Ruthless Realism and Cloying Sentimentality

The following is the first paragraph of the chapter "The Good Samaritan" in Tim Parks's novel Goodness. It appears about two-thirds of the way through the novel. George (the narrator) and his wife Shirley have a seriously handicapped daughter, Hilary, who cannot speak and has hardly developed beyond infancy:

January 1988. Hilary is five. Feeding her this morning, I thought: 'We get less change out of her than one would out of a three-week-old puppy.' I alternate between this ruthless realism and cloying sentimentality. The girl is so constipated that sometimes we have to hook a finger into her anus and lever the turds out. Shirley does this. I simply can't.

Like many a novel's narrator, George does not always have a very accurate vision of himself, but here he is right on target: he does swing between a "ruthless realism" that asserts his clear understanding of the world's difficulties and a "cloying sentimentality" that would conceal those difficulties in favor of an easier perspective.

The "change" he would like to "get out of" Hilary refers to childhood development: a puppy would develop faster than Hilary would. Since George had not wanted to have children, the reference to a puppy also recalls couples who stereotypically get a dog when they are "not ready for children." But what he and Shirley actually have to "get out of her" is her constipated shit, and it is in terms of shit that the contrast between realism and sentimentality is most fully realized here.

In a sense, "realism" appears here in the very fact that shit is mentioned at all, and it becomes "ruthless" in the explicitness with which George describes the "levering out" of the "turds." In contrast, George's "sentimentality" is somewhat concealed, only becoming clear in the final contrast between Shirley and himself: it is not both of them ("we") who do the dirty work but just Shirley. George wants to be a "ruthless realist," but when it comes to shit, he "simply can't" handle it.

The "realist," then, is beaten by the sentimentality his demonstrative "ruthlessness" is meant to combat. In his memoir Youth, J. M. Coetzee writes that "ruthless honesty is not a hard trick to learn." (See also this post.) Here, in Parks's novel, "ruthless realism" also ends up looking like a trick, and a relatively easy one at that: if you make a nasty joke and talk about your handicapped daughter's shit, then you are being "ruthless," even if it is your wife who actually cleans up the mess.

The "realistic" and the "sentimental" are also literary categories. Chronologically, the "sentimental" novel came first, in the eighteenth century, while literary "realism" emerged in the nineteenth century. In a simplified version of literary history, "realism" trumped the "sentimental" precisely by being "ruthless" rather than "cloying," and that is precisely the tendency of the "trick" of "ruthless honesty": it aims to produce a "realism" that trumps feelings.

But the slippery nature of this "hard trick" is clear in this passage. George plays tough, but is not really tough enough to face up to the challenge posed by his handicapped daughter. From the perspective of Parks's novel, the history of the genre is not the replacement of the sentimental by the realistic; rather, fiction "alternates" between the realistic and the sentimental. "Realism" would like to be "ruthless" enough to defeat "sentimentalism," but its tricks are never-ending attempts to conceal its own sentimental side. Let's talk tough about shit, but someone else has to actually dispose of it -- and the people who have to do so are those otherwise dismissed as "sentimental."

Summertime

I was surprised to see J. M. Coetzee's Summertime shortlisted for the Booker Prize—not because I did not enjoy the book, but because I did not read it as a novel. The book's subtitle is "Scenes from Provincial Life," which is also the subtitle of Coetzee's memoir Boyhood, so I read Summertime as a memoir. (Note that the Wikipedia page on Coetzee lists it under his memoirs.)

Granted, as a memoir, Summertime is even more singular than Boyhood (and than the similar Youth, Coetzee's second memoir). As I have noted before, in Boyhood and Youth, Coetzee takes an unusual approach to autobiographical writing: the books are in the third person and the present tense.

Summertime begins with a section called "Notebooks 1972-1975," and at first it appears to be a memoir like the other two: third person and present tense are used again. A small difference is that these selections from "Notebooks" are dated, whereas Boyhood and Youth are both largely vague about dates (and about how old the protagonist actually is at any given time).

In addition, these notebook entries are followed by italicized comments on them, like this one (the first): "To be expanded on: his father's response to the times as compared to his own; their differences, their (overriding) similarities" (6). To all appearances, then, Summertime is like Boyhood and Youth, but with a few little twists.

