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The sound of silence: J M Coetzee

When Samuel Beckett's wife heard that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, she is said to have turned to him and pronounced simply: "Quelle catastrophe!" Beckett refused to go to Stockholm and despatched his publisher - "very kindly facing the turnips in my stead on that Nobloodybeldamday".

This year's winner, JM Coetzee, is being a little more obliging. Although he did not turn up to collect either of his Booker Prizes in 1993 and 1999, he will deliver this year's Nobel Lecture on 7 December and receive the prize itself three days later.

What Coetzee will not do is make himself available for interview. He belongs to that small band of heroic writers who - without being as reclusive as Pynchon or Salinger - have declined to make themselves available for publicity purposes.

Beckett, one of Coetzee's inspirations, stands at their head. He had "no views to inter", he would tell applicants; "not even for you" he said to friends. As John Fletcher, says in a new book, About Beckett: "Not once was his face seen on the front cover of a glossy magazine below a banner headline announcing: 'The publicity-shy dramatist talks to us exclusively about the starstudded production of X, opening this week at the Y Theatre on Z Avenue ..."

Beckett's work is notoriously severe and "difficult", of course. But another heroic abstainer is the popular thriller writer Thomas Harris, creator of Hannibal Lecter. Harris courteously refuses reporters in much the same words: "I really can't start giving interviews now. I never have and I never will. I thank you kindly for your interest. But I wish to allow my work to speak for itself." His agent Mort Janklow put it thus: "If you delivered a cheque for a million dollars, he would not give you a three-cent interview. I just want you to understand how ludicrous the request is."

In Harris's novel Red Dragon there is an image of journalism that speaks for itself. An intrusive reporter is captured by the killer and forced to conduct an interview on his terms: "You're a reporter. You're here to report. When I turn around, open your eyes and look at me. If you won't open them yourself, I'll staple your eyelids to your forehead." After delivering this unwelcome exclusive, the Dragon bites the reporter's tongue off and burns him to death.

Other writers have dealt with their distaste by giving interviews that are not interviews but authorial exercises.

Vladimir Nabokov insisted: "The interviewer's questions have to be sent to me in writing, answered by me in writing, and reproduced verbatim."

"The interviewer wishes to visit me," Nabokov noted scornfully. "He wishes to see my pencil poised above the page, my painted lampshade, my bookshelves, my old white borzoi asleep at my feet, He feels he needs the background music of bogus informality, and as many colourful details as can be memorised, if not actually jotted down ('N gulped down his vodka and quipped with a grin - '). Have I the heart to cancel the cosiness? I have."

In a volume called Strong Opinions, Nabokov reprinted all these "interviews" as his own work - after he had further revised them, carefully eliminating "every element of spontaneity, all semblance of actual talk".

Coetzee did much the same in a collection of essays called Doubling the Point which includes nine "interviews" conducted by mail with an academic collaborator. In one of them Coetzee explains his resistance to being interviewed. "An interview is not just, as you call it, an 'exchange': it is, nine times out of 10 (this is the 10th case, thank God!), an exchange with a complete stranger, yet a stranger permitted by the conventions of the genre to cross the boundaries of what is proper in conversat ion between strangers. I don't regard myself as a public figure, a figure in the public domain. I dislike the violation of propriety, to say nothing of the violation of private space, that occurs in the typical interview."

He goes on to say he does not like to surrender control. "Writers are used to being in control of the text and don't resign it easily." He derides the notion that in an interview a writer can suddenly reveal his innermost secrets. "In the transports of unrehearsed speech, the subject utters truths unknown to his waking self ", as he puts it. "To me," writes Coetzee, "truth is related to silence, to reflection, to the practice of writing. Speech is not a fount of truth but a pale and provisional version of writing."

Wearily, he admits to a reputation among journalists as "an evasive, arrogant, unpleasant customer" . Nobody who saw his wonderfully taciturn appearance on Newsnight when he won the Booker for Disgrace, being interrogated by the hapless Kirsty Wark, will have forgotten it. It is rare to see such unyieldingness - such a stone - on television.

Journalists have exacted revenge. After he won the Nobel, a vicious article appeared in the South African Sunday Times claiming to reveal "The secret life of JM Coetzee" (his divorce, the death of his son, a squabble in the University of Cape Town English department, his love of long-distance cycle racing).

Another piece in the same paper called him "a charlatan", denouncing his writing as "lifeless", his vision as "repellent". Coetzee's books are treated as no more than evidence for his own pathology.

Such activities confirm Coetzee's commitment to express himself only in the writing that he can control. In his novels Boyhood and Youth - this is a writer who believes that "all autobiography is storytelling, all storytelling is autobiography" - Coetzee has drawn the most piercing, harsh picture of his own development that it is possible to conceive. To read these books and then imagine that a journalist can reveal more of his "secret life" is grotesque.

The Nobel Lecture will be a charged occasion. In the first chapter of his latest book, Elizabeth Costello, a famous novelist, receives a prize and makes an awkward acceptance speech, comparing her performance to that of the ape who addresses a learned academy in a story by Kafka. When Coetzee received the Jerusalem Prize in 1987, he contentiously called South African literature a "less than fully human literature, unnaturally preoccupied with power and the torsions of power".

Whatever he says this time, it will come from Coetzee's true being as a writer, one of the greatest we have. We may all want, from time to time, to have difficult writing converted into an easier form of verbiage, to be made available without having actually to be read, to be de-created, but we should resist these destructive impulses. And we must admire JM Coetzee for his exemplary intransigence.

 

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