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.
That you don’t really see the joins in the enterprise is credit to Barkham’s skill as a writer, but also as an organiser of content. The story here is largely chronological, but the way it is told, the movement between the jagged present tense of the journals, the more meditative reflectiveness of the notebooks written late in life and the wistful reminiscences of friends lends the whole endeavour a sense of multidimensional dynamism.
Deakin only published a single book in his lifetime: Waterlog was hugely successful and one of the foundational texts for the whole wild swimming movement. His more ambitious work, Wildwood, a meditation on the relationship between humans and trees, came out after his death, as did Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, which was, like The Swimmer, mined posthumously from his journals. There are two things, though, that strike you early on as you read The Swimmer: first, that Deakin was more about the life than the art – his career, writes Barkham, riffles like a wild river”, moving lustily from lover to lover, from job to job, propelled by an overpoweringly romantic vision of himself; second, that this is as much a biography of a generation as an individual.
I confess to feeling something like jealousy reading the record of Deakin’s wonderful, friend-filled existence, at once liberated and rooted. A boomer, he grew up in a postwar era of optimism and economic prosperity, a working-class scholarship boy at Haberdashers’ Aske’s (“we knew how to use the apostrophe”) who went on to a dreamlike Cambridge of punting and Pimm’s. He became a successful advertising executive, was pursued by any number of girls, then found a ruined farmhouse in Suffolk to which, aged 31, he retired. He then teaches, swims, gets involved in the local “faires”, which are like mini East Anglian Glastonburys, befriends Richard Branson and Andrea Arnold, Richard Mabey and Robert Macfarlane. He’s a terrible poet but a beautiful writer of prose, and records his life as if he knows that a book like this will one day be written about it.
With freedom, as for so many in his generation, comes selfishness and callousness. Turning 20 in 1963, the year Larkin said that sex began, Deakin leaves a trail of broken hearts behind him. He almost misses the birth of his son (he was checking on his donkeys), begins an affair soon after, and then is downcast when his wife scoops the child up after a final, violent argument and departs. Other women come and go; friends are the constant. He dies (of cancer) too young, too swiftly, at 63, leaving behind two great books: one is Waterlog, the other is The Swimmer – a rich, strange and compelling work of creative memoir that beautifully honours and elevates the life and work of its subject.
Alex Preston is the author of Winchelsea (Canongate, £9.99)
The Swimmer by Patrick Barkham is published by Hamish Hamilton (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
