What can fascinate more than genius, except imperfect genius? Whereas one can be total, when the very exceptionality of an individual's talent removes it far from the common grasp and ken, the other is the intriguing situation of one who is like the common herd, striving and falling, and yet nothing like us, because of a shining gift. Call it the Princess Diana dichotomy.
Yet nothing could be further from the unintellectual common touch of the beautiful royal wife than the deeply cerebral complexity of the writer Jim Farrell. Farrell drowned 20 years ago this August. Tonight, a public gathering in Bantry House, Cork, some miles from the spot where he was apparently washed into the sea, will discuss his work and life.
The former, according to the first - and probably only - biography of him, by Lavinia Greacen, was a much finer thing than the latter. Farrell's writing, as in the novels Troubles, The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip, was a special thing indeed. In life he was self-centred, often cold, and superficial in relation to others.
The summer of 1979 was momentous in this part of the world. The whole country was anticipating the visit of Pope John Paul II, which was to start at the end of September. It was another dreary Irish summer weatherwise, erupting into lashing fury at the time of the Fastnet yacht race - a heartbreaker that year, the stormy seas between England and the south coast of Ireland claiming the lives of 12 sailors.
The Fastnet tragedy was covered in detail by The Irish Times of mid-August 1979. Eugene McEldowney, now a night editor and himself a successful novelist, covered the Fastnet disaster. But he can remember hearing nothing of Jim Farrell's death. The English writer, who had just come to live in west Cork, was swept off a rock as he was fishing and drowned on August 12th. His body was not recovered for another month. He was 44.
Lavinia Greacen says in her foreword that she found truth in the maxim that it is necessary to fall in love with the subject of a biography. This is her second biography, after Chink, the true story of one of Ernest Hemingway's most memorable characters. A sense of the love that is a little too close and uncritical suffuses this book. Farrell was obviously, to use the common phrase, a bastard to women. He picked them up with ease, despite his damaged physique after a dangerous bout of polio when he was a student at Oxford. This clearly left him troubled, psychologically as well as physically, although Greacen does not tease this out.
What is recorded is his facility for attracting women - one of the pages of photographs in the book is a gallery of doe-eyed late-1960s beauties, all his girlfriends - and his tendency to treat them cruelly. "Each girlfriend believed she was the only one, until made aware when she was in love with him of the quality and quantity of equal candidates," writes Greacen, who records many examples of his women-as-toys attitude. One girlfriend decided to pay an impromptu visit to his London flat. The friends with her saw him come to the door, look at her, kiss her on the cheek, and retreat inside. "He just dismissed her."
When he came to live in Ireland in the spring of 1979 he brought a list of "marriage prospects", a top five, one of whom he had to discount when she decided to return to her husband. However, another acquaintance described him as rather effete and wondered about his sexuality. From reading his novels I had suspected their creator was not heterosexual, at least not happily; perhaps his confusion, as much as conflicting ideas about man-woman relations, was the source of his ambivalence.
James Gordon Farrell was born in Liverpool of an Irish mother and an English father in 1935. As a boy he lived in Ireland, in the Shankill area of County Dublin, because of the family connections. Later he worked for a year as a master at Castlepark school in Dalkey. He never displayed any great love of this country, and even the fond Greacen has to concede that when he did come to live here in 1979 it was because of the tax-free status for artists established by Charles Haughey's government. "Why, he was asked, if he was such a staunch socialist, was he leaving the country [England] as soon as he had enough money to qualify for the higher tax net? He had no answer, except the necessity . . . of a temporary retreat and redeployment of forces."
This hypocrisy was foreshadowed by his Booker Prize acceptance speech in 1973, when he castigated the Booker McConnell company for its exploitation of cheap native labour in its sugar plantations, yet was happy to pocket the £5,000 cheque. Even his good friend, Malcolm Dean of the Guardian, is reported to have told him his gesture was "corny as well as phony".
For all this, many people loved him, and his generosity as a dinner party host, coupled with his prowess as a cook, can only explain a fraction of that. His friends who wrote tributes to him after his death, including Margaret Drabble and the playwright John Spurling, commented on his seeming need to set challenges to himself, to make things hard so that he could gain his own self-respect by overcoming difficulties.
Greacen's book is a staggering piece of work, a labour of love, although she never met Jim Farrell herself. His life is itemised in great detail over 400 pages. A slightly annoying conceit of interleaving passages from his novels, in italics, into the narrative is employed. Having a great interest in the author myself I consumed it voraciously, but niggles do nig. It is a handsome book, well produced and bound, in excellent type. So why not more care with the spell-check? "Curvacious" might be forgiven, but "sentances"?
Greacen also has a talent for the odd infelicitous or obscure construction, in her eagerness to bring Farrell to life. "Shouldering his way around her drawing-room, Jim's strapping build was as apparent as his consuming interest in books." A more diligent editor would have helped this well-researched biography achieve at least some of the glory of the prose created by its subject.