Everything for keeps

LETTERS: DEREK MAHONreviews JG Farrell in His Own Words: Selected Letters and DiariesEdited by Lavinia Greacen Cork University Press, 382pp, €39

THE NOVELIST JG Farrell (1935-1979) inspired great affection and esteem in his lifetime, and a mystique survives – owing, in part, to the tragic nature of his early death. (He drowned at Kilcrohane, Co Cork, where he had moved just months before.) His biographer, Lavinia Greacen ( JG Farrell: The Making of a Writer, Bloomsbury 1999), has put together a fascinating and generously annotated selection of his letters to family, friends, agents and publishers, and added vivid passages from his diaries. The result is a moving and memorable portrait of the man, one that his many fans will want to have; and not only fans but, increasingly, students – for Farrell's fiction, a big hit in its day and never out of print, is now recognised as an important contribution to the post-colonial, or perhaps post-imperial canon, with special reference to the famous "Empire Trilogy"; not really a trilogy but (his own word) a triptych: Troubles(1970), The Siege of Krishnapur(1973) and The Singapore Grip(1978).

An English-born Anglo-Irishman, he spent most of his working life in London, with much travel: France, Spain and Morocco, Mexico, India and South-East Asia. The Indian Diary, first published posthumously in 1981, is particularly fine, and perhaps reveals more about the author than anything else he wrote. At one hotel he considers tipping the staff “in inverse ratio to their place in the caste-system”. The elegance of the phrasing, and of the thought, is typical. Watching a funeral at a burning ghat in Benares: “Presently the attendant turned one of the legs over. It was when it went right over against the natural articulation of the joint that the body really stopped being a person for me and became an object”. Again, that elegant phrasing, of a piece with a personal elegance amusingly described by John Banville, in a foreword, as “slightly sinister”. Anatomy and economics were two of Farrell’s chief preoccupations. Anatomy because, stricken by polio while at Oxford, he was always conscious of physical inadequacy; and economics as he pursued his imperial researches and drew his own trenchant conclusions. The two preoccupations came together in a pathological, but warmly pathological, vision haunted by such old-fashioned things as mortality and unavailing love.

Lavinia Greacen has been tactful, but there was no shortage of women in Jim’s life and several of them feature here as regular correspondents – notably Gabriele, a mystery girl from his early years; Sarah Bond, another early flame, and his later soulmate, Bridget O’Toole – besides fellow writers Margaret Drabble and Alison Lurie, Sonia Orwell, and various agents including Deborah Rogers, one of the first to see the brilliance of Troubles.

He was mischievous, but had great empathy, with women. With men he could be a firm friend – for example with fellow sportsman Jack Kirwan (rugger mostly) of the then “Dalkey Set”, to which Jim too belonged; and with Russell McCormmach, an (American) Oxford contemporary. Or he could be a formidable sparring partner, as with the legendary 1960s publisher Tom Maschler (“of Cape”). With his parents he was a devoted and dutiful son. “Warm, and sometimes full of self-doubt,” says Graecen, the letters trace his daily life and literary development through the 1960s and 1970s, “recreating a lost autobiographical voice”. It was an unusual voice, speculative and whimsical, and one that those who knew him remember well. Its very timbre is audible here in this “increasingly companionable” volume.

When he died, Greacen points out, email was still further in the future but the phone was always at hand; so, as with others, those who lived nearest him had little or nothing to contribute of an epistolary nature. Those further off, with more to show, provided the bulk of the material. Would Jim, in any case, have adopted email? Very likely. Despite his handicap and an air of retro-chic, he was quite nimble and advanced in some ways. He kept a racy-looking bike in his London flat at 16 Egerton Gardens, a short walk from Harrods, and to "Russ" McCormmach shows a surprising interest in the martial arts. Not so surprising, really, if you think of The Singapore Grip: "Did you go through with the karate idea? I have, in fact, often thought about it myself, my trouble being that I'm not strong enough, as a result of polio, to hurt anybody, no matter how scientifically aimed my blows. It would be refreshing to feel dangerous and arrogant for a change".

