swept away by a mysterious genius
JG Farrell in His Own Words: Selected Letters and Diaries Edited by Lavinia Greacen (Cork University Press, 382pp, €39)
Saturday November 28 2009
Thirty years ago, in August 1979, 15 people died during a terrible storm that struck the Fastnet yacht race. The former British prime minister Ted Heath, a keen sailor and a participant in the race, very nearly died too. On the same day, but in relatively calm conditions, a man fishing on the rocks at Kilcrohane in Cork was swept away by a freak wave and drowned. Onlookers say that the man did not struggle in the water but seemed to accept his fate calmly.
This strangely unforgettable death was suffered by the then 44-year-old James Gordon Farrell, the author of three novels, Troubles, which is set in Ireland, The Siege of Krishnapur, which won the Booker Prize, and The Singapore Grip.
By now Farrell's incipient greatness is widely recognised -- he came very closely to snatching the Booker of all Bookers from Salman Rushdie. This recognition would probably have to come to him eventually on merit alone, but its early arrival owes a great deal to Lavinia Greacen who edits these letters meticulously and who published a fine biography in 1999.
As with all novelists of genuine originality, Farrell's character is plainly obvious and yet mysterious, almost impossible to grasp or explain. Many geniuses seem to to be forced into art for the first time by the death of a parent or by illness. Farrell belongs in the latter category. His relationship with his Anglo-Irish Protestant parents in Dalkey was -- unlike, say, Samuel Beckett's -- warmly dutiful. But a youthful bout of polio and the claustrophobic experience of being locked up in an iron lung added hurt and distance to a naturally sharp intelligence.
This combination of characteristics made him extremely attractive to women, as did, perhaps, an unwillingness to make lasting commitments. As in the song, if he wasn't near the one he loved, he loved the one he was near.
Actually, these letters -- and most of them are to women -- show that he was quite capable of juggling with lovers even when they were in close proximity to each other. Again, like most novelists, he had a voyeuristic streak: a German girlfriend, who has allowed her cache of letters to be published but without her name being revealed, was in receipt of repeated requests to explain exactly (and I mean exactly) what it was like to lose her virginity.
Farrell was mild-mannered and non-judgmental, but he knew his own mind. When he won the Booker prize, for example, he made a speech criticising the Booker company for their colonialist work practices (they thought it "most unmannerly"). And a friend who asked for advice on his divorce received a stinging letter telling him and his wife to behave themselves for the sake of their children.
Add to this steeliness a sense of humour and a dash of the young fogey -- he occasionally gives the impression of being a man in his 60s trying out phrases picked up from the younger generation -- and the reader is guaranteed an experience almost as interesting as a Farrell novel.
At the end of his life he seems to have found a new contentment with his new house in Cork. This is not to say that he avoided infuriating troubles from the Department of Posts and Telegraphs (two years to get a phone) and comic troubles from the shopkeepers in Bandon -- "If I had been trying to squeeze the petrol out of her nipples it could hardly have been worth more of a performance."
But by the time one reads his last letter, on August 10, 1979, which promises a new novel by the end of the year, the more one is convinced that a degree of lovableness went with his genius. It was a cruel wave that swept him away from Ireland and the world of literature.
Brian Lynch's novel The Winner of Sorrow was published in America earlier this year. His publishing venture, the Duras Press, has just brought out The Nicotine Cat and Other People by Augustus Young.
- BRIAN LYNCH
Irish Independent
