Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life is the third installment of J.M. Coetzee’s memoirs, following on Boyhood (1998) and Youth (2002). Summertime pursues further the themes touched on in these earlier volumes: maturation, solitude and alienation, family dynamics, the outsider and the artist in society, South African politics, racism, sex, ideas of home and homeland, and exile. Taken together, the books offer a multivolume portrait of the artist.
They follow an arc across decades from Coetzee’s boyhood in the 1940s and 1950s through his maturity in the 1970s. Over this period he struggles to define himself as an individual, tries to make his way in the world, pursues grand literary ambitions, tallies up unsatisfying love affairs, makes compromises, and suffers humiliations and setbacks. A complex, enigmatic, and creative human being emerges in Coetzee’s own account.
Summertime comprises mainly fictional interviews conducted between a man named Vincent, who is working on a biography about the dead J.M. Coetzee, and five people who knew Coetzee in his thirties. The interviewees include Julia, a woman who had a brief extramarital affair with Coetzee; Coetzee’s cousin Margot; a Brazilian dancer and widow named Adriana whom Coetzee was infatuated with; a colleague named Martin from Coetzee’s years teaching at the University of Cape Town; and another colleague from the University named Sophie, who was also one of Coetzee’s former lovers.
Vincent says to Sophie of his biography-in-progress, “It is a serious book, a seriously intended biography. I concentrate on the years from Coetzee’s return to South Africa in 1971/72 until his first public recognition in 1977. That seems to me an important period of his life, important yet neglected, a period when he was still finding his feet as a writer.” When challenged by Martin to explain his biographical methodology, namely, interviewing various people mentioned by the famous, now dead, writer, in notebooks he left behind, Vincent explains, “I am not interested in coming to a final judgment on Coetzee. . . . What I am doing is telling the story of a stage in his life, or if we can’t have a single story then several stories from several perspectives.”
Vincent focuses on that period of Coetzee’s life when he lived with his elderly father in bachelor seclusion in a rundown house in Cape Town, after spending years abroad in England and the United States. He teaches English at a local school. He expresses deep ambivalence about having to care for his father. His life seems at an impasse. Cousin Margot recalls a conversation with him when she had once proposed that he buy a house in Cape Town and write a best-seller. Here is Coetzee’s response:
“I don’t know enough about people and their fantasy lives. Anyway, I wasn’t destined for that fate.”
“What fate?”
“The fate of being a rich and successful writer.”
“Then what is the fate you are destined for?”
“For exactly the present one. For living with an ageing parent in a house in the white suburbs with a leaky roof.”
The testimonials of the various interviewees paint Coetzee as an awkward outsider. Julia, for example, describes him as a loner: “Socially inept. Repressed in the wider sense of the word.” The interviewees recall a man who struggled to sustain social contacts, a gentle but dispassionate lover, a diligent but uninspiring teacher, and a man of earnest social and political convictions—particularly regarding the illegitimacy of South Africa’s apartheid-era policies—whose ideas were sometimes simplistic and even contradictory. He is remembered by most of the interviewees as essentially unknowable. Few of the interviewees seem to know much about Coetzee’s literary ambitions or projects other than the fact that he was working on or wrote some books during the time that they knew him. He kept his creative life and inspirations to himself. Martin, for example, notes, “You must have noted how rarely he discussed the sources of his own creativity. In part that came out of the native secretiveness I mentioned.”
The fact that he gained a reputation as a world-famous writer confuses just about every one of the people interviewed. Adriana, for example, asks Vincent, “So tell me, am I wrong about John Coetzee? Because to me, frankly, he was not anybody. He was not a man of substance. . . . Because to my mind, a talent for words is not enough if you want to be a great writer. You have also to be a great man. And he was not a great man. He was a little man. An unimportant little man.” Similarly, Sophie says of Coetzee, “As a writer he knew what he was doing, he had a certain style, and style is the beginning of distinction. But he had no special sensitivity that I could detect, no original insight into the human condition. He was just a man, a man of his time, talented, maybe even gifted, but, frankly, not a giant.”
The recollections especially of Coetzee’s former lovers Julia and Sophie are intimate and occasionally brutal. Both women remember him as a gentle man who was also a cold fish, a man incapable of illiciting romantic passion. Both women are reluctant or refuse to bend to the idea that they will appear in Coetzee’s biography as romantic conquests or footnotes. Julia, for example, tells Vincent, “I warn you most earnestly: if you go away from here and start fiddling with the text, the whole thing will turn to ash in your hands. I really was the main character. John really was a minor character.”
One might assume that the book’s artifice would put the reader at a distance from its subject. After all, Coetzee portrays himself as dead. What could be more distancing than that? And the book is tied together through the interview transcripts of a fictional biographer. One could even suspect that Coetzee intends for this artifice to seal off and protect his character and reputation, like concrete barriers around an embassy. But on the contrary, through this artifice, this meta-structure, Coetzee has created multifarious, realistic, thoughtful and sometimes even brutal vignettes of himself. By showing himself through the eyes of characters who knew him from different perspectives—as a paramour, as a relative, as an acqaintance, as a colleague, and as a lover—we see the parts of the man and his character come together into a self-portrait of surprising depth and sophistication.
Coetzee’s earlier books, Boyhood and Youth, are masterpieces in the traditional form of memoir and possess the narrative vitality of great bildungsroman. They offer up vivid self-portraits, enlivened by memorable evocations of their respective settings (i.e., South Africa in the 1950s, London in the 1960s), in an idiosyncratic, honest and self-conscious voice that is at turns hilarious and wistful. Summertime, by contrast, is more experimental. Its structure, comprised of different voices and, as mentioned, more artifice, lacks the narrative straighforwardness and cohesion of those earlier memoirs. It’s a kind of hybrid of novel and autobiography and as a result feels as challenging and enigmatic as the man it portrays.
Why did Coetzee structure this book in this way? It could simply be the best form for the memoirist at this specific time in his life. After all, Boyhood and Youth dealt specifically with the navel gazing and egocentrism typical of adolescence and young adulthood. But the road to maturity and adult responsibility grants greater primacy to the thoughts and opinions of others. Coetzee, later in life, has perhaps chosen to give those who he knew, those whose lives intersected his and who influenced him, their due, their say in the story of his development as an individual and as an artist. The fact that Coetzee has returned to South Africa from years abroad to care for his father is the ultimate proof of a significant benchmark in his heretofore footloose life. He has entered an age of self-sacrifice. Thus both the form and the content of Summertime signify maturity and respect for the perspectives and viewpoints of others.
Coetzee could also have intended for Summertime to serve as an iconoclastic book, a book meant to challenge our traditional or preconceived notions of what memoir is, demand more of us as readers, and also pose important questions, such as what is memoir, anyway? Is it fact or is it fiction? Is it record or simply reminiscence? Is it some of all of these things? And why would a writer, a writer of fiction especially, commit to paper the facts, or something like the facts, of his or her own life (disappointing and troublesome as they may be) for the scrutiny and delectation of anyone inclined to pore over the sordid details? Summertime doesn’t definitively answer these questions, but it incites them. It accomplishes this while also portraying the artist as a man, an adult, alienated but striving to connect and participate in the varieties of experience and life.