Coetzee’s autobiographies: triumph of the self-condemned outsider

I

J.M. (John) Coetzee’s fictional autobiographies — Boyhood, Youth and Summertime — use the third person and present tense to describe his obscure background, unappealing character and improbable life. One of the greatest living authors, he was born in 1940 in South Africa, where he majored in mathematics at the University of Cape Town. He worked in computer jobs in England, studied linguistics in Texas, taught in Buffalo and finally settled as a distinguished professor in Adelaide, Australia. The perpetual outsider has lived on four continents but doesn’t belong in any of them. He’s the only Nobel laureate in literature (except for the historian Theodor Mommsen) with a Ph.D.

Boyhood (1997) covers Coetzee’s life from the age of thirteen to seventeen. It suddenly plunges into the story without explaining why his family have to leave their comfortable life in Cape Town and move 65 miles northeast to the unpleasant Afrikaner atmosphere of rural Worcester. Nor does he explain (until the end of the novel) why he is so hostile to his father and declares, referring to himself, “He is her son, not his father’s son. He denies and detests his father.”

Like D. H. Lawrence and many American writers, from Fitzgerald and Hemingway to Lowell, Berryman and Jarrell, the young Coetzee has a strong mother and weak, often absent father. His mother (like Sylvia Plath’s) is devoted and sacrificial as well as overprotective and stifling. He adores her but is also “angry with his mother for turning him into something unnatural, something that needs to be protected if it is to continue to live. . . . Her love emerges about [i.e., above] all in her watchfulness, her readiness to pounce and save him should he ever be in danger.” Well aware of the contradictions of his mother, a former schoolteacher, he quotes her denouncing “all book learning” and claiming that “studying is just nonsense.” But she also immediately tells him, “you must become a doctor or an attorney” — and follow his professionally disastrous father.

Though Zacharias (Jack) Coetzee was an attorney, he served in World War II as a humble lance-corporal (below the rank of corporal) rather than as an officer in the South African army. As a gunner, he manned anti-aircraft artillery and shot down German planes in North Africa and Italian planes in Europe. Unlike George Orwell, who refused to shoot a fascist with his pants down in the Spanish Civil War, Jack proudly shot a German who was sitting on a privy. During the war, Coetzee, his mother and younger brother live in great hardship in a single room, too poor to buy butter or tea, and get no help from his father’s family on their nearby farm.

Coetzee didn’t know his father for the first five years of his life but decides, even before his father returns from the war, that he is not going to like him. He can’t help admiring Jack’s natty clothes, maroon cravat, trim figure, brisk walk and Brylcreemed hair. Despite his father’s considerable achievements, Coetzee is not impressed: “He is an attorney but no longer practises. He was a soldier but only a lance-corporal. He played rugby, but only for Gardens second team. He plays cricket, but only for the Worcester second team.” Coetzee wittily remarks that “Russians do not appear to play anything, perhaps because it is always snowing there.”

In his fictional account Coetzee reports that Jack, who opposed racist legislation, was dismissed as a government lawyer in 1948 when Field Marshal Jan Smuts’ United Party was unexpectedly defeated by D. F. Malan’s Nationalist Party, which legalised apartheid. In fact, as Coetzee’s biographer J. C. Kannemeyer more prosaically notes, Jack, strangely called “Controller of Letting,” arranged housing for servicemen who’d returned from the war. When they were all settled, his job disappeared.

The family then moves to Worcester where Jack works as a bookkeeper for a fruit-canning company. When they return to Cape Town in 1951, Jack becomes an-out-of control and financially irresponsible lawyer. He fails to collect his legal fees, lends cash that is never repaid, spends lavishly on himself and his friends, and embezzles money from trust funds. Caught and forbidden to practice law, he narrowly escapes prison when a relative repays his considerable debts. Jack never finds another job, though he pretends to leave for the office each day, and ends up as an alcoholic invalid, surrounded by disgusting cigarette butts floating in a chamber pot of urine. John le Carré’s father was also a con man and swindler who treated him cruelly and did time in prison. But le Carré, once a devious spy himself, admired his father’s cheek and cunning, and vividly portrayed him in A Perfect Spy. Coetzee, by contrast, can never regard his father with humour or admiration.

