Not long after my first novel was published, I was invited to a writers’ symposium at UEA in Norwich. The campus is just outside the town and overlooks a lake they call the Broad, where I spent much of my time. I swam under the spell of two books: Charles Sprawson’s Haunts of the Black Masseur and Roger Deakin’s Waterlog, each of which made swimming feel like an expression of the liberated self, a declaration of existential intent. During those strange days in Norfolk, I also stumbled into the university library, where I found, to my delight, the Roger Deakin archive: a vast collection of notebooks, letters and journals left by the writer on his death in 2006.
A good literary biography is often a kind of joint venture between writer and subject. You think of Nicholas Shakespeare’s life of Bruce Chatwin, or Jonathan Coe on BS Johnson. In The Swimmer, Patrick Barkham – a fine author in his own right – takes this idea to its logical conclusion, mining and shaping that enormous, eccentric archive into a book that is, as far as we can make out, about four-fifths in Deakin’s own hand but reads like a first-person memoir. Deakin’s own observations are augmented by Barkham, who did extensive interviews with the writer’s friends, family and former lovers. There are also, fascinatingly, passages written by Barkham in Deakin’s own voice. In the introduction, he parses a brief section – Deakin’s visit to a Royal Navy ship in Venice – and tells us which paragraphs were Deakin and which Barkham. But for the rest, we have to guess.
