Youth

Youth is a novel by J. M. Coetzee that traces the early adulthood of its protagonist, John, from his student years in Cape Town, South Africa, to his time as a young immigrant in England during the early 1960s.

At nineteen, John is a university student living alone in a one-room flat near Mowbray railway station in Cape Town. He supports himself through multiple jobs: library assistant, mathematics tutor, drama instructor, and cram-school coach. He maintains a spartan routine, boiling marrowbones and beans into weekly soup, proving to himself that he needs no one. Slim but flabby, self-conscious about his appearance, he consoles himself with the belief that love and art will one day transform him.

His best friend, Paul, a fellow mathematics student, is involved with Elinor Laurier, a language teacher born in England. At a beach party, John meets Elinor's twin sister, Jacqueline, a nurse trained at Guy's Hospital in London. Within a week Jacqueline has moved into his flat; he cannot recall inviting her and has simply failed to resist. Cohabitation quickly becomes suffocating. He resents her clutter and retreats into silence, while she weeps and talks endlessly about men who have used her. The affair reaches a crisis when Jacqueline finds and reads his diary. She packs to leave, telling him he has a lot of growing up to do. He reflects on whether his diary entries represent his true feelings or are merely fictions.

Jacqueline returns intermittently, and the disruptions take a toll on his studies. He immerses himself in the literary world of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, seeing in Pound's life of exile and persecution a model for the sacrifices an artist must make. He reads Gustave Flaubert on Pound's recommendation. His plan is to qualify as a mathematician and go abroad to devote himself to art. Professor Guy Howarth, an Australian who teaches early English prose, invites John to house-sit his home in Cape Town for six months. During this period, John gets a girlfriend named Sarah pregnant. Sarah arranges her own abortion, asks only that he drive her, and endures three days of recovery at the Howarths' house without a single reproach, teaching him a lesson in decency that shames him.

Political turmoil intrudes. After the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, in which police fire on a crowd of Black protestors, strikes and marches spread across South Africa. One afternoon, John watches from the university embankment as thousands of workers march silently along De Waal Drive, summoned from the shantytowns of the Cape Flats. He fears military conscription and resolves to flee the country, but cannot leave without his degree.

He arrives in London and stays on Paul's sofa in a bedsitter in Belsize Park. After panicking out of a teaching job, he takes a position as a trainee programmer at IBM's Newman Street bureau. The programming course baffles him, and he barely passes the final test.

IBM proves soul-destroying. His refuge is the Everyman Cinema in Hampstead, where he falls in love with the actress Monica Vitti through the films of Michelangelo Antonioni. He rents a room off Archway Road and settles into a monotonous routine: chipolatas for supper, bookshops on Saturdays, the Observer on Sundays. Weekend loneliness is crushing. His mother's aerogrammes arrive weekly from Cape Town; he resents them as evidence of an unchanging love he has resisted all his life but cannot bring himself to sever the connection. He registers as an absent Master's student at the University of Cape Town, choosing the novels of Ford Madox Ford as his thesis topic, and reads the Ford corpus at the British Museum Reading Room. His own poems grow shorter and less substantial.

His romantic life in London is defined by frustration. Caroline, a drama student from Cape Town, arrives, and they resume a prior affair. She works at a nightclub; he waits outside her Kensington flat until she returns, sometimes not until four in the morning. He recognizes his abjectness but cannot break free. He meets Astrid, an Austrian au pair, at the Tate Gallery, but he lies tense whenever she shares his bed.

The Cuban Missile Crisis brings fear of nuclear annihilation. He attends a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) rally in Trafalgar Square but stays on the fringes. At IBM, he checks punched cards containing wind-tunnel data for the TSR-2, a British bomber, and reflects uneasily that he has become part of the defense effort. Through BBC radio he discovers the music of Anton von Webern and is transfixed by Robert Motherwell's Homage to the Spanish Republic 24 at the Tate. These encounters sustain him even as his social isolation deepens.

After more than a year at IBM, he resigns, citing a lack of friendship. He drifts through London without work, his days marked by silence. One Sunday on Hampstead Heath, he sinks into a half-sleep on the grass and feels a brief, surprising moment of ecstatic connection with the earth.

He takes a house-sitting job in Swiss Cottage, guarding a divorced woman's flat from her ex-husband. His cousin Ilse and her friend Marianne arrive from South Africa. Ilse falls ill; Marianne is at loose ends. He brings Marianne back to the flat. She is a virgin; they sleep together and she bleeds profusely. In the morning he is cold and dismissive, thrusting money at her and sending her away in a taxi. A letter from Ilse reproaches him. The episode reveals depths of coldness and callousness rather than the artistic depths he came to London to plumb.

A letter from the Home Office forces him out of his illegal drift: IBM has reported his departure, and he has twenty-one days to renew his work permit. He finds a job with International Computers in Bracknell, Berkshire, writing tape-scheduling routines for Atlas, a pioneering computer that can interrogate its own efficiency. The work absorbs him completely; he stops yearning for women and stops writing poetry, noting the connection.

He befriends Ganapathy, an Indian colleague who lives in squalor, subsisting on bananas and chocolate. Ganapathy reminds him of himself: a clever boy who has run away from his mother but lacks the energy to survive alone. Out of sympathy for the Vietnamese and frustration with the Cold War, John writes to the Chinese Embassy offering to teach English in China; no reply ever comes. In a second-hand bookshop off Charing Cross Road, he discovers Samuel Beckett's novel Watt and recognizes it as a voice whose doubts and scruples match the pace of his own mind. Beckett, not Ford, is his true literary model. He reads memoirs of early Cape visitors, especially William Burchell's Travels, and conceives a plan to write a book set in the 1820s.

Every few weeks he travels to Cambridge to test programs on Atlas. He installs his routines at Aldermaston, the atomic weapons research station, where he works under armed guard. He knows he has aided the arms race and tries to justify it as experience but dismisses this as sophistry. Weekends remain unbearable. He confronts the blank page, but the right words will not come. He recognizes that his failure as a writer and his failure as a lover are parallel, both rooted in fear. At twenty-four, he is merely a computer programmer in a field with no future for anyone over thirty, locked into an attenuating endgame against himself.