, as he would see the great recession and the collapse of the stock markets.) As it happens Anya threatens to leave him if he carried out his skullduggery. When faced with the stark choice between potentially unimaginable wealth and a trophy girlfriend Allan baulks. However, the lost opportunity, if that is what it is, still rankles in his mind. Therefore, when JC invites them to his apartment to celebrate the completion of the manuscripts, he has to get it off his chest, which he proceeds to do after helping himself to one too many glasses of champagne, and manages to make a fool of himself and insult Anya at the same time. The upshot is Anya leaves him. (One also hopes that JC, having been made aware of the heinous intentions of the investment consultant, would be more vigilant in future). The novel ends with Anya, who continues to correspond with JC, musing over JC’s death (‘We all have got to die, he is old, he is as ready to go as he will ever be.’) and how she would deport when his time comes (‘I will fly to Sidney. . . I will hold his hand. I can’t go with you . . .it is against the rules . . .but I will . . . hold your hand as far as the gate. At the gate you can let go and give me a smile to show you are a brave boy and get on the boat or whatever it is you have to do . . .sweet dreams, and flights of angels, and all the rest.’)

Diary of A Bad Year reads like two novels in one. The narration serves to make the boundaries between the different components more striking. Each page of the novel is divided into three segments, which are separated from one another by horizontal lines. The first segments in the first section of the novel (entitled 'Strong Opinions’) has little direct connection with the remaining two segments, and can constitute a novella in their own right, a la Elizabeth Costello). In the second section of the novel (entitled ‘Second Diary’), the first segments are of the same nature as those in the first section—JC’s musings on various issues except that they are not for the book the German publisher is planning to bring out. The second segment, in both the sections of the novel is about JC’s thoughts on and his interactions with Anya, while the third and the final segment is about Anya’s take on the same interactions plus her interactions with her boyfriend.

Despite the thematic incongruity between the different sections of the novel, it does not feel like a hodgepodge. JC’s views on democracy, terrorism, the response of the Western governments to the threat to their way of life, their treatment of asylum seekers et cetera are very left wing. JC holds Toni Blair—‘[a man with] no philosophical grounding, and little capacity for introspection, and no inner compass save personal ambition . . .’—in contempt and is an unabashed admirer of the late Harold Pinter, the 2005 recipient of the Nobel Prize of literature. Pinter, who was in the terminal stages of cancer when the award was announced, launched a savage attack on Blair in a recorded speech for his part in the Iraq invasion and called for him to be put on trial as a war criminal. JC’s response is: ‘It takes some gumption to speak as Pinter has spoken. . .there comes a time when the outrage and shame are so great that all calculations, all prudence, is overwhelmed, and one must act, that is to say, speak.’ A counterpoising argument to JC’s views is provided by Allan, who prides himself at dealing with realities. Allan tries to distinguish between the Communists, the old foe, and the Islamists, the latest threat to the Western way of life, along the predictable lines. And he is disparaging not just of JC’s views on politics, he also ridicules JC’s views on philosophy and mathematics: ‘Every words he [JC] says is bullshit.’ At times the reader gets the feeling that they are not so much reading a novel as witnessing an Oxford Society debate, albeit an absorbing and fascinating one.

J.M. Coetzee, together with V.S. Naipaul, is the greatest living writer writing in English. In his long and distinguished career he has handled many narrative forms with great success. Disgrace, arguably his most powerful novel (for which he became the first author to be awarded the Booker prize on two occasions), is in the traditional realistic style, as are some of his other novels most notably The Life and Times of Michael K (for which he won the Booker the first time round) and Waiting for the Barbarians. He used the stream of consciousness technique to devastating effect in In the Heart of Country. In all of his recent novels Coetzee has deliberately removed the space between the narrator and his narrative, and is choosing to appear in them under disguises that camouflage little. Thus the readers are encouraged to think that the views of the protagonists are Coetzee’s own view. He also seems increasingly preoccupied with panoply of contemporary issues, which force their way into his novels as essays. In one of the essays, entitled, ‘Authority in Fiction’ Coetzee, via his alter ego, JC, comes closest to revealing what it is that he is trying to achieve in his recent experiments with the form of novel. He invokes Tolstoy whom JC [Coetzee] greatly admires. ‘No one,’ JC remarks, ‘is better at building authority than Tolstoy. In this sense of the word Tolstoy is the exemplary author.’ JC then goes on to remark that in his later life Tolstoy was treated not just as a great author but as an authority on life, a great man, a sage. JC [Coetzee] then wonders whether authority couldn’t be achieved, not just by the trick of rhetoric, but ‘by opening the poet-self to some higher force, by ceasing to be oneself and beginning to speak vatically.’

One wonders whether Coetzee is not aspiring to be a modern day Tolstoy, a great sage, a wise man, and commentator on the human condition.