Scenes From Provincial Life: Boyhood, Youth, Summertime Read online

  Praise for Summertime by J. M. Coetzee

  “Not since Disgrace has he written with such urgency and feeling.”

  —The New Yorker

  “The novel is a postmodern masterpiece.”

  —New York Post

  “Summertime is a challenging but rewarding read, a warts-and-all mosaic of an irascible character. Even though the facts of the fiction are not always in accord with information known about the real Coetzee, the variant perspectives coalesce to form an intriguing likeness of a formidable writer.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “Reading Summertime, you wonder at how artfully this modern master can ‘sublime’ (his verb) the raw material of life and love in an attempt to grasp the truth about human nature, which may, in the end, be just too elusive for words.”

  —O, The Oprah Magazine

  “A teasing and surprisingly funny book, at once as elaborately elusive and determinedly confessional as ever autobiography could be…this trilogy [Boyhood, Youth, Summertime] has earned its place at the heart of contemporary literature.”

  —The New York Review of Books

  “With its candor and intricate design mixed with elementary passions, [Summertime] challenges…[our] understanding of Coetzee’s work.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Coetzee portrays his younger self as scrawny and pretentious, but even if this insistent humility is just another form of self-aggrandizement, the result is enthralling.”

  —Entertainment Weekly (A–rating)

  “A compelling testament to the limitations of art, a bracing example of one of our major writers.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “[A] joy…Summertime…calls into question the demands we place on art and the people who make it.”

  —TimeOut New York

  “Delve[s] deeper into the workings of a writer’s mind than we ever could have hoped to go.”

  —The Nation

  “There is a highly subtle kind of heroism in the way people in his novels struggle to deal with everyday life and sometimes succeed.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Summertime, with its dark tone softened by surprising dabs of humor, is a rich addition to Coetzee’s formidable oeuvre.”

  —PortlandOregonian.com

  “[An] intriguingly designed novel…with its candor and frank design, and intricate passions on display.”

  —All Things Considered

  “J. M. Coetzee’s magnificent Summertime is a work of fiction. Never, though, has a genre seemed more ambiguous, more masterfully and provocatively tampered with than in this incredible novel…. Genius.”

  —BookPage

  Praise for Youth

  “A delight to read: It will make you angry, amused, scornful, and sympathetic by turns.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Youth proves yet again that the awkward young man did indeed become a ‘real artist.’”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “Coetzee makes a book of melancholy beauty and quiet force.”

  —Vince Passaro, O, The Oprah Magazine

  Praise for Boyhood

  “Fiercely revealing, bluntly unsentimental…a telling portrait of the artist as a young man that illuminates the hidden source of his art.”

  —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

  “Boyhood is a charmingly accessible book. It is the memoir of a sensitive soul, absorbing the elemental impulses of life for later use.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Exceptional…a scorched tale of race, caste, shame, and—at times—hilarious bewilderment.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Tremendously readable and powerful…a masterfully told, spare, and accessible memoir.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “This life is described with such skill, such exactitude, and such relentlessness that I found myself gasping for air…. Coetzee has achieved something universal in his work…. A fine book, probably the best description of childhood I have ever read.”

  —The Times (London)

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  SCENES FROM PROVINCIAL LIFE

  J. M. Coetzee has won many literary awards, including the Booker Prize (twice), and in 2003 the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is the author of twenty books and has been translated into many languages. A native of south Africa, he now lives in Adelaide, Australia.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Scenes from

  Provincial Life

  Boyhood, Youth, Summertime

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Boyhood: Published simultaneously in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin

  Putnam Inc. and Great Britain by Secker & Warburg 1997

  Published in Penguin Books 1998

  Youth: First published in Great Britain by Secker & Warburg 2002

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 2002

  Published in Penguin Books 2003

  Summertime: First published in Great Britain by Harvill Secker 2009

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2009

  Published in Penguin Books 2010

  This omnibus edition published in Great Britain by Harvill Secker 2011

  Published in Penguin Books 2012

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Boyhood: Copyright © J. M. Coetzee, 1997

  All rights reserved

  Portions of this work first appeared in Artes, Common Knowledge (published by Oxford University Press),

  Granta, and West Coast Line.

  Youth: Copyright © J. M. Coetzee, 2002

  All rights reserved

  Summertime: Copyright © J. M. Coetzee, 2009

  All rights reserved

  Portions of this work first appeared in The New York Review of Books.

  Excerpt from Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. Copyright © 1954 by Grove Press, Inc.

