Respectable, consistent, immortal Jeff
Sally Vincent
LOW LIFE by Jeffrey Bernard Duckworth, £9.95 Duckworth has anthologised him and John Osborne's done the eulogy which leaves only two bits of news for anyone silly enough to imagine Jeff Bernard's a mere toss-pot and inspired one-off mer- chant. One, he's respectable (which any half way persona-grata could have affirmed) and two, his work mounts up to a consistency that knocks you sideways. Why this second thing should stun me I really don't know. I always said he was a ruthless little sod, right from the day in 1963 when Elizabeth Smart brought us together in Gerry's Club and I mistook him for a bit of rough trade and he let me think I'd introduced him to Thackeray. He's had me on ever since.
Every time I got one of those quavery dawn choruses of his — Hallo, could you bring some fags and the papers to St George's only I was a bit silly again last night and they had to pump me out — I'd go tear-arseing across London with 20 Capstan full-strength and the Observer to find his locker already choked with cartons of 200 and all the Sundays. You'd have to fight your way through all the women to catch the end of the one about the vet gelding the stallion and the stable-lad's dog wolfing down the warm bits as they hit the straw. He'd be right as ninepence by lunch-time and upping the atmospheric ante elsewhere over a refreshing Bells.
He was generous with his intimations of immortality even in those pre-vodka days. He'd large up your life for you, soon as borrow a fiver. I never minded the carica- ture he made of me.
Of course I never did fling open a window and hurl sleeping tablets at his lovesick head while bawling that he should do his appalling self in. But I've always found it almost as plausible a tale as everyone he's told. I didn't black his eye in a lover's tiff, either. He taught me to box, was all, and I got him under strict Queens- berry rules. Still, the wretched fellow is immortal now. He doesn't get up in the morning any more, he rises again. You think you've seen the last of him, you take a last look at his ghastly face nestling in a plate of cold spaghetti and you tip-toe away feeling horribly sorry for Bruce (his brother) and the end of an era; and next day, at crack of opening time, he's brisking down Old Compton Street, fragrant as dew with his jeans creased by she who would iron 15 shirts at one standing. Clean carrier bag with Smirnoff in one hand, clean copy in the other.
How does he do it we ask ourselves, meaning why does she do it, or when does he actually write the stuff, or how can anyone with no known pancreas drink so much vodka and live? It's what we say every time another sparrow falls. And Jeff Bernard Lives? We are in awe. We fore- gather yet again at the chapel of rest, bereaved as newts, to have ourselves deep- ly moved by another of Jeff's tasteful funeral orations. Nobody does it better. Bill Hagerty reckons he'll do us all, in the fullness of time. We'll go stumbling into the great afternoon drinking club in the sky asking if Jeffs been in and they'll tell us no, he's still in the Coach, having just the one. Which is what this consistency thing is all about. You can't dice with 19 varieties of suicide and the daily wrath of fisty insultees and not have that commodity in spades. But it would be foolish to confuse it with 'writing' or 'talent' or 'giftedness'. What Jeff has is the intensely zen aware- ness that the way to prolong your life, or at least make it seem to last for ever, is to piss it up the wall. And that takes will-power. To relinquish great gobbets of personal time and space to such matters as gainful employment, sobriety, busy-ness and the pursuit of dutiful social intercourse only makes the clock tick faster. Jeff's a kind of control-freak in this regard. He's utterly fascist about doing it his way. Which is why, in his way, he's as beguiling as a Nuremberg Rally. He's not remotely sen- timental himself, he merely arouses the sentimentality in others by being so very dramatically more-suffering-than-thou. Plus he knows what he likes. I mean, he really knows what he likes.
I stood in line with him once, at Barba- dos airport. They had one of those slick, American hostess people at the check-out, whose job it is to say Smoking or Non- smoking? and make it sound like an option between two worldly paradises. My com- panion and I, said Jeff with the air of one honing earthly joys to their finest point of perfection, would like Smoking and Dirty Talk. It made me realize that until that moment my own cup had only ever been half full.
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