Even as an undergraduate, Robin Farquharson was famous for being erratic. He provoked anxiety and goodwill in equal measure. His aim in life, according to an anonymous writer in an Oxford student newspaper, was “to become a contradiction in terms. Since last October, he has been cutting friends in the street; sleeping alternate nights in mysterious George Street garrets and obscure collegiate crypts.” The profile described his soul as “dogged, indomitable” and “fierce, incompatible”. Maybe. Later to become a prize-winning game theorist often hailed as a genius, he died aged just 42 in a squat fire on April Fools’ Day 1973. The poet Aidan Andrew Dun called him an “outsider among outsiders … a luminous ruin of a man”. For anti-psychiatrist RD Laing, he was “very intelligent and totally out of his fucking mind”.
Farquharson once joked he had been born a member of the master race in South Africa. He wasn’t entirely wrong. His father had founded a distinguished law firm in Pretoria; high-up politicians would regularly come over for dinner. He attended elite private schools – future pupils included the novelist Wilbur Smith and Elon Musk – and got himself a pilot’s licence even before, barely 16, he entered university. Later at Oxford he studied PPE, befriended Bertrand Russell and Rupert Murdoch (a self-declared Marxist at the time), and shared digs with future chancellor of the exchequer Nigel Lawson. Intellectually he was regarded as high-wattage but, about to land a starry All Souls College fellowship, he wrecked his chances by phoning the college warden to tell him he had a message from God he needed to share.
Like Lewis Carroll a century before him, Farquharson was interested in mathematics and voting systems, believing in the need for greater direct input from the electorate than from parliament. His work won him plaudits from philosophers such as John Searle, Michael Dummett and Amartya Sen, as well as a major prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He appeared on panels and at conferences with key figures in economics, holography, computer science and artificial intelligence. His eloquence and number-crunching skills led to a prominent role on the BBC’s election night coverage in 1955.
By the start of the 1960s, Farquharson was busy being a race traitor back in South Africa. He was one of the leading lights in that country’s Liberal party (which was more leftwing than its name suggested), found publishing perches for novelist Bessie Head and her journalist husband, Harold, and conspired with poet-activist Dennis Brutus in his ultimately successful campaign to get South Africa banned from international sporting events. He kept non-segregated company, refused to hide his homosexuality, and was routinely harassed by police hoping to strip him of his passport. Later, in London, he managed to blow much of his inheritance trying to raise funds to set up a guerilla army to cross into the apartheid state. (He was diddled by drinkers at his local Irish pub who had sworn they could provide him with grenades and dynamite.)
In M Syd Rosen’s mesmerising, fastidiously researched biography – the first to date – Farquharson appears to have been everywhere in the 60s and early 70s. At seminars with Nobel prize-winners and department of defence employees. Hanging out with occultist Frater Choronzon and dianetics promoter George Hay. At celebrated countercultural spaces such as the Arts Lab on Drury Lane, explaining the cult of Rupert Bear among London’s demimonde to a reporter from the Sunday Times, founding the Situationists Housing Association, making an experimental pro-Palestinian film which ended, Rosen observes, “with Israel pinning Palestine to the ground and making thrusting buttocks movements”.
Was Farquharson an intellectual itinerant, another Timothy Leary – the US academic whose career was rerouted by drugs? A class defector on the run from his blessed background? His 1968 memoir, Drop Out!, recalls him being attacked by a gang of teenagers – “Now I was a Negro. Now I was a Jew. At last, at last.” Madness, poorly treated by psychiatric institutions, dogged him: he claimed to be the king of Zembla – a nation that exists only in the pages of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire; was arrested at Didcot station for wearing no clothes while awaiting a train; had no compunction, especially when stoned, about punching policemen – or even friends.
Rosen, who co-founded Jargon – a project devoted to forgotten and fringe aspects of the Jewish diaspora – first heard about Farquharson from a random drinker in a London pub. “I was drawn to the story and repulsed by it,” he writes. Considering his subject’s vagrant life and the fact that the Cambridge college that holds material about him will not release it because it is “too distressing”, he has done remarkably well to reconstruct the peripatetic adventures of a “crazed scholar”, someone “on a trip without a ticket”, a cultural precog who channelled and was eventually devoured by the roiling energies of his age. “I adumbrated vast enterprises,” Farquharson once wrote. Did he ever.
