I wonder if you would be prepared to comment on the human side of him. I value what you have said about his politics, but are there stories of a more personal nature that you would be prepared to share, stories that might shed a better light on his character?
You mean stories that would show him in a more attractive, more endearing light — stories of kindness towards animals, for instance, animals and women? No, stories like that I will be saving for my own memoirs.
[Laughter.]
All right, I will tell you one story. It may not seem all that personal, it may again seem to be political, but you must remember, in those days politics thrust its way into everything.
A journalist from Libération, the French newspaper, came on an assignment to South Africa, and asked whether I could set up an interview with John. I went back to John and persuaded him to accept: I told him Libération was a good paper, I told him French journalists were not like South African journalists, they would never arrive for an interview without having done their homework.
We held the interview in my office on the campus. I thought I would assist in case there were language problems, John’s French was not good.
Well, it soon became clear that the journalist was not interested in John himself but in what John could tell him about Breyten Breytenbach, who was at the time in trouble with the South African authorities. Because in France there was a lively interest in Breytenbach — he was a romantic figure, he had lived in France for many years, he had connections in the French intellectual world.
John’s response was that he could not help: he had read Breytenbach but that was all, he did not know him personally, had never met him. All of which was true.
But the journalist, who was used to literary life in France, where everything is so much more incestuous, would not believe him. Why would one writer refuse to comment on another writer from the same little tribe, the Afrikaner tribe, unless there was some personal grudge between them or some political animosity?
So he kept pressing John, and John kept trying to explain how hard it was for a foreigner, an outsider, to appreciate Breytenbach’s achievement as a poet, since his poetry was so deeply rooted in the volksmond, the language of the people.
‘Are you referring to his dialect poems?’ said the journalist. And then, when John failed to understand, he remarked, very disparagingly, ‘Surely you would agree one cannot write great poetry in dialect.’
That remark really infuriated John. But, since his way of being angry was, rather than shouting and creating a scene, to turn cold and retreat into silence, the man from Libération was nonplussed. He had no idea of what he had provoked.
Afterwards, when John had left, I tried to explain that Afrikaners became very emotional when their language was insulted, that Breytenbach himself would probably have responded in the same way. But the journalist just shrugged. It made no sense, he said, to write in dialect when one had a world language at one’s disposal (actually he didn’t say a dialect, he said an obscure dialect, and he didn’t say a world language, he said a proper language, une vraie langue). At which point it began to dawn on me that he was putting Breytenbach and John in the same category, as vernacular or dialect writers.
Well, of course John did not write in Afrikaans at all, he wrote in English, very good English, and had written in English all his life. Even so, he responded in the prickly fashion I have described to what he saw as an insult to the dignity of Afrikaans.
He did translations from Afrikaans, didn’t he? I mean, translated Afrikaans writers.
Yes. He knew Afrikaans well, I would say, though in much the same fashion as he knew French, that is, better on the page than spoken. I was not competent to judge his Afrikaans, of course, but that was the impression I got.
So we have the case of a man who spoke the language only imperfectly, who stood outside the national religion or at least the state religion, whose outlook was cosmopolitan, whose politics was — what shall we say? — dissident, yet who was prepared to embrace an Afrikaner identity. Why do you think that was so?
My opinion is that under the gaze of history he felt there was no way in which he could separate himself off from the Afrikaners while retaining his self-respect, even if that meant being associated with all that the Afrikaners were responsible for, politically.
Was there nothing that drew him more positively to embrace an Afrikaner identity — nothing at a more personal level, for example?
Perhaps there was, I can’t say. I never got to meet his family. Perhaps they would provide a clue. But John was by nature very cautious, very much the tortoise. When he sensed danger, he would withdraw into his shell. He had been rebuffed by the Afrikaners too often, rebuffed and humiliated — you have only to read his book of childhood memories to see that. He was not going to take the risk of being rejected again.
So he preferred to remain an outsider.
I think he was happiest in the role of outsider. He was not a joiner. He was not a team player.
You say you were never introduced to his family. Did you not find that strange?
No, not at all. His mother had passed away by the time he and I met, his father was not well, his brother had left the country, he was on strained terms with the wider family. As for me, I was a married woman, therefore our relationship, as far as it went, had to be clandestine.
But he and I talked, of course, about our families, our origins. What distinguished his family, I would say, is that they were cultural Afrikaners but not political Afrikaners. What do I mean by that? Reflect for a moment on the Europe of the nineteenth century. All over the continent you see ethnic or cultural identities transforming themselves into political identities. That process commences in Greece and spreads rapidly through the Balkans and central Europe. Before long the wave hits the colonies. In the Cape Colony, Dutch-speaking Creoles begin to reinvent themselves as a separate nation, the Afrikaner nation, and to agitate for national independence.
Well, somehow or other that wave of romantic nationalist enthusiasm passed John’s family by. Or else they decided not to swim with it.
They kept their distance because of the politics associated with nationalist enthusiasm — I mean, the anti-imperialist, anti-English politics?
Yes. First they were disturbed by the whipped-up hostility to everything English, by the mystique of Blut und Boden; then later they recoiled from the ideological baggage that the nationalists took over from the radical right in Europe — scientific racism, for example — and the policies that went with it: the policing of culture, militarization of the youth, a state religion, and so forth.
So, all in all, you see Coetzee as a conservative, an anti-radical.
A cultural conservative, yes, as many of the modernists were cultural conservatives — I mean the modernist writers from Europe who were his models. He was deeply attached to the South Africa of his youth, a South Africa which by 1976 was starting to look like a never-never land. For proof you have only to turn to the book I mentioned, Boyhood, where you find a palpable nostalgia for the old feudal relations between white and Coloured. To people like him, the National Party with its policy of apartheid represented not backwoods conservatism but on the contrary new-fangled social engineering. He was all in favour of the old, complex, feudal social textures which so offended the tidy minds of the dirigistes of apartheid.