David Beresford
Another Country
One of the most enjoyable pieces of television I have seen recently was a video recording of an attempt to interview JM Coetzee for Dutch TV. The writer’s distaste for the public limelight has become almost legendary since he failed to pick up his second Booker Prize – the first person ever to do the “double”.
It posed a challenge to a well-known Dutch TV personality who determined to fly to Cape Town to interview him, obviously convinced he could overcome with sympathetic charm what he saw as a shy writer’s block when it came to publicity.
Sympathy turned to irritation as it seemingly dawned on the intrepid interviewer that, whatever it was he had flown 7 000 miles to deal with, it was not shyness. The realisation was driven home when he pulled that old trick, the long silence.
Now the long silence – to which suckers like myself respond with desperate babble in instinctive recognition of nature’s abhorrence of vacuums – is bad enough when used as a weapon in private conversation. In the hands of a professional broadcaster armed with a television camera and microphone it is no less than wicked. But Coetzee simply reacted with the flat stare of a … of … “a leopard!” I muttered with astonishment at the frozen tableau on the silent screen.
I must confess that I am a latecomer to Coetzee’s work, or at least to an appreciation of it. I started the Life and Times of Michael K with determination, continued in puzzlement and finally skimmed querulously through it. I did hear distantly familiar chords in Waiting for the Barbarians, but too distant to catch the tune.
I simply ignored a friend’s rapture over The Master of Petersburg and felt mildly irritated when Disgrace arrived – partly, I suspect, because I was already feeling over-burdened with demands being made on my understanding by political developments in South Africa, notably attempts at the time to crucify this newspaper on the “racism” charge.
I came across a copy of Disgrace during a periodic bout of late-night insomnia some months ago and settled down to it in the anticipation that frustration would soon put me to sleep. I put it aside in the early hours of the following morning, not out of frustration, but what I feared to be looming depression and further sleeplessness.
The story told in Disgrace, for those who may not have read it, is of a white professor of English in what used to be known as the “liberal Cape” who has an affair with a student. He is hauled before a disciplinary committee where he makes a stand on what is to them an obscure principle in the full knowledge it will cost him his job.
Cast out of academia he lands up on a smallholding with his neglected daughter who is then raped by some black men.
It was probably at the point where some dogs are being “put to sleep” by lethal injection that I identified South Africa, not just as setting but as subject matter. “Probably”, because it was a gradual process of subconscious recognition, poisonous injections having a certain resonance in South Africa at the time, thanks to the opening of the trial of “Dr Death”, Wouter Basson.
I have just finished what promises to be the first volume of Coetzee’s memoirs, Boyhood. Leaving it with the regret one leaves a great novel – with the image of Aunt Annie “lying in the rain waiting for somebody to find the time to bury her” – I was struck at how intensely personal and intimate his writing is. Which would seem to contradict his other public persona as an intensely private man.
It would be nice to go on and resolve the paradox with something along the lines of “that’s because he has chosen to painfully explore and share an inner truth by the means of his art, rather than by way of public cross-examination”.
But it sounds trite and besides, whatever the truth of it, journalism has made me tired of chasing phantoms known as “the truth”, whether of the inner or outer varieties.
I suspect great writing is not the work of a hunter-after-truth, but of a stage magician who delights the heart and bewilders the mind with illusions. It is all done with mirrors, constructed from the glass and silver of memory and imagination. “Truth” and its twin sister, “meaning”, are as irrelevant to the art and the craft of writing as is the provenance of the rabbit plucked out of the magician’s top hat. A pivotal moment in Disgrace comes when father and daughter exchange brief notes under their doors, in reference to the rapes. The professor says, of his daughter’s refusal to protest against the wrong done to her by at least abandoning her defenceless homestead: “You are on the brink of a dangerous error. You wish to humble yourself before history. But the road you are following is the wrong one. It will strip you of all honour. You will not be able to live with yourself. I plead with you, listen to me.”
To which the daughter replies: “You have not been listening to me.I am not the person you know. I am a dead person and I do not know yet what will bring me back to life. All I know is that I cannot go away.”
The words seem to resonate through an auditorium of the living dead. How irritating it would be to have the ensuing, awestruck silence shattered by a call of: “Excuse me, maestro, over here … yes, behind the camera … yes, jolly clever, but now can you explain to the world outside this suffocating room how you did it and what, exactly, it all means!”