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On the other hand, being a teacher allowed him contact with a younger generation. Which he might not have had, had he withdrawn from the world and devoted himself wholly to writing.

True.

Did he have any special friendships that you know of among students?

Now you sound as if you are angling. What do you mean, special friendships? Do you mean, did he overstep the mark? Even if I knew, which I don’t, I would not comment.

Yet the theme of the older man and the younger woman keeps coming back in his fiction.

It would be very, very naïve to conclude that because the theme was present in his writing it had to be present in his life.

In his inner life, then.

His inner life. Who can say what goes on in people’s inner lives?

Is there any other aspect of him that you would like to bring forward? Any stories worth recounting?

Stories? I don’t think so. John and I were colleagues. We were friends. We got on well together. But I can’t say I knew him intimately. Why do you ask if I have stories?

Because in biography one has to strike a balance between narrative and opinion. I have no shortage of opinion – people are more than ready to tell me what they think or thought of Coetzee – but one needs more than that to bring a life-story to life.

Sorry, I can’t help you. Perhaps your other sources will be more forthcoming. Who else will you be speaking to?

I have five names on my list, including yours.

Only five? Don’t you think that is a bit risky? Who are we lucky five? How did you come to choose us?

I’ll give you the names. From here I travel to South Africa – it will be my second trip – to speak to Coetzee’s cousin Margot, with whom he was close. Then on to Brazil to meet a woman named Adriana Nascimento who lived in Cape Town for some years during the 1970s. After that – but the date isn’t fixed yet – I go to Canada to see someone named Julia Frankl, who in the 1970s would have gone under the name Julia Smith. And I will also be seeing Sophie Denoël in Paris.

Sophie I knew, but not the others. How did you come up with these names?

Basically I let Coetzee himself do the choosing. I followed up on clues he dropped in his notebooks – clues as to who was important to him at the time, in the 1970s.

It seems a peculiar way of selecting biographical sources, if you don’t mind my saying so.

Perhaps. There are other names I would have wanted to add, of people who knew him well, but alas they are dead now. You call it a peculiar way of going about a biography. Perhaps. But I am not interested in delivering a final judgment on Coetzee. I am not writing that kind of book. Final judgments I leave to history. What I am doing is telling the story of a stage in his life, or if we can’t arrive at a single story then several stories from different perspectives.

And the sources you have selected have no axes to grind, no ambitions of their own to pronounce final judgment on Coetzee?

[Silence.]

Let me ask: Leaving aside Sophie, and leaving aside the cousin, was either of the women you mention emotionally involved with Coetzee?

Yes. Both. In different ways. Which I have yet to explore.

Shouldn’t that give you pause? With your very narrow roster of sources, will you not inevitably come out with an account or set of accounts that are slanted towards the personal and the intimate at the expense of the man’s actual achievements as a writer? Worse: do you not run the risk of allowing your book to become no more than – forgive me for putting it in this way – no more than a settling of scores, personal scores?

Why? Because my informants are women?

Because it is not in the nature of love affairs for the lovers to see each other whole and steady.

[Silence.]

I repeat, it seems to me strange to be putting together a biography of a writer that will ignore his writing. But perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps I am out of date. Perhaps that is what literary biography has become. I must