Are you saying that you and he commiserated together?
Commiserated is the wrong word. We had too much going for us to see our fate as a miserable one. We had our youth – I was still in my twenties at the time, he was only slightly older – we had a not-bad education behind us, we even had modest material assets. If we had been whisked away and set down somewhere else in the world – the civilized world, the First World – we would have prospered, flourished. (About the Third World I am not so sure. We were not Robinson Crusoes, either of us.)
Therefore no, I did not regard our fate as tragic, and I am sure he did not either. If anything, it was comic. His ancestors in their way, and my ancestors in theirs, had toiled away, generation after generation, to clear a patch of wild Africa for their descendants, and what was the fruit of all their labours? Doubt in the hearts of those descendants about title to the land; an uneasy sense that it belonged not to them but, inalienably, to its original owners.
Do you think that if he had gone on with the memoir, if he had not stopped writing, that is what he would have said?
More or less. Let me add one further comment on our stance toward South Africa: that we cultivated a certain provisionality in our feelings toward it, he perhaps more so than I. We were reluctant to invest too deeply in the country, since sooner or later our ties to it would have to be cut, our investment in it annulled.
And?
That's all. We had a certain style of mind in common, a style that I attribute to our origins, colonial and South African. Hence the commonality of our outlook.
In his case, would you say that the habit you describe, of treating feelings as provisional, of not committing himself emotionally, extended beyond relations with the land of his birth into personal relations too?
I don't know. You are the biographer. If you find that train of thought worth following up, follow it.
Can we now turn to his teaching? He writes that he was not cut out to be a teacher. Would you agree?
I would say that one teaches best what one knows best and feels most strongly about. John knew a fair amount about a range of things, but not a great deal about anything in particular. I would count that as one strike against him. Second, though there were writers who mattered deeply to him – the nineteenth-century Russian novelists, for instance – the depth of his involvement did not come out in his teaching, not in any obvious way. Something was always being held back. Why? I don't know. All I can suggest is that a strain of secretiveness that seemed to be engrained in him, part of his character, extended to his teaching too.
Do you feel then that he spent his life in a profession for which he had no talent?
That is a little too sweeping. John was a perfectly adequate academic. A perfectly adequate academic but not a notable teacher. Perhaps if he had taught Sanskrit it would have been different, Sanskrit or some other subject in which the conventions permit you to be a little dry and reserved.
He told me once that he had missed his calling, that he should have been a librarian. I can see the sense in that.
I haven't been able to lay my hands on course descriptions from the 1970s – the University of Cape Town doesn't seem to archive material like that – but among Coetzee's papers I did come across an advertisement for a course that you and he offered jointly in 1976, to extramural students. Do you remember that course?
Yes, I do. It was a poetry course. I was working on Hugh McDiarmid at the time, so I used the occasion to give McDiarmid a close reading. John had the students read Pablo Neruda in translation. I had never read Neruda, so I sat in on his sessions.
A strange choice, don't you think, for someone like him: Neruda?
No, not at all. John had a fondness for lush, expansive poetry: Neruda,gWhitman, Stevens. You must remember that he was, in his way, a child of the 1960s.
In his way – what do you mean by that?
I mean within the confines of a certain rectitude, a certain rationality. Without being a Dionysian himself, he approved in principle of Dionysianism. Approved in principle of letting oneself go, though I don't think he ever let himself go – would probably not have known how to. He had a need to believe in the resources of the unconscious, in the creative force of unconscious processes. Hence his inclination toward the more vatic poets.
You must have noted how rarely he discussed the sources of his own creativity. In part that came out of the native secretiveness I mentioned. But in part it also suggests a reluctance to probe the sources of his inspiration, as if being too self-aware might cripple him.
Was the course a success – the course you and he taught together?
I certainly learned from it – learned about the history of surrealism in Latin America, for instance. As I said, John knew a little about a lot of things. What our students came away with I don't know. Students, in my experience, soon work out whether what you are teaching matters to you. If it does, then they are prepared to consider letting it matter to them too. But if they conclude, rightly or wrongly, that it doesn't, then, curtains, you may as well go home.
