A literary gypsy

When Lavinia Greacen undertook her magisterial yet intimately sympathetic biography of James Gordon Farrell, she gained access to his diaries and many of his letters, especially love letters and letters to his literary agents, editors and publishers about his professional desires and requirements. In this supplementary volume, a selection of her prime sources is presented in their full extent, amounting to a warts-and-all self-portrait of the novelist. It might well serve as an inspiration or a warning. Even with his fecund talent, ardent ambition, sound education (Rossall and Brasenose), eagerness to work and sufficient charm for social survival (English father, Irish mother), writing novels for a living proved intellectually arduous, financially precarious and often desperately lonely.

J. G. Farrell was sustained and handicapped by a complex temperament not uncommon in his difficult trade. He was a gregarious solitary. He recurrently sought the love of women, sometimes in overlapping affairs, until there seemed to be a danger of commitment, whereupon he managed to fend them off, but usually tried never to let them go, maintaining their hope by means of persuasively affectionate correspondence.

John Banville, today’s pre-eminent Irish novelist, himself a Booker prizewinner of celebrated subtlety, met Farrell only once but observed him closely enough to contribute a perceptive foreword to this new book. ‘Farrell the man,’ Banville writes, ‘was immensely attractive, tall and slender and possessed of a slightly jaded and even slightly sinister elegance.’ Farrell was both earnest and engagingly frivolous, satirical and satyric, and, when temporarily withdrawn in hermitic mode, provocatively saturnine.

Polio ended Farrell’s career as a rugby player at Oxford and forced him to spend months in an iron lung. The illness made him acutely aware of mortality, provided material for a novel, permanently weakened one arm, and gave him an air of vulnerability that moved women to cosset him.