New book explores Coetzee's closely-guarded private life, almost two years after the death of its author JC Kannemeyer
JM Coetzee: 'All writing is biography.' Photograph: Eric Miller/AFP/Getty Images
The first authorised biography of the novelist JM Coetzee, in which the Nobel laureate discusses personal subjects including his daughter's illness, will be published in the UK this summer almost two years after the death of its author, JC Kannemeyer.
An intensely private man, who has twice declined to collect a Booker prize in person, Coetzee was persuaded to collaborate on the biography by the late professor of Afrikaans and Dutch at Stellenbosch University. Kannemeyer, who died on 25 December 2011, was the first researcher to be given complete access to Coetzee's private documents, including the manuscripts of his 16 novels. He also spoke at length to the author, and was put in touch by Coetzee with the author's family, friends and colleagues. Although Coetzee has said "all autobiography is storytelling, all writing is autobiography", and has published three volumes of fictionalised memoir, this is the first time he has given his full cooperation to a biographer.
"My letter of 9 June 2008 to John Coetzee, in which I asked his permission to undertake his biography, must have reached him while he was still writing away at Summertime. My request may have raised a smile. Here he had been since April 2005 in Adelaide writing about a fictional English biographer, Mr Vincent, engaged in the preliminaries for a biography of the dead author JM Coetzee. And here appears a real biographer applying to write a real biography," writes Kannemeyer in his book, JM Coetzee: A Life in Writing. "This biographer does not, as one would expect, emerge from the ranks of the English literary world, but from the much smaller province of Afrikaans literature. Perhaps the very fact that the request was coming from outside the sphere of English literature may have appealed to Coetzee, with his contrarian take on things."
Kannemeyer travelled to Adelaide in March 2009 to begin interviews with Coetzee, while the author was hard at work on his second revision of Summertime. "He answered all my questions meticulously, and impressed me as a man of integrity," he writes. "From the manuscripts that I perused in his office in the second week of my stay, I also got the impression of an incredibly hard worker who had spared no effort to develop and deploy his talent. The various versions, up to fourteen, that had been produced of Disgrace provide some measure of the demands Coetzee makes of himself as a writer."
Kannemeyer covers everything from Coetzee's early years to his time in Britain and America, the 30 years he spent back in South Africa and his time in Australia since 2002. Its independent publisher Scribe promised that the biography would "correct many of the misconceptions about Coetzee", looking at "aspects of his personal life kept largely hidden until now, including his son's early death, the collapse of his marriage and his daughter's illness". The book, translated by Michiel Heyns, also looks in depth at Coetzee's novels.
"In the course of our conversations I … developed a certain compassion with this intensely private and reserved man," writes Kannemeyer. "Even on highly sensitive topics, he kept strictly to the facts. Only when he spoke of the illness of his daughter, Gisela, was there a measure of emotion, and, at first, reticence. On this topic I got the impression – for the only time in our conversations – that he was withholding certain information from me (which he later provided). Add to this the sorrow he experienced at his father's dishonesty and alcoholism, the life and death of Nicolas, and the death from cancer of Philippa, and one stands amazed that someone could experience so much unhappiness and yet sustain himself and continue his work."
The biography was published late last year in Coetzee's native South Africa and in Australia, where the author now lives. It has received a mixed reception. "It is seldom that one can say that a book approaches magisterial status, but JC Kannemeyer's biography of JM Coetzee is such a case," praised the Financial Mail. A review in the Mail and Guardian was much harsher, finding that the book "suffers from many problems, including a star-struck author".
Scribe's publisher and founder, Henry Rosenbloom, said the press had found itself "in a difficult situation for the original Australian edition in late 2012. The biography was a magisterial work, but the author had died, the editor had been slaving over a massive manuscript, and we got the typeset files late from the South African publisher – they and we were in danger of missing both our print deadlines. Our production department saw a number of obvious errors that they tried to correct on the fly, but they knew there'd be others that they'd had no time to find or fix."