  Copyright © renewed 1982 by Samuel Beckett.

  Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. This selection has been altered by J. M. Coetzee.

  Boyhood, Youth and Summertime have been revised for this edition.

  Copyright © J. M. Coetzee, 2011

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Coetzee, J. M., 1940–

  Scenes from provincial life : Boyhood, Youth, Summertime / J. M. Coetzee.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-61553-9

  1. Coetzee, J. M., 1940—Fiction. 2. Novelists, South African—20th Century—Biography—Fiction. 3. South<
br />
  Africans—England—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9369.3.C58S34 2012

  823’.914—dc23 2012003847

  Printed in the United States of America

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  In memoriam D.K.C.

  Author’s note

  The three parts of Scenes from Provincial Life have appeared before as Boyhood (1997), Youth (2002), and Summertime (2009). They have been revised for republication.

  I would like to express my thanks to Marilia Bandeira for assistance with Brazilian Portuguese, and to the estate of Samuel Beckett for permission to quote (in fact to misquote) from Waiting for Godot.

  Contents

  Boyhood

  Youth

  Summertime

  Boyhood

  One

  They live on a housing estate outside the town of Worcester, between the railway line and the National Road. The streets of the estate have tree-names but no trees yet. Their address is No. 12 Poplar Avenue. All the houses on the estate are new and identical. They are set in large plots of red clay earth where nothing grows, separated by wire fences. In each backyard stands a small block consisting of a room and a lavatory. Though they have no servant, they refer to these as ‘the servant’s room’ and ‘the servant’s lavatory’. They use the servant’s room to store things in: newspapers, empty bottles, a broken chair, an old coir mattress.

  At the bottom of the yard they put up a poultry-run and install three hens, which are supposed to lay eggs for them. But the hens do not flourish. Rainwater, unable to seep away in the clay, stands in pools in the yard. The poultry-run turns into an evil-smelling morass. The hens develop gross swellings on their legs, like elephant-skin. Sickly and cross, they cease to lay. His mother consults her sister in Stellenbosch, who says they will return to laying only after the horny shells under their tongues have been cut out. So one after another his mother takes the hens between her knees, presses on their jowls till they open their beaks, and with the point of a paring-knife picks at their tongues. The hens shriek and struggle, their eyes bulging. He shudders and turns away. He thinks of his mother slapping stewing steak down on the kitchen counter and cutting it into cubes; he thinks of her bloody fingers.

  The nearest shops are a mile away along a bleak eucalyptus-lined road. Trapped in this box of a house on the housing estate, there is nothing for his mother to do all day but sweep and tidy. Every time the wind blows, a fine ochre clay-dust whirls in under the doors, seeps through the cracks in the window frames, under the eaves, through the joints of the ceiling. After a daylong storm the dust lies piled inches high against the front wall.

  They buy a vacuum cleaner. Every morning his mother trails the vacuum cleaner from room to room, sucking up the dust into the roaring belly on which a smiling red goblin leaps as if over a hurdle. A goblin: why?

  He plays with the vacuum cleaner, tearing up paper and watching the strips fly up the pipe like leaves in the wind. He holds the pipe over a trail of ants, sucking them up to their death.

  There are ants in Worcester, flies, plagues of fleas. Worcester is only ninety miles from Cape Town, yet everything is worse here. He has a ring of fleabites above his socks, and scabs where he has scratched. Some nights he cannot sleep for the itching. He does not see why they ever had to leave Cape Town.

  His mother is restless too. I wish I had a horse, she says. Then at least I could go riding in the veld. A horse! says his father: Do you want to be Lady Godiva?

  She does not buy a horse. Instead, without warning, she buys a bicycle, a woman’s model, second-hand, painted black. It is so huge and heavy that, when he experiments with it in the yard, he cannot turn the pedals.

  She does not know how to ride a bicycle; perhaps she does not know how to ride a horse either. She bought the bicycle thinking that riding it would be a simple matter. Now she can find no one to teach her.

  His father cannot hide his glee. Women do not ride bicycles, he says. His mother remains defiant. I will not be a prisoner in this house, she says. I will be free.

  At first he had thought it splendid that his mother should have her own bicycle. He had even pictured the three of them riding together down Poplar Avenue, she and he and his brother. But now, as he listens to his father’s jokes, which his mother can meet only with dogged silence, he begins to waver. Women don’t ride bicycles: what if his father is right? If his mother can find no one willing to teach her, if no other housewife in Reunion Park has a bicycle, then perhaps women are indeed not supposed to ride bicycles.