What follows, though, is utterly different. The next section is called "Julia," and it is an interview with a woman who had an affair with one John Coetzee in the early 1970s in South Africa. The interviewer (at first anonymous, but later identified by the interviewee, Julia Frankl, as "Mr. Vincent" [43]) begins by referring to "the pages I sent you from John Coetzee's notebooks for the years 1972-1975," and on the next page a question from Frankl to Vincent leads to the clarification that the italicized passages after the entries were by Coetzee, "notes to himself, written in 1999 or 2000, when he was thinking of adapting these particular entries for a book" (20).

Julia then tells Mr. Vincent about her affair with Coetzee. At one point, she says, "And John was not a great talker, as you know" (34). If this implies that this John Coetzee is dead (which J. M. Coetzee is emphatically not), then Mr. Vincent's reply confirms it: "I don't know. I never met him in the flesh" (34). Not "I have never met him," but "I never met him": so this interview is about the late John Coetzee.

At this point, I could have stopped for a moment and thought, "Okay, this is not a memoir!" But this is Coetzee we're talking about, and Boyhood and Youth had already rewritten the rules about memoirs, so I just took this as a much more extreme variation on the memoir: Coetzee writing as if he were dead and a biographer, Mr. Vincent, was working on a book by interviewing people for it.

Five interviews appear in the book, followed by a last section called "Notebooks: undated fragments." In the fourth interview, with Martin, an academic colleague of Coetzee's in the 1970s, Mr. Vincent begins by reading "an account of his [Coetzee's] first meeting with you" (with Martin, that is), which Coetzee had written "in one of his late notebooks." Mr. Vincent goes on to add that he suspects "it was intended to fit into the third memoir, the one that never saw the light of day. As you will hear, he follows the same convention as in Boyhood and Youth, where the subject is called 'he' rather than 'I'" (205). A few pages later, Mr. Vincent then asks a question about what Coetzee might have said "if he had gone on with the memoir, if he had not stopped writing" (210).

Within the world of Summertime, then, John Coetzee worked on a third memoir after Boyhood and Youth, but he did not finish it—not because he died, but because he had stopped writing before he died. In the real world, J. M. Coetzee has continued writing, of course—but he has not published the third memoir. Instead, he has published Summertime.

One can speculate about what this might mean. Coetzee might have started writing a third memoir and decided that it would be boring to just write a third book like the first two. Then the form of Summertime would be an experiment by a writer who does not like to repeat himself. But it's also possible that Coetzee began the third memoir and stopped writing it—not because he stopped writing entirely, like Summertime's John Coetzee, but because he failed to pull it off for one reason or another. Somewhere between failure and experimentation lies the somewhat more down-to-earth alternative that J. M. Coetzee (not John Coetzee) simply decided that this material called for a different approach, an entirely new form, neither memoir nor novel, but a mixture of the two.

But what of these interviews? The strangest possibility of all is that Coetzee conducted the interviews himself! A slightly less strange variation would be that he had somebody else conduct them. A third possibility, odd in an entirely different way, would be that he imagined interviews with these people he had once known. A fourth possibility is that he invented the interviewees, and then I would finally have to admit that the book is an unusual novel, and not a memoir.

But that third alternative is intriguing: if Coetzee conducted imaginary interviews with five people he knew from the 1970s, then one has to grant him a capacity that he ahs not generally been seen as having (either by critics or even by himself—although perhaps his self-criticism in this respect is an ironic mocking of his critics): empathy. Even though the interviews are about John Coetzee, they are as much or even more about the interviewees themselves, and as musings about how others might have seen him, they demonstrate that Coetzee does have a good feel for his own weaknesses and their effects on others.

In the end, then, I find Summertime most interesting when I read it as an experimental memoir, as it were, much more then when I read it as a novel. As a novel, it fits nicely with his last two, Slow Man and Diary of a Bad Year (though I would then say the latter is a much better book), while as a memoir, it is a unique and compelling book.

Coetzee on Prose and Poetry

Here's one way the young J. M. Coetzee thought about the difference between prose and poetry (from his memoir Youth):

In poetry, the action can take place everywhere and nowhere: it does not matter whether the lonely wives of the fishermen live in Kalk Bay or Portugal or Maine. Prose, on the other hand, seems naggingly to demand a specific setting. (62-63)

He goes on to say that he cannot write about London (where he is living at the time) because he does not know it well enough yet—and thus implies that he can only write about South Africa, where he grew up.

