“People are terribly self-interested, aren’t they? I mean, I’m always amazed if I see someone doing something selfless.” Or perhaps, “Life is mostly boring and fucking miserable, isn’t it? I mean, the days when you’re actually happy are the exception, not the norm.” Remarks like these would be spoken in a kind of dirge, as though each word cost the speaker blood. But the voice that uttered them was strangely beautiful, even adolescent, belying the ravages that time and a dissolute life had wreaked on the body. The name of this person was Jeffrey Bernard, he had just turned 60, and he was then the most famous and celebrated journalist in London.
Soho was his stamping ground. He’d discovered it as a teenager following his expulsion from the naval college to which his opera-singer mother had sent him. It was love at first espresso and from that moment forward he had, in his own words, “never looked upwards.” By the 1980s, Soho had plummeted since its heyday, when it was a rich melange of Italian delicatessens, Greek restaurants, violin shops, poets, painters, prostitutes, and gangsters. Yet Bernard kept faith with it, returning to the Coach and Horses on Greek Street each morning with the grim resignation of a commuter.
That pub, made famous in his weekly column, was presided over by landlord Norman Balon, a man (still with us) of legendarily mean and rude temperament, which disguised (or so his advocates claim) a heart of gold. Bernard compared him variously to Fagan, Wackford Squeers, and a Frankenstein’s Monster he and other journalists had created in their writing (the pub was the site of Private Eye lunches too). In print, the Coach and Horses provided the perfect backdrop to Bernard’s musings on the deaths of friends who succumbed to alcohol and tobacco-related diseases and his own health complications caused by diabetes and pancreatitis. These were accompanied by sundry reflections on his two most enduring pursuits: pursuit by the Inland Revenue for unpaid taxes, complete with court appearances and bankruptcy threats, and pursuit of an endless succession of ladies—“sphinxes without secrets”—who usually abandoned him with a feeling of immense disillusion and the hissed accusation: “You make me sick.”
These columns brought him a cult readership, but they were not responsible for making Bernard the Talk of London. This was accomplished by Keith Waterhouse, a Leeds-born powerhouse of a writer who seemed to be everywhere for a while—in newspapers, novels, plays, and even books on English grammar. A few years prior, Waterhouse had walked into the Coach and Horses with a surprise for Bernard. He proposed to turn the writer’s Low Life columns—a catalogue of woes and comical indignities—into a stage play. Titled Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell (the explanation invariably provided by the Spectator whenever the writer was too drunk or sick to file his column), it went on to star Peter O’Toole and became a massive success, playing to packed houses after it opened in 1989. It was subsequently revived three times over the years to exuberant receptions. On the way to his perch at the Coach and Horses, Bernard could now stop off in Shaftesbury Avenue and see his name in lights. It was a staggering coda to a life in which all efforts at betterment, it seemed, had been given the swerve. (...)
Occasionally, looking back at a life swallowed by vodka, he would comfort himself that, “Without alcohol, I would have been a shop assistant, a business executive or a lone bachelor bank clerk. … How must a bank clerk feel when he sees the clock moving towards opening time or the first race?” His attitude to job security seems to have mirrored his attitude to gambling: “The fun lies in putting yourself at risk and then getting out of the shit. There’s no fun unless the stakes are more than you can afford.” He always preferred, he said, people who’d had experience of ruination: “Skating on thin ice keeps a man on his toes.”
Even in his fated profession, journalism, Bernard was constantly slipping up. He was sacked by the Daily Mirror and kept his editors at the Spectator on tenterhooks waiting for his copy. For a while, he wrote a highly successful column for Sporting Life on the racing community about losing, and made fun of the more self-important figures in that world. But he was sacked there too when he passed out at a dinner instead of delivering the speech he’d been hired to make. This followed the notorious occasion when he disgraced himself by throwing up over the Queen Mother at Royal Ascot. Appalled eye-witnesses reported half-digested tomato-skins spattering the QM’s pristine tights.
Had Bernard just been a drunk with literary talent—a kind of British Bukowski—he would not have been especially remarkable. But his writing often reached for something more noble. His copy, when it arrived—if it arrived—was usually immaculately clean. He had a style of hammering out his prose with as few commas as possible, like a prize racehorse effortlessly clearing jumps. When Sue Lawley interviewed Bernard for Desert Island Discs, she giggled skittishly at the old rogue, spoke of his immaculate shirts and highly polished shoes, and marvelled at his near-encyclopaedic knowledge of Mozart’s music. His column included digressions on how to make perfect mashed potato fortified with cream and egg yolks—“the potato must be whipped, not mashed”—or instruct his readers in how to cook a fine chicken with tarragon, lemon juice, and cream. (...)
So many of his columns start bleakly—“It’s been a perfectly awful week”; “The last few days have been about as bad as can be”—but this was usually a sign that this week’s offering would crackle and pop. Bernard was at his most diverting when wallowing in gloom. Those early morning cigarettes, the gallons of tea, and the remorse he felt staring at the photographs of his wives on the walls (he mostly remained on good terms with them, despite everything) were, like reading about his insomnia or hospital stays, oddly cosy. Much cosier to read about, I suspect, than they were to live through. Bernard told us about his fits of sobbing, his suicide attempts, the period of sobriety he imposed on himself after he punched a female friend one day while in his cups: “I’ve never met such boring people as my friends when I was sober, never been so miserable or so lonely.”
After just two years, he packed sobriety in for good. His column certainly benefitted from that decision, even if he didn’t: drink was the banana skin he so often slipped on. “A couple of days ago, when I woke up and got out of bed, I found a paper-clip in my pubic hair. I don’t keep paper-clips and I am not having an affair with a secretary. … A mystery.” He found peas in the ashtray, curry in his shoes, an omelette on the floor, a mysterious note—he knew not from whom—by the side of his bed: “Would you like to try again some time?” One morning, he upset his cup of tea into the bathwater in which he was sitting: “I didn’t get out at once but lay there in the hot brown water in a sort of resigned despair. Have we travelled thus far, I thought, to end up resembling a tea bag?”
by Robin Ashenden, Quillette | Read more:
Image: Alarmy
[ed. See also: The Crack-Up (Quillette)]