Coetzee’s mother makes heroic efforts to save the family. But, as David Atwell writes, “all of the disadvantages in John’s childhood could indeed be construed as the consequence of Jack’s misdemeanours and misfortunes: the [food and money] shortages, the nomadism, the social descent from Rosebank [in Cape Town] to Worcester, the weakening of the connection with Voëlfontein,” the paternal family farm.

Boyhood is structured by a series of unresolved cultural conflicts that are strikingly similar to those of Kipling’s Kim:

Something I owe to the soil that grew,
More to the life that fed,
But most to Allah Who gave me two
Separate sides to my head.

Though both parents come from a Dutch background and have a typical Afrikaner name, the bilingual Coetzee is loyal to the culture and language of England, speaks English at home and is educated in English schools. He condemns “the Voortrekkers getting their revenge [for their emigration] by shooting thousands of Zulus who didn’t have guns, and being proud of it.” He rejects the patriotic myth of the Boers’ 1835 Great Trek from the Cape Colony to the interior of South Africa, which resembles the Mormons’ dangerous 1835 Great Migration across America to Utah and Mao’s disastrous but ultimately successful 1934 Long March to Yenan in northern China.

Coetzee fears the rage and resentment that he sees crackling through the Afrikaans boys. He hates their racism and being associated with them — claims he would rather kill himself than go to their school — and is savagely satirical about them. He “thinks of them as rhinoceroses, huge, lumbering strong-sinewed, thudding against each other as they pass. . . . Afrikaans women are either huge and fat, with puffed-out breasts and bullfrog necks, or bony and misshapen. . . . It is unthinkable that he should ever be cast among them: they would crush him, kill the spirit in him.” His hatred of the Afrikaans contains a powerful element of self-hatred about his origins and guilt about the white man’s treatment of the Black population.

Coetzee loves Cape Town and hates Worcester, but contrasts both places to Voëlfontein, the idyllic family farm in the semi-desert Karoo, 250 miles northeast of Cape Town. The farm gives him freedom to explore the unusual landscape and animals, go hunting for antelope and feel the pangs of first love for his attractive cousin. Back in Cape Town, the posh schools for rich boys reject him, despite his excellent grades and strong recommendations, because of his Afrikaans name, telltale accent and provincial education in Worcester. Always the outsider, the atheist first poses as a Catholic in a Protestant school, then as a Protestant in the inferior Catholic school that finally accepts him.

Cruelty is a dominant theme in Boyhood. The bullies at school force a squishy caterpillar into the mouth of a suspected Jew, and brutal floggings leave agonising memories in the flesh. The cruel treatment of animals, a recurrent theme in Coetzee’s works and especially powerful in his masterpiece Disgrace, is ubiquitous. His first memory is of a dog, crushed by a car, which drags itself away, squealing in pain. Another dog dies after eating poisoned meat put down for the jackals who kill the sheep. A third dog fatally eats ground glass someone has kindly put out for him. Hens about to be cut up shriek and struggle with bulging eyes. Pigs, dispatched with a bullet, grunt, fart and collapse quivering. A lamb with its throat slashed kicks, struggles and coughs while its lifeblood gushes out. Coetzee “does not understand why sheep accept their fate, why they never rebel but instead go meekly to their death. . . . He wants to whisper to them, warn them what lies in store.”

The most astonishing act of cruelty occurs when the usually gentle and well-behaved Coetzee perversely persuades his brother to put his hand down the funnel of a corn-grinding machine while he turns the handle: “For an instant, before he stopped, he could feel the fine bones of the fingers being crushed. His brother stood with his hand trapped in the machine, ashen with pain, a puzzled inquiring look on his face.” Coetzee, who likes his brother and does not respond to the inquiring look, is infected by the all-pervasive cruelty in South Africa and enjoys torturing his weak and helpless victim. It’s also surprising, in this terse account, that he neither apologises to his brother for the crushed bones and lost bits of finger, nor is punished by his parents for his acte gratuit. Coetzee’s style, like those of Tolstoy or Hemingway, is so deceptively clear that it’s easy to miss the complex emotions that swirl beneath the surface of the novel.