This could be a commentary on Coetzee's own work, for at the time when Youth was published (2002), he had published eight novels, only one of which does not have "a specific setting": Waiting for the Barbarians is set in an imaginary, unnamed "Empire." Foe and The Master of Petersburg complicate the point, but neither fully contradicts it: Foe might even be the London novel that the younger Coetzee feared he could not write, while imagines a Petersburg that Coetzee the author fully inhabited, in a sense, in his extensive reading of and about Dostoevsky. — The rest of those previous novels are set in South Africa, and the three he has published since are very specific about setting (except perhaps for one or two sections of Elizabeth Costello).

Still, a statement like the above in a memoir is somewhat unstable (even if it is not as unstable as it might be if uttered by a character in a novel). A memoirist might be asserting this position as his own, but he might also be saying that the position is one he once held but now finds mistaken. A more straightforward memoirist than Coetzee would probably make explicit whether he agreed or disagreed with his younger self on this point, but Coetzee never says anything like "what a fool I was" or "I already knew that." He establishes distance from his younger self by writing about himself in the third person and the present tense, but it is not always clear whether that distance is ironic or not. (See my thoughts on this in Boyhood from 2007 here.)

Finally, though, it is worth considering the truth of the claim that prose demands a specific setting while poetry does not. One should be more precise: novels demand a specific setting while lyric poems don't. Put that bluntly, it's surely not true (Kafka, anyone?), but as a rule of thumb it seems accurate to me: lyric poetry can be very unspecific about setting in a way that most novels could never get away with being.

Wanting to be normal

Rereading Coetzee's Boyhood, I was struck by the issue of being "normal." The issue is raised in a disturbing way, in a discussion of the beating of children in school: if John, the third-person Coetzee in this memoir, is finally beaten by a teacher, then "he will be able to come out on the other side a normal boy" (7). A few pages later, then, it is no longer just a matter of beatings at school: "He wants his father to beat him and turn him into a normal boy" (13).

What would be beaten out of him so that he would be normal?

Once, during their early months in Worcester, a boy from his class had wandered in through the open front door and found him lying on his back under a chair. 'What are you doing there?' he had asked. 'Thinking,' he had replied unthinkingly: 'I like thinking.' Soon everyone in his class knew about it: the new boy was odd, he wasn't normal. (29)

Thinking, then, is not normal, and the irony is brutal: when he speaks "unthinkingly," his inner world of thinking is exposed. Implicitly, then, "thinking" is what needs to be beaten out of him for him to become "normal."

This is connected to lying:

If he stopped lying he would have to polish his shoes and talk politely and do everything that normal boys do. In that case he would no longer be himself. If he were no longer himself, what point would there be in living? (35)

This reveals the other perspective on normalcy: John wants to be normal, but he also wants to be himself, the thinker and, here, the liar. If thinking and lying make him feel guilty, they still make him who he is: the boy who is different.

His mother is also responsible for his difference: "He wishes she would be normal. If she were normal, he could be normal" (38). Does she create the thinker and liar? Perhaps in part, John thinks, because she does not let his father beat him.

One odd effect of Boyhood is that it is in the present tense, so everything seems to happen at the same time. The boy's development is thus obscured. But his perspectives do change, as do his ability to articulate them:

He is just a boy walking beside his mother: from the outside he probably looks quite normal. But he thinks of himself as scuttling around her like a beetle, scuttling in fussy circles with his nose to the ground and his legs and arms pumping. In fact he can think of nothing about himself that is still. His mind in particular darts about here and there all the time, with an impatient will of its own. (59)

Here, his external perspective on himself grants an apparent normalcy that could not be articulated earlier in the book, and the internal depiction of thinking is much more complex.

And a while later, he rejects normalcy entirely—at least temporarily:

'Can't you just be normal?' asks his mother.
'I hate normal people,' he replies hotly. (78)

His mother, previously seen as partially responsible for his failure to be normal, now wants him to be normal, but now he rejects what, as a younger boy, he so vehemently desired. Still, it is better to be on his mother's side:

He is chilled by the thought of the life he would face if his father ran the household, a life of dull, stupid formulas, of being like everyone else. His mother is the only who stands between him and an existence he could not endure. (79)

Once, his father's failure to beat him was a lack that contributed to his difference; now, the father is a representation of the normalcy he rejects.

