As Plenary Speaker At The 2006 Samuel Beckett Symposium in Tokyo, J. M. Coetzee presented a tantalizing “what might have been” had Samuel Beckett in 1937 succeeded with his half-hearted application for a lecturing position in Italian at the University of Cape Town and been appointed to that university where Coetzee was subsequently to spend much of his professional academic life. Rewriting the account for a set of reminiscences,1 and again for the volume of essays from the Tokyo occasion,2 Coetzee documents the circumstances leading to the application: a job vacancy advertised in the Times Literary Supplement and seen by T. B. Rudmose-Brown of Trinity College, Dublin, who prevailed upon his star pupil to apply; the laconic letter that Beckett (“M.A., T.C.D.”) wrote on his own behalf (presented in facsimile: IH, 76) to support a brief CV on which More Kicks than Pricks was discreetly rechristened Short Stories; and his failure to get the job, which instead went to a specialist in the Sardinian dialect. Coetzee then offers the fantasy of a young academic trapped by the war at the southern tip of Africa, married (with children) to a South African belle (“some sweet-breathed, bronze-limbed Calypso capable of seducing an indolent Irish castaway who found it hard to say no into the colonial version of wedded bliss”; EW, 29); promoted to a professorship in the Romance languages; and still in residence in 1957 when Coetzee enrolled at the institution, the two perhaps meeting when Professor Beckett consented now and then to conduct the Wednesday afternoon creative-writing class to which students brought their work. Under this scenario, some things emphatically could not have been: Beckett, in this multiverse no longer hiding out from the Gestapo in Roussillon, would not have written Watt, and Coetzee could not therefore have done his PhD (1968) on the manuscripts of that novel at the University of Texas at Austin, where they recently had been archived.

A more convincing, albeit ostensibly still-fictional account of what led Coetzee to Beckett is offered in the former’s Youth (2002), a nel mezzo del cammin reflection by the recent recipient of his second Booker Prize (for Disgrace, the furor over which, in South Africa, might have clinched the decision to leave the land of his birth), taking stock of the forces and processes that had shaped his destiny as a writer.