Review of International Freak by M. Sid Rosen – British Timothy Leary | books

eEven as a college student, Robin Farquharson had a reputation for being an eccentric. It aroused concern 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 ties with friends in the street; sleeping alternate nights in the shadowy attics of George Street and the mysterious communal cellars.” The profile described his spirit as “stubborn and indomitable” and “fierce and nonconformist.” maybe. Later, he became an award-winning game theorist, often hailed as a genius, and died at the age of 42 in a fire on April Fools’ Day 1973. He was described by the poet Aidan Andrew Donne as “an outsider among strangers…the luminous desolation of man”. For anti-psychiatrist R. D. Laing, he was “too clever and completely out of his mind.”

Farquharson once joked that he was born a member of the master race in South Africa. And he wasn’t entirely wrong. His father founded a distinguished law firm in Pretoria. High-ranking politicians regularly came for dinner. He attended elite private schools – his future students included novelist Wilbur Smith and Elon Musk – and obtained a pilot’s license even before he entered university, at the age of 16. Later at Oxford he studied PPE, became friends with Bertrand Russell and Rupert Murdoch (who was a self-declared Marxist at the time), and took part in excavations with future Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson. Intellectually, he was seen as highly capable, but when he was about to receive the star-studded Fellowship of All Souls College, he ruined his chance by phoning the college’s superintendent 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, believing in the need for greater direct input from voters than from Parliament. His work has won 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 key figures in economics, holography, computer science, and artificial intelligence. His skills in rhetoric and number crunching led to him playing a prominent role in the BBC’s election night coverage in 1955.

By the early 1960s, Farquharson was busy being a race traitor in South Africa. He was a leading figure in that country’s Liberal Party (which was more left-wing than its name suggested), found publishing positions for the novelist Bessie Head and her journalist husband Harold, and conspired with the poet and activist Denis Brutus in his ultimately successful campaign to ban South Africa from participating in international sporting events. He kept inseparable company, refused to hide his homosexuality, and was routinely harassed by police in the hope of being stripped of his passport. Later, in London, he managed to blow up much of his inheritance trying to raise money to create a guerrilla army to cross into the apartheid state. (He was tricked by drinkers at his local Irish pub who swore they could supply him with grenades and dynamite.)

In Sid Rosen’s charming, carefully researched biography – his first to date – Farquharson seems to have been everywhere in the 1960s and early 1970s. At seminars with Nobel laureates and employees of the Ministry of Defense. Hanging out with occultist Frater Choronzon and Dianetics promoter Georg Hay. In famous counter-cultural venues such as the Arts Laboratory in Drury Lane, explaining the cult of Robert Baer among Londoners to a reporter from the Sunday Times, founding the Situationists’ Housing Association, and producing an experimental pro-Palestinian film, which ended, as Rosen notes, “with Israel pinning Palestine to the ground and doing push-ups.”

Was Farquharson an intellectual wanderer, or another Timothy Leary – the American academic whose career path was changed by drugs? A class defector fleeing from his blessed background? In his 1968 memoir, “Drop Out!”, he recalls being attacked by a gang of teenagers — “Now I was a Negro. Now I was a Jew. Finally, finally.” He was haunted by madness, abused in psychiatric institutions: he claimed to be the king of Zembla – a nation that only existed in the pages of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel The Pale Fire; He was arrested at Didcot station for not wearing clothes while waiting for a train; He had no remorse, especially when stoned, about punching police officers – or even friends.

Rosen, who co-founded Jargon — a project dedicated to forgotten and marginal aspects of the Jewish diaspora — first heard about Farquharson from a random drinker in a London pub. “I was drawn into the story and it shocked me,” he writes. Given the vagabond life of his subject and the fact that the Cambridge college that held material on him would not publish it because it was “too painful,” he does a remarkably good job of reconstructing the itinerant adventures of a “mad scientist,” someone “on a journey without a ticket,” a culturally literate person who channeled and ultimately devoured the turbulent energies of his time. “I was referring to huge projects,” Farquharson once wrote. Has he ever done that?