The Writing Life:
THE WORD ACCORDING TO J.M. COETZEE
(Part I)

"I am not a herald of community or anything else. I am someone who has intimations of freedom (as every chained prisoner has) and constructs representations of people slipping their chains and turning their faces to the light." J.M. Coetzee

A writer on the path to becoming a serious, working writer, from the very beginning, finds those poets, novelists, essayists and storytellers who speak to him through style, subject matter, dedication, their personal sense of what it means to be alive in the world with nothing but words to hold it all together.

Midway down that both, the writer, hopefully having finally found his own voice, created his own world, sometimes loses sight of those who were there for him in the beginning. Those who opened his own stories into new directions, re-framed the poem in different ways, brought the essay to new levels, or most importantly, suggested ways of living with an intensity the emerging writer might never have experienced had not Saroyan spoke to him in the early days (THE DARING YOUNG MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE); or Hemingway in IN OUR TIME; Maugham’s autobiography, THE SUMMING UP; Henry Miller’s TROPIC books, the diaries of Anais Nin; Gertrude Stein’s (TENDER BUTTONS), her sense of self and language (“I am writing for myself and strangers”…”To begin is more interesting than to finish…”); and the countless others who were always there, in print, to cast a little more light on the path. Writers of accomplishment whom struggling, new writers could fall back upon when it all appeared so difficult, so hopeless.

It’s important that the writer never lose track of those early voices. That he revisit them often. That he pass them on to other writers. It’s perhaps even more important that the quest for new mentors continue throughout a writer’s life, regardless the level of success he may or may not have achieved. There is always more to be learned about the writing life from the works of others--be it pure advice, or the incredible art which shines so true in another man or woman’s poetry, essays or fiction.

I first read the South African writer, J. M,. Coetzee, in l982 (WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS), admired it, yet his works did not truly take hold of me till his novel, DISGRACE, in 1999. His ‘mentoring’ began then. His style. His grasp of the wider world out there-anti-imperialism. His sense of silence in the world (in the man himself) amidst all the tumult, the shouting, the injustice…all the distractive and destructive violence out there. What’s a man to do? The ordinary life, lived in extraordinary times.

Coetzee’s writing life (publication) began in 1969 with his first book, Dusklands, published in South Africa in 1974. In the Heart of the Country (1977) won South Africa’s then principal literary award, the CNA Prize, and was published in Britain and the USA. Waiting for the Barbarians(1980) received international notice. His reputation was confirmed by Life & Times of Michael K <\i>(1983), which won Britain's Booker Prize. It was followed by Foe (1986), Age of Iron(1990), The Master of Petersburg (1994), and Disgrace (1999), which again won the Booker Prize. White Writing (1988) is a set of essays on South African literature and culture. Doubling the Point (1992) consists of essays and interviews with David Attwell. Giving Offense (1996) is a study of literary censorship. Stranger Shores (2001) collects his later literary essays.
Coetzee has also been active as a translator of Dutch and Afrikaans literature.
In 2002 Coetzee emigrated to Australia. He lives with his partner Dorothy Driver in Adelaide, South Australia, where he holds an honorary position at the University of Adelaide.
He also wrote two extraordinary fictionalized memoirs, Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002). The Lives of Animals (1999) is a fictionalized lecture, later absorbed into Elizabeth Costello (2003). Both Boyhood and Youth, I would highly recommended to other writers. YOUTH will be the center of both this essay/blog and the next-Part II.
In 2003 Coetzee won the Nobel Prize for Literature, which immediately thrust him into the spotlight: one of the world’s greatest living writers. A sense of ‘celebrity’ which no doubt made him uncomfortable, given his reclusive nature.
Author Rian Malan describes Coetzee as “a man of almost monkish self-discipline and dedication. He does not drink, smoke or eat meat. He cycles vast distances to keep fit and spends at least an hour at his writing-desk each morning, seven days a week. A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh once. An acquaintance has attended several dinner parties where Coetzee has uttered not a single word.”
The book YOUTH captures that period in a writer’s life when he is “testing the waters.” And there is much to test. For Coetzee’s narrator (a student in South Africa in the 1950’s) it is a time of shedding: letting go of his country--South Africa for London; letting go of parents who are an imposition at best; and a need to both live and record life more intensity. One thinks of Joyce’s, PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN, in this respect.

London is not the answer, yet it does “forge the writer” in the young man’s soul as he deals with those life experiences that eventually give the inner direction he needs.
It is a passage, such as the following from YOUTH: Scenes From Provincial Life II, that both readers and writers relish and find sustenance:

“…There are many alternative logics, he is convinced (but how many?), each just as good as the logic of either-or. The threat of the toy by which he earns his living, the threat that makes it more than just a toy, is that it will burn either-or paths in the brains of its users and thus lock them irreversibly into its binary logic.

“He pores over Aristotle, over Peter Ramus, over Rudolf / Carnap. Most of what he reads he does not understand, but he is used to not understanding. All he is searching for at present is the moment in history when either-or is chosen and and/or discarded.

“He has his books and his projects (the Ford thesis, now nearing completion, the dismantling of logic) for the empty evenings, cricket at midday, and, every second week, a spell at the Royal Hotel with the luxury of nights alone with Atlas, the most redoubtable computer in the world. Could a bachelor's life, if it has to be a bachelor's life, be any better?

“There is only one shadow. A year has passed since he last wrote a line of poetry. What has happened to him? Is it true that art comes only 'out of misery? Must he become miserable again in order to write? Does there not also exist a poetry of ecstasy, even a poetry of lunchtime cricket as a form of ecstasy? Does it matter where poetry finds its impetus as long as it is poetry?

“Although Atlas is not a machine built to handle textual materials, he uses the dead hours of the night to get it to print out thousands of lines in the style of Pablo Neruda, using as a lexicon a list of the most powerful words in The Heights of Macchu Picchu, in Nathaniel Tarn's translation. He brings the thick wad of paper back to the Royal Hotel and pores over it. 'The nostalgia of teapots.' 'The ardour of shutters.' 'Furious horsemen.' If he cannot, for the present, write poetry that comes from the heart, if his heart is not in the right state to generate poetry of its own, can he at least string together pseudo-poems made up of phrases generated by a machine, and thus, by going through the motions of writing, learn again to write? Is it fair to be using mechanical aids to writing - fair to other poets, fair to the dead masters? The Surrealists wrote words on slips of paper and shook them up in a hat and drew words at random to make up lines. William Burroughs cuts up pages and shuffles them and puts the bits together. Is he not doing the same kind of thing? Or do his huge resources - what other poet in England, in the world, has a machine of this size at his command - turn quantity into quality? Yet might it not be argued that the invention of computers has changed the nature of art, by making the author and the condition of the author's heart irrelevant? On the Third Programme he has heard music from the studios of Radio Cologne, music spliced together from electronic whoops and crackles and street noise and snippets of old recordings and fragments of speech. Is it not time for poetry to catch up with music?

“He sends a selection of his Neruda poems to a friend in Cape Town, who publishes them in a magazine he edits. A local newspaper reprints one of the computer poems with a derisive commentary. For a day or two, back in Cape Town, he is notorious as the barbarian who wants to replace Shakespeare with a machine.”