Public CompanyV V: JM Coetzee - The story of himself
All fiction has its autobiographical roots, but Evelyn Waugh puts it as “experience totally transformed”. The autobiographical impulse is particularly strong in JM Coetzee, the South African Nobel Prize winner (2003), but his writings lie at the frontier between life and the freedoms of fiction. Summertime (Harvill Secker, special Indian price Rs 799), the final volume of a trilogy — the other two being Boyhood and Youth — is subtitled Scenes from a Provincial Life, charts the border territory with multiple skills of a biographer and fiction writer so that it can pretty well mean what you would want it to be.
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Boyhood and Youth can be described as memoirs because they provide a portrait of the artist at the relevant age. Summertime is different: it gives a series of interviews by prospective biographers (four of them are women) and by people who knew Coetzee along with some notes by the biographee himself about possible developments and additions. In other words, the biographer(s) and biographee are one and the same. By the time the interviews take place, the novelist has emigrated to Australia, won the Nobel Prize for literature and died.
To go back to Coetzee’s formative years because they provide a constant echo in the trilogy that has to be read as a seamless whole, Boyhood provides a picture of the sufferings at school, memorable both for the savage beatings by the master and Afrikaner boys. Coetzee is an Afrikaner and spoke Afrikaans but never identified with its language and culture. “He thinks of Afrikaners as people in a rage all the time because their hearts are hurt. He thinks of the English as people who have not fallen into a rage because they live behind walls and guard their hearts well.” Coetzee’s early childhood and experiences foretell a future of solitude and introspection that is reflected in all his novels and essays.
Youth’s narrator, a student in the 1950s South Africa, has long been plotting an escape from his native country. Studying mathematics, reading poetry, saving money he tries to ensure that when he arrives in the real world, he would be able to experience life to its full intensity. Arriving in London, he finds neither poetry nor romance. Instead succumbs to the monotony of daily life as a computer programmer; he hangs up on his writing as a hack and just drifts along with a few occasional affairs that provide a temporary life. Against the background of the 1960s, it is the portrait of a young man in search of his own self.
Summertime brings both Boyhood and Youth together in a series of interviews. The first of the five interviewers is Dr Julia Frankl, who asks a string of questions and then reconstructs the life of John Coetzee through the answers he provides: how he came to write his first novel, his conversion to vegetarianism and his love for animals, and that his only passion was to become a writer which would bring him as close to immortality as possible. Coetzee’s “as-told-to” life is nothing more than a series of incidents that simply doesn’t add up to anything significant: “a tale told to an idiot signifying nothing”. In fact, we learn more about interviewer Frankl than about Coetzee which makes you wonder whether this is the best way of going about writing a biography, fictionalised or otherwise.
The other interviewers follow the same pattern of Qs and As. But it is the questions that are of interest because the interviewers reveal more about themselves — their attitudes and values — than the answers because the interviewee always dodges direct answers to the questions. In an interview with a male friend, Martin, Coetzee says that just because he had written about relationships between older men and younger women, there was a parallel to be found in his real life. “It would be very, very naïve to conclude that because the theme was present in his writing, it had to be present in his life.”
In his last interview with a French woman, Sophie, he says, “Our life stories are ours to construct as we wish, within or even against the constraints imposed by the real world”. And adds, he was well aware that “a novelist’s books and diaries… cannot be trusted, not because Coetzee was a liar but because he was a fictioneer”.
And this brings us to the nub of the question about the nature of biography: how much of it can be trusted? Do biographers bridge the gap between the lies and silences that lie at the heart of everyone’s life and the real truth? Does an individual have just a single identity or multiple identities? If it is the latter, how can the biographer tether the broomstick? Coetzee is a very prolific writer who has always raised the question of the problems of fiction and Summertime is another addition to that oeuvre.