The critic and the novelist

Novelists do not always make the best critics, and vice versa. But there are writers — Henry James, Virginia Woolf and John Updike spring to mind — who are similarly gifted in both fields. Such cases are interesting because of the questions they raise about the relationship between the novels and the criticism. How similar are the two stylistically? Can the judgments of the critic ever be independent of the inclinations of the novelist? (Or, to put it another way, are writers likely to favour those novelists who most resemble themselves?) Trickier still is the question of truthfulness: which, out of the fiction or the criticism, can best be said to represent the real author? Fiction’s domain is the imagination, whereas criticism deals with facts. But despite its basic falsity, fiction at its best reveals a kind of truth that will always be inaccessible to the critic.

All these questions are prompted by this fascinating collection of essays by the Nobel Prize-winning South African novelist J. M. Coetzee. Written mainly for the New York Review of Books, the pieces here range from overviews of relatively minor early 20th-century European writers (Robert Walser, Sándor Márai) to reviews of individual works by living novelists (Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, V. S. Naipaul’s Half a Life). As a young man Coetzee worked as a computer programmer (an experience he describes in his autobiographical novel Youth), and subsequently combined writing fiction with a career as an English professor. The essays in this volume show these influences: restrained in tone and only cautiously speculative, they proceed with a dogged, patient logic that is singular to this author.

Coetzee is often at his best when he picks out just one idea or theme connected with a writer and then pursues it with absolute determination. He does this, for example, in an essay on Walt Whitman, in which he considers the poet’s sexuality and its relationship to his art. During his life Whitman formed a number of close attachments to young men, including many of the injured soldiers he ministered to while working as a Soldiers’ Missionary during the American Civil War. When he wrote about these attachments, he tended to do so in the manly language of the day: in the 1876 preface to Leaves of Grass he speaks of the ‘sane and beautiful affection of man for man, latent in all young fellows’. Biographers, unsurprisingly, have asked whether there was a tacit acknowledgement that this kind of language was a code for ‘affection’ of a more intimate kind. But Coetzee, without denying that Whitman may have had sex with other men, is impatient with the anachronistic prurience that seeks to ‘interpret’ such language:

There is a certain sophistication . . . whose nature lies in taking things simply for what they seem to be. It is this sort of wisdom, whose other name might be tact, that we are in danger of denying to our Victorian forebears.

What of the relationship between Coetzee the novelist and Coetzee the critic? In his introduction to the collection, Derek Attridge suggests that there is a gulf between the two. ‘One would not have predicted it if one had read the novels alone,’ he writes, ‘but Coetzee is an ideal reviewer.’ Well, Coetzee may be an ideal reviewer, but I’m not sure his criticism diverges that much from his fiction. Linguistically, they are of a piece: there is the same spare style, the same interrogative method of argument. His knowledge of literature is formidably wide-ranging, but he nonetheless displays a preference for writers of a certain kind, who in many cases are not dissimilar to him. He evidently sympathises with provincials and outsiders (V. S. Naipaul, Joseph Roth) and with novelists who have pursued other careers besides writing (Italo Svevo, W. G. Sebald). He is interested in novelists who take extreme, or heretical positions: what he describes as Gabriel García Márquez’s desire ‘to speak on behalf of paedophilia’ in Memories of my Melancholy Whores could be seen as paralleling his own suggestion, in various works, that the slaughter of animals for meat is an act of barbarity. Though an impeccable stylist in many ways, he is not greatly interested in, or impressed by, linguistic exuberance. For that reason, an essay on Saul Bellow sits rather awkwardly in this book, particularly as he makes the odd claim that Bellow’s best work is his second novel, The Victim.

What of the question of truthfulness? This is a complex matter with Coetzee, because he himself is so inscrutable. In his fictional writings (‘novels’ can seem a slightly misleading term) he has often come close to self-revelation, while always stopping just short. Is the protagonist of Boyhood and Youth really Coetzee? And what about Elizabeth Costello, the author figure at the centre of his two most recent novels? If Coetzee the novelist flirts with self-disclosure, Coetzee the critic adopts the opposite tack: compared with many critics, he gives little of his own opinions and prejudices away. But it is wholly characteristic of this unpredictable writer that this should be the case. For one thing is certain about Coetzee: we will never be entirely sure what he thinks.

William Skidelsky is Deputy Editor of Prospect magazine.