John's sense of his difference, then, gradually turns positive, until he can finally feel "convinced that he is different, special" (108). But this cannot be a stable, positive feeling, as this frightening passage makes all too clear:

... if all the stories that have been built up around him, built by himself, built by years of normal behavior, at least in public, were to collapse, and the ugly, black, crying, babyish core of him were to emerge for all to see and laugh at, would there be any way to go on living? Would he not have become as bad as one of those deformed, stunted, mongol children with hoarse voices and slavering lips that might as well be given sleeping pills or strangled? (112)

His outward appearance, as when he was walking with his mother, is "normal," but the restless "thinker" disappears here in a maelstrom of feelings. The move toward a positive sense of "abnormality" can never be permanent and ends in the horrifying image of the strangling of children with Down's Syndrome. (An image that deserves lengthy discussion in the context of Coetzee's work as a whole!)

So a dialectic remains (inevitably?), between normalcy and difference: "Though he blames his parents because they have not brought him up as a normal child, he is proud of their education" (124). Education (thinking?) is something to be proud of even if it does not make one "normal"—and one's "normalcy" remains, always, it seems, the responsibility of one's parents. (Is this a theme in the life of many writers? — Educated parents who have come down in the world? Certainly, mothers who gave up a "creative" side to raise children are a theme in artists' lives.)

"Thinking," as the source of difference, is expressed through education, and most of all, through examinations:

He is good at examinations; if there were no examinations for him to be good at there would be little special about him. Examinations create in him a heady, trembling state of excitement during which he writes quickly and confidently. He does not like the state in itself but it is reassuring to know it is there to be tapped. (131)

Here, his difference from others, what makes him special, is reduced to his good performance in school. The problem with this does not appear in Boyhood, but only in Youth: what do you do when you stop doing well in examinations, or when there are no more examinations to take? ["Never in his life has he been forced to call on his utmost powers. Less than his best has always been good enough"—Youth, 13]

Near the end of the book, a new claim is made about John:

Once upon a time he used to be full of ideas, ideas for places to go, things to talk about, things to do. He was always a step ahead of everyone: he was the leader, the others followed. Now the energy that he used to feel streaming out of him is gone. At the age of thirteen he is becoming surly, scowling, dark. (151)

This is quite surprising, given that the book contains no evidence at all of John, the leader. His energy has only appeared as the energy of thinking about himself and normalcy, and he has largely seemed "surly, scowling, dark." Has Coetzee's older self colored his sense of his younger self? As he says in Youth, "ruthless honesty is not a hard trick to learn" (Youth, 164). Perhaps Coetzee's desire to be "ruthlessly honest" has led him to avoid depicting himself as a leader, for fear of glamorizing himself. In any case, Boyhood is not self-aggrandizing—and Youth, with its scathingly ironic self-portrait of the artist as a young man, is even less so.

Youth 10

Last one from Coetzee's Youth:

"What more is required than a kind of stupid, insensitive doggedness, as lover, as writer, together with a readiness to fail again and again?"

Coetzee continues: "What is wrong with him is that he is not prepared to fail." At twenty-four, then, perhaps JMC did arrive at a moment of insight about his attempts at being a writer.

It's certainly a moment of insight that is useful for any aspiring writer: if you are not ready to write something bad, then you have little chance of writing anything good. Of course, the main thing is to write something.

I'm not sure about the value of the insight for the lover, although perhaps it is a version of this.

Youth 9

Later in the same passage as in my previous post on Youth, there is another moment that is quite thrilling for this reading of Coetzee:

"As for ruthless honesty, ruthless honesty is not a hard trick to learn. On the contrary, it is the easiest thing in the world."

Coetzee is often praised for his "ruthless honesty," but as he points out here, that should not be such a big deal: it's not something "hard won," as many might imply, but a trick—a technique, as it were, to generate literary effects. I would add that such praise is surely of the "damning-with-faint" variety, because "ruthless honesty" is also a bit of a code for "a hard read."

This goes back to my first post on Boyhood, where I cited the young John's understanding of himself: "His only excuse is that he is merciless to himself too. He lies but he does not lie to himself." There, the mercilessness is not seen as a trick or a technique, but rather as a move in his relationship with his mother.

Alarm bells are going off: I'm getting close to saying that here we can see the development of that technique in Coetzee's biography. The argument would be that the "ruthless honesty" of his literary work is a technique that derives not from his understanding of literature and art but from his early relationship to his mother. I sure hope that is not what JMC himself would argue, because that's all too close to Freud for my taste.

