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. 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.ĭeakin only published a single book in his lifetime: Waterlog was hugely successful and one of the foundational texts for the whole wild swimming movement. 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. But for the rest, we have to guess.ĭeakin records his life as if he knows that a book like this will one day be written about it 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. There are also, fascinatingly, passages written by Barkham in Deakin’s own voice. Deakin’s own observations are augmented by Barkham, who did extensive interviews with the writer’s friends, family and former lovers. 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. You think of Nicholas Shakespeare’s life of Bruce Chatwin, or Jonathan Coe on BS Johnson. 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.Ī good literary biography is often a kind of joint venture between writer and subject. 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. The campus is just outside the town and overlooks a lake they call the Broad, where I spent much of my time.

Not long after my first novel was published, I was invited to a writers’ symposium at UEA in Norwich.

Roger deakins