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Low life
Puffed up
Jeffrey Bernard
Readers of this and Taki's column are warmly invited to a party at Kettner's in Greek Street on Friday, 26 June to launch our book, High Life Low Life, provided they bring a few quid with them. We've only got 50 or 60 bottles of wine and that won't last too long. Personally, I never touch the stuff without grub but I reckon we can have a ten-minute thrash. It's very odd this business of having a book coming out and I fear it may well go to my head. Luckily my ingrained sense of the absurd prevents me from going entirely overboard but it is strange to think that something will actually appear after years of sterility as far as publishers go. Taki's steel will, powers of concentration and self-discipline make him a natural for a hardback book. My own aversion to labour makes it all seem like a miracle.
I got the jacket from the printers the other day — I haven't yet seen a copy of the actual book — and the blurbs are so horrifyingly complimentary and sycophan tic — how else could they attempt to sell the wretched collection — that it's something of an embarrassment. Take the sentence our colleague Bron Waugh wrote and which has been printed on the front cover: 'Here at long last between the covers of one book are Taki, and Jeffrey Bernard. They have more to say about contemporary society than Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.' Lovely, but what an amazing piss-take. I really do believe that the man I thought to be a man of the world, publisher and nutter Jay Landesman, was originally so innocent as to believe Bron meant it.
But it's heady stuff for a man like me with a small head to get a sudden mite of publicity. LBC just phoned to ask me to give voice on a phone-in programme soon and it's all rather frightening. The programme begins at 11 a.m. which allows me no time whatsoever for a drop of Dutch courage before spouting incoherent banalities in answer to the likes of aggressive taxi drivers who love, more than anything else, shooting people down in flames.
The thing that troubles me most though is the thought of what the odd critic may say. To be perfectly honest I have to own that I once gave a book a bad review — made it seem ludicrous in fact and cracked the odd snide joke about it — simply because I couldn't think of anything to say about it. I deserve the same and will probably get it. As a barman said to me the other day,`You should watch the vodka. That stuff doesn't take prisoners.' I don't think that book reviewers reviewing colleagues do either. Worst of all I discover, not for the first time, that I'm a self-deceiver. For the last five years in this journal I've been claiming that that old sense of the absurd and the business of not taking myself too seriously has saved my mental bacon. Bollocks. With something soon to be in a bookshop I'm a little scared and the thought of being put down seems like facing a serious hospital operation, a visit from the bailiffs, closing time or a sexual rejection.
But I do sincerely hope that Taki's columns get good notices. Although we work in a sort of tandem I don't know him very well and in spite of our distance it's impossible not to sense that the man has 'style'. As it's something of an occasion you'll forgive me, I hope, if this particular column seems to be something of a backslapping affair. Oddly enough a very, very nice young man, Cosmo Landesman, the son of our publisher Jay, has written such nice things on the jacket blurbs — so wildly sweet that I may never speak to him again.
But to be serious for a moment do please buy the wretched book. It's a snip at £6.95 and you know perfectly well that when I drop in on you you'll be frightfully embarrassed if I don't spot a copy on your bookshelf. Taki might even break your neck if he doesn't see one in a Gstaad residence. Get your copy now.
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