All these conflicts and crises shape the character and mind of the future writer. Coetzee adopts a confessional mode and constantly denigrates himself in all three autobiographical novels. He’s very different from both the Afrikaans and the English boys: he’s coddled, soft, namby-pamby and fearful as well as thoughtful, smart, serious and surly. He believes that “childhood is anything but a time of gritting the teeth and enduring” and concludes that “his heart is old, it is dark and hard, a heart of stone. That is his contemptible secret.” Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable (1953) expresses his dark, stoical mood: “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

II

Youth (2002) omits Coetzee’s six teenage years and describes his life from the age of 19 to 24, his escape from the horrors of South Africa and his miserable work in London. In a merciless examination of his own faults, relieved by occasional dark wit, he condemns his character, job, women, sex life and academic thesis. He wants to be a poet but doesn’t know how to write poems, and there’s a painfully comic gap between his high aspirations and abject failures. He not only lacks artistic talent, but also cannot lead a poet’s emotional and necessarily self-destructive life.

South Africa is a wound that cannot heal. Coetzee hates the dull anti-poetic heritage of the Dutch and their Afrikaner descendants. The gaunt teetotaller satirises the “big-bellied, red-nosed men in short pants and hats, roly-poly women in shapeless dresses.” Unlike his father, he’s desperate to escape military service in an oppressive regime and, in an elegant sentence, is torn between “the Afrikaners who want to press-gang him into their army and the blacks who want to drive him into the sea.” The 1960 massacre in Sharpeville, 40 miles south of Johannesburg, is a crucial turning point. The police fire on a huge peaceful crowd of Black demonstrators, killing 69 people and wounding 180. The country is clearly heading for revolution and Coetzee has to get out before it is too late.

As Coetzee tries to escape from his native land and become an artist, he finds salvation in literature. His personal and literary model is Franz Kafka, with whom he has a great deal in common. Both gloomy novelists struggle against and reject their oppressive fathers. They are bilingual (Kafka in German and Czech) but lifelong outsiders (one as a Jew, the other as a branded Afrikaner) in a deeply divided society. Like Kafka, the tall and extremely thin Coetzee is an ascetic vegetarian. Scrupulous, insecure and anguished, both men are overwhelmed by guilt, self-punishment and self-hatred.

The miserable Kafka and Coetzee eviscerate themselves, expose their worst qualities and reveal their failures with women. In letters to his fiancée, Felice Bauer, during their doomed engagement, Kafka insists that he lacks a sense of well-being, is friendless, incapable of happiness, inept and insecure at his office job, “weak, unsociable, taciturn, gloomy, stiff, almost hopeless,” anxious, feeble, wretched, selfish, unhealthy, unnatural, full of horrible excesses, close to madness and impotent. He holds nothing back. Not only is he a madman who above all dreads union with his beloved, he also has a messy desk.

In Youth Coetzee confesses that he’s handicapped by an undistinguished rural family, a bad education and a crude language. Dreary and alien to amusement, he lacks all gaiety, style and romance. The gauche colonial (like the hero of Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus) has nothing to offer: no future plans, no ideas. Like Kafka, he is frightened and indecisive, grim and with no flicker of the sacred fire: “his sole talent is for misery, dull, honest, misery” — a familiar but unpromising condition.

In his excellent essay “Translating Kafka,” Coetzee defines his own style as well as his subject’s. He notes that Kafka’s writing “tends to be restrained . . . clear, specific and neutral.” And (to anticipate) he includes many allusions to Kafka in Summertime. In this third volume of autobiography, Coetzee owns many books by Kafka and Beckett. One character quotes the famous aperçu, “A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us,” without mentioning that it comes from Kafka’s letter to Oskar Pollack of January 27, 1904. Another character calls Coetzee “not at ease among people who were at ease. The ease of others made him ill at ease.” His effective repetition of “ease” loosely paraphrases Kafka’s self-effacing admission, “What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe” (Diaries, 1914).

Coetzee specifically mentions Kafka’s story “In the Penal Colony”. Referring to Hitler’s actual unfulfilled plan, he writes, “The Nazis had taken over Madagascar, he thought, and turned it into a Strafkolonie for Jews.” Using the name of the superior officers in Kafka’s story, a character adds, “He wanted me to go to the prison commandant and plead on his behalf.” Another character’s description of her intensely frustrating encounters with the South African bureaucracy is exactly like K.’s inability to penetrate the labyrinth of The Castle: “whole days I would spend waiting in line to get a rubber stamp — a rubber stamp for this, a rubber stamp for that — and always, always it would be the wrong office or the wrong department or the wrong line.”