Youth 8

In my second post on Youth, I cited a passage about the morality of artists. Near the end of the book, Coetzee returns to the theme:

"The artist must taste all experience, from the noblest to the most degraded. Just as it is the artist's destiny to experience the most supreme creative joy, so he must be prepared to take upon himself all in life that is miserable, squalid, ignominious. ... It is a justification that does not for a moment convince him. It is sophistry, that is all, contemptible sophistry."

The context? His work at Aldermaston with the programming of the Atlas computer (see also the previous post on Youth), which he feels puts him on the wrong side of the Cold War (supporting the British military).

Here, the book's "youth" finds himself unable to justify his own behavior in terms of his position as an artist. His arguments in favor of the artist's position above morality (a position justified by "the artist's destiny") now seem like "sophistry."

It is worth keeping this in mind when considering Boyhood and Youth as "portraits of the artist as a young man": even within the two books, statements that may appear to be definitive comments about JMC's understanding of the artist and his role as a novelist end up getting called into question.

One could say that this is a sign of the "youth's" development, that we are reading a memoir as Bildungsroman. I'm almost convinced, but Youth does not arrive at the point where JMC is sitting down to write his first book (as one might hope on the model of Proust, say), so his memoirs do not present the complete artist, as it were.

As I pointed out before, Kakutani's reading of Boyhood as a book "that illuminates the hidden source of his art" is just not convincing. Boyhood and Youth are both fascinating books, but they do not illuminate something hidden. Instead, they add further dimensions to the house of mirrors that is Coetzee's oeuvre.

Youth 7

Here's one bit of Coetzee's Youth that I will just cite without comment. Coetzee worked in the early sixties with a British supercomputer (or what then passed for a supercomputer) called "Atlas":

"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."

Youth 6

"He has not played cricket since he left school, when he decided to renounce it on the grounds that team sports were incompatible with the life of a poet and an intellectual."

Near the end of Youth, Coetzee's "youth" makes this discovery: cricket (his sport of choice as a child) is too much fun to renounce on the grounds that it lacks intellectual seriousness.

Me, I've never been good enough at any sport to have to renounce it on intellectual grounds, but I have always been a sports fan, and being a fan has always given me aesthetic pleasures that both resemble and differ from those provided by art ("It is not beautiful, yet it speaks like beauty, imperiously"). Resemble: the beauties of drama and narrative (and sometimes of comedy) are what make sports work. You have to follow them for a while to really experience this. (One reason I only tangentially follow baseball in Basel is that I have nobody to share the drama with.) Differ from: the beauties of sport are always subject to one significant determining factor that is lacking in art: in sports, the goal is always the same. Roger Federer and J. M. Coetzee may both abide by the rule "just do it", but in Roger's case, the "it" is defined in advance; in Coetzee's, it is not.

Recently I have had two striking experiences playing sports. Since last year, my son Miles has gone crazy for soccer (I have to write "soccer" for Americans reading this!), so I have played lots of soccer with him. But that was not striking. It was playing a bit of basketball with him earlier this year, and then in the past few days ping pong, that was striking: those are sports I grew up playing, and though I make no claims to being especially good at either (my basketball skills are especially rusty), when I play them, it feels natural in a way that soccer does not (which I only played regularly for a year as a child, when my family lived in Leamington Spa in England when I was nine).

Coetzee: "Does there not also exist a poetry of ecstasy, even a poetry of lunchtime cricket as a form of ecstasy?"

Youth 5

After getting glasses for the first time (at around 20), the "youth" in Coetzee's Youth experiences a sudden revelation that moves me every time I read it, because I had the same revelation when I was 12 and got glasses for the first time:

"... looking out through the window, he is amazed to discover he can make out individual leaves on the trees. Trees have been a blur of green ever since he can remember."

I've spoken with many people who wear glasses about this moment, and almost all of them have agreed with me about it: a fascinating revelation.

Youth 4

"It is not beautiful, yet it speaks like beauty, imperiously."

In Youth, Coetzee writes this of Robert Motherwell's "Elegy for the Spanish Republic 24" (which I was unable to find on the web; this is no. 34 instead).

There's something about this statement that makes it feel different than many other statements about the tastes of the "youth" at the center of JMC's memoir; here, it does seem like something JMC would like to have his work be: not necessarily beautiful, but as imperious as beauty — as many paintings by Abstract Expressionists were and are.

But for me, the most beautiful feature of this statement is not that it points toward a way to understand the effect of art works that are not beautiful but that generate emotions that resemble those we have when do experience beautiful works. No, for me, the most beautiful thing here is the idea that beauty is imperious.

