Mother: Age of Iron

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen; Distinguished Guests, Friends

The other day, suddenly, out of the blue, while we were talking about something completely different, my partner Dorothy burst out as follows: “On the other hand,” she said, “on the other hand, how proud your mother would have been! What a pity she isn’t still alive! And your father too! How proud they would have been of you!”

“Even prouder than of my son the doctor?” I said. “Even prouder than of my son the professor?”

“Even prouder.”

“If my mother were still alive,” I said, “she would be ninety-nine and a half. She would probably have senile dementia. She would not know what was going on around her.”

But of course I missed the point. Dorothy was right. My mother would have been bursting with pride. My son the Nobel Prize winner. And for whom, anyway, do we do the things that lead to Nobel Prizes if not for our mothers?

“Mommy, Mommy, I won a prize!”

“That’s wonderful, my dear. Now eat your carrots before they get cold.”

Why must our mothers be ninety-nine and long in the grave before we can come running home with the prize that will make up for all the trouble we have been to them?

To Alfred Nobel, 107 years in the grave, and to the Foundation that so faithfully administers his will and that has created this magnificent evening for us, my heartfelt gratitude. To my parents, how sorry I am that you cannot be here.

Thank you.¹

Coetzee’s after-dinner speech at the banquet in the Stockholm City Hall on 10 December 2003, following the Nobel Prize award ceremony, amazed the twelve hundred guests. There was a conspicuous reaching for tissues. Ten years later, it was still among the first points of conversation in Stockholm when Coetzee’s name came up. It seemed so uncharacteristic: his rather recondite Nobel Lecture a few days earlier had done little to amend a reputation for reserve and severity. While the banqueting hall and television audience braced themselves for more gravitas, Coetzee surprised them with a disarming tribute to his mother.

Figure 1.

John’s mother, Vera Coetzee.

To those who had read Boyhood, the pleasure of hearing this speech would have been mixed with recognition. For Boyhood places much emphasis on John’s relationship with his mother, beginning with a tender sequence about one of the difficult phases in the life of Vera Coetzee. When his father, Jack, lost his job in Cape Town in 1948 and the family moved from the comfortable suburb of Rosebank to rural Worcester, Vera would have felt diminished. One day, not long after moving to the drab environs of Worcester’s Reunion Park, Vera came out saying that she wished she had a horse. She had grown up on a farm, Oude Wolwekraal, near the town of Uniondale. Instead, she bought a bicycle which she had yet to learn to ride.

The men in the family, Jack and the two boys, mock her efforts to learn, but John is sufficiently aware of what is at stake for her. While he is at school, Vera wobbles into the town centre: “Only once does he catch a glimpse of her on her bicycle. She is wearing a white blouse and a dark skirt. She is coming down Poplar Avenue toward the house. Her hair streams in the wind. She looks young, like a girl, young and fresh and mysterious.” Later, the “memory of his mother on her bicycle does not leave him. She pedals away up Poplar Avenue, escaping from him, escaping towards her own desire.”²

Vera Hildred Marie Wehmeyer was born on 2 September 1904. Assuming that the bicycle episode of Coetzee’s memory bears some relation to fact, she would have been 44, old enough for her dignity to be in jeopardy when learning to ride, but young enough to carry the air of having lived under different horizons.

Figure 2.

Vera...