IN old age one often withdraws from the world. No friends to fall back on and a world of solitude in which the last days are spent immersed in oneself or occupied with the remnants of an interest that one still relishes. Such is the case of J.M. Coetzees father, who lives in a rundown cottage on the outskirts of Cape Town. The only company he has is that of his son, who at the start of the novel is in his thirties and groping for a life of a writer. This is the back ground with which the story of his life begins in Summertime, a novel that is original, arresting and at times disturbing. Coetzee has captured the anxiety and ambiguity of his life in South Africa with terse, hypnotic language filled with the prospect of imminent violence that has been intrinsic to his intellectual and intuitive experience.
Summertime is the last of the trilogy of fictionalised memoirs begun with boyhood and youth. Coetzee is the hero of all the three, though it is debatable if the historical truth coincides with the fictionalised. He said recently at a lecture in Oxford that those hoping to find the historical record tallying with the fictional record will be disappointed, adding that he played fast and loose with the historical record.
Interestingly, after 15 pages, the narrative comes to an end, and the reader discovers that Coetzee is dead. The story, thereafter, is told by a young English biographer in a series of interviews with Coetzees friends, colleagues and relatives. The interviews are all fictionalised and Coetzee portrays himself as seen through the eyes of other characters he has been associated with in his life. With complete self-effacement, the book renders the life of a writer from multiple points of view, narrating not a single story but a number of them, which allows the reader to construct his own picture of one of the greatest living writers of our time. Famous for his reclusive nature, Coetzee is known to stay away from functions and ceremonies that are held in his honour. But recently, he did agree to speak at the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, which went into raptures to witness the writer that Oxford had honoured in 2002.
Regaling the audience with humorous anecdotes and off-the-cuff jokes, Coetzee had the last laugh at the audience that mistook him for an introvert; he is known to have laughed only once in a number of years as reported by his colleagues.
Reading Summertime, I am reminded of Coetzees obsession with cycling and his aloof nature, a fact corroborated in one of the interviews: In the laughing department he is the last companion his father needs. In laughing he comes bottom of the class. A gloomy fellow: that must be how the world sees him, when it sees him at all. A gloomy fellow; a wet blanket; a stick in the mud. He, like his father, seems to have no friends and no desire or energy to make new ones.
Both father and son have but one binding force and that is the love of sports: He and his father sit side by side in the north stand, watching the curtain-raiser. Over the days proceedings hangs an air of melancholy. This is the last season when the stadium will be used for club rugby. With the belated arrival of television in the country, interest in club rugby has dwindled away. Men who used to spend their Saturday afternoons at Newlands now prefer to stay at home and watch the game of the week. Of the thousands of seats in the north stand no more than a dozen are occupied.
His father is one of the many solitary men in gray gabardine raincoats in the twilight of their lives, keeping to themselves as if their loneliness were a shameful disease. The scenario brings out the end of the era of rugby: Those days are gone. Club rugby is on its last legs. One can sense it today not just in the stands but on the field itself. Depressed by the booming space of the empty stadium, the players seem merely to be going through the motions. A ritual is dying out before their eyes, an authentic petit-bourgeois South African ritual. Its last devotees are gathered here today: sad old men like his father; dull, dutiful sons like himself. Indeed, his father becomes the symbol of Coetzees links with the history of the Afrikaner culture, a culture that he has always wanted to escape from and yet cannot do without. This is integral to the duality of his psyche as well as his emotional ties with the burden of his history. It is a struggle between primitive fury and open-handed generosity.
Their loneliness is integral to their feelings of despair and disgust that the history of the south invokes. Coetzee is regarded as an outsider by his family; he has rarely opened up to anyone. Could it be because of the trauma of losing a son or is it the result of the innumerable incidents of violence in the borderlands followed by bland denials by the state government? At the outset, the narrative emphasises the state of Coetzees mind: So this is what he has come back to! Yet where in the world can one hide where one will not feel soiled? Would he feel any cleaner in the snows of Sweden, reading at a distance about his people and their latest pranks?
