About two months ago I picked up J.M. Coetzee’s The Pole — a compact story of late life romantic love. I enjoyed it so much I immediately went on to Waiting for the Barbarians and then Disgrace. You know you’ve enjoyed a story when, after finishing, you immediately find another by the same author. But that second book can be a bitter disappointment. Many people (if still a small minority of us) can write one very good book. Few people can write two good books. And by the time you are at three good books? Well, I guess the Nobel can’t be too far off.
There’s no doubt Coetzee can write, though I don’t suppose saying so of a Nobel prize winner is a revelation. Nevertheless, I was surprised by how spare, clean and unshowy his books were. His style is pure yet elegant; it fits his stories like some perfect Hollywood gown might fit Audrey Hepburn. Still, what makes a writer great isn’t usually or often great writing. There are stylists of such power that the words themselves are sufficient testament to greatness. Dickens is that way. More often, though, greatness in a writer is born of very good writing paired with deep human insight — by which I mean insight into people. Bellow, Austen, and Tolstoy are all fine stylists, but what makes their work great is their remarkable empathy — their ability to understand and put into words how people are. That is the real gift of a great writer.
Coetzee, at least for me, isn’t Tolstoy or Austen or Bellow, but he is a great writer. There isn’t a false human moment in any of the three novels. And these are NOT safe, easy novels. The Pole deals with a topic that’s hardly ever touched — late life romantic love — and does it extraordinarily well. Its main character is as carefully drawn as any Austen heroine, as human, and as finely placed within her culture. Waiting for Barbarians has its own complexities, featuring a difficult personal journey, a fall from relative power into the most abject of miseries and tortures, paired up with a biting commentary on the ethics of empire (this, too, handled with care and thoughtfulness). Disgrace is probably the most complicated of them all. It’s a black, bitter novel of personal disgrace and social disintegration. There are a lot of uncomfortable scenes and while it was my least favorite of the three, not one moment seemed untrue even while much of it felt deeply unpleasant.
Coetzee is 84 now and should be too old to be writing great novels. Yet The Pole (the newest) was my personal favorite of the three. I doubt the general critical consensus would agree, but The Pole is the most interesting and the most unique. There are plenty of books about the ethics of empire and even more about personal disgrace. There are precious few about the role of unrequited romantic love in late life. The Pole has none of the social commentary of Barbarians or Disgrace, and none of the bitterness. And it’s a better book on both counts.
I haven’t read any book that treated this particular theme so well. For Coetzee, obviously at an age where he can ask the question, wants to know whether romantic love has meaning past a certain age. Can it still be transformative? And should we let it be an option for us? Most of all, Coetzee asks what we can make of romantic love when we are no longer capable of feeling it. Coetzee isn’t dealing in easy questions or easy answers. On the one hand, our culture could care less about late-life romantic love. But if pushed about it, most people will doggedly insist that romantic love is possible at any age. Coetzee isn’t necessarily buying that and The Pole explores these questions in the most unexpected ways.
The Pole is a short novel, and it has only two characters that matter. The Pole, a moderately well-known, aging concert pianist who is a renowned Chopin interpreter and Beatriz, a society woman living comfortably in Barcelona. She’s married in the distant sort of way that often accompanies late-stage marriage when all the children are grown, and she leads a solid if typically uninspiring upper middle-class life. She is drafted to host the Pole after a recital in Barcelona for a music series of which she is patron.
They have a dinner together (with another patron couple) and something about Beatriz catches and holds the pianist. He falls in love. A lover of Dante, she is his Beatrice: an idol of female perfection, a guide to the next world. She is, somehow, the meaning that is left in his life. Much older than Beatriz, previously married, a grown-up child of his own, is not the Pole too old for this? He doesn’t know her at all. Is not Romeo at 70 just silly? Has his art left him vulnerable to romantic love? Is this one last flowering of love before death? It isn’t really clear, and I don’t think Coetzee cares to make it so.
The Pole begins a pursuit of Beatriz. It’s a pursuit that is straightforward and simple. Mostly, he just tells her how he feels. Perhaps he has no choice in this. As one ages, the games of romantic love become absurd, and the Pole shows no inclination to play them. Nor is he in a position where such games would likely work. He is old. Too old for Beatriz. Too old, in our culture at least, for romantic love. He is not at a level of success or wealth that might change that. Even in music, he is past his prime — and, in any case, Beatriz is not a woman to be easily swayed.
Yet sway her he does, at least to some extent. She is bemused and put off by his passion. Yet she is flattered by it too. One does not expect, as Beatriz, to inspire real passion. Desire? Certainly. She knows she can still inspire desire though it is not perhaps an everyday occurrence. But romantic passion? That has not been her experience for many years, and she is unsure how to respond. The Pole is a serious man. Anyone can see that. He is not a fool, and he is not a man to be put aside lightly. Yet his passion seems foolish to her.