  Alone in the backyard, his mother tries to teach herself. Holding her legs out straight on either side, she rolls down the incline towards the chicken-run. The bicycle tips over and comes to a stop. Because it does not have a crossbar, she does not fall, merely staggers about in a silly way, clutching the handlebars.

  His heart turns against her. That evening he joins in with his father’s jeering. He is well aware what a betrayal this is. Now his mother is all alone.

  Nevertheless she does learn to ride, though in an uncertain, wobbling way, straining to turn the heavy cranks.

  She makes her expeditions to Worcester in the mornings, when he is at school. Only once does he catch a glimpse of her on her bicycle. She is wearing a white blouse and a dark skirt. She is coming down Poplar Avenue towards the house. Her hair streams in the wind. She looks young, like a girl, young and fresh and mysterious.

  Every time his father sees the heavy black bicycle leaning against the wall he makes jokes about it. In his jokes the citizens of Worcester interrupt their business to stand and gape as the woman on the bicycle labours past. Trap! Trap! they call out, mocking her: Push! There is nothing funny about the jokes, though he and his father always laugh together afterwards. As for his mother, she never has any repartee, she is not gifted in that way. ‘Laugh if you like,’ she says.

  Then one day, without explanation, she stops riding the bicycle. Soon afterwards the bicycle disappears. No one says a word, but he knows she has been defeated, put in her place, and knows that he must bear part of the blame. I will make it up to her one day, he promises himself.

  The memory of his mother on her bicycle does not leave him. She pedals away up Poplar Avenue, escaping from him, escaping towards her own desire. He does not want her to go. He does not want her to have a desire of her own. He wants her always to be in the house, waiting for him when he comes home. He does not often gang up with his father against her: his whole inclination is to gang up with her against his father. But in this case he belongs with the men.

  Two

  He shares nothing with his mother. His life at school is kept a tight secret from her. She shall know nothing, he resolves, but what appears on his quarterly report, which shall be impeccable. He will always come first in class. His conduct will always be Very Good, his progress Excellent. As long as the report is faultless, she will have no right to ask questions. That is the contract he establishes in his mind.

  What happens at school is that boys are flogged. It happens every day. Boys are ordered to bend over and touch their toes and are flogged with a cane.

  He has a classmate in Standard Three named Rob Hart whom the teacher particularly loves to beat. The Standard Three teacher is an excitable woman with hennaed hair na
med Miss Oosthuizen. From somewhere or other his parents know of her as Marie Oosthuizen: she takes part in theatricals and has never married. Clearly she has a life outside the school, but he cannot imagine it. He cannot imagine any teacher having a life outside school.

  Miss Oosthuizen flies into rages, calls Rob Hart out from his desk, orders him to bend, and flogs him across the buttocks. The blows come fast one upon another, with barely time for the cane to swing back. By the time Miss Oosthuizen has finished with him, Rob Hart is flushed in the face. But he does not cry; in fact, he may be flushed only because he was bending. Miss Oosthuizen, on the other hand, heaves at the breast and seems on the brink of tears – of tears and of other outpourings too.

  After these spells of ungoverned passion the whole class is hushed, and remains hushed until the bell rings.

  Miss Oosthuizen never succeeds in making Rob Hart cry; perhaps that is why she flies into such rages at him and beats him so hard, harder than anyone else. Rob Hart is the oldest boy in the class, nearly two years older than himself (he is the youngest); he has a sense that between Rob Hart and Miss Oosthuizen there is something going on that he is not privy to.

  Rob Hart is tall and handsome in a devil-may-care way. Though Rob Hart is not clever and is perhaps even in danger of failing the standard, he is attracted towards him. Rob Hart is part of a world he has not yet found a way of entering: a world of sex and beating.

  As for himself, he has no desire to be beaten by Miss Oosthuizen or anyone else. The very idea of being beaten makes him squirm with shame. There is nothing he will not do to save himself from it. In this respect he is unnatural and knows it. He comes from an unnatural and shameful family in which not only are children not beaten but older people are addressed by their first names and no one goes to church and shoes are worn every day.

  Every teacher at his school, man or woman, has a cane and is at liberty to use it. Each of these canes has a personality, a character, which is known to the boys and talked about endlessly. In a spirit of connoisseurship the boys weigh up the characters of the canes and the quality of pain they give, compare the arm and wrist techniques of the teachers who wield them. No one mentions the shame of being called out and made to bend and being beaten on one’s backside.