EEven during graduation, Robin Farquharson was famous for being erratic. They provoked concern and goodwill in equal measure. His life’s purpose, according to an anonymous writer of the Oxford student newspaper, was “to become a paradox in words. Since last October, he has been cutting off friends on the street; sleeping alternate nights in mysterious George Street garrets and obscure collegiate crypts.” The profile describes his spirit as “tenacious, indomitable” and “fierce, uncompromising.” Perhaps. Later to become an award-winning game theorist often hailed as a genius, he died in a squat fire on April Fools’ Day 1973, aged just 42. The poet Aidan Andrew Dunn called him “an outsider among outsiders… a shining ruin of a man”. For the anti-psychiatrist RD Lang, he was “very intelligent and completely out of his mind”.
Farquharson once joked that he was born in South Africa a member of the master race. He was not completely wrong. His father had established a prestigious law firm in Pretoria; High ranking politicians regularly came for dinner. He attended elite private schools – future pupils included novelists Wilbur Smith and Elon Musk – and barely even entered university at the age of 16, he earned himself a pilot’s license. Later at Oxford he studied PPE, befriended Bertrand Russell and Rupert Murdoch (at the time a self-proclaimed Marxist), and shared conversations with Nigel Lawson, the future Chancellor of the Exchequer. Intellectually he was considered to be of high ability, but when a fellowship to All Souls College was up for grabs, he ruined his chances by phoning the college warden to tell him that he had a message from God that he needed to share.
Like Lewis Carroll a century before him, Farquharson was interested in mathematics and voting systems, and believed in the need for more direct input from voters than from Parliament. His work has won him praise from philosophers such as John Searle, Michael Dummett, and Amartya Sen, as well as a major award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has appeared on panels and conferences with leading figures in economics, holography, computer science, and artificial intelligence. His eloquence and number-crunching skills led to a prominent role in the BBC’s election night coverage in 1955.
By the early 1960s, Farquharson was busy becoming a race traitor in South Africa. He was one of the key leaders of that country’s Liberal Party (which was more left-wing than its name suggests), did publishing work for the novelist Bessie Head and her journalist husband, Harold, and conspired with the poet-activist Dennis Brutus in their ultimately successful campaign to ban South Africa from international sporting events. He kept non-segregated associations, refused to hide his homosexuality, and was regularly harassed by police hoping to take away his passport. Later, in London, he managed to squander much of his inheritance in an attempt to raise funds to set up a guerrilla army to penetrate the apartheid state. (He was betrayed by drinkers in his local Irish pub, who swore they could provide him with grenades and dynamite.)
In M Sid Rosen’s spellbinding, meticulously researched biography – the first to date – it appears that Farquharson was everywhere in the ’60s and early ’70s. In seminars with Nobel laureates and Defense Department employees. Hanging out with tantric fraternity Choronzon and Dianetics promoter George Hay. at famous countercultural venues such as the Arts Lab on Drury Lane, explaining to a Sunday Times reporter the cult of Rupert Beers among London’s demimonde, setting up the Situationists’ Housing Association, making an experimental pro-Palestine film that ended, Rosen believes, with “Israel razing Palestine to the ground and making vigorous buttocks movements”.
Was Farquharson an intellectual nomad, another Timothy Leary – the American academic whose career was upended by drugs? A class turncoat running away 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, haunted him: he claimed to be king of Zembla – a nation that exists only in the pages of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire; Arrested at Didcot station for wearing no clothes while waiting for a train; I had no remorse, especially when stoned, in punching policemen or even friends.
Rosen, who co-founded Jargon – a project dedicated to forgotten and marginalized aspects of the Jewish diaspora – first heard about Farquharson from a random drinker in a London pub. ‘I was attracted to this story,’ he writes, ‘and I was disgusted by it.’ Considering his subject’s vagabond life and the fact that Cambridge College, which holds material about him, will not release it because it is ‘too disturbing’, he has done a remarkably good job of recreating the adventures of a ‘mad scholar’, someone ‘on a journey without a ticket’, a cultural preg who was ultimately consumed by the fiery energies of his era. Had gone. Farquharson once wrote, “I admired huge enterprises.” Has he ever?