Coetzee earns a degree in mathematics, and after escaping from South Africa he finds a job in England as a computer programmer for IBM. This soul-destroying work, the absolute antithesis of an academic or poetical career, turns him into a eunuch and a drone. He hates it as much as he hates his native land, his lonely life and himself. In a final twist of the knife, he discovers that his work is being used to develop a new RAF bomber, which will help destroy the world in an atomic war. His mathematical expertise has led to the creation of evil, far worse than service in the South African army, rather than to the advancement of learning.

Coetzee’s relations with women are a series of Kafkaesque tragicomic failures, in and out of bed, with seven ambitious and often arty companions. He can attract women but cannot sustain relations with them. He fantasises about living with a beautiful Indian girl, “making love to her, practising Tantra, deferring orgasm for hours on end.” But reality does not match his fantasies. He makes friends with Rhoda, a thick-legged punch operator at IBM. Always the hopeless South African, he has trouble following her English, which in any case is confined to dull chat about work. He would like to get to know her (to know anyone) better, but she belongs to a foreign tribe.

In the Tate Gallery he meets Astrid, from unromantic Klagenfurt in Austria. Her skin when he undresses her feels cold and clammy. He’s made a mistake but has come too far to pull back, so they “go through with it” as if it were a laborious task. As T. S. Eliot wrote, he “Endeavours to engage her in caresses / Which still are unreproved, if undesired.” Another girl, a London University student and would-be poet, seems more promising. She allows him to undress her and he marvels at the ivory whiteness of her body. They lie naked in bed (a good start), but “at last the girl withdraws, folds her arms across her breasts, pushes his hands away, shakes her head mutely. He could try to persuade her, induce her, seduce her; he might even succeed, but he lacks the spirit for it” — and resigns himself to detumescence.

In Cape Town he begins an affair with Caroline, an energetic would-be actress. She turns up in London and works as a waitress in a nightclub. Since he has no key to her flat, he must patiently wait for her return in the cold dark street — a real turn-off. Sometimes, he mournfully recalls, “Caroline comes back from the club as early as midnight, sometimes as late as 4 a.m.,” which gives him plenty of time to wonder what she’s been doing. They have sex and fall asleep, and he must be out of the flat by seven o’clock before her friends wake up — though they must be aware of his nightly presence.

Also in Cape Town Jacqueline, a reputedly randy nurse, suddenly moves into his flat without being asked. Instead of fulfilling his fantasies as an in-house lover, she sneakily reads his diary that condemns her and frankly informs him, “I have hated living with you, hated every minute of it, and I can’t wait to be free.” No great loss. “At no time,” he admits, “did Jacqueline blaze with the divine and exhilarating fire of creativity. On the contrary, she was self-obsessed, unpredictable and exhausting to be with.”

Bad enough, so far, but there’s worse to come. He behaves caddishly with the small plump Marianne, who arrives in London with his cousin and must be looked after when his cousin falls ill. In a borrowed flat he seduces the virgin who “bleeds while they are making love and goes on bleeding afterwards.” He clumsily tries to hide the incriminating evidence on towels, sheets and mattress, and flees like a thief in the night.

In Cape Town he gets another girl pregnant, and she herself makes the difficult arrangement for an abortion. In an agonising passage Coetzee imagines, as if he were the victim, how they would “carry out some unspeakable manipulation inside her with a piece of wire, something that involves hooking and dragging,” as if they were catching a fish. He then describes the surging submarine journey of the still-alive foetus: “He sees the little creature flushed down the toilet, tumbled through the maze of sewers, tossed out at last into the shallows, blinking in the sudden sun, struggling against the waves that will carry it out into the bay. He did not want it to live and now he does not want it to die.”

Throughout Youth Coetzee pays tribute to authors he admires with subtle, often covert allusions that enhance the interest and meaning of the novel. “Flowers grow best on dungheaps” paraphrases Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94, “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.” “Each man is an island” reverses John Donne’s humane poem “No man is an island.” “Jude Fawley amid the dreaming spires of Oxford” is the hero of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. “The robed man in Dürer’s etching [that is, the woman in his engraving Melencolia, a symbolic image of Coetzee] “waits patiently for his season in hell,” in which Arthur Rimbaud pointed the way through suffering to art. Coetzee wonders if he can write about the familiar “London crowds trudging to work, of cold and rain, of bedsitters with curtained windows,” which Eliot portrayed in “The Waste Land”: “Under the brown fog of a winter dawn / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many” and “Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays / On the divan are piled (at night her bed).”

