David Attwell - J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing Face-to-face With Time

M Y FIRST DEBT of thanks is owed to the Leverhulme Trust in the United Kingdom, which provided respite from the day-to-day business of academic life in the form of a research fellowship. Thanks are also due to the Department of English at the University of Stockholm, which provided a visiting professorship close to the glories of the Swedish Academy and Nobel Library, and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies (STIAS), whose hospitality brought me to the heartlands of Cape Town and the Karoo during the early months of conceptualizing the project.

Through the good offices of Wium van Zyl and Anton Kannemeyer, I was also able to consult John Kannemeyers papers in Stellenbosch. It is tragic that John Kannemeyer died so soon after completing the first biography of J.M. Coetzee. He deserved to see the fruits of his labours and the positive influence he has had on Coetzee studies. He and I met twice and corresponded frequently as he worked on his project in the last three years of his life, and I am grateful for his courtesy and friendship during this period. While in Stellenbosch I also received personal support from Hannes van Zyl, John Kannemeyers editor, for which I am very grateful.

Colleagues old and new have enabled me to give parts of this work an airing at the universities of Adelaide, Cape Town, Stellenbosch, Giessen, Stockholm, Verona and York, Queen Mary, University of London, Rhodes University and the Norwegian Literary Festival in Lillehammer. In Adelaide, my sincere thanks to John Coetzee and Dorothy Driver for their hospitality, and to Nick Jose and Brian Castro of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice for their interest and encouragement, not to mention the invitation to return. In Cape Town, the Centre for Open Learning and the Coetzee Collective led by Carrol Clarkson have been consistently generous during several visits over the past five years.

The staff of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin went out of their way by making special arrangements to place parts of the Coetzee archive in the public domain earlier than expected. My thanks to Tom Staley, Megan Barnard, Gabby Redwine, Micah Erwin, Rick Watson and Jen Tisdale for their hospitality and professionalism during two visits to Austin in 2011 and 2012. Bernth and Judith Lindfors made these visits to Austin a real homecoming.

Friends and colleagues have endured my conversation or read and commented on this work, either in part or in some cases on the entire manuscript. I am immensely grateful to all of them and have freely made use of their suggestions: Derek Attridge, Rita Barnard, Elleke Boehmer, Christoph Buchwald, Carrol Clarkson, Eva Cossee, Jonathan Crewe, Dorothy Driver, Laura Emsley, Patrick Flanery, Ian Glenn, Irina Rasmussen Goloubeva, Lucy Graham, Michael Green, Hugh Haughton, Stefan Helgesson, Evi Hoste, Shawn Irlam, Michelle Kelly, Rob Nixon, Annalisa Pes, Hedley Twidle, Andrew van der Vlies, Geoffrey Wall, Hermann Wittenberg and Susanna Zinato. At an early stage, Kai Easton was immensely generous in sharing some of her research in the Coetzee papers. I am grateful for her help and collegiality throughout the writing of this book. Chabani Manganyi read early efforts and asked usefully sharp questions, such as Who in Coetzee is Dostoevsky? Finuala Dowling lent a novelists eye to a number of draft chapters, helping me to see the material more clearly as a writer would do. Paul Wise provided expert editorial guidance at a crucial stage of the manuscripts development. My sincere thanks to Russell Martin at Jacana Media, for his practical help and guidance and his insightful copyediting of the final manuscript.

At York I am fortunate to be in unusually collegial company. Sincere thanks to my colleagues for their interest in this project and for their support in making it possible for me to take up the fellowship. Derek Attridge, in particular, has been unstinting in his support and I have frequently had to rely on his good counsel.