Never quite in Queer Street

D. J. Taylor

JEW MADE IN ENGLAND by Anthony Blond Timewell Press, £20, pp. 299, ISBN 1857252004 Some years ago the author of this entertaining if characteristically diffuse memoir made a pass at me. The venue was the balcony of the tenniscourt-sized flat in redeveloped Bermondsey that Blond shared with his second wife, Laura Hesketh, and the exact words spoken were as follows:

BLOND: Come outside, my beautiful boy. TAYLOR: Fuck off, Anthony.

By this stage in the proceedings — I had been helping our man to arrange his library, by the way — it was too late to get home, so I spent a somewhat nervous night on the sofa, molested, as it turned out, only by the cat. In the morning, by way of a thank-you. Blond presented me with an inscribed copy of Marie-Jacqueline Lancaster's wonderful compendium, Brian Howard: Portrait of a Failure, which he had published as long ago as 1968. Tye written "with gratitude for the

evening of July 29th 1985" rather than "the night of" ',he thoughtfully explained, 'so that people won't think that we've slept together.'

By this time Blond's great days were emphatically behind him. The publishing firm of Muller, Blond & White, which he had cobbled together with his associate Anthony White in the early 1980s, shortly afterwards failed for .E400,000 in circumstances which are amusingly related here. The two partners had financed an epic work on the restoration of the Sistine Chapel, then being underwritten by Nippon TV. The deal had been done in yen, 10,000 copies sold to New York and insurance taken out on the possible decline of the dollar against the yen to a margin of 15 per cent. It fell by 25 per cent. Blond enjoyed a brief swansong as consultant to Nairn Attallah's Quartet outfit, before retiring to France. It was all, one felt, rather a come-down for a man who many years before had given the world Simon Raven, English translations of Jean Genet and sold 150,000 copies of Harold Robbins' The Carpetbaggers.

The Blonds, as Jew Made in England records in considerable detail, were Manchester clothing manufacturers. Further Jewish spice and a great deal more money were added to the family circumstances when his father, having separated from his first wife, married Elaine Marks of Marks & Spencer. The chronicle of Blond junior's rackety progress through Eton, New College, Oxford and the London literary world of the Fifties and Sixties (he spent five years as a literary agent before founding his own imprint in 1958) is a testimony to the extraordinary fluidity of English social arrangements. The first significant book published by Anthony Blond Ltd was Hugh Thomas's symposium, The Establishment. Eyeing up the list of the great, good and not so good (Goldsmith, Aspinall, Maxwell, Oyston etc.) with whom Blond either hobnobbed at school, played chemmy with in Walton Street or fraternised with during the negotiations that established Piccadilly Radio, it is impossible not to feel that the author was a part of that elite himself.

Readers of Blond's two previous industry guides, The Publishing Game (1971) and The Book Book (1985), both of which the present volume discreetly plagiarises, will be familiar with his chronically digressive style, in which the gossip, originally intended as a garnish, ends up as the meal itself. He is the kind of writer who, if giving an account of his own prosecution for murder, would doubtless begin by remarking that the defence counsel was a Cinque Port Warden's illegitimate son who had been expelled from Winchester for 'the usual thing'. What follows, consequently, is less a chronological narrative than a series of vignettes and personal impressions (Jimmy Goldsmith's vendetta against Private Eye, Captain Bob, his 'beau ideal', fixing his election as Labour MP for Buckingham by bribing the local university students, portrait galleries from college and publishing days, and chips let fall from the workbench of the author's sex life, of which the Eye several times remarked 'Blond prefers gentlemen'.

The scent that rises from this florid concoction is approximately that of a Simon Raven novel (indeed Blond appears in many of Raven's works as the my-dearing Etonian publisher Gregory Stern): pungent, gamy and unrepentantly louche. The stories are not so much tall as vertiginous, and I had trouble believing the account of Frances Partridge, on hearing of the death of her

only son Burgo (author of Blond's first big success, A History of Orgies), telephoning

Harrods to ask that the body be cremated and the ashes sent round, or the rabbi's address at Blond senior's funeral ('He has gone to a place even more beautiful than his own lovely house in East Grinstead Here and there among the japes and the respectful salutations something more feline stirs, as when he remarks of the publishing co-religionists who did or did not offer support after his commercial collapse, 'George Weiderifeld spoke to me, as did Paul Hamlyn' or compares his old chum Alan Clark to the Vitamin C drink Redoxon ('fizzy, healthy, expensive, tart and cold'.) The best bits, curiously enough, are not to do with publishing, sex, politics (he put up a decent showing as Labour candidate for Chester in 1964), Marks &, Spencer or Beverley Nichols writing an essay for Blond's

undergraduate magazine Harlequin which

began. 'I was a delicious little boy ...' but with the domestic interiors of his later life, a ménage extended by his and Laura's adop tion of a Sri Lankan orphan. The account of five-year-old Ajith's absorption into a house hold consisting of a bankrupt 58-year-old bisexual and the granddaughter of the Earl of Scarborough is the most moving thing in the book.

Jew Made in England is self-evidently a confection of a work, put together from old

newspaper articles and previous publica tions, but there is an odd, zestful ruthlessness about the way in which Blond confronts and chops away at the persona he has created for himself this past half-century (see in particular the stringent self-written obituary that introduces the book). Most autobiographies,

after all, are only exercises in wool-pulling. Here, against rather high odds, the reader is I left with the queer impression of a man who

' has tried very hard to understand himself and his effect on the people around him. I ended up charmed by its honesty, if not by the personal attractions so coyly advertised by its author on the Bermondsey balcony all those years ago.