JG Farrell in His Own Words : Selected Letters and Diaries

A Lost Autobiographical Voice

A Lost Autobiographical Voice The novelist J.G. Farrell – known to his friends as Jim – was drowned on 11 August 1979, when he was swept into the sea by a sudden Atlantic storm while fishing off rocks in County Cork, in the south west of Ireland. He was in his early forties and at the crest of his career, having won the Booker Prize for The Siege of Krishnapur only five years earlier. As The Times would subsequently put it, a generation felt bereft. It was not the last time Farrell’s name was to be linked with the Booker Prize, however. In 2008 The Siege of Krishnapur was one of the six finalists chosen for the international ‘Best of Booker’ vote, to mark the fortieth anniversary. Salman Rushdie was the ultimate winner, and when asked afterwards which book should have taken the title, if his had not, he did not hesitate. ‘Well, I have always enormously admired The Siege of Krishnapur,’ he told The Guardian. ‘Had Farrell not sadly died so young, there is no question that he would today be one of the really major novelists of the English language.’ Referring to Troubles and The Singapore Grip, which complete Farrell’s twentieth-century classic, the Empire Trilogy , he added, ‘The three novels that he did leave are all in their different way extraordinary.’ But that, too, was not the end of Farrell’s Booker impact. In 2010 the Lost Booker Prize was announced for books from 1970 which had missed out, due to a rule change. Until then the prize had been retrospective, for novels published the previous year, but from 1971 onwards only those published in the same year were considered. Troubles duly graduated from the longlist of twentyone to the shortlist of six, putting Farrell in contention with Patrick White, among others, and Muriel Spark, who was the bookies’ favourite. But the international reading public thought otherwise and Troubles received 38 per cent of the final vote, over twice that 1 2 J.G. Farrell in his own Words of any rival. Farrell became a member, in company with J.M. Coetzee (1999) and Peter Carey (2001), of the exclusive club for double Booker winners. Had he won with Troubles in 1970, it was pointed out in the press at once, when The Siege of Krishnapur took the prize in 1973 he would have been the first. J.G. Farrell, glimpsed as the author’s name on the cover of a book, has an austerely confident ring to it. The man behind that name is revealed in these letters (spanning childhood to the day before his death) and diary fragments to be quite the opposite. Warm, and sometimes full of self-doubt, they trace his daily life and literary development throughout the 1960s and ’70s, recreating a lost autobiographical voice. The more confessional letters are written to women whom Farrell loved and occasionally hurt, but his kindness , deft humour and gift for friendship reached across rejection, which is why so many were kept. As the editor, and his biographer in J.G. Farrell, the Making of a Writer (Bloomsbury 1999), my priority is for Farrell himself to step forward here, to speak directly to the reader. Only a short introduction (and the occasional subsequent briefing) is needed before his educated drawl, described as having a tendency to trail away on the ends of words he emphasised, takes over. The childhood treble of the first three letters will not last long, nor the postgraduate introspection. He was born in Liverpool on 23 January 1935, the second of two sons; a third brother, Richard, was to be born in 1943. After the outbreak of the Second World War, his parents moved the family to Southport, farther down the coast, to escape the heavy bombing of Liverpool docks. Boscobel, the large Victorian house owned by an elderly bachelor uncle whose housekeeper and gardener had been called-up, was auspiciously named after a Harrison Ainsworth novel, and Jim and his older brother Robert had full run. Bill Farrell, their English father, was an accountant excused active service because he suffered from the tinnitis – a form of deafness – that had cut short his managerial business career in India shortly before Jim’s birth. War brought him a book-keeping role in a factory in Cumberland on twenty-four hour production, and Josephine, his capable Irish wife, took charge of everyone at home. Family life in wartime was less disrupted...