JG Farrell in His Own Words : Selected Letters and Diaries

The Correspondents

391 The Correspondents Brigid Allen Brigid Allen, a young graduate to whom Farrell was attracted in 1973, likened his behaviour with women who loved him to the tides of the sea, continually retreating and advancing. At the time she was supporting herself while completing her doctoral thesis by part-time teaching, and he constantly urged her to ‘Give up and write’. She saw him less often after he won the Booker Prize, but early in 1975, when she was returning from Chandigarh, India, and he was returning from Singapore, they met at Moscow airport and spent the 36-hour stopover together. She last saw him shortly before he left for Ireland in 1979 at a farewell party in London, which she attended with her husband and baby son. Her memoir ‘J.G. Farrell’ appeared in the April/May 1992 edition of the London Magazine. G.M. Arthursen As Head of Modern Languages at Rossall, Arthursen had instilled in Farrell a love of French. The testy schoolmaster, whose nickname to the boys was Whiskey Joe, revealed his kind and erudite nature when he visited him in hospital during his treatment for polio, encouraged his forays to France, and kept up a regular correspondence in retirement . Farrell made a point of sending Arthursen a copy of each of his novels. Vincent and John Banville Vincent (b. 1940) and John (b. 1945) Banville, who are brothers, were born in County Wexford. Vincent’s novel An End to Flight (Faber and Faber), under the pen-name Vincent Lawrence, came out in the year they were photographed with Farrell. A schoolteacher until 1988, he has written acclaimed short stories, several thrillers as well as four books for children. John Banville (who in 1998 became 392 J.G. Farrell in his Own Words literary editor of The Irish Times) had written two novels, Nightspawn (1971) and Birchwood (1973) at the time of Farrell’s Christmas card. His seventh, The Book of Evidence, was shortlisted for the Booker in 1989, and in 2005 he was awarded the Booker Prize for his novel The Sea. Catherine Barton Better known in publishing as Catherine Peters, she was Jim’s editor at Cape for Troubles, and bore the brunt of his disillusion over outstanding royalty payments for A Girl in the Head. She took his side against her managing director, Tom Maschler, and as a result Farrell trusted her. In 1972 she lent him family papers containing the letters home of two long-dead young officers who had been trapped at Lucknow in 1857, and he acknowledged that these had influenced the characters of Fleury and Harry Dunstable in The Siege of Krishnapur . Catherine married the psychiatrist and author Anthony Storr in 1970. Franz Beer An Austrian artist, Beer was living in Paris with his first wife, Claire, in the early 1960s when Farrell got to know him, and ‘a beautiful abstract painting by Franz Beer’ appears in The Lung. In 1966, when Beer was teaching in America, he made an indirect but crucial contribution to Troubles by recommending that Farrell go to Block Island, site of the catalyst for the novel’s structure, the burnedout Ocean View Hotel. Beer’s work is now in public and private collections, including the Peggy Guggenheim in Venice and the Museum of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Sally Bentlif Although he considered Sally to be the most glamorous of her year at Lady Margaret Hall when he was at Oxford, Farrell’s single letter to her from that period paints a more dashing picture of himself than he possessed at the time. Invited to the dance for her twenty-first birthday shortly beforehand, he had chosen to spend the evening with her step-father, far from the noise of the band, listening to his anecdotes about being a Japanese POW. When Sally was working as a literary agent with A.D. Peters, five years later, she was sent the typescript of A Man from Elsewhere, and the title 393 The Correspondents instantly reminded her of his personality at Brasenose. She married the writer Anthony Sampson, and both frequently saw Farrell in the years ahead. Sarah Bond Aged twenty-four when she met Farrell in New York, Sarah had grown up in Scotland and graduated from St Andrews in French and German, before joining a public relations firm in Fleet Street. Independent and plucky, qualities that instantly attracted him, she...