For the UK edition, which will be published on 18 June, there was time to be "as thorough as possible, without trying to re-edit the manuscript", said Rosenbloom. "My wife proofread the whole book, double-checking facts and references, and I went through it as well to correct grammatical errors, and stylistic inconsistencies or infelicities. I think we've done justice to the author and his subject, in unusually difficult circumstances."
An intensely private man, who has twice declined to collect a Booker prize in person, Coetzee was persuaded to collaborate on the biography by the late professor of Afrikaans and Dutch at Stellenbosch University. Kannemeyer, who died on 25 December 2011, was the first researcher to be given complete access to Coetzee's private documents, including the manuscripts of his 16 novels. He also spoke at length to the author, and was put in touch by Coetzee with the author's family, friends and colleagues. Although Coetzee has said "all autobiography is storytelling, all writing is autobiography", and has published three volumes of fictionalised memoir, this is the first time he has given his full cooperation to a biographer.
"My letter of 9 June 2008 to John Coetzee, in which I asked his permission to undertake his biography, must have reached him while he was still writing away at Summertime. My request may have raised a smile. Here he had been since April 2005 in Adelaide writing about a fictional English biographer, Mr Vincent, engaged in the preliminaries for a biography of the dead author JM Coetzee. And here appears a real biographer applying to write a real biography," writes Kannemeyer in his book, JM Coetzee: A Life in Writing. "This biographer does not, as one would expect, emerge from the ranks of the English literary world, but from the much smaller province of Afrikaans literature. Perhaps the very fact that the request was coming from outside the sphere of English literature may have appealed to Coetzee, with his contrarian take on things."
Kannemeyer travelled to Adelaide in March 2009 to begin interviews with Coetzee, while the author was hard at work on his second revision of Summertime. "He answered all my questions meticulously, and impressed me as a man of integrity," he writes. "From the manuscripts that I perused in his office in the second week of my stay, I also got the impression of an incredibly hard worker who had spared no effort to develop and deploy his talent. The various versions, up to fourteen, that had been produced of Disgrace provide some measure of the demands Coetzee makes of himself as a writer."
Kannemeyer covers everything from Coetzee's early years to his time in Britain and America, the 30 years he spent back in South Africa and his time in Australia since 2002. Its independent publisher Scribe promised that the biography would "correct many of the misconceptions about Coetzee", looking at "aspects of his personal life kept largely hidden until now, including his son's early death, the collapse of his marriage and his daughter's illness". The book, translated by Michiel Heyns, also looks in depth at Coetzee's novels.
"In the course of our conversations I … developed a certain compassion with this intensely private and reserved man," writes Kannemeyer. "Even on highly sensitive topics, he kept strictly to the facts. Only when he spoke of the illness of his daughter, Gisela, was there a measure of emotion, and, at first, reticence. On this topic I got the impression – for the only time in our conversations – that he was withholding certain information from me (which he later provided). Add to this the sorrow he experienced at his father's dishonesty and alcoholism, the life and death of Nicolas, and the death from cancer of Philippa, and one stands amazed that someone could experience so much unhappiness and yet sustain himself and continue his work."
The biography was published late last year in Coetzee's native South Africa and in Australia, where the author now lives. It has received a mixed reception. "It is seldom that one can say that a book approaches magisterial status, but JC Kannemeyer's biography of JM Coetzee is such a case," praised the Financial Mail. A review in the Mail and Guardian was much harsher, finding that the book "suffers from many problems, including a star-struck author".
Scribe's publisher and founder, Henry Rosenbloom, said the press had found itself "in a difficult situation for the original Australian edition in late 2012. The biography was a magisterial work, but the author had died, the editor had been slaving over a massive manuscript, and we got the typeset files late from the South African publisher – they and we were in danger of missing both our print deadlines. Our production department saw a number of obvious errors that they tried to correct on the fly, but they knew there'd be others that they'd had no time to find or fix."
For the UK edition, which will be published on 18 June, there was time to be "as thorough as possible, without trying to re-edit the manuscript", said Rosenbloom. "My wife proofread the whole book, double-checking facts and references, and I went through it as well to correct grammatical errors, and stylistic inconsistencies or infelicities. I think we've done justice to the author and his subject, in unusually difficult circumstances."
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