Deep learning
Neel Mukherjee
Late Essays 2006–2017
by J.M. Coetzee
Harvill Secker, £17.99, pp. 304
Given the brilliance of his career as a fic-
tion-writer, it is easy to forget that J.M.
Coetzee has a commensurate career in non-
fiction. He trained as an academic (Eng-
lish literature, mathematics, linguistics and
computer analysis of stylistics), taught for
several years in the US and in South Afri-
ca, and continues to translate, write essays
and reviews — most notably for the New
York Review of Books — and introductions
to books. This third volume of non-fiction
pieces, Late Essays 2006-2017, gathers a
selection mostly from the NYRB and from
his introductions to a series of novels trans-
lated into Spanish and published by the
Spanish-language press El Hilo de Ariadna.
The current crop seems to be sim-
pler essays than the ones that appeared in
Stranger Shores (2001) and Inner Workings
(2007). In the earlier works, we’ll find a dis-
cussion of the concept of hybridity in the
memoirs of Breytenbach, or a long piece on
Benjamin’s ‘Arcades Project’, or referenc-
es to Homi Bhabha’s notoriously impene-
trable book The Location of Culture, or a
bravura lecture, ‘What Is A Classic?’, which
forensically dissects T.S. Eliot’s own lec-
ture bearing the same title that breathtak-
ingly positioned the modernist project in a
redefined map of European literary great-
ness. Certainly, one can see the differences
between the introductions and the NYRB
pieces, but this is not a failing, rather an
intelligent understanding of genres: the
demands of a short introduction to a Euro-
pean or English-language classic in Span-
ish translation are different from those of
an intellectual (but not academic) literary-
political magazine.
Coetzee’s lifelong interest in Beckett
— his PhD dissertation was on the Irish
writer — appears here in no fewer than
four essays, the last of which, ‘Eight Ways
of Looking at Samuel Beckett’, is original,
revelatory, dense with thought and ideas
that could be used as a springboard for sev-
eral doctoral theses. There are two essays on
Patrick White, one of the greatest novelists
of the last century (and a fellow Nobel lau-
reate); the essay on White’s posthumously
published unfinished novel, The Hanging
Garden, has an illuminating discussion on
The Vivisector and how the novel ‘was...
fated to be an elegy not only for the school
of painting represented by Duffield [the
novel’s protagonist] but also for the school
of writing represented by White himself’. A
startling essay on Les Murray sails close to
personal criticism, augustly reprimanding
the poet for carping about his status as an
outsider in Australian literary life, a status
Coetzee thinks is largely a pose.
Unsurprisingly, given Coetzee’s deep
knowledge and abiding interest in German
language and literature, there are essays
on Goethe, Hölderlin, Kleist and Walser
(Coetzee is a great standard-bearer for
this sui generis Swiss writer). The essay on
translating Hölderlin presents a clear (and
gripping) summary of the life and works of
the poet, finds time to talk about his appro-
priation by the National Socialists and con-
test the appropriation, before moving on
to the merits and shortcomings of MichaelHamburger’s translation of the poetry. One
can only feel humility and gratitude in the
presence of such deep learning, so lucidly
conveyed. It brings to mind a similar essay,
‘Paul Celan and his Translators’, in Inner
Workings, and the long essays, on translat-
ing Kafka, and Robert Musil’s Diaries, in
Stranger Shores.
A spare, dry sense of humour occasional-
ly flashes through the essays. Making a list of
the jobs (and their corresponding locations
in parentheses) which the young Beckett
applied for, Coetzee writes, ‘...advertising
copywriting (in London), piloting commer-
cial aircraft (in the skies)’. And Coetzee’s
own stylistic austerity can make certain riffs
in the ‘Eight Ways...’ piece look positively
like flights of fancy. His powers of syntheses
and linkage are formidable, something only
possible to pull off if an author has seem-
ingly boundless reserves of knowledge and
reading. Not a single page goes by in this
collection when you don’t learn something:
he will pick out the moment from Beck-
ett’s letters when, talking about Cézanne,
Beckett will strike ‘the first authentic note
of [his] mature, post-humanist phase’. The
term ‘late style’, certainly in the Said-ian
connotation of it, is often meant to signify
jaggedness and incompletion married to aMuddled in minutiae
Richard Davenport-Hines
The World Broke in Two: Virginia
Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence,
E.M. Forster, and the Year that
Changed Literature
by Bill Goldstein
Bloomsbury, £25, pp. 336‘Publitical’ is a neologism worth avoiding.
Bill Goldstein uses it to describe T.S. Eliot’s
activities when launching and promoting his
quarterly review of literature, the Criterion,
which had its first issue in October 1922.
Eliot wanted an eminent French author as a
contributor: ‘the only name worth getting is
Proust’, he told Ezra Pound. As the founding
editor of the New York Times books web-
site, Goldstein is attuned to cultural fash-
ions, publicity drives and the politicking of
literary factions. And so he makes a painful-
ly reductive explanation of Eliot’s remark:
‘The importance of Proust was publitical
above all.’
1922 was the publication year of P.G.
Wodehouse’s The Clicking of Cuthbert and
of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philos-
ophus. It was the foundation year of the
Laugh-a-Gram cartoon film company (pro-
prietor, Walt Disney). But there was nothing
‘publitical’ about Wodehouse or Wittgen-
stein, and so Goldstein turns his focus on
Eliot (who finished and published The Waste
Land), D.H. Lawrence (who wrote a novel
set in Australia, while living in a small town
in New South Wales), E.M. Forster (who
overcame writer’s block and began his last
novel), and Virginia Woolf (who wrote a
short story, ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’,
which she expanded into a wonderful novel).
As Kangaroo was published in 1923, A Pas-
sage to India in 1924 and Mrs Dalloway in
1925, the reality behind Goldstein’s chrono-
logical arrangement seems weak.
Goldstein is an enthusiast for literature
with the right measure of self-belief. He
crackles with excitement about the making
of books and the creating of literary repu-
tations. His admiration for his four chief
protagonists gives a nice temper to his own
book: there is no one whom he wants to
show up or do down. Einstein and Patrick
Hennessy, scientist and historian, both took
as their motto: ‘Never lose a holy curiosity.’
But although Goldstein reveres his quartet,
his inquisitiveness is neither discriminating
nor hallowed. He gives his readers a trudg-
ing chronicle, week by week, sometimes even
day by day, of his protagonists’ activities and
ideas during 1922. His purpose is to convey
the tensions, fumbling, frustration, arousal
and joyous climax of creativity. But the fore-speaks admiringly of Marley’s ‘iconic sta-
tus’ and (in another cliché) his ‘consum-
mate professionalism’. Through all the
‘trials and tribulations’ (another cliché) of
his fame the Trench Town rocker contin-
ued to embrace universal love, smoke ganja
(he was ‘no joker-smoker’, says a friend),
and eat nut cutlets. Unfortunately, Marley’s
proto-hippy ‘One Love’ vibe died a death
in Jamaica long ago: there is too much vio-
lence for kindly, dreadlocked Rastafari ide-
alists who grow cannabis plants and hope to
save the planet by smoking them. So Much
Things to Say (the title is taken from a song
on Marley’s Exodus album) offers lots of
new information on the Jesus-like cult of
Holy Bob.
Not a single page goes by in
this collection when you don’t
learn somethingsimplicity born of wisdom and maturity, but
here, Coetzee’s ‘late style’ is all lucidity.