Twice the man he's cracked up to be
Vicki Woods
REACH FOR THE GROUND by Jeffrey Bernard Duckworth, £8.99, pp. 160
In Reach for the Ground (as in real life over the past few years) Jeffrey Bernard shatters six ribs, breaks an arm and an elbow, has two 'Elephant Man' cysts removed from the back of his head, cracks his pelvic bone, suffers pancreatitis, breaks a foot, develops septicaemia in it and even- tually has it amputated. Having spent much time on hospital trolleys, cursing nurses and Mrs Bottomley right and left, he finally
'Good news! That walnut-sized tumour we found in your stomach turned out to be a walnut.' goes on the wagon.
As I typed that catalogue of human catastrophe, I realised I was smiling broad- ly. If the reader smiles, too, then he or she is one of those people who grasps the point of Jeffrey Bernard, whether between the lurid yellow covers in which Duckworth Press has put him or in his usual niche a few pages on from here.
Jeffrey's book (and his life) tell us two things: one is about the phenomenon of fame (it's endlessly alluring), and the other is about the essential difference between men and women, i.e. the overwhelming majority of the former are more or less knaves and the overwhelming majority of the latter are more or less fools:" It's sad, but it's so, and any passing sympathy I might have lies only with the latter, poor boobies, especially the ones that got tangled up with Jeffrey Bernard. On a knave's scale of one to 100, Jeffrey Bernard is 100. No question,, He • was always a groper and he was — for 35 years — so staggeringly, heartbreakingly fabulous looking that gropees fell at his feet like petals from blown roses. Where they would remain, until crushed by a heap of ciggie butts, empties and torn-up betting slips. Not this petal, mind. I first met Jeffrey Bernard in the mid-Seventies when I was a reasonably foolish and bright-eyed little biddy myself. But women had a wonderful advantage in those days. When devastating rakehells veered dangerously towards you with a propositioning sort of a look in their piercing blue eyes (be still, my beating heart), you could employ the then fashion- able tenets of 'raging feminism' as a lucky talisman. You could scowl, and mutter mantra-words like 'sisterhood' or 'women's empowerment', which worked like bulbs of garlic in the Hammer films. Rakehells would veer away, taking you for a closet ballbreaker, and leave you safely ungroped. Phew! Damned close-run thing, sometimes, but phew! nonetheless.
Germaine Greer said in The Female Eunuch (my nightly bedside reading in the mid-Seventies) that women are always sur- prised by how much men hate them. She was right then, and she is still right, and Spectator readers who have daughters they love should press Bernard's little book into their hands — along with selected writings of Stephen Glover and Martin Amis — so that they will learn what men think about women. Your daughter will also learn (from Bernard, I mean) how to write spare, tight, bleak, funny and enviable English prose.
You should give your daughter, along with the book, these three facts of life. 1) It will always be a man's world; 2) If you want to sleep with beauty that dazzles, take a small hand-mirror to bed with you; and 3) Only male drunks can be heroic, caustic, cynical, sexually alluring, amusingly self- lacerating and internationally celebrated. Women who are slaves to alcohol can only be pitiable drunks; and Hell mend them.
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