Youth 3

"On the basis of the poems he has heard on the radio and nothing else, he knows Brodsky, knows hims through and through. This is what poetry is capable of. Poetry is truth. But of him in London Brodsky can know nothing. How to tell the frozen man he is with him, side by side, day by day?"

I love the image of the young Coetzee listening to the BBC in the early sixties and discovering Brodsky's poetry. Who was broadcasting the one future Nobel Prize winner's work so that another future Nobel Prize winner could hear it? — Note, though, that when Youth was published, JMC had not yet won his.

Even here, though, JMC manages to mock his young self a bit: at least I read him as gently poking fun at his youthful passion for Brodsky's work, with his sense of identification with "the frozen man" (at the time, Brodsky was in Archangel, serving five years hard labor). "Poetry is truth": it's hard for me to believe that JMC believes that now (and easy for me to believe that he believed it then).

Youth 2

"... artists do not have to be morally admirable people. All that matters is that they create great art. If his own art is to come out of the more contemptible side of himself, so be it."

In both Boyhood and Youth, Coetzee's decision to write in the third person repeatedly proves useful. Imagine the last sentence above in the first person: "If my own art is to come out of the more contemptible side of myself, so be it." Instead of a claim that is both distanced and ironized by the third person, it becomes a pathetic attempt at self-justification, the kind of claim one would expect from someone implicated in fascism, say.

The distance and irony are, as I suggested in my first post on Youth, stronger in this book than in Boyhood. Without ever actually criticizing his twenty-year-old self, JMC manages to make him seem ridiculous over and over again, as happens here with the young man's grandiose claims about himself and his ambition.

But suddenly I see a different way of looking at this. There are two different issues here: being immoral (that is, not "morally admirable") and having a "contemptible side" that one creates with. "John" (that is, Coetzee's self as a young man) has conflated the creation of art from one's darkest impulses with the acting out of those impulses. Surely one can see an artist as creating from "a dark side" while also expecting the artist to not follow through on the impulses that come from that dark side. Artistic works about contemptible acts are one thing (the torture scenes in Waiting for the Barbarians, say); such contemptible acts themselves are another. We do not expect writers to have committed the crimes they write about!

Or to go back to The Master of Petersburg: "... reading is being the arm and being the axe and being the skull." Writing is also a matter of being all those things—but one does not have to have murdered someone with an axe in order to imagine murdering someone with an axe.

In the end, then, the point about art and morality is another comment in JMC's memoirs that one might be tempted to turn into a general statement about his work (that is, JMC commenting on his own work). But such claims in his memoirs are as unstable as markers of how he works as similar claims are in his fiction.

Youth

"The question of what should be permitted to go into his diary and what kept forever shrouded goes to the heart of all his writing."

Coetzee's Youth is the second volume of his memoirs. Like Boyhood, it is written in the third person and in the present tense.

There is a gap between the two books, of several years. There is also a gap in the implicit relationship between the author and the main character of each book, if you will: Coetzee seems to ironize his youthful self (about 19 to 24 years old) more than he does his childhood self (up to about 15 years old?).

Even so, this being a memoir, there are still moments, as in Boyhood, in which the adult author seems to be commenting on his development as a writer. Here, near the beginning of Youth, the main character (only later identified as "John") has written about his affair with an older woman in his diary—specifically, about how discouraging he finds the whole relationship to be. When his lover reads his diary, she leaves him, of course, and he wonders about what one should write and what one should not write.

If this is a comment on Coetzee's own fiction, it's hard to say exactly what claim is being made about that fiction; after all, when we read his books, all we have is what they contain and not what he has "forever shrouded." In his books about novelists (The Master of Petersburg and Elizabeth Costello), though, this point might be touched on (as in the passage quoted at the end of my third post on The Master of Petersburg).

Perhaps what I am slowly getting at as I comment on JMC's memoirs is how the two books undermine one's hope that they will provide a reliable "portrait of the artist as a young man." In fact, my edition of Boyhood has a quotation from Michiko Kakutani on the cover: "Fiercely revealing, bluntly unsentimental ... a telling portrait of the artist as a young man that illuminates the hidden source of his art." Every time I read that, it seems like she could have written it without even having read the book: it's such a cliché about memoir writing.

Revelation and unsentimentality are themes in JMC's memoirs; that is, the idea of revelation and the idea of an unsentimental approach to oneself are circled around, but revelation and a "bluntly unsentimental" approach are not the tools JMC is simply "using" here.