FT272


My friend Stan Gooch spent his last years living on an old age pension on a caravan site in Wales. For a long time, his letters to me had revealed increasing cynicism and weari­ness, and friends who went to visit him – deeply impressed by the visionary scope of his books – were shocked to find him in an obvious state of indifference and discouragement. When tired of exchanging letters by ‘snail mail’, I offered to provide him with a computer; his reply was that he would never use it. It seems astonishing that this brilliant writer, author of more than a dozen books (some of them, like The Para­normal, classics in their field), should have been allowed to sink into the con­dition that the saints used to call accidia, but I suppose it has been the fate of many men of genius.