Writers tell us about their literary loves as part of a forum which appears in PEN America 13: Lovers.

Jessica Hagedorn | John Barth | Yusef Komunyakaa | Stewart O’Nan | Anne Landsman |
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh | Lily Tuck | Jesse Ball | Elissa Schappell

A Magnificent Neighbor

In 1979 and 1980, I studied with J.M. Coetzee in the English Department at the University of Cape Town, taking his “Realism in the Novel” class and a seminar on Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. I can still see the sun streaking into the classroom, dust motes dancing as we listened to Coetzee’s precise voice, the elegant turns and curves of his crystalline intellect. He had a way of carving his questions into the air with devastating simplicity. Quite often, the class was stupefied, perhaps by the heat, perhaps by the difficult times we were living in, perhaps by being nineteen and twenty and not knowing very much about anything.

Or perhaps everyone felt the way I did: heart in my throat, stunned into silence by this small, quiet man’s brilliance. His gifts as a writer were becoming known but he had not yet been crowned as one of the greatest writers of our time. When I began to read his novels, I heard his voice speaking the words, the same spare prose he used in the classroom, the same economy and honesty. In this way, he continued to be my teacher and moral compass through the darkest days of apartheid. By that time I was living in the United States, and reading about South Africa—in particular, reading Life & Times of Michael K—took me on a journey to the earliest part of myself, to my childhood in Worcester, a small Boland town ringed by mountains. The physical descriptions of the land were searingly familiar, and the excruciating solitude of Michael K so vivid.

In the late ’80s, Coetzee gave a reading at Endicott’s bookstore on the Upper West Side. I spoke to him there, reminding him I was once a student of his and letting him know I now lived in New York City, writing screenplays. He said drily, “You escaped the UCT English department,” and gave a faint smile. When I began writing my first novel, The Devil’s Chimney, in 1994, I couldn’t help recalling the desiccated landscape of In the Heart of the Country, the harsh world of Waiting for the Barbarians. But working in his shadow, guided by his influence, was never overwhelming or suffocating.

In 1997, the first of his memoirs, Boyhood, was published. I opened to page one, and was electrified by the line, “They live on a housing estate outside the town of Worcester, between the railway line and the National Road.” What? J.M. Coetzee lived in Worcester, where I was born and raised? He looked out at the same purple mountains I did, riding his bicycle to school every morning? I could scarcely believe it. I had always felt stretched thin between continents and cultures, and this was a sudden grounding, an affirmation that this town so unknown, so far away from the center of everything, meant something, was a worthy subject. As I read, I ran into familiar landmarks, people I knew, resonant details. The navy-blue cap he wore to school with the image of a mountain and stars on it, emblazoned with the legend “Per Aspera Ad Astra,” was the same cap my brother wore. Coetzee went to Boswell’s Circus too, and the bioscope! Other descriptions were painful and all too familiar—the unabashed racism, the canings of children at school, a father who drank too much.

Over the years, I’ve continued to read almost everything Coetzee has written, including the speeches he made upon receiving the Nobel Prize. I’ve delighted in his experimentation with the form of the novel, and reflected on the depth of his moral questioning. But I have never forgotten that shock of recognition, that my town was his town. No wonder I had read Life & Times of Michael K as if I was coming home, as if I could see every rock and every crevice up close. No wonder that when I sit down to write, Coetzee is always there, not admonishing, not making suggestions, but silent, a magnificent neighbor.
 

Copyright © 2010 by Anne Landsman. All rights reserved.