I hope I am not putting Coetzee in a box.
Well, that is how it sounds to me. No, he was not hostile to the liberation struggle. If you are a fatalist, as he tended to be, there is no point in being hostile to the course that history takes, however much you may regret it. To the fatalist, history is fate.
Very well, did he then regret the liberation struggle? Did he regret the form the liberation struggle took?
He accepted that the liberation struggle was just. The struggle was just, but the new South Africa towards which it strove was not Utopian enough for him.
What would have been Utopian enough for him?
The closing down of the mines. The ploughing under of the vineyards. The disbanding of the armed forces. The abolition of the automobile. Universal vegetarianism. Poetry in the streets. That sort of thing.
In other words, poetry and the horse-drawn cart and vegetarianism are worth fighting for, but not liberation from apartheid?
Nothing is worth fighting for. You compel me into the role of defending his position, a position I do not happen to share. Nothing is worth fighting for because fighting only prolongs the cycle of aggression and retaliation. I merely repeat what Coetzee says loud and clear in his writings, which you say you have read.
Was he at ease with his black students — with black people in general?
Was he at ease with anyone? He was not an at-ease person (can you say that in English?). He never relaxed. I witnessed that with my own eyes. So: Was he at ease with black people? No. He was not at ease among people who were at ease. The ease of others made him ill at ease. Which sent him off — in my opinion — in the wrong direction.
What do you mean?
He saw Africa through a romantic haze. He thought of Africans as embodied, in a way that had been lost long ago in Europe. What do I mean? Let me try to explain. In Africa, he used to say, body and soul were indistinguishable, the body was the soul. He had a whole philosophy of the body, of music and dance, which I can’t reproduce, but which seemed to me, even then — how shall I say? — unhelpful. Politically unhelpful.
Please continue.
His philosophy ascribed to Africans the role of guardians of the truer, deeper, more primitive being of humankind. He and I argued quite strenuously about this. What his position boiled down to, I said, was old-fashioned Romantic primitivism. In the context of the 1970s, of the liberation struggle and the apartheid state, it was unhelpful to look at Africans in his way. And anyway, it was a role they were no longer prepared to fulfil.
Was this the reason why black students avoided his course, your joint course, in African literature?
It was a viewpoint that he did not openly propagate. He was always very careful in that respect, very correct. But if you listened carefully it must have come across.
There was one further circumstance, one further bias to his thinking, that I must mention. Like many whites, he regarded the Cape, the western Cape and perhaps the northern Cape along with it, as standing apart from the rest of South Africa. The Cape was a country of its own, with its own geography, its own history, its own languages and culture. In this mythical Cape, haunted by the ghosts of what we used to call the Hottentots, the Coloured people were rooted, and to a lesser extent the Afrikaners too, but black Africans were aliens, latecomers, outsiders, as were the English.
Why do I mention this? Because it suggests how he could justify the rather abstract, rather anthropological attitude he took up towards black South Africa. He had no feeling for black South Africans. That was my private conclusion. They might be his fellow citizens but they were not his countrymen. History — or fate, which was to him the same thing — might have cast them in the role of inheritors of the land, but at the back of his mind they continued to be they as opposed to us.
If Africans were they, who were us? The Afrikaners?
No. Us was principally the Coloured people. It is a term I use only reluctantly, as shorthand. He — Coetzee — avoided it as far as he could. I mentioned his Utopianism. This avoidance was another aspect of his Utopianism. He longed for the day when everyone in South Africa would call themselves nothing, neither African nor European nor white nor black nor anything else, when family histories would have become so tangled and intermixed that people would be ethnically indistinguishable, that is to say — I utter the tainted word again — Coloured. He called that the Brazilian future. He approved of Brazil and the Brazilians. He had of course never been to Brazil.
But he had Brazilian friends.
He had met a few Brazilian refugees in South Africa.
[Silence.]
You mention an intermixed future. Are we talking here about biological mixture? Are we talking about intermarriage?
Don’t ask me. I am just delivering a report.
Then why, instead of contributing to the future by — legitimately or illegitimately — fathering Coloured children — why was he having a liaison with a young white colleague from France?
[Laughs.] Don’t ask me.
What did you and he talk about?
About our teaching. About colleagues and students. In other words, we talked shop. We also talked about ourselves.
Go on.
You want me to tell you if we discussed his writing? The answer is no. He never spoke to me about what he was writing, nor did I press him.
This was around the time when he was writing In the Heart of the Country.
He was just completing In the Heart of the Country.
Did you know that In the Heart of the Country would be about madness and parricide and so forth?
I had absolutely no idea.
Did you read it before it was published?
Yes.
What did you think of it?
[Laughs.] I must tread carefully. I presume you do not mean, what was my considered critical judgment, I presume you mean how did I respond? Frankly, I was at first nervous. I was nervous that I would find myself in the book in some embarrassing guise.
Why did you think that might be so?
Because — so it seemed to me at the time, now I realize how naïve this was — I believed you could not be closely involved with another person and yet exclude her from your imaginative universe.
And did you find yourself in the book?
No.
Were you upset?
What do you mean — was I upset not to find myself in his book?
Were you upset to find yourself excluded from his imaginative universe?
No. I was learning. My exclusion was part of my education. Shall we leave it at that? I think I have given you enough.
Well, I am certainly grateful to you. But, Mme Denoël, let me make one further appeal. Coetzee was never a popular writer. By that I do not simply mean that his books did not sell widely. I also mean that the public never took him to their collective heart. There was an image of him in the public realm as a remote and supercilious intellectual, an image he did nothing to dispel. Indeed one might even say he encouraged it.
Now, I don’t believe that image does him justice. The conversations I have had with people who knew him well reveal a very different person, not necessarily warmer in temperament but more unsure of himself, more confused, more human, if I can use that word.