She puts him off. She ignores his letters. She remains only distantly intrigued. The Pole’s ardor does not wither or fade. He comes to Mallorca to be near her. He invites her. She visits and, in turn, invites him to her summer house, and they spend a few days together. There is sex of an elderly sort. And then she banishes the Pole from her life. It is too complicated. She doesn’t like to lie. She doesn’t want all the trouble of the affair. The sex isn’t that great. And, truth be told, she has never loved the Pole and never will. Love may be flattering, but it is a pain in the ass, too. It is a lot to live up to, especially from a man like the Pole.
Her life resumes and the Pole is reduced to occasional letters that she does not read. Until, a few years later, she learns that he has died and left her a bequest — a set of poems he has written for her. She vacillates. She does not want the poems. She does not want to travel to Poland. She does not want poems written in a language she does not even read! But it seems there is no other course and, in the complicated way we sometimes seem to inherit someone else’s legacy, she feels a duty to the Pole. She is bound to him by the love only he felt. She gets the book of poems and has it translated. It is fine but nothing special. She has not been transmuted into Beatrice. She is not immortal in literature. But she has been deeply and undeniably loved, and she feels, if nothing else, a need to justify that love.
And here the novel ends.
Despite the title, Beatriz is the character that matters. It is Beatriz through whose eyes we see the action. It is Beatriz we identify with. It is Beatriz who bears the burden of transformation. Coetzee, the artist, does not seem to doubt that his Pole can fall into a deep romantic love. But he certainly doubts whether any woman worthy of the passion and not already in love with that artist will be likely to respond. She has her life and it’s a good enough one. Her husband has discrete affairs, she does not. No doubt there is unhappiness there. Yet they’ve been together a long time. She is a practical woman. She doesn’t WANT a lover and she doesn’t WANT to be in love. It is not a matter of duty or faithfulness. It is a matter of what she values. Modern culture binds us not with religion or morality or honor, it binds us with comfort and with the values to match. Coetzee captures this with a subtle and sure perfection. If Saul Bellow captured the beating heart of “I want, I want, I want” that drives our culture, Coetzee captures the “I have, I have, I have” that is the reply of the mostly successful life.
It is an “I have” that may be as undesirable as the “I want”, making us as incapable of higher things as material lust, and perhaps even more difficult to escape. When Beatriz sleeps with the Pole, she is trying to fit his love into her (and our) younger understanding of romantic love. Sex is the culmination of romantic love, the fusion that we long for, and, if successful, serves as a kind of physical proof of its value. At some point in our life, though, such proof can no longer materialize. And when, put to the test, that proof fails, Beatriz banishes the Pole from her life. On our understanding of romantic love, he and she have failed.
But that is not the Pole’s understanding of romantic love. He has said that words are not his milieu, but it is to words that he resorts. Would a pianist resort to mere words? Perhaps not, or perhaps this is his own kind of transformation, this late love demanding a new language from his youth. In any case, it is not the poems that move Beatriz, but the example. The Pole has not given in to the comfort. He has not cast aside poetry even though he cannot make it great. He has not cast aside love though the same is true. He can no longer make that great either.
Like Beatriz, we all live through an endless series of life’s waves, each small crest pushing against us, wearing us down. For many of us, romantic love provides the one motive engine that can push us out of this endless sea of troughs. To be in love can wreck us, but it can also change us. Yet we give much less meaning to the experience of being loved. And for the young we are probably right. To be loved is simply one’s due. It may be transformative for those to whom it is unexpected, but it is to our own search for love that we attach a meaning. And it is that search we mostly abandon as we age.
Yet is then, Coetzee suggests, that being loved can become transformative. Loved, we are cast into the role of exemplar, and few of us are quite willing to completely reject that role even when we are loath to return the love. If Beatriz is no longer capable of romantic love it says little about her except that she is like most of us her age. We are not going to fall in love again. And if we did, it would probably be rejected. Yet even when we can no longer fall into romantic love, its power is hard to deny. A real love, the love of a serious person, reminds us of the deeper values, of a world beyond the comfortable land of “I have”. These are values we cannot relax into, but that push us to be better.
Beatriz did not and does not love the Pole. She is not wrong about this. We don’t spend the novel thinking that she should love the Pole. But though she neither craves nor desires his love, neither does she scorn it. She knows that it has at least some meaning. There may well be an age where romantic love is no longer an option for us, but there is no age at which we cannot seek to be worthy of love.