Elizabeth Costello Read online

  Praise for Elizabeth Costello

  “[Elizabeth Costello] resonates in the mind long after it has been put aside.”

  —John Banville, The Nation

  “Coetzee is a writer who refuses to take the easy way out.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “There is no justice in the ability of youth to shame age, and yet it’s a fundamental fact of the embodied life. Coetzee’s unflinching exploration of this desolate and strangely beautiful terrain represents the cruelest and best use to which literature can be put.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Elizabeth Costello has an unflinching gaze before the dilemma of being a novelist in our day.”

  —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Elizabeth Costello is learned, intelligent and thought-provoking. . . . Coetzee’s prose is flawless.”

  —Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

  “Elizabeth Costello is a marvelous, unforgettable book.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “Elizabeth Costello takes an unflinching look at our dearest ideas and questions our beliefs in filial duty, marriage, reason, humanities, literature and certainly realistic novels.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Elizabeth Costello is powerful and thought-provoking.”

  —Orlando Sentinel

  “A difficult masterpiece.”

  —The New York Observer

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  ELIZABETH COSTELLO

  J. M. COETZEE was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. His work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Boyhood, Disgrace, Youth, Summertime, and The Childhood of Jesus. He was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice. He lives in Australia.

  BY J. M. COETZEE

  FICTION

  Dusklands

  In the Heart of the Country

  Waiting for the Barbarians

  Life & Times of Michael K

  Foe

  Age of Iron

  The Master of Petersburg

  Boyhood

  The Lives of Animals

  Disgrace

  Youth

  Elizabeth Costello

  Slow Man

  Diary of a Bad Year

  Summertime

  The Childhood of Jesus

  NONFICTION

  White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa

  Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews

  Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship

  Stranger Shores: Literary Essays 1986–1999

  The Nobel Lecture in Literature, 2003

  Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000–2005

  Here and Now: Letters 2008–2011 (with Paul Auster)

  The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy (with Arabella Kurtz)

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  First published in Great Britain by Secker & Warburg,

  The Random House Group, 2003

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2003

  Published in Penguin Books 2004

  Copyright © 2003 by J. M. Coetzee

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Here constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

  Ebook ISBN 9781524705503

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: Paul Buckley

  Cover image: Magali Moreau / Millennium Images, UK

  Version_1

  Contents

  Praise for Elizabeth Costello

  About the Author

  By J. M. Coetzee

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Lesson 1 Realism

  Lesson 2 The Novel in Africa

  Lesson 3 The Lives of Animals

  ONE: The Philosophers and the Animals

  Lesson 4 The Lives of Animals

  TWO: The Poets and the Animals

  Lesson 5 The Humanities in Africa

  Lesson 6 The Problem of Evil

  Lesson 7 Eros

  Lesson 8 At the Gate

  Postscript: Letter of Elizabeth, Lady Chandos

  Acknowledgements

  1

  Realism

  There is first of all the problem of the opening, namely, how to get us from where we are, which is, as yet, nowhere, to the far bank. It is a simple bridging problem, a problem of knocking together a bridge. People solve such problems every day. They solve them, and having solved them push on.

  Let us assume that, however it may have been done, it is done. Let us take it that the bridge is built and crossed, that we can put it out of our mind. We have left behind the territory in which we were. We are in the far territory, where we want to be.

  Elizabeth Costello is a writer, born in 1928, which makes her sixty-six years old, going on sixty-seven. She has written nine novels, two books of poems, a book on bird life, and a body of journalism. By birth she is Australian. She was born in Melbourne and still lives there, though she spent the years 1951 to 1963 abroad, in England and France. She has been married twice. She has two children, one by each marriage.

  Elizabeth Costello made her name with her fourth novel, The House on Eccles Street (1969), whose main character is Marion Bloom, wife of Leopold Bloom, principal character of another novel, Ulysses (1922), by James Joyce. In the past decade there has grown up around her a small critical industry; there is even an Elizabeth Costello Society, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which puts out a quarterly Elizabeth Costello Newsletter.

  In the spring of 1995 Elizabeth Costello travelled, or travels (present tense henceforth), to Williamstown, Pennsylvania, to Altona College, to receive the Stowe Award. The award is made biennially to a major world writer, selected by a jury of critics and writers. It consists of a purse of $50,000, funded by a bequest from the Stowe estate, and a gold medal. It is one of the larger literary prizes in the United States.

  On her visit to Pennsylvania Elizabeth Costello (Costello is her maiden name) is accompanied by her son John. John has a job teaching physics and astronomy at a college in Massachusetts, but for reasons of his own is on leave for the year. Elizabeth has become a little frail: without the help of her son she would not be undertaking this taxing trip across half the world.