“He can go hop-picking in Kent” refers to George Orwell’s account of that seasonal rural work in Down and Out in Paris and London. While watching a young girl swimming and “From some small action of hers, some unconscious gesture, he is suddenly convinced she has been unfaithful to him,” resembles Meursault’s perception of his girlfriend’s character when he goes swimming with her in Albert Camus’ The Stranger. Coetzee calls gemütlich Switzerland “a country that in all its history has not given birth to one great artist,” which echoes Harry Lime’s satirical remark in “The Third Man”, “In Switzerland they had brotherly love, and 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.” Surprisingly, the allusion that recurs four times, “poetry should be hard and clear like a flame,” comes from Walter Pater’s The Renaissance, “To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame.” But Pater himself, a timid Oxford don and repressed homosexual, burned only with the faintest flicker.

Youth considers the critical question closely connected to these literary allusions: how to live a Rimbaudian life of self-punishing excess in order to create great art. Fortunately, “artists do not have to be morally admirable people,” so at least he fits into that category. Disgusted with himself and his frequent failures with women, Coetzee even allows an older man to touch him through his clothes and have an orgasm. Alone in his room, he begins to cry and cannot cease.

Finding it difficult to transmute his sordid experiences into art, he turns to great writers to guide him. He admires Ezra Pound, justifies his behaviour and gives an extremely distorted account of his life. He was not “driven into exile,” but voluntarily left America for London in 1908. He was not merely “accused”, as Coetzee says, but was convicted of treason for actively aiding the Italian fascists in World War II. He was not “persecuted,” but briefly imprisoned, saved from execution by pleading insanity and comfortably confined in a mental asylum. He was not “expelled from his homeland a second time,” but willingly went to Italy when he was released from confinement and gave the fascist salute when he arrived.

Coetzee writes his master’s thesis on the novels of Ford Madox Ford, who luckily does not include the indecipherable Chinese characters of his friend Ezra Pound. Coetzee identifies with the half-German Ford (born Hueffer) but finds his novels, apart from The Good Soldier and Parade’s End, a tedious and soporific disappointment. In a brilliantly amusing passage he feebly tries to imitate Ford’s glorification of Provençal cuisine, based on fish, olive oil and garlic. In an ersatz version of Ford’s banquet, “he buys fish fingers instead of sausages, fries them in olive oil instead of butter, sprinkles garlic salt over them” and devours the revolting repast.

Coetzee finally finds three impressive literary touchstones. D. H. Lawrence teaches him “to smash the brittle shell of civilised convention and let the secret core of his being emerge. Girls wore flowing dresses and danced in the rain and gave themselves to men who promised to take them to their dark core.” He admires Joseph Brodsky’s simile, “As dark as the inside of a needle,” from “There Was a Black Sky,” and wonders “If he concentrated, truly concentrated, night after night, if he compelled, by sheer attention, the blessing of inspiration to descend upon him, he might be able to come up with something to match it.”

Samuel Beckett, who shares Coetzee’s ascetic appearance and austere style, leads him away from the sometimes sloppy and self-indulgent Ford. In Watt, Coetzee observes, “There is no clash, no conflict, just the flow of a voice telling a story, a flow continually checked by doubts and scruples, its pace fitted exactly to the pace of his own mind.” In real life Coetzee wrote his University of Texas dissertation on “The English Fiction of Samuel Beckett”, and “attenuating endgame” in the last paragraph of Youth alludes to the title of Beckett’s play.

Despite this literary inspiration, considerable obstacles remain. He has a Beckettian horror of spilling his emotions on the page and will certainly not be, like his father, “a Bohemian, that is to say, a drunk and a sponger and a layabout.” In London he sets himself the titanic task of following Rilke’s advice, “You must change your life.” He must get rid of his old South African identity and create a new passionate self. He desperately asks, “How else does poetry come, anyway, except out of suffering, like blood squeezed [impossibly] from a stone? . . . Without descending into the depths one cannot become an artist.” At the end of the novel Coetzee, unable to take this perilous plunge, hits a dead end. Passively waiting for his destiny to arrive and lending himself to evil at IBM, he is still afraid of writing, still afraid of women.

