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You say he was not political. Do you mean that he was apolitical? Because some people would say that the apolitical is just one variety of the political.

No, not apolitical, I would rather say anti-political. He thought that politics brought out the worst in people. It brought out the worst in people and also brought to the surface the worst types in society. He preferred to have nothing to do with it.

Did he preach this anti-political politics in his classes?

Of course not. He was very scrupulous about not preaching. His political beliefs you discovered only when you got to know him better.

You say his politics were Utopian. Are you implying they were unrealistic?

He looked forward to the day when politics and the state would wither away. I would call that Utopian. On the other hand, he did not invest a great deal of himself in these Utopian longings.

He was too much of a Calvinist for that.

Please explain.

You want me to say what lay behind Coetzee's politics? You can best get that from his books. But let me try anyway.

In Coetzee's eyes, we human beings will never abandon politics because politics is too convenient and too attractive as a theatre in which to give play to our baser emotions. Baser emotions meaning hatred and rancour and spite and jealousy and bloodlust and so forth. In other words, politics is a symptom of our fallen state and expresses that fallen state.

Even the politics of liberation?

If you refer to the politics of the South African liberation struggle, the answer is yes. As long as liberation meant national liberation, the liberation of the black nation of South Africa, John had no interest in it.

Was he then hostile to the liberation struggle?

Was he hostile? No, he was not hostile. Hostile, sympathetic – as a biographer you above all ought to be wary of putting people in neat little boxes with labels on them.

I hope I am not putting Coetzee in a box.

Well, that is how it sounds to me. No, he was not hostile to the liberation struggle. If you are a fatalist, as he tended to be, there is no point in being hostile to the course of history, however much you may regret it. To the fatalist, history is fate.

Very well, did he then regret the liberation struggle? Did he regret the form the liberation struggle took?

He accepted that the liberation struggle was just. The struggle was just, but the new South Africa toward which it strove was not Utopian enough for him.

What would have been Utopian enough for him?

The closing down of the mines. The ploughing under of the vineyards. The disbanding of the armed forces. The abolition of the automobile. Universal vegetarianism. Poetry in the streets. That sort of thing.

In other words, poetry and the horse-drawn cart and vegetarianism are worth fighting for, but not liberation from apartheid?

Nothing is worth fighting for. You compel me into the role of defending his position, a position I do not happen to share. Nothing is worth fighting for because fighting only prolongs the cycle of aggression and retaliation. I merely repeat what Coetzee says loud and clear in his writings, which you say you have read.

Was he at ease with his black students – with black people in general?

Was he at ease with anyone? He was not an at-ease person (can you say that in English?). He never relaxed. I witnessed that with my own eyes. So:Was he at ease with black people? No. He was not at ease among people who were at ease. The ease of others made him ill at ease. Which sent him off – in my opinion – in the wrong direction.

What do you mean?

He saw Africa through a romantic haze. He thought of Africans as embodied, in a way that had been lost long ago in Europe. What do I mean? Let me try to explain. In Africa, he used to say, body and soul were indistinguishable, the body was the soul. He had a whole philosophy of the body, of music and dance, which