  We skip. They have reached Williamstown and have been conveyed to their hotel, a surprisingly large building for a small city, a tall hexagon, all dark marble outside and crystal and mirrors inside. In her room a dialogue takes place.

  ‘Will you be comfortable?’ asks the son.

  ‘I am sure I will,’ she replies. The room is on the twelfth floor, with a prospect over a golf course and, beyond that, over wooded hills.

  ‘Then why not have a rest? They are fetching us at six thirty. I’ll giv
e you a call a few minutes beforehand.’

  He is about to leave. She speaks.

  ‘John, what exactly do they want from me?’

  ‘Tonight? Nothing. It’s just a dinner with members of the jury. We won’t let it turn into a long evening. I’ll remind them you are tired.’

  ‘And tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow is a different story. You’ll have to gird your loins for tomorrow, I am afraid.’

  ‘I have forgotten why I agreed to come. It seems a great ordeal to put oneself through, for no good reason. I should have asked them to forget the ceremony and send the cheque in the mail.’

  After the long flight, she is looking her age. She has never taken care of her appearance; she used to be able to get away with it; now it shows. Old and tired.

  ‘It doesn’t work that way, I am afraid, Mother. If you accept the money, you must go through with the show.’

  She shakes her head. She is still wearing the old blue raincoat she wore from the airport. Her hair has a greasy, lifeless look. She has made no move to unpack. If he leaves her now, what will she do? Lie down in her raincoat and shoes?

  He is here, with her, out of love. He cannot imagine her getting through this trial without him at her side. He stands by her because he is her son, her loving son. But he is also on the point of becoming – distasteful word – her trainer.

  He thinks of her as a seal, an old, tired circus seal. One more time she must heave herself up on to the tub, one more time show that she can balance the ball on her nose. Up to him to coax her, put heart in her, get her through the performance.

  ‘It is the only way they have,’ he says as gently as he can. ‘They admire you, they want to honour you. It is the best way they can think of doing that. Giving you money. Broadcasting your name. Using the one to do the other.’

  Standing over the Empire-style writing table, shuffling through the pamphlets that tell her where to shop, where to dine, how to use the telephone, she casts him one of the quick, ironic looks that still have the power to surprise him, to remind him of who she is. ‘The best way?’ she murmurs.

  At six thirty he knocks. She is ready, waiting, full of doubts but prepared to face the foe. She wears her blue costume and silk jacket, her lady novelist’s uniform, and the white shoes with which there is nothing wrong yet which somehow make her look like Daisy Duck. She has washed her hair and brushed it back. It still looks greasy, but honourably greasy, like a navvy’s or a mechanic’s. Already on her face the passive look that, if you saw it in a young girl, you would call withdrawn. A face without personality, the kind that photographers have to work on to lend distinction. Like Keats, he thinks, the great advocate of blank receptiveness.

  The blue costume, the greasy hair, are details, signs of a moderate realism. Supply the particulars, allow the significations to emerge of themselves. A procedure pioneered by Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe, cast up on the beach, looks around for his shipmates. But there are none. ‘I never saw them afterwards, or any sign of them,’ says he, ‘except three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows.’ Two shoes, not fellows: by not being fellows, the shoes have ceased to be footwear and become proofs of death, torn by the foaming seas off the feet of drowning men and tossed ashore. No large words, no despair, just hats and caps and shoes.

  For as far back as he can remember, his mother has secluded herself in the mornings to do her writing. No intrusions under any circumstances. He used to think of himself as a misfortunate child, lonely and unloved. When they felt particularly sorry for themselves, he and his sister used to slump outside the locked door and make tiny whining sounds. In time the whining would change to humming or singing, and they would feel better, forgetting their forsakenness.

  Now the scene has changed. He has grown up. He is no longer outside the door but inside, observing her as she sits, back to the window, confronting, day after day, year after year, while her hair slowly goes from black to grey, the blank page. What doggedness, he thinks! She deserves the medal, no doubt about that, this medal and many more. For valour beyond the call of duty.

  The change came when he was thirty-three. Until then he had not read a word she had written. That was his reply to her, his revenge on her for locking him out. She denied him, therefore he denied her. Or perhaps he refused to read her in order to protect himself. Perhaps that was the deeper motive: to ward off the lightning stroke. Then one day, without a word to anyone, without even a word to himself, he took one of her books out of the library. After that he read everything, reading openly, in the train, at the lunch table. ‘What are you reading?’ ‘One of my mother’s books.’

