JG Farrell in His Own Words : Selected Letters and Diaries

Threshold 1943–60

5 Threshold 1943–60 To his father 1 Preston Road Southport [undated] 1942 Dear Daddy, I’m sorry I could not get you a present as I am h hard up aaa and I had’ent [sic] time to earn any money. I hope you get this letter in time to wish you many happy returns. I wish you were home as I am saving up for a book and I might be able to wangle it out [of] you. Love from XXXX JIMMY XXXXXX XXXX XXXXXX To his parents Terra Nova School Jodrell Bank Holmes Chapel Cheshire 15 October 1945 Dear Mum and Dad, Please tell Miss Roberts I am in the 4th set for Latin, Maths, French, Latin, English, and Modern. I am 9th in a class of about fifteen for Maths and I’ve beaten all the other new boys. It was the pictures last night, and there was a Laural [sic] and Hardy one which was quite good. Love from Jimmy To his mother Terra Nova School Sunday [undated] 1947 Dear Mum, It snowed on Saturday for about twenty minutes during French. If you can get the aeroplane I would like it for Christmas ... The S.E.5 is a last war plane and is rather hard to make so I’d better make it at home. Love from Jimmy After Rossall, he had to fill in time before university owing to the backlog of undergraduates after the war. He spent a restless year as a junior master at Castlepark, an exclusive prep school in County Dublin, and a second year in Canada, where he earned good money labouring in arctic conditions at the Defense Early Warning System, known as the DEW Line, in Baffin Bay. In October 1956, feeling fit and optimistic, Jim went up to Brasenose College, Oxford; his aim was to read Law half-heartedly and to work extremely hard to gain a rugby blue. Within six weeks of arrival, however, shortly before the end of the first term, that all changed. He was taken ill after rugby practice, polio was diagnosed in hospital, and he was put into an iron lung. ‘The familiar road had ended’, as he would mourn in The Lung, his second novel, ‘and the future was a jungle through which [I] would have to cut [my] way.’ (A full account of his ordeal can be found in J.G. Farrell, the Making of a Writer.) In the spring of the following year, grey-haired and four stone lighter, with the muscles of his shoulders and arms and, especially, his breathing affected, he was allowed home. During the lengthy, inert months of convalescence in Dublin, he resolved to follow his instinct and become a novelist . In one useful way, hospital had equipped him. Typing had been encouraged as physiotherapy, to strengthen the muscles in his hands, and he practised diligently. Writing by hand would remain wearying, and it took years before the polio damage was erased from his previously meticulous classical script. Almost all the letters in this book were typed. His Oxford colleagues, like his old Dublin friends, found Farrell greatly changed, and the physical losses were accentuated by his new sense of purpose . He was advised to take up Modern Languages instead of Law because it was less physically demanding; the incentive for the switch, he liked to murmur, was to read Proust in the original. Privately he was beginning to J.G. Farrell in his Own Words 6 write. These were sighting shots for a novel, and darkened by guilt, anguish and self-blame after 1959 when he eventually rejected his Irish girlfriend, who had aided his recovery, during her own protracted recovery from serious head injuries sustained in a car crash. She had been on the way to a party to which he, too, had been invited, and he had renegued on taking her there, preferring to write. On the surface, Farrell fitted back into student life. He made lasting friendships, wrote an occasional column for Oxford Opinion, and in due course gained an undistinguished Third. To Sally Bentlif 1 [Card postmarked Av. D’Italie, Paris] 8 April 1960 Dear Sally, Wish you were here. Come to that, why aren’t you here? Saw Les Liaisons Dangeureuses. Fabulously sexy and immoral and great in every way. Love Jim To The Irish Times Balholm Saval Park Road Dalkey Co. Dublin 28 July 1960...