Low life
Slagged off
Jeffrey Bernard
Acolleague wrote a review of my book the other day that was so bitchy it viza spiked. How very naïve of him to submit it to this journal. Anyone else would prob- ably have printed it but dog doesn't eat dog 100 per cent of the time. Ever since it be- came obvious that Keith Waterhouse's play was going to do me nothing but good Irma Kurtz warned me to look out for the backlash.
Well, I am half amused by it and half fascinated. If I read a bad review of a book I had written while reclining in a cardboard box under Waterloo Bridge it might poss- ibly be the final straw to bring tears to these tired old eyes. As it is I can take the bad news while tucking into Mediterranean prawns followed by roast partridge in a good restaurant in the company of a supportive editor. That and a wad of notes in the pocket makes adverse criticism slide off my back like marmalade off the back of an Irish duck a l'orange (I still can't get over that bizarre meal in Dublin).
The play is one of two good things that have happened in the last ten years. In 1980 I shed the fear of being alone and discovered the luxury of living in that state and now I don't give a toss about wanting to be universally liked. At one time Tom Baker and I concurred that it was not enough to be loved — we wanted adora- tion — but now I don't care at all. What a relief. As long as I don't run out of cigarettes in the night and am still able to sit upright in bed at four a.m. drinking mugs of steaming Heinz minestrone soup while listening to Cole Porter on the radio then people are welcome to slag off More Low Life. In fact, if one American feminist hackette had said something nice I would have felt I had failed in my duty.
But it isn't only a good play and a pretty ordinary book that gets to those people, it is almost anything that gets you out of the pigeonhole you are supposed to be trapped in. Three years ago, when I decided to have fewer but larger bets on horses, I lost my oldest friend to the Lamb in Lamb's Conduit Street. When I won £3,000 on the 1986 Derby he was severely sick. Apparently I then rubbed salt into his wounds by lending him some money. What an odd business, but it is nothing new. What was new to me not long ago was to see a doctor at St Stephen's Hospital in Fulham get visibly irritated when he real- ised that in spite of diabetes and chronic pancreatitis I was making a good recovery from pneumonia and pleurisy. So you mustn't step out of the allocated pigeonhole. Never contradict a doctor's prognosis, or a wife's come to that. It would never do to really change and settle down.
And now I am off to Bristol in half an hour to go on a television show called Gallery. It is chaired by George Melly, put together by Dan Farson and I only know one other guest and that is Molly Parkin. I wonder what she will be wearing. I am going as the man in a grey flannel suit.
After Bristol it is back tomorrow to London for the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award and lunch at the Café Royal. It is to be hoped that Rocco Forte has laid on some grain as well as grape and I hope to meet Clare Francis who will be there. Brave women fascinate me. I have known a few, or were they just masochists?
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