The Pole by J.M. Coetzee

The Pole
By J. M. Coetzee
Liveright, 2023

The Pole is the most straightforward novel JM Coetzee has published since Disgrace, which won the Booker Prize in 1999. Gone are the metafictional loop-the-loops of Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man, and Diary of a Bad Year. Ditto the strained philosophical and political allegory of the Jesus trilogy that followed. But The Pole does have a complicated publishing history: it was first released in a Spanish translation, then combined with some short stories for its Australian publication. In this American edition, the stories are gone, perhaps because they would have interfered with the pure enjoyment of this short, mostly comic novel.

Of Coetzee, a long-time acquaintance said that he never saw the novelist smile or laugh. Now 83, Coetzee could be reversing the traditional “late style” of wise seriousness as Yeats did with his plain-speaking and humorous “Crazy Jane” poems. One of the most famous includes the following lines that have a general relevance to The Pole:

A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.

Coetzee’s woman in The Pole is proud not to be intent on love. In 2015, Beatriz, a married 49-year-old resident of Barcelona, is tasked by her cultural group to entertain for an evening a visiting pianist, a man in his mid-seventies named Witold whose recordings have achieved some notice by minimizing the Romantic qualities of his fellow Pole, Chopin. Oddly, Beatriz feels it necessary to assure herself that a man of this age will not be expecting sex from his minder. Even before Beatriz sees Witold or hears him play, she has mistaken assumptions about him. From the very beginning, then, The Pole is a cascade of unreliability told through Beatriz’s point of view. Though Beatriz is, for example, wrong that Witold is a man with many past divorces, she is right about sex. Witold is a polite, even courtly man who does not expect a one-night stand with his younger hostess. Poles say of a man as stiff as Witold that he has “swallowed a pole.”

A year later Witold is back in Spain and invites Beatriz to observe lessons he is giving in Girona, a town near Barcelona. Though Beatriz finds him “cadaverous” and dislikes his dentures, she visits him in Girona and discovers that Witold is in love with her. He says she is his “destiny,” that her presence gives him “peace,” and he invites her to go to Brazil with him. “Foolish,” Beatriz thinks, “an old man in love,” and yet she imagines herself in Brazil and lies to her husband about Witold. She and her husband no longer have sex, and he has affairs, but Beatriz tells herself she likes the familiarity and comfort of her life.

Perhaps because Beatriz is a mystery to herself—her needs and emotions—she treats Witold as a mystery to be solved. Maybe he acts the way he does, she speculates, because he’s a Pole or because, like Chopin, he may eventually need a nurse or because he confuses Beatriz with Dante’s Beatrice whom the poet said he loved after one innocent meeting. Then there’s the constant problem of missed or failed communication. The Spanish-speaking Beatriz is fluent in English, but Witold speaks an old-fashioned and formal English that Beatriz feels she can’t decode: is it the language of Romantic love or just bookish speech? To investigate, Beatriz invites Witold to spend a week with her in her country house on Mallorca. After a couple of days in which he makes no sexual advance, she invites him into her bed. Though she has an ecstatic moment, she says to herself she expected more from their lovemaking. Beatriz does admit to herself she is pleased to be “adored,” but the best she can do for poor old Witold is pity him and send him on his way.

But love—with Yeats’s capital “L”-- may have pitched his mansion in the place of excrement or, at least, the place of pleasure. Several years after their four nights of coupling, Beatriz learns that Witold has died—and The Pole pivots from the comic pole to the existential pole (Coetzee explicitly plays with the words in a book that could be called bipolar). Beatriz is informed by Witold’s daughter that he has left her something that Beatriz must go to Warsaw to collect. She still somewhat paranoidly (and comically) suspects him and his relations in Poland, but she does go and returns to Barcelona with a gift—and I’ll now be vague about the last third of the novel —that she has to decode, as she tried to decode Witold’s words and motives when he was alive. Witold’s use of the word “rose” becomes crucial: is it erotic or religious or somehow both--bipolar?

Examining her “inheritance,” Beatriz comes to understand Witold wanted more from her than she could give, and she understands that she wanted to be seduced, not loved like Dante’s pure Beatrice. And from her recognitions, love—something like the Love Witold wanted at the end of his life—emerges. The ending of The Pole seems a far cry from the ending of Disgrace in which the protagonist expiates his errors and sins by caring for dead animals, but in fact Beatriz does become a caretaker of the dead in the last pages of The Pole.

Coetzee may get some criticism for writing from a woman’s point of view and for making Beatriz a comic figure who belatedly becomes a serious person. In Coetzee’s defense, he gives us enough information about Witold to suggest that if the point of view had been Witold’s, he, too, might have been a comic figure, one who becomes more serious before his death. He wants to tamp down Chopin’s work, but Witold also wants to be influenced by the grand romances of Dante and George Sand. Beatriz wonders if he’s serious or a “poseur” and “clown.”

Former American-trained literature professor Coetzee may also have in mind another Beatrice, the literally toxic young woman in Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” whose last words to her romantic but ultimately selfish lover are: “Oh, was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?" This could be true of Witold and what Beatriz calls his “whole creaking philosophical edifice of romantic love.” While I do think The Pole is ultimately a love story, it’s one with some of the usual Coetzee ambiguities—psychological, linguistic, and cross-cultural. Almost 200 years after the publication of Hawthorne’s story, scholars are still arguing about its meaning. I expect reviewers of The Pole will be divided about its ending—and its value.

Both Beatriz and Witold “wanted more.” I wonder if readers will want more than what the 166-page, wide-margined novel about two characters seems to offer. Readers who know Slow Man and Diary of a Bad Year can think about The Pole as closing a trilogy about elder male desire, for each novel features a somewhat debilitated male protagonist attracted to or obsessed with a much younger woman who, by the end of the books, surprises the protagonist or readers with her care for the old man.

Another way to extend the reach of The Pole is to read it as a stealth Coetzee metafiction. Is the intellectual and reserved Witold a stand-in for the novelist, who is often described as dour? Does Beatriz at the end of the novel represent the audience Coetzee wanted, readers who would not just respect his work but accept him for who he is, for who he can only be? In Stanley Elkin’s novella “The Living End,” God destroys the world because “He never found his audience.” Perhaps Coetzee published The Pole to create an audience that he felt he never really had, an audience that takes pleasure from his work and leaves it with hope. In this case, hope that Beatriz will continue to appreciate both Witold and his art, no matter how much they may, at times, distress or rend her. As not so crazy Jane says,

For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.

Tom LeClair is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.  His seventh-and final-novel, Passing Away, was published in 2018.