Grub Street Irregular by Jeremy Lewis

Author:Jeremy Lewis [Jeremy Lewis ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007380442
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

The piece petered out before I could discover what kind of friend I was, but I learned that I was ‘a big, tweedy, smiling man wearing green corduroy trousers and highly polished shoes’, that I shared her enthusiasm for wine, and that – at first meeting – I ‘appeared to be extremely jovial and easy to talk to, with a likeable tail-wagging charm, not at all intimidating or highbrow’. I wasn’t sure about the tail-wagging business – it was almost as bad as Anthony Powell comparing me to a ‘floppy labrador’ in his Journals, or James Lees-Milne likening me to a scoutmaster in the Spectator – but otherwise it seemed fair enough. I was sad that Barbara didn’t live to read my biography: I hope she’d have liked the jokes, both Connolly’s and mine, greeting each one with a silvery laugh.

But that was not the end of the affair. Barbara had also given me various diaries and papers of her own, and these included some unkind remarks about her second husband, George Weidenfeld. Alan Ross had told me how upset Weidenfeld had been by her bitchy if comical account of their relationship in her memoirs; and now I was not only reopening old wounds, but adding second-hand salt of my own. After I’d finished my book, I sent Lord Weidenfeld the relevant pages with a note saying how sorry I was to bring all this up once more, and asking if he could bear to check it for inaccuracies. The weeks went by, and I heard nothing; Cape wanted to get the book into production; I dreaded a writ for libel, or a terrible cry of rage.

I got home one evening, and my youngest daughter, Hattie, told me that a foreign-sounding man had rung a couple of times: could I ring him back? Heart pounding, I picked up the phone and rang Weidenfeld at his home on Chelsea Embankment. A purring, slightly inflected voice told me that the chapter I had sent him was most elegantly done, that he was full of admiration; when I apologised for raising old ghosts he assured me that I should not worry, that it was all ancient history, but would I mind terribly if he suggested some very small corrections? Of course not, I cried, bending low with gratitude and pleasure. He hoped I wouldn’t mind, but a particular date was wrong: no problem. I had misquoted from the Latin: I was happy to stand corrected. Was there anything else in need of amendment? Well, he said, it was rather a pity that I’d made mention of – and here he referred to an unkind observation of Barbara’s, culled from the papers she’d left me rather than the published memoirs. It wasn’t libellous, and I was loath to lose it, so I said nothing, and the conversation moved elsewhere.

‘Now,’ he suddenly said, ‘I’m going to tell you something in the strictest confidence, and you’re not to use it in your book. Do you know

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