292 - ] English Literature
Duncan Fallowell
Born 26
September 1948 (age 77)
London, England
Education St
Paul's School, London
Alma mater Magdalen
College, Oxford
Occupation(s) Novelist,
travel writer, journalist and critic
Awards PEN/Ackerley
Prize, 2012; John Heygate Award, 2014
Website www.duncanfallowell.com
Duncan Fallowell FRSL (born 26 September 1948) is an English novelist,
travel writer, memoirist, journalist and critic.
Early life
Fallowell was born on 26 September 1948 in London, son of Thomas
Edgar Fallowell, of Finchampstead, near Wokingham, Berkshire, and La
Croix-Valmer, France, and Celia, née Waller. His father, marketing director for
a wire manufacturing company, founded the family business Arrow Wire Products
in 1965. He had been an officer in the RAF during World War II. The family
moved to Somerset and Essex, before settling in Berkshire. While at St Paul's
School, London, Fallowell established a friendship with John Betjeman, and
through him, links to literary London. In 1967, he went to Magdalen College,
Oxford (BA and MA in Modern History). At the university, he was a pupil of Karl
Leyser, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and Howard Colvin. He was also part of a group
experimenting with psychedelic drugs.[8] While an undergraduate he became a
friend of April Ashley, whose biography he later wrote.
Career
In 1970, at the age of 21, Fallowell was given a pop column in
The Spectator. He was subsequently the magazine's film critic and fiction
critic. During the 1970s, he travelled in Europe, India and the Far East,
collaborated on the punk glossies Deluxe and Boulevard; was a reviewer for the
monthlies Books and Bookmen and Records and Recording; and worked with the
avant-garde German group Can. He began writing about Can's music in the British
press in 1970 and visited the group in Cologne soon after. Early in the same
decade he explored other aspects of the German rock scene, visiting Berlin,
Munich and Hamburg. He wrote verbal covers to many of Can singer Damo Suzuki's
non-linguistic vocals. When Damo left the band in 1973, Fallowell was asked if
he would like to take over as a vocalist. Fallowell noted that "after a
long dark night of the soul", he decided against it.
In 1979, he edited a collection of short stories, Drug Tales.
This was followed by two novels, Satyrday and The Underbelly. Chris Petit,
reviewing the second for The Times, wrote: "The author's pose and prose is
that of dandy as cosh-boy.... The writing attains a sort of frenzied detachment
found in the drawings of Steadman or Scarfe."
During the 1980s, Fallowell spent much of his time in the south
of France and in Sicily, celebrated in the travel book To Noto (1989). Patrick
Taylor-Martin, reviewing it, called the author "stylishly at ease with the
louche, the camp, the intellectual, the vaguely criminal. His prose combines
baroque extravagance with a shiny demotic smartness.... He is particularly good
on the sexual atmosphere." His second travel book: One Hot Summer in St
Petersburg, was the outcome of a period living in Russia's old imperial
capital. Michael Ratcliffe, literary editor of The Observer, made it his Book
of the Year: it "combines, as exhilaratingly as Christopher Isherwood's
Berlin writings, the pleasures of travel, reporting, autobiography.... There is
candour of every kind... an absolute knockout." Anthony Cross, Emeritus
Professor of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge, in his book St
Petersburg and the British, wrote that Fallowell's "evocation of life in
the new St Petersburg is a stunning tour de force... in the spirit of Nikolai
Gogol."
It was while living in St Petersburg that he wrote the first
draft of the libretto for the opera Gormenghast, inspired by Mervyn Peake’s
trilogy. With music composed by Irmin Schmidt, this was first staged in 1998 at
the Wuppertal Opera in Germany, which had commissioned it. Schmidt was a member
of Can and Fallowell had already written the lyrics to two albums of his songs:
Musk at Dusk (1987) and Impossible Holidays (1991). This work is also featured
in Irmin Schmidt's compilation Villa Wunderbar (2013) and his collection
Electro Violet (2015).
A third novel, A History of Facelifting (2003), draws on his
experience of the Marches, the border country in Herefordshire and mid-Wales,
which Fallowell discovered in 1972 when he first visited Hay-on-Wye at the
invitation of Richard Booth, the self-styled 'King of Hay'. Fallowell has
visited the area often since then, at times staying for long periods in remote
cottages. A third travel book, Going As Far As I Can, recounted Fallowell's
wanderings through New Zealand. Jonathan Meades described it as having the
ghostly atmosphere of de Chirico's paintings: "The text has the movement
of a dream," he remarked in the New Statesman feature "Books of the
Year 2008".
His books have been controversial – Bruno Bayley in Vice wrote
that Fallowell has "penned novels that people seem to have a tendency to
burn." In the same interview, Fallowell told him: "Fiction is such a
turn-off word, not because I am against imaginative work – of course not – but
because there is so much crap published as fiction. I am interested in
literature. I am not interested in some commercial idea that is simply
verbalised. I want high performance language operated by an expert." Roger
Lewis dubbed Fallowell "the modern Petronius" in a recent book.
As a journalist, Fallowell identified with the New Journalism
movement, which advanced a literary form variously taking in reportage,
interview, commentary, autobiography, travel, history and criticism. He has
only worked freelance. His writings have appeared in The Times, The Sunday
Times, Observer, Guardian, Independent, The Daily Telegraph, The American
Scholar, the Paris Review, Tatler, Vanity Fair, Marie Claire, Playboy,
Penthouse, Encounter, Tages Anzeiger, The Age, La Repubblica, New Statesman,
Vice, and many other publications. He has often contributed to the intellectual
monthly Prospect and has had columns in The Spectator, the Evening Standard and
several online magazines. A collection of Fallowell's interview-profiles,
Twentieth Century Characters was described by Richard Davenport-Hines as
"like Aubrey's Brief Lives in twentieth-century accents. The effect is of
a rich, energetic frivolity and passionate curiosity about human types."
April Ashley's Odyssey, Fallowell's authorised biography of his
friend, was published in 1982. In 2006, April Ashley published what purported
to be a new book, her autobiography; but this was discovered to be mostly a
reprint of the Fallowell book. After taking legal action for plagiarism,
Fallowell received damages, costs, and the reaffirmation of his intellectual
property rights; and a public apology from the authors and John Blake
Publishing was printed in The Bookseller on 1 December 2006.
The memoir How To Disappear: A Memoir For Misfits was published
in 2011 by Ditto Press, designed by Nazareno Crea; it was awarded the
PEN/Ackerley Prize for memoir in 2012. Chairman of the judges Peter Parker
commended it as "a subtle, beautifully written and often very funny
example of autobiography by stealth." Alan Hollinghurst, in the Guardian
Books of the Year, called it 'brilliant and haunting'. The Independent on Sunday
said Fallowell "writes like a spikier Sebald, alternating between acerbic
witticisms and passages of voluptuous description."
He published his fourth novel London Paris New York in 2020 in
electronic form via Amazon.
Fallowell has for many years conducted an epistolary
relationship with the Surrealist Mexican artist Pedro Friedeberg.
In an interview with Prospect magazine (May 2008), Fallowell
said: ". . . both Graham Greene and Harold Acton said that I belong to the
21st century. At the time I was rather distressed by that, as it seemed a form
of rejection. But now I understand it a little better."
Fallowell states on his Facebook page that he is also making
experimental films and that "The artist is the last free person."
Awards
PEN/Ackerley Prize for memoir, 2012
John Heygate Award, 2014.
Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, 2015.