III

Summertime (2009), about Coetzee’s mature years, vaults over his twenties and covers his life from age 31 to 37 during the 1970s. Coeztee writes: “He ran away from South Africa to escape the army. Then he was thrown out of America because he broke the law.” Other sources reveal that he took part in an anti-Vietnam war demonstration while teaching at Buffalo University, was arrested and convicted of trespassing, and his visa was not renewed. He reluctantly returned to South Africa, then moved to Australia, where he did not feel soiled, could make a fresh start and looked forward to a decent future. But in Summertime Coetzee dies there at an unspecified date.

Coetzee declares that he is writing fiction, not a factual record, and “believed that our life-stories are ours to construct as we wish, within or even against the constraints imposed by the real world.” Kannemeyer reports that in real life Coetzee, in contrast to the events in the novel, never spent a night with his cousin in a broken-down truck in the remote Karoo, and never intended to buy his father a broken-down house in the remote and horrible town of Merweville.

Coetzee writes that his fictional self had no woman in his life, that he never married and had no children. In fact, he married Philippa Jubber in 1963 and had two children with her. His son Nicolas jumped or fell from a high balcony to his death aged 22, his daughter Gisela is epileptic. Coetzee and Philippa divorced in 1980. David Atwell explains that “Coetzee’s immediate family life, the life he shared with Philippa and the children, is excluded altogether. In the early 1970s, far from being the lonely, sexually awkward schlemiel that he portrays himself to be in Summertime, he was living a suburban life with his family in Cape Town.”

Coetzee changes his method in this novel and describes himself indirectly. His young, wide-ranging English biographer, Mr. Vincent, conducts interviews during 2007-2008 in Canada, South Africa, Brazil, England and France. His five informants include a male colleague at Cape Town University and four women: his cousin, who saw him on the Voëlfontein farm; a Jewish-Hungarian therapist and a French colleague who were his lovers; and a Brazilian woman who dislikes him. Like all biographers, Vincent must trust his informants to remember the past and tell the truth instead of giving egoistic and self-serving versions of their relations with his subject. In this case, the informants all agree and the descriptions of Coetzee are consistently negative.

Like Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Coetzee’s novel portrays himself through the eyes of others and preempts his biographers by imagining what they would say about him. After grudgingly conceding that Coetzee has integrity and is responsible and hard-working, he unleashes a Kafkaesque self-flagellation and evisceration of his physical, personal and sexual faults, leaving nothing for his biographer to condemn. Not a snappy dresser, he is “neither rich nor handsome nor appealing”. He has a bad accent, bad diet and bad teeth, which he tries to hide with a tight-lipped smile. A superannuated hippy, both scrawny and soft, he has owl-glasses, scraggly beard and greasy hair.

His personal faults match his revolting appearance. He is weak, clumsy, incompetent, vain and affected; abstemious, dour, wary, secretive and self-absorbed. The cold fish is opinionated, supercilious, critical, insensitive, prickly, ridiculous, even stupid. He perfectly fits Dürer’s image of a “melancholy type.” Most significantly, he’s not fully human: “his mental capacities . . . were overdeveloped at the cost of his animal self.” Just as he ground up his brother’s fingers in Boyhood, his animal self erupts once again in cruelty. On the farm, he pulls off the rear leg of a locust and watches it fall into the dust, “the remaining rear leg jerking ineffectually.” Instead of killing it, he just walks away, looking disgusted with the crippled insect as well as with himself. He’s also cruel to his father, who leads an equally miserable life but at least enjoys listening to opera records. To punish his father he uses a razor blade to make a deep scar across a favourite record.

The deepest scars of the fictional Coetzee are sexual. He is repressed, tepid, disembodied: loveless and incapable of love. With no emotional presence, sex with him lacks all thrill and fails to arouse even “the faintest quiver of womanly response.” In short, he’s either a homosexual or a eunuch. Not only is he inhuman and sexless, but his claw-like toe nails protrude from his sandals. His ruthless self-portrait leaves readers wondering how someone lacking all decent human qualities could write such brilliant books.

The most perceptive, poignant and hostile informant is Adriana, a former ballerina now teaching Latin American dance. She’s fled from the Portuguese colony of Angola to Cape Town. Her husband, a former journalist, worked as a guard in a dockside warehouse. Robbers smashed his face in with an axe and injured his brain, and he took a whole year to die. With Adriana, Coetzee reverses roles and regresses from English language teacher to dance student. He’s attracted to Adriana’s pretty teenaged daughter, whom he teaches and provides the encouragement she craves. She adores him but is untouchable. So he turns to Adriana, who finds him unattractive, rejects him and exclaims: “Freedom, sensuality, erotic love — it was all just an idea in his head, not an urge rooted in his body.” Fearing he’ll seduce her daughter, she fires him as language teacher and expels him when he turns up in her dance class. She’s a grieving and lonely widow, sacrificing herself for her two children, and angry that she cannot find anyone better than the worthless Coetzee.

