I finished Summertime last week and I’m still thinking about it. It doesn’t get less cruel; in fact, the dead Coetzee’s failures only become more grave, but it does get more bearable, partly because it becomes more of a novel, by which I guess I mean more fictional, more self-consciously experimental. And the people the biographer interviews at the end are more philosophical and have less at stake than those at the beginning, so the whole thing feels less tense. Here’s an excerpt from the final interview that shows what I mean. The person speaking is named Sophie. She was a colleague of dead Coetzee’s at the University of Cape Town. She is responding here to the biographer’s suggestion that she should tell him everything about her relationship with the dead man because “a great writer becomes the property of us all . . . is to some extent public property.”
On that subject my opinion is irrelevant. What is relevant is what he himself believed. And there the answer is clear. He believed our life-stories are ours to construct as we wish, within or even against the constraints imposed by the real world — as you yourself acknowledged a moment ago. That is why I asked about authorization, a question you brushed aside. It was not the authorization of his family or executors I had in mind, it was his own authorization. If you were not authorized by him to expose the private side of his life, then I certainly won’t assist you.
Their competing claims on, or rather, for, dead Coetzee interest me. On the one hand, Sophie seems to be saying the only person fit to write a biography is the biography’s subject, even though that must make it by definition an incomplete story — except, of course, if the auto-biographer stages a fictional death and writes a fictional biography. But how is this so different from the broken, distorted, opinionated stories that strangers produce about any of us? Why is the subject’s own story about himself allowed to be a fiction, while the stories of others require authorization?
I think I find this so interesting because I have never managed to think clearly about how I live my life. I mean I don’t have any sense that I make decisions that lead in a particular direction, or that my life even reflects my values. I know that it does, but it seems an accident, a happy accident, even, that it should. I don’t remember ever saying, I will live in such and such a manner. I will do such and such a kind of work. Instead I drift around in a perplexity of feeling, and somehow I must follow those feelings into decisions and those decisions accumulate into a direction, and here I am. Perhaps what I mean is that my life seems to be defined by a set of longings, some of which are distinct, some inchoate, some small and possibly sweet, some massive and possibly obnoxious. Those longings must result sometimes in my making choices, life requires all kinds of choices, but it’s never the choice that I remember. I hardly think about the past at all, though it shapes my imagination more than anything else. That sounds like a peculiar distinction, but it makes sense, because I hardly think of anything at all. I worry and fantasize and stage conversations, but I don’t weigh options. I arrive at everything crab-wise. I get this worry of Coetzee’s, then, that if you live your life that way you may fail to notice the moments when a direct glance is required, when you really must commit, when the decision is everything, and it must be acknowledged as a decision, and the right or wrong of it accepted. Those moments you can only see in memory, perhaps. Maybe you can really only see them when none of the usual things are at stake anymore. And so comes the temptation to stage your own death, to see yourself from a place where your longings have no force, to enter the heart of another.
On the subject of decision making and how it happens, the Writer’s Almanac sent me Robert Frost this morning. The familiarity of the last three lines make it easy to forget how good this poem is — sort of like if you’ve had the same really flattering haircut for years you forget it’s flattering because you’re so bored of it. But it still looks good!
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Your reflections on how life is lived helped me clarify my frustrations with some educational reform documents I’ve read recently. They tend to characterize communities as making conscious and unwise decisions for children. It all sounds too intentional (and intentionally stupid) to me. So, I’ve been playing with the idea that people and communities thrive as they think through clashing priorities and potential options, that few follow any pre-planned strategy. I think traditions matter–they shape imaginations; i.e. a past–but that most of us arrive at decisions “crab-wise” and do our best. Thanks, M.E.!
This is great to hear, Cheryl. Thank you!