J.G. Farrell in His Own Words: Selected Letters and Diaries

by Lavinia Greacen

The Siege of Krishnapur , the second of Farrell's Empire Trilogy, won the Booker Prize in 1973, and it was selected as one of only six previous winners to compete in the 2008 international Best of Booker competition. The strength of American interest in Farrell's books is underlined by the inclusion of all three Trilogy novels in the Classics imprint of the New York Review of Books. Troubles won the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010.



Many of these selected letters are written to women whom Jim Farrell loved and whom he inadvertently hurt. His ambition to be a great writer in an age of minimal author's earnings ruled out the expense of marriage and fatherhood, so self-sufficiency was his answer. Books Ireland has astutely portrayed him as "a mystery wrapped in an enigma, a man who wanted solitude and yet did not want it, wanted love but feared commitment, reached out again and again but, possibly through fear of rejection, was always the first to cut the cord." But Farrell's kindness, deft humor and gift for friendship reached across rejection, which must account for why so many such letters were kept.



Funny, teasing, anxious and ambitious, these previously unpublished letters to a wide range of friends give the reader a glimpse of this private man. Ranging from childhood to the day before his death, Farrell's distinctive letters have the impact of autobiography.

464 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2009

Reviews

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

J. G. Farrell is the author of the three masterful novels we call the Empire Trilogy: Troubles, The Siege of Krishnapur, and The Singapore Grip. We find that by reading the letters and diaries of writers we admire can lead us to insight about the sources of their work. That impulse was unsatisfied in my reading of In His Own Words, the letters and diaries of Farrell. He wrote a wide variety of people. However, the letters concern business with publishers and agents. Or they are letters to lovers, who were numerous, but Farrell wasn't given to writing affectionately or poetically to them. Or the letters are notes to friends. Disappointingly, the collection shed no light on the thought processes behind his work, the ideas which were the engines running his writing. There is no debate with correspondents, no discourse or argument running through the letters. Instead there is personal news: the current progress of what he was working on, where he'll spend holidays, complaints about the lack of money. And yet anyone who has read The Singapore Grip knows that an intellectual current coursed through his thinking. Here, though, the letters to acquaintances reveal a degree of naivete. The air of pointless youthful enthusiasm never quite left him. He had literary friends. He was close enough to Margaret Drabble to be invited to dinner parties at her home. Yet the only correspondence to her in the book are thank you notes for the evenings. He knew Garcia Marquez, Saul Bellow, and Richard Hughes, but we have only notes to Hughes thanking him for a weekend's hospitality. He was friends with Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell, and John Banville but seems not to have corresponded with them, a practice which might have leavened the collection with some bookish, literary dialogue to spice up these rather ordinary letters.

[Justin · Rating 2 out of 5]

These letters and notes do not provide much insight about Farrell's creative process, and that would have been their only redeeming value. Their subjects are extremely prosaic. I confess that I was very disappointed by them and hoped for more.

[Howard · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a set of letters written to supportive friends and to people in the publishing business with whom he worked and was keen to cultivate good working relations with. They indicate Farrell's focus and committment to his writing and trace his development as a writer from the time before the natural theme of his books emerged to even himself. It gives a good picture of the trials and discipline of getting his novels written. The letters inform friends on what perspectives he had on some current affairs, and show his determination and application in getting his novels over the line and published, with the demands of working with agents. Not having read his novels yet, in this series of letters he seemed quite concerned with the structure of his novel's narrative and what bits could be left out and still empower him to let his characters rip on some of the outrages of colonial society that he was documenting in 'Troubles', 'Siege of Krishnapur', 'The Singapore Grip' and 'The Hill Station'.

This book seems to essentially a presentation of materials assembled and analysed for Greacen's book with commentries 'J.G. Farrell, the Making of a Writer', 1999. As such, it really does demonstrate how this writer became more confident in what he was writing. On pp 176-177 there is a fascinating letter from September 1969 written to his agent detailing the structural pruning of his manuscript. In his later career, he negotiated advances to write up commissions that involved travel and research in India in 1971 and South East Asia in 1975. This series of letters show how novel writing is both a trial for the author who not only has to create the story, but also be detached enough from it to prune it mercilessly to reach the final manuscript for publication and how all writing is a learning process in the development of ones opinions on various matters of the day. As a reader of remarkably few biographic and autobiographic works on writers from Ireland, Greacen has provided with Farrell's letters as good an introduction to the genre as any.