The politics and the killings in South African history occupy his mind whereas his father cleverly skips to the news or discussions on sports. The disgust with the country is very clear: Africa: a place of starving masses with homicidal buffoons lording it over them. The choices are clear: either immerse yourself in cricket or, as in the case of the protagonist, remain obsessed with thugs who slaughter defenseless women and children.
The Afrikaners had settled in the south, the remote tip of a hostile continent, holding forth the promise of the civilising mission and upholding the ideologies of Western civilisation. But, as history has shown, this was a bluff. Coetzee, at the start of this biography, is located at the juncture of the times of the early 1970s when such false promises were held out by the National Party and the security state dominated by the Afrikaners, who sent out the law and order machinery to carry out the massacres in the hope of continuing their exploitation of the nation and its people. As far as the fate of Christian civilisation in Africa, they have never given two hoots about it.
Dwelling on political issues, he begins to work simultaneously on the repairs of his fathers dilapidated house, endeavouring to save it from the dampness creeping slowly through the building. This manual labour brings home to him the nature of immortality that each one of us achieves through labour. How many of the ragged workingmen who pass him in the street are secret authors of works that will outlast them: roads, walls, pylons? If this is the case, why then does he persist in inscribing marks on paper, in the faint hope that people not yet born will take the trouble of deciphering them.
Coetzees experience of Italian opera is another aspect of the pursuits of a growing lad who is suddenly thrown into the world of music. His father had been exposed to Italian opera, especially the drama of Tosca or The Barber of Seville or Lucia di Lammermoor while posted in Italy after the defeat of Mussolini and the ouster of the Germans. So when Corporal Coetzee returned to South Africa at the end of hostilities, it was with a new-found passion for opera. La donna e mobile, he would sing in the bath. Figaro here, Figaro there, he would sing, Figaro, Figaro, Feeegaro! He went out and bought a gramophone, their familys first; over and over again he would play a 78 rpm recording of Caruso singing Your tiny hand is frozen. When long-playing records were invented he acquired a new and better gramophone, together with an album of Renata Tebaldi singing well-loved arias.
But the young Coetzee had been in love with Bach and could not stand the repeated playing of Tebaldi. One day, outraged at his fathers obsession with Tebaldi, he takes out the record and with a razor blade drew a deep scar across its surface. But ever since his despicable act he suffers pangs of remorse: One of his first actions when he returned to the country was to scour the music shops for the Tebaldi record. Though he failed to find it, he did come upon a compilation in which she sang some of the same arias. He brought it home and played it through from beginning to end, hoping to lure his father out of his room as a hunter might lure a bird with his pipes. But his father showed no interest. Ever since, Coetzee has returned to Tebaldi and as he listens the beginnings of some kind of transformation seem to take place inside him. As it must have been with his father in 1944, his heart too begins to throb in time with Mimis. As the great rising arc of her voice must have called out his fathers soul, so it now calls out his soul too, urging it to join hers in passionate, soaring flight.
This soaring spirit is behind the novel, which is both a portrait of the writer as well as the story of apartheid South Africa. Humorous and ironical at the same time, the work is subtly structured to suit a multiple narrative that is replete with human insight, honesty and self-ridicule. As the interviews that make up the novel reveal memories and judgments about Coetzee the man, the lover and the writer, mostly through the eyes of women, one comment on the subtlety of the method needs to be mentioned to show the originality of such a method of throwing light on oneself with no qualms.
The words are of a woman academic he has had a brief affair with: As a writer he knew what he was doing, he had a certain style, and style is the beginning of distinction. But he had no special sensitivity that I could detect, no original insight into the human condition. He was just a man, a man of his time, talented, maybe even gifted, but, frankly, not a giant.
Nothing could be more incisive and unhesitatingly self-critical. The novel succeeds in bringing out a man who considers himself ordinary, acceptable and real.
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