Coetzee claims that “he was not political at all. He looked down on politics. He didn’t like political writers, writers who espoused a political programme.” But he admires the Chilean communist Pablo Neruda as a “model of how a poet can respond to injustice and repression.” Summertime, which condemns South Africa, is a profoundly political novel by a man who has Afrikaner origins but rejects their politics. He believes the white man’s “presence was grounded in a crime, namely colonial conquest, perpetuated by apartheid.” He has the uneasy sense (a major theme in Disgrace) that the land belongs not to the whites but “inalienably, to its original owners” — the Africans. He dares to ask the unspoken question, “What are we doing here?”, declaring that the whole project of Europeans bringing civilisation to Africa and “humanising the place was misconceived from the start.” He is ashamed that the Whites constantly and legally humiliate the Blacks, and admires his liberal and generous cousin who works hard to support thirteen dependent Blacks in his farm. But Coetzee bitterly calls the whole African continent “a place of starving masses with homicidal buffoons lording it over them.”

As in Youth, poets and literary allusions suggest a more enlightened way of living. Just as Coetzee distorted the life of Pound, so with his “fondness for lush, expansive poetry,” he emphasises the similarity of very different poets, Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens. But where Whitman is sweeping, rambling and careless, Stevens by contrast is polished, exquisite and refined. Using his characteristic technique, Coetzee follows John Keats’ advice to “load every rift with ore.” He strengthens his argument by lacing his novel with allusions that reflect his taste, reversing the original quotations and giving them an ironic modern twist. Like Hamlet, he “by indirections finds directions out.”

“This world is not our dwelling place” echoes Psalm 91, “He that dwelleth in the secret place.” “Multitudinous shades” recalls Macbeth’s “multitudinous seas incarnadine.” “How sweetly flows the liquefaction of her clothes” comes from Robert Herrick’s “Upon Julia’s Clothes.” “Forgive me if I tread where I should not tread” is from Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Criticism,” “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” “Countless acts of meanness” reverses William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”: “nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.” “The principle of Dionysianism” comes from Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. “The state would wither away” is from Friedrich Engels’ Anti-Dühring. “Your tiny hand is frozen” quotes Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème.

“Wherever he is, he wants to be somewhere else” resembles D. H. Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia, “Comes over one an absolute necessity to move.” “Agenbite of inwit” (guilt or remorse of conscience) quotes James Joyce’s Ulysses. The title of The Wooden Men alludes to T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”. “Defrocked clergymen make the best proofreaders” paraphrases Evelyn Waugh’s witty remark, “one can’t get any decent proofreading when defrocked clergymen are no longer hired by publishers.” “John knew a little about a lot of things” alludes to Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” “The inscrutable object of the other’s desire” echoes Luis Buñuel’s film “The Obscure Object of Desire”. The man who “mistook her for some instrument or other” refers to Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

Just as Coetzee’s father had ruined his childhood, so he returns at the end of Summertime to haunt him as an invalid. A shaky, prematurely aged man, he undergoes an operation for cancer of the larynx and forces Coetzee, a difficult person to live with, to move in, reassume the role of son and care for him. But Coetzee refuses to take responsibility for his moribund father, whom he’s always disliked. He has to free himself from human bondage and declares, “I cannot face the prospect of ministering to you day and night. I am going to abandon you. Goodbye.” Once again, Coetzee must passively wait for his destiny to arrive.

By casting these three novels as autobiography, Coetzee portrays himself as a constant work in progress: as a man full of guilt and shame, unable to resolve his cultural conflicts. He is keenly aware of other people’s suffering, yet unwilling to forgive his own father, whom he plans to abandon as if he were no more than a wounded locust. He is hyperaware of the tension in himself between a human instinct for kindness and an obsession with cruelty. Only the most impressive writers and the English language itself escape his contempt, occasionally alleviated by flashes of wit and dark humour. At the end of the trilogy, he has still not published anything and Summertime ends negatively with no hint of his future achievements. But he still hopes to be saved by literature and has created his greatest character: himself.

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