2009 Press Releases
28.10.2009
JG Farrell in His Own Words: Selected Letters and Diaries edited by Lavinia Greacen will be launched by Irish writer, John Banville this evening (Wednesday, October 28th 2009) in the Royal Irish Academy.
"An important Anglo-Irish writer", the Irish Times described Farrell last Saturday. Correct on all counts! ‘Being half Irish and half English,’ he himself once commented, ‘I can look at the same thing from both sides: the colonist and the colonised.’
Born in Liverpool in 1935, his mother was Irish & his father English. The family moved to Dublin after the war: first to Northumberland Road while house-hunting, then to Shankill, and later to Saval Park Road, Dalkey. A favourite pen-name in his teens was the anagram Dora Parke Saville!
At school at Rossall in Lancashire – Patrick Campbell was an Old Boy – Farrell dominated the school magazine, signing articles ‘Seamus’, and was a star of the rugby 1st 15. During Christmas holidays at home he played with Wanderers at Lansdowne Road. Before going up to Oxford to study Law and concentrate on getting a rugby Blue, he spent a year teaching French and games at Castlepark, the prep school near his home in Dalkey.
University changed Farrell’s life, but not as he expected. As we know with hindsight, he soon contracted polio, which led to weeks in an Iron Lung, & months of physiotherapy at the Central Remedial Clinic in Clontarf. He lost 5 stone; shoulder muscles & breathing were permanently affected.
When he returned to Oxford the following year, he switched from Law to Modern Languages. He was now determined to become a writer. The Salk vaccine was available 6 months after he fell ill. But had it not been for Farrell’s polio, we might not have the novels today.
The diary extracts in this book show the cost to him of writing them. His early novels won reviewers’ notice but even compliments stung. When the Guardian wrote, ‘One sees sure signs of the developing powers of a considerable talent,’ he confides, ‘The idea that my powers should be developing covers me with alarm and despair. I fancy they are diminishing!’
In 1966 Farrell was awarded a Harkness Fellowship to America, & the first lines of Troubles were written on St Patrick's Day in New York. It would win the Faber Prize in 1971 and lead to his classic Empire Trilogy with The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip.
In 1979 Farrell came back to live in Ireland, and he chose to settle in Kilcrohane, near Bantry in West Cork.
Full Circle to 2009, the 30th anniversary of his death and the felicitous publication of his letters and diaries by CUP, which opens up Jim Farrell’s life from childhood to the day before his death.
Richard Farrell will read aloud a few extracts in a voice as near to Jim’s own as it is possible to find.
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