FOE DEFOE & COETZEE: one black beetle knows another

Daniel Defoe was plain Foe by birth. Coetzee was and is Coetzee. He has only one look for the camera. 

There's a new mighty volume on Defoe. The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe. He would love that. He who was the eighteenth century in English letters, has engendered a handbook. I read a review in the New York Review of Books, 'The Fact Man'. 

Defoe could talk to Everybody in Their Own way. He had fingers in many pies, he'd been there, done, or knew someone who had, he was a one-man band, a self-publicist. JM Coetzee plugs into Daniel Foe, into Cruso, and Friday; into his reading. His writing literally emerges from his reading, as from Adam's rib. Gathering his own hinterland into the weave: South Africa, America, Australia. 

J.M. Coetzee looks the same in all his portraits, as if he were already a portrait, a portrait of a portrait, a stab at a portrait, three-quarter view, three-quarter darkness. Giving away less and less with every iteration.

After a swift read of the slender Foe, I started the only other Coetzee book I have, Elizabeth Costello; which I found painful. No, I kept thinking, no you don't have to do it this way. In fact, drop it all, do not pass GO, do not collect 200.

I did pass GO. I read the whole book, with a deepening revulsion/understanding. There are many ways of inhabiting books; one black beetle knows another; yes. Elizabeth Costello is a black beetle; as is J.M. Coetzee; as I am. But once we're there, in the black beetle arena of books and reading, we're as different as we can be. Difference is what makes us black beetles in the first place. We need to differentiate as we go along. Constructing and undermining with every move, every word.

Jack Robinson, Charles Boyle

Reading books by someone you know is even more piquant on the train: strangers all around and speed and space out of the window on a grey day ready for populating. The line from Cork to Dublin in January features reeds and heaps in flooded fields bordered by ivy-darkened trees, and up as far as Templemore, Charles Boyle writing as Jack Robinson about Robinson (Crusoe) in a language already familiar from conversation or emails. It is also discomfiting; I start to imagine people I know reading my books.

At Templemore a family gets on and settles two compartments down with a mammy who howls as across windy hillsides and small children who shriek back: life is this loud. I try for a reading that excludes all but give in to the easy contemplation of the lives of others, the very thing that Robinsons do not know how to do; this is an exercise for isolates like me who leave the island or come down from the tree with all the inner resources they have accrued now ready for dispersal.

My favourite Defoe reading was when I was about 23 and went on holiday with my mother—the only such occasion ever—and read the right-hand pages only of Robinson Crusoe. The book was heavy. I was recovering from having had my wisdom teeth taken out. It was an apt and adequate way to read half a book and keep a mother at a manageable distance in this unusual circumstance: Ibiza in the era of unfinished hotels on the beach.

The other Charles Boyle/Jack Robinson I read on the train was Jack Robinson by the same author, which is about staying close and keeping a distance from writers you know or could know. I do not know many writers; I know more artists and tree-planters. There are possibly some tactics here. The quote from Coleridge on the back cover strikes me as being the wrong way around. He says that writers of the past inspire passivity and submissiveness, whereas writers who are one's contemporaries can be friends. Writers of the past, like Virginia Woolf, Robert Walser, Bruno Schulz, feel like friends with an intensity beyond most that life in the living has to offer.

Just across from my seat is another arrival from the crusty midlands of Ireland, in her Regatta anorak and her black wig, or black-dyed hair, I'd suspect wig, reading her Irish Daily Mail and bulking consistently from the chin down to the floor.