Margaret, Melvyn and Antonia

Jeffrey Bernard

As is our wont at this time of year, we have asked Kenneth Horrid, the very highly paid interviewer with a tape recorder, to speak to our life, love, death and what-does-it-allmean critic, Jeffrey Bernard, about his impressions of the past twelve months. KH: Well, it must have been an extraordinary year for you in many ways. Tell me, how did it start for you ?

JB: (for it is me) On 1 January.

KH: Yes, I suppose it did really. But in a way, it's incredible isn't it ?

JB: Yes and no, I suppose you could say that, but you may remember that 1975 started in much the same way.

KH: True. Basically, of course, this is it. What I'd like to do is to ask you what sticks out in your mind most as the more memorable events of the past year.

JB: That's a very tricky one. I think you've got me here. I suppose you could say that handing over to the black and white television critic, Richard Ingrams, was a highlight, but then so was the closing down of the Empire Billiard Rooms in Frith Street. But basically, and I'm simply using words as symbols here—talking off the top of my head, if you like—it's probably the rows, fights, debts and rejections that stick most firmly in my mind.

KH: That's fascinating really. I was talking to Mervyn Bragg the other day in a teashop in Cockermouth and he said much the same sort of thing. I wonder if you could enlarge a little on this?

JB: Yes, by all means. I think I'm right in saying that it was Arthur Koestler or, at any rate, Antonia Fraser. who remarked to me at some point in time during the great drought that you only remember the things you hate and despise the most.

KH: Could we stay with this one for a moment ? I think I'm right in saying that this is the theme of most of your novels and books. Correct me if I'm wrong.

JB: No, actually you're dead right, but I haven't, in fact, ever written a book. There are, it's true, books in my head, but I like to think and digest them for a long time before [commit anything to actual paper.

KH: What sort of time. I mean, just how

long?

JB: Forty years, I suppose, is about average. You see, the trouble is there's a lot of competition about at the moment and I can't help feeling slightly anxious about going into your actual hardback while people like—oh, you name them, there's hundreds of them—are about.

KH: Could you be more explicit ?

JB: Haig, Remy Martin, Courvoisier. There's any number of them.

KH: Can we revert to 1976 now in a more personal way ? You mentioned Antonia Fraser earlier in our interview. Es there anything else that particularly bored you during the past twelve months ?

JB: Well, I think I'm safe in saying that Bernard Levin, the German and Russian correspondent of The Times, got on my wick ...

KH: Sorry. Could we delete wick ?

JB: Nerves.

KH: Jolly good.

JB: And that the sheer hell of the Olympic Games, teetotalism, plus the injudicious replacement of Clive James with Kingsley Amis during the Aussie's sabbatical—all that—and Otherveised Engaged, the play that won the Evening Standard Play of the Year Award and most of the letters nicked by Antonia Fraser for her anthology of love letters. They bored me.

KH: Forgive me for saying so, but you seem to come back to Antonia Fraser time and again. Why ?

JB: Ah, I thought you might ask me that one. Several people in Cap d'Antibes and at my other home in Lesbos have been puzzled by that. I suppose the answer is best illustrated by the remark that Jung—I think it was Jung, but it could have been John Curry—made to me over tea in Brown's Hotel on the second day of the Guineas meeting at Newmarket. What was it ? Well, I don't remember very clearly, but it was either, 'There's 'owt so queer as folk', or, 'Bollocks.' Anyway, and I'm simply talking off the top of my liver now, wasn't it Margaret Drabble who said, 'There's no fool like a serious woman writer'?

KH: I'm sorry. You've lost me here. I think

you may be referring to Claire Tomalin's remark overheard in the London Library during the last furlong of the Gimcrack Stakes, 'What this magazine needs is less Grub Street and more Bond Street.'

JB: You could well be right.

KH: I'd like now, if you don't mind, to ask you about your cultural life.

JB: Well, 1 suppose that if you read my verse, then you'll know that I read an enormous amount of Tina Brown, Bel Mooney, Sally Vincent and Irma Kurtz. Also, if I'm not knitting things for Ronnie Laing's patients, then I occasionally venture out into the night to my local and talk to an amazing old man called Fred Bloggs who was badly gassed at Passchendaele and about whom Melvyn Bragg and I are writing a one-act musical.

KH: You obviously love the theatre. JB: Good Lord yes.

Kh: Would I be right in thinking that it was your first love ?

JB: No. My first love was a girl met in Oxford Street in 1947. ..

KH: Can [ interrupt you here ? Looking at my notes I observer, I mean observe, that Melvyn Bragg seems to upset you. Is that right ?

JB: Ah! You could say not really. Then I suppose that in a strange sort of way—and this is utterly undefinable in practical linguistic terms—yes, he does.

KH: Could this possibly have anything to do with the fact that he's never invited you on his programme, 'Read All About It'? JB: Yes.

KH: I'd like now, if you'll permit me, to move on to aspects of 1977. How do you see it in terms of being another year ?

JB: Well, looking at it practically, I think that basically, as I've said before, like a lot of other years, it'll start on 1 January. And, let's face it, it's probably going to be cold until the weather breaks in May. KH: Yes, I'll go along with that. But can you tell me how you see it in aliterary sense? JB: This is almost impossible to answer, but I'll try. I wouldn't be surprised if Margaret Drabble writes a book about how ghastly it is to be a woman and I'll hazard a guess that J illy Cooper will write three books each consisting of twenty-five pages. Moving to more popular sorts of publications, I have a hunch that Antonia Fraser will write a biography of Lambert Simnel and that Claire Tomalin will commission Hans Carl, the blind and limbless Austrian critic, to review the twelve volumes—and incredibly exciting they are— that make up My Formative Years by Wanda Landowska as told to Willi Frischauer. Apart from that, I hope to see Ipswich Town win the FA Cup and, surely be to God, won't John Anstey get a well deserved promotion from the Sunday Telegraph Magazine ? It's anyone's guess. If Bernard Levin becomes the Siberian correspondent of the Sun, then there's no telling where it will stop. If the pound falls still farther, then it's on the cards that a book by Auberon Waugh could cost £100.

KH: Thank you.