And Neruda didn't matter to him?
No, I'm not saying that. Neruda may have mattered a great deal to him. Neruda may even have been a model – an unattainable model – of how a poet can respond to injustice and repression. But – and this is my point – if you treat your connection with the poet as a personal secret to be closely guarded, and if moreover your classroom manner is somewhat stiff and formal, you are never going to acquire a following.
You are saying he never acquired a following?
Not as far as I am aware. Perhaps he smartened up his act in his later years. I just don't know.
At the time when you met him, in 1972, he had a rather precarious position teaching at a high school. It wasn't until some time later that he was actually offered a position at the University. Even so, for almost all of his working life, from his mid-twenties until his mid-sixties, he was employed as a teacher of one kind or another. I come back to my earlier question: Doesn't it seem strange to you that a man who had no talent as a teacher should have made teaching his career?
Yes and no. The ranks of the teaching profession are, as you must know, full of refugees and misfits.
And which was he: a refugee or a misfit?
He was a misfit. He was also a cautious soul. He liked the security of a monthly salary cheque.
You sound critical.
I am only pointing to the obvious. If he hadn't wasted so much of his life correcting students' grammar and sitting through boring meetings, he might have written more, perhaps even written better. But he was not a child. He knew what he was doing. He made his choice.
On the other hand, being a teacher allowed him contact with a younger generation. Which he might not have had, had he withdrawn from the world and devoted himself solely to writing.
True.
Did he have any special friendships that you know of among students?
Now you sound as if you are angling. What do you mean, special friendships? Do you mean, did he overstep the mark? Even if I knew, which I don't, I would not comment.
Yet the theme of the older man and the younger woman keeps coming back in his fiction.
It would be very, very naive to conclude that because the theme was present in his writing it had to be present in his life.
In his inner life, then.
His inner life. Who can say what goes on in people's inner lives?
Is there any other aspect of him that you would like to bring forward? Any stories worth recounting?
Stories? I don't think so. John and I were colleagues. We were friends. We got on well together. But I can't say I knew him intimately. Why do you ask if I have stories?
Because in biography one has to strike a balance between narrative and opinion. I have no shortage of opinion – people are more than ready to tell me what they think or thought of Coetzee – but one needs more than that to bring a life-story to life.
Sorry, I can't help you.
Perhaps your other sources will be more forthcoming. How many people will you be speaking to?
Five. I have cut the list down to five.
Only five? Don't you think that is risky? Who are the lucky five? How did you choose us?
From here I'll be making another trip to South Africa to speak to Coetzee's cousin Margot, with whom he was close. From there to Brazil to see a woman named Adriana Nascimento who lived in Cape Town for some years during the 1970s. And then – the date isn't fixed yet – I will go to Canada to see someone named Julia Frankl, who in the 1970s would have gone under the name Julia Smith. And I also plan to see Sophie Denoël in Paris. Do you or did you know any of them?
Sophie I knew, but not the others. How did you choose us?
Basically I let Coetzee himself do the choosing. I simply followed up on clues he dropped in his notebooks – clues as to who was important to him at the time. The other criterion you had to meet was to be alive. Most of the people who knew him well are, as you must know, dead by now.
It sounds a peculiar way of selecting biographical sources, if you don't mind my saying so.
Perhaps. But I am not interested in coming to a final judgment on Coetzee. I leave that to history. What I am doing is telling the story of a stage in his life, or if we can't have a single story then several stories from several perspectives.
And the sources you have selected have no axes to grind, no ambitions of their own to pronounce final judgment on Coetzee?
[Silence.]
Leaving aside Sophie, leaving aside his cousin, was either of the women you mentioned emotionally involved with Coetzee?
Yes. Both.
Shouldn't that give you pause? Are you not inevitably going to come out with an account that is slanted toward the personal and the intimate at the expense of the man's actual achievements as a writer? Will it amount to anything more than – forgive me for putting it this way – anything more than women's gossip?
Because my informants are women?
Because it is not in the nature of love affairs for the lovers to see each other whole and steady.
