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Friday 5 December 2008

Grub Street Irregular: Scenes from

Waves of geniality

D.J. Taylor on the third volume of Jeremy Lewis's autobiography

No disrespect to Jeremy Lewis, this third amiable volume of autobiography or his hopeful sponsors at the Harper Press, but it is extraordinary that books like this still get written. Here we are, after all, in the age of the Waterstone’s three-for-two, the novels of Miss Keri Katona and the cheery philistinism of the man at

Hodder Headline who declared that if the public wanted cookery and celebrity memoirs then that is what he would publish for them, yet still, apparently, there is a market for garrulous book-world memoirs fanatically absorbed in what the literary editor of the New Statesman said to his assistant around the time that Hillary climbed Everest.

This is an exaggeration, but not much of one. Grub Street Irregular’s tone reveals itself from the very first paragraph, in which Lewis maintains that as a child he excelled at nothing, was debarred from organised sport by ‘cowardice, short-sightedness, physical ineptitude and a total absence of team spirit’ and displayed ‘no artistic leanings whatever’. It is the Ferdinand Mount tone, the Michael Holroyd tone, the Richard Cobb tone, so characteristic of gentlemanly English memoir-writing, in which the note of modest self-deprecation not only clangs away like a Geiger counter but altogether fails to convince. At any rate, coming across Lewis’s proud proclamations of his uselessness as agent and publisher, the mortal funk he fell into at one of Mrs Drue Heinz’s conversazioni and so on, I didn’t believe a word of it. No one, it might be said, makes a living out of literary journalism for 20 years without a certain inner steeliness.

As a long-term attendant on the literary scene, Lewis’s tastes are profoundly esoteric. Eternally beguiled by such superannuated denizens of the Bloomsbury undergrowth as Derek Verschoyle, literary editor of this magazine at around the time of Macdonald’s National Government, or Charles Fry, the satanic lynch-pin of B. T. Batsford & Co, who announced to the bookseller Heywood Hill’s wife Anne that he had slept with three of her cousins, two male and one female, he often seems to be engaged in a trial of strength with his editor to see just how far he can go in piling up recherché detail about people hardly any one has heard of. Come the advent of a character named John Holroyd-Reece, born Hermann Reiss, founder member of the continental reprint firm of Albatross Verlag and described by one informant as ‘the worst rogue he had ever met in publishing’, I began to suspect Lewis of making some of his quarries up.

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