Low life
Write-off
Jeffrey Bernard
?t numerous cotnplaints about the vulgari- !!Puerile racial abuse', because I happen to I1111 told that recently there have been 1 -s comes hotfoot following the ridiculous 1.etter (27 August) from the daft Arabist t,i Obscenity and horror of this column.
end of self-advertising alcoholism with bPeterl Mansfield, accusing me of writing a title reasons that it stinks is because it is ut- reri,Y and wholly anti-female. But it doesn't :eailY matter. What puzzles me is that 'eaders ofthis journal
)Ink Islam stinks. It does stink and one of rnal (the letters page s the only boring page in it) can be bothered to pay for a first-class stamp to write a com- plaining letter about something so trivial and temporal as this column.
You see, the trouble is that I can only write about things I know about and the only thing I know about is the vulgarity, obscenity and horror of my own life. A let- ter this week complained, to the aforemen- tioned beloved editor, that I had duplicated an article I wrote for the soft-porn magazine Penthouse. All my articles are duplicated. I have been writing the same ar- ticle for years. I am not a renaissance man like Bernard Levin, who has been writing two articles — Wagner and dissident Rus- sians — for the past 100 years. Yes, I go on and on thinking and dreaming about sex, drinking and gambling. Sorry about that. But the strange Peter Mansfield and various religious organisations don't actually have to read 'Low life'.
You don't have to listen to writers either, let alone hacks, but you can if you go to a meeting called a '24-hour vigil, Writers against Nuclear Weapons'. It's a shindig on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields whereupon no less than 72 writers are going to read passages from their own and other people's work. What bloody conceit. There's even a timetable for this exercise in literary wanking. For example, Marina Warner will pontificate from 12.40 until 1.00, and Melvyn Bragg wil exercise his voice and ego from 5.20 until 5.40. Who the hell Elaine Feinstein, Deidre Redgrave, Dinah Livingstone and Sicily Herbert are, God alone knows. Obviously I'm slightly smashed at the thought that I haven't been asked to quote some of my own obscene and horrific pieces. I can't think of a better nuclear deterrent than the piece I wrote for Penthouse three years ago about oral sex and the vicar's daughter. What the monologuist Alan Brien and his loo-proud wife Jill Tweedie will say between 7.00 and 7.40 surely can't be as Anteresting or as amusing as my piece on being in lunatic asylums and drying-out clinics. It's a bit like that awful business at the Edinburgh Festival they called 'Meet the Author'. Who on earth wants to meet the wretched author? Would you cross the street to meet Jeffrey Archer? No.
But low life has its perks. Last week, browsing among the ponces, poofs and drunks in the Colony Room Club one after- noon, I met and drank and chatted with Anthony Burgess for half an hour. I read extracts from his books. I read his entire books and I thank God that I don't have to go to the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields or Edinburgh to meet him. Meanwhile, this column will continue to be as disgusting as ever this old life really is.
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