Loose Leaves

Tribute to JG Farrell:The early death of novelist JG Farrell, who drowned aged 44 at Kilcrohane in Co Cork 30 years ago this year, was nothing less than a disaster for literature, said John Banville, launching a selection of the late writer's letters and diaries this week. Banville, who wrote a foreword to JG Farrell in His Own Words: Selected Letters and Diaries, edited by Lavinia Greacen and published by Cork University Press (CUP), added that Farrell's loss is still keenly felt by those with any serious interest in good fiction.

“Farrell, when I met him, struck me as an Edwardian or even a Regency figure, marvellously suave and poised, one of those people who seem to fit perfectly into their particular space in the world. In his writing he was blithely impervious to theory, while so many of us in those days, the 1960s and the early 1970s, were made so nervous by the many ‘isms’ wafting our way from France,” said Banville, a Man Booker prize winner (for The Sea in 2005) of Farrell, whose

The Siege of Krishnapur

won the Booker Prize in 1973.

Like all artists, says Banville in his foreword, Farrell was aware of the personal cost of art, of the deprivations and interdictions it imposes on the emotional self. In the pages of the new book (reviewed in WeekendReviewlast Saturday) "there speaks to us one who in his life was passionate, sceptical, wry, funny and, above all, wholly committed to the task of being an artist".

CUP’s publications director Mike Collins said it was fitting to launch the book in Dublin, where Farrell moved aged 12 and where his papers were archived in TCD: “His connections with Ireland continued until his final year when he moved from London to a remote farmhouse on the Sheep’s Head peninsula.”

The sting of recession

The chill wind of fear continues to swirl in advance of the much-heralded draconian December budget – so much so that Declan Meade, editor of The Stinging Fly, had Stephen Foster's Hard Times Come Again No Morecoursing through his head as he walked to the office to bang out the editorial in its latest issue (Issue 14 Volume Two, Winter 2009-10. €7). Understandable, when he explains that a stark letter from the Arts Council is on his desk. "A similar letter has gone out to all organisations who receive funding from them. The letter offers us funding for the first four months of 2010 – at a level that is down about a third on this years figure. It warns us that some organisations will not receive any further money beyond April 2010." Meanwhile, says Meade, the council is continuing to lobby the Government in advance of the budget – arguing for its allocation not to be further cut.

“We now have to wait until January to find out what will happen. But we also have to seriously consider just how we might manage if our 2010 grant does, in fact, end up being cut by a third. (I balk at considering the possibility of an even worse outcome.) We are not strangers to surviving on a shoestring, but where exactly can we save money? Will there be an office to walk to?” asks Meade, appealing to the journal’s readers to subscribe or become a patron.

As well as an interview with novelist Deirdre Madden, this issue has Jack Harte on the Irish Writers Centre, and new creative work by an array of writers including Colin Barrett, Eimear Ryan, Helena Nolan, Theo Dorgan and Kit Fryatt.