IT's unlikely that many readers of this column will recognise the name Patricia Avis, and indeed until a few years ago I only knew of her through Richard Murphy, to whom she was married in the 1950s. Yet the people who did know her well make an impressive list Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, John Wain, Sean O'Faolain, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Thomas Kinsella, Honor Tracy and J.R. Ackerley, among many others.
If she's at all known to the general reader, it's probably through Larkin's letters some of the most tender of them are written to this Johannesburg born daughter of a Dutch father and an Irish mother. She was then called Patsy Strang, having married a fellow Oxford student called Colin Strang and having moved to Belfast with him when he became lecturer in philosophy at Queen's.
It was there in 1951 that she met Larkin, who was a librarian at Queen's and with whom she had a two year affair that resulted in pregnancy and a miscarriage. (Larkin wrote to her "I'm sorry about the little creature, but it's not for me to say, really. I dare say my pride in it would have been over balanced by a distressful knowledge of double dealing.") Their friendship, however, long outlasted their affair.
A couple of years later in Paris, she was introduced to the admired young poet Richard Murphy, and though she confided in her journal, "It's Philip all over again" and "I've had enough poets in my life", she also admitted "I've met what I've been looking for." They married in 1955, after her divorce from Colin, and settled in Ireland, where their daughter Emily was born.
Aside from her journal, Patricia was writing poetry, and in 1957 she began a novel called Playing the Harlot. Two years later, she sought and gained a divorce from Richard, and she took up residence in Wilton Place, where she lived for most of the rest of her life with T. Desmond Williams, Professor of Modern European History at UCD.
The latter years of her life were sad. Playing the Harlot, a thinly disguised roman a clef had been turned down by Charles Monteith of Faber & Faber according to Richard Murphy, Monteith "did not want to publish it because it slandered his friends". This disappointed her greatly in contrast to the praise being accorded to the men in her life, she felt that her own literary efforts were being overlooked (a second novel was also turned down by Faber), and this sense of rejection, combined with her lifelong tendency to depression, may have led to her death in 1977 from alcohol and barbiturates.
I mention the facts of Patricia Avis's life because Playing the Ha got is finally being published by Virago. Her daughter, Emily, now married and running a restaurant with her husband in South Africa, is coming over to Dublin for next Tuesday's official launch. Richard Murphy will, of course, also be there, as will many eminent people who knew Patricia from the 1950s onwards.
SPEAKING of Faber, I see that one of the best known editors bin British publishing, Robert McCrum, is leaving the firm next month to become literary editor of the Observer. He has been with Faber for seventeen years, and among the authors with whom he has worked are John McGahem, Paul Auster, Milan Kundera, Hanif Kureishi and Peter Carey.
He has also written some dozen novels (the latest, Suspicion, is being published this month by Macmillan), and though he suffered a stroke last summer, he is now fully recovered.
Of his new appointment, he says that it was "obviously too good an opportunity to refuse", though the Evening Standard declared recently that his departure from Faber is "devastating" for a firm "desperate" to hold on to its authors. However, Matthew Evans, chairman of Faber, described this as "nonsense everybody is quite calm."
I hope that Mr McCrum doesn't alter the Observer books pages too much they're still by the far the best in any English paper. The current literary editor, Tim Adams, will, according to the Observer, be taking on the "enhanced role of editor of Review fronts as well as writing regularly for the paper".
LOUISE MOORE of Heinemann is madly excited about a new thriller that she has just bought for the firm. Describing it as "ER meets The Silence of the Lambs", she declares that when she read the manuscript it left her "breathless".
It's called The Scalpel, it concerns a serial killer at loose in a hospital, and I mention it here because the author, Paul Carson, is a Dublin paediatrician. I hope he's not writing from real life, or else it's time to cancel my VHI subscription.
Anyway, back to Ms Moore. She was so enthused about the manuscript that she "biked a copy to our sales director Sheila Crowley at the hairdresser" and she concluded a deal with Paul Carson's agent just ten minutes before a rival offer came from Hodder.
The Scalpel will be Heinemann's lead title next June.