When I was sixteen there were two new English teachers at school: Mr Harrison was genial and engaging from day one, a cricketer on an open wicket; Mr Gough was gangly, awkward, reticent, an odd boy who didn't like sport. Mr Gough is the one I remember because it took a while. I don't remember what we were reading with him, I remember the tenor of what he said, the reserve and yet desire to say it as simply as possible.
Boyhood, the first volume of J.M. Coetzee's trilogy, reminded me of Mr Gough, and of myself. How generous/free are we able to be in telling our early lives?
It takes a while.
I have taken Coetzee sparingly for about twenty-five years and only now thought to read about his growing up in South Africa: small town astringent, fearful, correct, understanding little, foreseeing every tiny disaster, every humiliation.
So that is what is at stake. That is why he never makes a sound in class. That is why he is always neat, why his homework is always done, why he always knows the answer. He dare not slip. If he slips, he risks being beaten; and whether he is beaten or whether he struggles against being beaten, it is all the same, he will die.
Young Coetzee is aware that if he could break the spell of terror, slip up, take one beating, he would come out the other side a normal boy. Like Pinocchio, who dreamed of being a real boy.
Boyhood ends with a consideration of death.
He does not like to think of death. He would prefer it if, when people got old and sick, they simply stopped existing and disappeared. He does not like ugly old bodies; the thought of old people taking off their clothes makes him shudder. ....
His own death is a different matter. He is always somehow present after his death, floating above the spectacle, enjoying the grief of those who cased it and who, now that it is too late, wish he were still alive.
It took this long to get into Coetzee because I recognise and don't entirely like what I see in his mirror.
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