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The naked peer in flip flops and other strange stories
Jeremy Lewis’s autobiography reveals the real experiences of a literary figure consumed by tall stories, writes John Horder
Grub Street Irregular. By Jeremy Lewis.
The Harper Press £20 order this book
JEREMY Lewis has always been addicted to embellishing anecdotes or stories, preferably of the tallest impossible literary sort, as far as I can make out. He is like the Malvern public schoolboy that he once was, who is addicted to doughnuts and cream cakes. In this, the third instalment of his autobiography, he cannot get enough of them into his mouth at the same time.
Take what he comes up with about my much-maligned relative Mervyn Horder (the second Lord Horder), an eccentric who had twice been prosecuted as a result of sending naked photographs of himself through the post in the 1960s, and latterly the managing director of Duckworths, the publishers, in Covent Garden. This is recorded in the third volume of Lewis’s literary tall stories.
When Jeremy met Mervyn in a pub in Camden Town where Beryl Bainbridge also used to meet him, he “must have been in his early 80s by then: he was wearing a skimpy bathing costume, rubber flip-flops and a vest, and had shaved and waxed his legs for the occasion”.
A sentence or two later, after conferring with his beloved mentor on such all-important matters, Alan Ross, the poet, editor of The London Magazine and cricket journalist for the Observer, he concluded: “I suspect the flippers and the goggles were [Mervyn’s] own embellishments.”
Not so about the goggles. Mervyn was a keen motorcyclist, who specialised in looking like Toad in The Wind of the Willows when the latter was on the verge of taking up with some mad new invention like the motor car. In this instance, Jeremy found it impossible to tell the embellished from the real.
Mervyn’s obituary, when it appeared in the Daily Telegraph, included a sulky photograph of him complete with goggles, but without the rubber flip-flops.
In another context entirely, it fell to Dennis Enright, the poet, and Jeremy after him, when both were working for publishers Chatto and Windus, to try to edit Iris Murdoch’s novels.
On one of two occasions, Jeremy comes out with the whole truth: “I always felt that Chatto had done her a great disservice by not insisting on editing her later books, but by then it was too late. Her novels were treated as Holy Writ... As Dennis soon discovered, she was not prepared to be edited in any way.” End of story.
The most heartbreaking chapter is the last, in which Ross, as a result of many years of depression dating from experiences in the Second World War, attempts suicide, and eventually dies.
In the last sentence, Jeremy sums up the whole book: “Dennis and Alan had been my mentors and my friends, the two men I loved and admired more than any others in the literary world, father figures standing in for the one I had lost.”
After a lifetime of embellished anecdotes, he might remember TS Eliot’s infamous saying in Four Quartets: “In my end is my beginning.”
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