Accountant who wished to be remembered as a writer
GABRIEL DUFFY, who has died aged 66, was an accountant and founder of a successful recruitment agency. But it is as a writer that he wished to be remembered.
In his early 20s he travelled to Cornwall to introduce himself to his literary hero Colin Wilson, author of The Outsider, the book that popularised existentialism in Britain.
Wilson described the self-proclaimed genius as “brilliant, widely-read and capable of drinking so much whisky that I was convinced he would die of cirrhosis of the liver before he was 30”.
Duffy confounded Wilson by surviving his "fondness for drink" to produce a respectable if modest body of work, which included a well-received memoir Sham to Rock, published in 2003.
Born in Dublin in 1942, he was the only child of Joseph Duffy, a Dublin-born garda, and Elizabeth (Babs) Banahan, from Roscommon. He was educated by the Christian Brothers, who, he wrote, punished pupils as much for being “stupid” as for being “too smart by half”. He was deemed to be in the latter category, having got five honours in his Inter Cert. Expecting to do equally well in his Leaving and go on to university, he, however, left school in his final year following an altercation with one of the Brothers.
Notwithstanding beatings by his mother, for which in old age she sought forgiveness, he enjoyed growing up in the area around the North Circular Road in Dublin and spending summer holidays in Roscommon. He also enjoyed visits to the Carlton cinema, later graduating to the “foreign” films at the Astor on Eden Quay.
In 1956 he was among the crowds of excited teenagers who flocked to see Bill Haley and The Comets whose Rock Around The Clockbecame the anthem for Dublin's Teddy Boys. He was inspired to buy his first record, Bill Doggett's Honky Tonk– "tin can music" according to his father.
He cycled to record hops at the Carlton Hall, Marino, where he sought to master jiving and searched for romance. And, eager to find out what a “misspent youth” might mean, he frequented a local snooker hall The Cosy.
Drawn to jazz, he was part of a circle that listened to records by Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan and Oscar Peterson. He first heard the music played live by the Ian Hendry quartet at a jazz club on Stephen’s Green.
An avid reader from childhood, English was his favourite subject at school. Swapping books with likeminded friends – Huxley, DH Lawrence and Orwell were much in demand – he found in Joyce a reflection of his growing estrangement from Irish Catholicism.
Reading The Outsider, and its sequel Religion and the Rebel, convinced him that he should become a writer.
Having left school, he wrote poetry, short stories and a novel that earned him his first rejection slip. Exasperated, his parents told him to get a job. To placate them he joined Dublin Corporation.
But his heart wasn’t in it, and he took to having long liquid lunches discussing literature with a colleague. This didn’t endear him to his superiors, and he quit the corporation.
Moving to London in 1963, he took up accountancy while waiting to make his breakthrough as a writer. He established a successful financial recruitment consultancy, and made and lost two small fortunes. He resumed writing full-time in the early 1990s.
He devoted much of his time to exploring the works of the philosopher Edmund Husserl and psychiatrist Abraham Maslow. At the time of his death he was completing a book on how their ideas could be applied to anti-stress therapy.
A second volume of memoirs awaits publication, along with a science-fiction novel set in China towards the end of this century entitled Living in Tsin.
The poet Simon Jenner described him as a “wonderfully affable, erudite and spendthrift stylist . . . always, it seemed, a page-turn away from fame”.
He is survived by his former wife Susan and daughters Megan and Sally.
Patrick Gabriel Duffy: born 1942; died December 2008