[Silence.]
I repeat, it seems to me strange to be doing the biography of a writer while ignoring his writing. But perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps I am out of date. I must go. One final thing: if you are planning to quote me, would you make sure I have a chance to check the text first?
Of course.
Interview conducted in Sheffield, England,
in September 2007.
Sophie
MME DENOËL, TELL me how you came to know John Coetzee.
He and I were for years colleagues at the University of Cape Town. He was in the Department of English, I was in French. We collaborated to offer a course in African literature. This was in 1976. He taught the Anglophone writers, I the Francophone. That was how our acquaintance began.
And how did you yourself come to be in Cape Town?
My husband was sent there to run the Alliance Française. Before that we had been living in Madagascar. During our time in Cape Town our marriage broke up. My husband returned to France, I stayed on. I took a position at the University, a junior position teaching French language.
And in addition you taught this joint course that you mention, in African literature.
Yes. It may seem odd, two whites offering a course in black African literature, but that is how it was in those days. If we had not offered it, no one would have.
Because blacks were excluded from the University?
No, no, by then the system had started to crack. There were black students, though not many; some black lecturers too. But very few specialists in Africa, the wider Africa. That was one of the surprising things I discovered about South Africa: how insular it was. I went back on a visit last year, and it was the same: little or no interest in the rest of Africa. Africa was a dark continent to the north, best left unexplored.
And you? Where did your interest in Africa come from?
From my education. From France. Remember, France had been a major colonial power. Even after the colonial era officially ended, France had other means at its disposal to maintain its influence – economic means, cultural means. La Francophonie was the new name we invented for the old empire. Writers from Francophonie were promoted, fêted, studied. For my agrégation I worked on Aimé Césaire.
And the course you taught in collaboration with Coetzee – was that a success, would you say?
Yes, I believe so. It was just an introductory course, but students found it, as you say in English, an eye-opener.
White students?
White students plus a few black. We did not attract the more radical black students. Our approach would have been too academic for them, not engagé enough. We thought it sufficient to give students a glimpse of the riches of the rest of Africa.
And you and Coetzee saw eye to eye on this approach?
I believe so. Yes.
You were a specialist in African literature, he was not. His training was in the literature of the metropolis. How did he come to be teaching African literature?
It is true, he had no formal training in the field. But he had a good general knowledge of Africa, admittedly just book knowledge, not practical knowledge, he had not travelled in Africa, but book knowledge is not worthless – right? He knew the anthropological literature better than I did, including the francophone materials. He had a grasp of the history, the politics. He had read the important writers working in English and in French (of course in those days the body of African literature was not large – things are different now). There were gaps in his knowledge – the Maghreb, Egypt, and so forth. And he didn't know the diaspora, particularly the Caribbean, which I did.
What did you think of him as a teacher?
He was good. Not spectacular but competent. Always well prepared.
Did he get on well with students?
That I can't say. Perhaps if you track down old students of his they will be able to help you.
And yourself? Compared with him, did you get on well with students?
[Laughs.] What is it you want me to say? Yes, I suppose I was the more popular one, the more enthusiastic. I was young, remember, and it was a pleasure for me to be talking about books for a change, after all the language classes. We made a good pair, I thought, he more serious, more reserved, I more open, more flamboyant.
He was considerably older than you.
Ten years. He was ten years older than me.
[Silence]
Is there anything you would like to add on the subject? Other aspects of him you would like to comment on?
We had a liaison. I presume you are aware of that. It did not endure.
Why not?
It was not sustainable.
Would you like to say more?
Would I like to say more for your book? Not before you tell me what kind of book it is. Is it a book of gossip or a serious book? Do you have authorization? Who else are you speaking to besides me?
Does one need authorization to write a book? From whom would one seek it? I certainly don't know. But I can give you my assurance, it is a serious book, a seriously intended biography. I concentrate on the years from Coetzee's return to South Africa in 1971/72 until his first public recognition in 1977. That seems to me an important period of his life, important yet neglected, a period when he was still finding his feet as a writer.