MEMOIR:JEREMY LEWIS, after 40 years in the London book trade, as an editor, memoirist, biographer and freelance literary journalist, a connoisseur of the traditional long vinous lunch and an indefatigable guest at publishers' parties, is modest to a fault; in print, very nearly humble, writes Patrick Skene Catling.
A credulous reader might be moved to tears by the way he introduces himself in this third volume of his professional reminiscences.
"As a child," he writes, "I excelled at nothing, and little has changed. I was academically average, but no more; cowardice, short-sightedness, physical ineptitude and a total absence of team spirit ruled me out as a games player; I had no artistic leanings whatsoever, and never had the slightest desire to paint, sculpt or play a musical instrument."
He says that when he reads about "writers who have scribbled incessantly since they could first hold a pen," he knows himself to be "a fake, or the literary equivalent of a Sunday painter". "Despite my propensity for embellishing the truth, I have never had any desire to write fiction." "I have worked for six publishers, two literary agents and three magazines, and written reviews, articles and obituaries for more newspapers and magazines than I can begin to remember." Et cetera.
A pitiful case? Hardly. Lewis went to a perfectly respectable English public school, Malvern, and onward and upward to Trinity College, Dublin. He is a gregarious, amiable character who writes well and has never been in any danger of having no work to do when he wanted it. His 653-page life of Cyril Connolly is one of the outstanding literary biographies of the 20th century, psychologically sensitive and sensible and highly entertaining. In it, Lewis emulated his favourite autobiographers, whose writings "combine comicality with a sense of the sad absurdity of life". Through the international research for his Connolly masterpiece, Lewis achieved an appreciation of the charms of hedonistic intellectuality and sloth.
He managed to keep a job as an editorial director of Chatto Windus for 10 years, until his boss, Carmen Callil, a formidable feminist, told him that he would be more usefully employed elsewhere. So he was, even when his employer often proved to be himself. His present regular occupation is unstrenuous, visiting the office of Richard Ingrams's magazine for senior citizens, The Oldie, as its commissioning editor, one day a week. "Grub Street Irregular" is a misnomer which carries self-deprecatory frivolity perilously close to inverted arrogance. Grub Street was located beside an open sewer in Moorfields, a London slum that became overcrowded with refugees from the 17th-century Great Fire, including unsuccessful writers, booksellers and Bohemian hangers-on. When the street was renamed in 1830, Grub Street became a metaphor for the literary fringe wherever freelance hacks scrabble for survival. Lewis certainly isn't one of them. He has been able to make a home for a wife and two daughters near Richmond, an absolutely unGrubean environment.
If he were a mere hack David Hockney probably would not have asked him to pose for his portrait. The artist portrayed him in ink and watercolours when they were fellow guests of Drue Heinz for a cultural conversazione in her castello on the shore of Lake Como.The portrait, which appears on the cover of Lewis's new book, is not at all flattering, featuring acne rosacea, the affliction that made WC Fields's nose such an embarrassing joke. But, after all, Hockney is Hockney; his models must be willing to suffer for prestige.
ALTHOUGH SOHO, Bloomsbury and Chelsea have been the venues of many jeux d'ésprit, Lewis's mood now is elegiac. Books are still published in Britain at the rate of about 100,000 titles a year. But what books! He remembers when independent publishers, such as André Deutsch, George Weidenfeld, Tom Maschler, Jock Murray, Rupert Hart-Davis and Allen Lane, were able to publish books they really cared about, as well as some they hoped would become bestsellers, able to subsidise the others. However, he laments, since the publishing conglomerates and their marketing men took over and the giant bookselling chains have squeezed so many small bookshops out of business, individualists who believed in maintaining civilised literary standards have been "elbowed aside by celebrity chefs, footballers' wives, telly personalities and the other heroes of a less literate age". Under commercial pressure, the life expectancy of the average book is measured nowadays only in weeks, rather than years. As the electronic media grow, the Gutenberg era seems inevitably to be coming to an end.
The most nostalgic section of Lewis's book, "Rogues' Gallery," depicts some of the writers who spent more time in pubs talking about writing than actually doing it. They were the men who inspired Private Eye to create "Lunchtime O'Booze," "a Legend in His Own Lunchtime". Looking back, one may see him as a tragic wastrel, but Lewis is charitable as he recalls his own youth. He is as meticulously observant of the literati's physiognomy, dress and deportment as James Lees-Milne, without any of that gossipy diarist's feline malice. Readers of all ages should enjoy Lewis's sentimental trip down Memory Lane. The rest of the book, especially the accounts of his freebies to Kenya and Auschwitz, is padding.
Patrick Skene Catling is an author
Grub Street Irregular: Scenes from Literary Life, By Jeremy Lewis, Harper Press, 330pp, £20