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![As Coetzee’s subject matures, so does his memoir
A Contrary review by David M. Smith
Summertime
J.M. Coetzee
UK: Harvill Secker, 2009
US: Viking Adult, Dec. 24 2009
When we last encountered John Coetzee as an aspiring writer in Youth, he was writing prose that had “no real plot” and in which “everything of importance happened in the mind of the narrator, a nameless young man all too like himself.” While this may be conceived as a more or less accurate description (and criticism) of Youth itself, at least the implied distance between the author’s present and past selves provided some comic recognition, without which this memoir would probably have been somewhat hard to bear.
In Summertime, John is in his thirties and living in his father’s decaying home outside of Cape Town. He is still aiming to be a writer, but his sojourns in Britain and America seem not to have altered his character in any big way. If we no longer have the patience for another Youth, however, in Summertime J. M. Coetzee at least gives us reason to care about the memoir again, and maybe even hold out a little hope for its future.
In contrast with Youth, Summertime renders explicit the author’s present-day persona, but with a twist: the Nobel Prize-winning author is dead, and a young biographer is gathering Coetzee’s unpublished notes for a planned, but never-executed third memoir, as well as conducting interviews with people who knew him in the 70s, when Coetzee was “finding his feet as a writer.”
The fragments of the “planned” memoir are rendered in the third person, present tense mode familiar to readers of Boyhood and Youth: “Generally he is sceptical about the capacity of the ocular orbs to express complex feelings.” The interviews, however, are something different; with these, Coetzee manages to take us, at least superficially, outside “the mind of the narrator, a nameless young man.” The biographer, for instance, emerges as an important and powerful figure, even though he never actually met Coetzee. “I thought it would be better if I had no sense of obligation toward him,” he says. “It would leave me free to write what I wished.”
Which is often exactly what he does. For instance, he rewrites the interview with Coetzee’s cousin, Margot, as “an uninterrupted narrative” (and over her protests), claiming that “changing the form should have no effect on the content.” It becomes plain enough that with these interviews, Coetzee is not merely including other perspectives, as though that would finally provide the yearned-for detachment from the kind of narration we encountered in Youth. We have to disagree with the biographer’s hope for “a set of independent reports from a range of independent perspectives, from which you can then try to synthesize a whole.”
What, then, is Coetzee attempting to shed light upon, if the tools provided by memoir or biography turn out to be suspect? It might be instructive to turn our attention to the kind of sense-blindness described by one Julia Frankl, one of the many women who invariably found something lacking in John Coetzee. “In sexual mode he could perform the male part perfectly adequately,” Julia says, but “in his lovemaking I now think there was an autistic quality.” She felt, namely, that he treated her as a “mysterious automaton” or “the inscrutable object of the other’s desire.”
Why, after all, do we perceive the eyes as the locus of so much human feeling, rather than merely the “ocular orbs” of “mysterious automatons”? Or rather, how does John Coetzee fail to perceive them as such, when he, moreover, “makes his living writing reports, expert reports, on intimate human experience”? Nearly all the figures in the book express some bafflement over this, that the Coetzee they knew, a man with “no special sensitivity… no original insight into the human condition,” would go on to assume such a huge status in the world of letters.
The gap between the author's present and past selves, which was the unstated condition for reading Youth, is hence taken up as the mystery of Summertime. In the planned memoir, John asks, “Why […] does he persist in inscribing marks on paper, in the faint hope that people not yet born will take the trouble to decipher them?” As the travails of the young biographer show, this is not a question that can be answered by careful research in pursuit of a thoroughgoing account.
If the memoir really is concerned with “happenings in the mind of the narrator,” if it is conceived as the memoirist’s radical turning into himself, it will require a rethinking of what that entire project entails. In this, Summertime succeeds brilliantly.
David M. Smith is a writer living in Norway.
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© 2009 | all rights reserved
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