  He is in her books, or some of them. Other people too he recognizes; and there must be many more he does not recognize. About sex, about passion and jealousy and envy, she writes with an insight that shakes him. It is positively indecent.

  She shakes him; that is what she presumably does to other readers too. That is presumably why, in the larger picture, she exists. What a strange reward for a lifetime of shaking people: to be conveyed to this town in Pennsylvania and given money! For she is by no means a comforting writer. She is even cruel, in a way that women can be but men seldom have the heart for. What sort of creature is she, really? Not a seal: not amiable enough for that. But not a shark either. A cat. One of those large cats that pause as they eviscerate their victim and, across the torn-open belly, give you a cold yellow stare.

  There is a woman waiting for them downstairs, the same young woman who fetched them from the airport. Her name is Teresa. She is an instructor at Altona College, but in the business of the Stowe Award a factotum, a dogsbody, and in the wider business a minor character.

  He sits in the front of the car beside Teresa, his mother sits at the rear. Teresa is excited, so excited that she positively chatters. She tells them about the neighbourhoods they are driving through, about Altona College and its history, about the restaurant they are headed for. In the middle of all the chatter she manages to get in two quick, mouselike pounces of her own. ‘We had A. S. Byatt here last fall,’ she says. ‘What do you think of A. S. Byatt, Ms Costello?’ And later: ‘What do you think of Doris Lessing, Ms Costello?’ She is writing a book on women writers and politics; she spends her summers in London doing what she calls research; he would not be surprised if she had a tape recorder hidden in the car.

  His mother has a word for people like this. She calls them the goldfish. One thinks they are small and harmless, she says, because each wants no more than the tiniest nibble of flesh, the merest hemidemimilligram. She gets letters from them every week, care of her publisher. Once upon a time she used to reply: thank you for your interest, unfortunately I am too busy to respond as fully as your letter deserves. Then a friend told her what these letters of hers were fetching on the autograph market. After that she stopped answering.

  Flecks of gold circling the dying whale, waiting their chance to dart in and take a quick mouthful.

  They arrive at the restaurant. It is raining lightly. Teresa drops them at the door and goes off to park the car. For a moment they are alone on the pavement. ‘We can still abscond,’ he says. ‘It is not too late. We can get a taxi, drop by the hotel to pick up our things, be at the airport by eight thirty, take the first flight out. We will have vanished from the scene by the time the Mounties arrive.’

  He smiles. She smiles. They will go through with the programme, that barely needs to be said. But it is a pleasure to toy with at least the idea of escape. Jokes, secrets, complicities; a glance here, a word there: that is their way of being together, of being apart. He will be her squire, she will be his knight. He will protect her as long as he is able. Then he will help her into her armour, lift her on to her steed, set her buckler on her arm, hand her her lance, and step back.

  There is a scene in the restaurant, mainly dialogue, which we will skip. We resume back at the hotel, where Elizabeth Costello as
ks her son to run through the list of the people they have just met. He obeys, giving each a name and function, as in life. Their host, William Brautegam, is Dean of Arts at Altona. The convenor of the jury, Gordon Wheatley, is a Canadian, a professor at McGill, who has written on Canadian literature and on Wilson Harris. The one they call Toni, who spoke to her about Henry Handel Richardson, is from Altona College. She is a specialist on Australia and has taught there. Paula Sachs she knows. The bald man, Kerrigan, is a novelist, Irish by birth, now living in New York. The fifth juror, the one who was seated next to him, is named Moebius. She teaches in California and edits a journal. She has also published some stories.

  ‘You and she had quite a tête-à-tête,’ says his mother. ‘Good-looking, isn’t she?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  She reflects. ‘But, as a group, don’t they strike you as rather . . .’

  ‘Rather lightweight?’

  She nods.

  ‘Well, they are. The heavyweights don’t involve themselves in this kind of show. The heavyweights are wrestling with the heavyweight problems.’

  ‘I am not heavyweight enough for them?’

  ‘No, you’re heavyweight all right. Your handicap is that you’re not a problem. What you write hasn’t yet been demonstrated to be a problem. Once you offer yourself as a problem, you might be shifted over into their court. But for the present you’re not a problem, just an example.’

  ‘An example of what?’

  ‘An example of writing. An example of how someone of your station and your generation and your origins writes. An instance.’

  ‘An instance? Am I allowed a word of protest? After all the effort I put into not writing like anyone else?’

  ‘Mother, there’s no point in picking on me to fight with. I am not responsible for the way the academy sees you. But you must surely concede that at a certain level we speak, and therefore write, like everyone else. Otherwise we would all be speaking and writing private languages. It is not absurd – is it? – to concern oneself with what people have in common rather than with what sets them apart.’