ALASTAIR NIVEN

A.N. Jeffares (11 August 1920 — 1 June 2005)

We have all experienced it. Someone we hugely admire because of their inexhaustible energy or their creative talent dies, and it is as though night had fallen in the afternoon. It is simply not possible that this person has gone. Yes, they were nearly 85, but they seemed so young, so positive, and they still had so much to give.

Thus it was for his friends, former colleagues, former students, and countless associates in a wide spectrum of the literary world when they heard that Derry Jeffares had died. Died characteristically, of course, if one can have a characteristic death. He had been entertaining on a fine early summer afternoon in the garden of his home at Fife Ness, Scotland’s most easterly point where it reaches out towards the continent and the wider world. He retired to bed. The next morning his wife could not wake him. He had slipped out of the world as though it was the most natural thing to do at that moment. That was how he lived his life. Everything seemed right when Derry did it, even when he was asking you to do the impossible — to write a book in six weeks, change your academic specialism because he thought you were in too crowded a field, take a post in Ouagadougou, claim tax relief on the garden shed because you might use it as a study.

I met Alexander Norman Jeffares for the first time in 1967. I was a postgraduate student at the University of Ghana and Derry, as we all were invited to address him from the start (had I at that stage and in that era ever called a professor by his first name, let alone a diminutive?), arrived in June as our external examiner. Douglas Dunn, head of the Department of English, assigned me to look after the visiting dignitary. This meant accompanying him to the sea in order just to talk and to listen. Derry was a brilliant talker and, though a brisk listener verging on the impatient, he had a knack of ferreting out the nugget of information he needed. In my case he wanted to know what I intended to do after I finished my modest M.A. and my limited teaching. ‘You must do a Ph.D. and have a lectureship in the School of English!’ he announced, within what seemed minutes of spreading our towels on Labadi Beach.

And so I did. Few people gainsaid Derry Jeffares when he had a plan in his mind. Like many academics of my generation, we owed everything at the beginning to him. He would snap people up wherever he visited, commission a first book from them, get them a post somewhere, and by a combination of stick and carrot would groom them for what he hoped would be a splendid university career. It was a style which could not survive this era of equal opportunities and I am sure that those who disapproved of it did so with good reason. Notable among them was his colleague at Leeds, Arnold Kettle, who was not only an outstanding critic of Victorian fiction and a brilliant teacher, but also Vice-President of the British Communist Party. They had more in common than they admitted, both being bon viveurs, but their mutual antipathy was because they represented different points on the politico-economic spectrum. Derry was an entrepreneur, a capitalist and a lover of private initiatives, Arnold a believer in conforming to social and moral principles derived from a passionate belief in the equality of human beings. But in some ways they mistook each other. Both of them utterly lacked in class prejudice. At Derry’s dinner table to the end of his life you might find Seamus Heaney and the local garage mechanic, a specialist in alternative medicines and a publishing baron, an eminent novelist and a farmer’s wife. It was the same in the Kettle household. And both loved wine.