Very man-to-man with Russ, he reports that he's met a call-girl "who decided she was in love with me and introduced me to all her prostitute friends, gangsters, pimps, etc. I had no idea just what the London underworld was like". Two steps from Stephen Ward and Christine Keeler, for an unworldly man he was remarkably well-connected. To Russ and Gaby both he reports that he's reading a life of Tolstoy: "My amazement and admiration grow with every page. He had the talent I most admire, that of playing everything for keeps . . . What a man! I'm sure genius is largely a question of energy". It wasn't until the obituaries that he himself was mentioned in the same breath as the author of War and Peace, though he must have been aware of the ghostly presence. His own theory of history was very similar.

New York, where he spent two years on a fellowship, was “intolerably dirty and hostile”, so he got out of town a lot. On Block Island he made a fresh start on a new book, “partly inspired” by the charred remains of the burnt-out Ocean View Hotel, evidently a magnificent place in its day.

Diary entry, May 1967: “This morning I went up to look at the remains: old bedsprings twisted with heat; puddles of molten glass; washbowls that had fallen through to the foundations; a flight of stone steps leading up into thin air; twisted pipes; lots of nails lying everywhere, and a few charred beams. The way the glass had collected like candle-grease under the windows impressed me most. When you picked it up it flaked away in your hand”.

This was to be the Majestic in Troubles, its description transferred almost word for word from his diary. His current reading was fortuitous too, Giorgio Bassani's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis: "I kept recognising myself in the narrator, vis-à-vis the Kirwans in Dalkey." What he admired in Conrad he admired also in Lampedusa's The Leopard: "Clear, very concrete images; the characters beautifully portrayed." Clear, almost hallucinatory images were a striking feature of Troubles, and recurred with photographic intensity in the Siegeand the Grip. All his characters, moreover are "beautifully portrayed".

Elizabeth Bowen lived long enough to read, admire and review Troubles, remarking that it was not a period piece but "yesterday reflected in today's consciousness; the ironies, the disparities, the dismay, the sense of unavailingness, are contemporary".

Jim met her and writes to Bridget (“Dear Brid”): “I had a longish personal chat with her. A tremendously good person; in spite of her stammer and nervousness she is very open and direct. She mentioned that she was about contemporary with the twins ‘though much less enterprising’.”

On a research trip to India, while charmed by the elephants and peacocks in Jaipur, he notes "an encampment of untouchables in a dusty grove just outside the hotel gates, to remind that things are bad here" – though "it occurred to me today that people here don't actually lookunhappy. People in England, including Indians, look much more desperate . . .".

To his American agent Carol Drisko from Kathmandu, then on the hippy trail, he reports that few of the hippies strike him as real people: "There are any number of maladjusted young Americans drifting around India, though making precious little contact, it seems to me, with any of the Indias". He himself did no better, he admits, but the poverty and "unavailingness", now a favourite word, were to leave their stamp on his subsequent work – especially on the Grip, with its imaginative immersion in the life of the Singapore slums of the 1940s.

The Diary again: “Glimpsed at twilight on the Singapore River, an old Chinese standing to scull a tiny, frail prau with a lantern on a stick behind him. A vast barge surges by, causing him to rock wildly in its wash.” Even his casual observations carried a metaphorical import, usually political.

The Kirwans reappear in his life when he decides to buy a house at Gortfahane and Jack, a Dublin solicitor, acts for him. It's often thought that, with this move, Jim was withdrawing from the world, but he had many friends come to visit. Always determinedly active, he goes window-shopping at the London Boat Show, deferring a decision. (He was now quite well-off thanks to sales, prizes and film options, and had it in mind to find himself a pied-à-terrein Paris, though he never got around to it.)

The photographs reproduced here include several of the man himself at different ages, an old one of the Ocean View Hotel in decline, the Gortfahane house, and the adjacent rock where he fished and where a freak wave swept him into the water in the third week of August 1979, the week of the disastrous Fastnet Race when 15 died. He was the 16th. His grave is at St James’s (Church of Ireland), beyond Durrus.

Derek Mahon's most recent collection of poetry Life on Earthwas short listed for the Griffin Prize earlier this year