Low life
Sweet charity
Jeffrey Bernard
T sometimes feel pangs of ineffectual guilt
about not contributing towards worth- while charities. But the pangs are fleeting and the charities remote. Like the earth- quake in Chile that didn't kill many people the waves from the Third World are vague ripples by the time they reach me. I once
gave all my cricket gear to Oxfam when I gave up that game but it must have seemed like a bad joke to the recipient in Mozambi- que or wherever. Feelings of charity radiate from home but do not travel a lot farther. More than the Third World it's what I call Third People that touch me the most. Apart from down and outs the group I feel for most is the one Malcolm Bradbury calls 'liv- ing risk-taking writers'. Of present day Third People individuals I am most con- cerned with Derek Jameson and Mr Alan Clark. Mr Jameson's plight I wrote about recently and it only needs to be added that when I called in at the offices of a leading national newspaper last week in my guise of a living risk-taking writer in the hope of a journalistic handout, I was informed that the whip-round in Fleet Street to raise Mr Jameson's £75,000 legal expenses had not had the lift-off that had been hoped for; it would appear that Fleet Street and not just Cape Canaveral can defy gravity. Alan Clark is another new recruit to the Third People brigade. His father who died last May and left £5,282,124 also left con- siderable death duties and Alan is going to have to sell some treasures. This is very tough tit and a practical matter. What moves me about his plight though is that even with his considerable fortune he was quoted in the Observer as saying, 'I always feel flat broke, we're not big spenders.' Think about it.
Perhaps the inability to spend is hereditary although, unfamiliar with the Clark family as I am, his father may have tried and simply had too much to make in- roads into. But what meanness of spirit to feel flat broke with that sort of loot behind you. I see him eking out the bread and drip- ping and infusing a teabag while gazing sad- ly at Turner's 'View of Folkestone' — and Titian's 'Wormwood Scrubs', for all I know — that will shortly have to go to pay the bills. Of course, had 1 a Turner I'd very much like to hang on to it but I don't think I could feel flat broke while beholding it. Come to that I could't feel flat broke with the odd £124 tagged on the end of dad's leftovers. It is enough for the weekend housekeeping, pathetic though it may be.
What might make him feel better and give his life some purpose and meaning could be joining forces with Malcolm Brad- bury to help living risk-taking writers. I can appreciate just how difficult it is for these people not in the position to be able to steal stationery from the Spectator to get hold of a pencil and some paper. Getting hold of the Muse though is another matter, I know. Not even living risk-taking Arts Councillors can help there let alone risk-taking publishers. I suppose I'm slightly jaundiced having come up the hard way as I did, writing my first few books on betting slips with pencils from Joe Coral betting shops. (Ladbrokes chain their biros to the wall and you have to write standing up as Hem- ingway did which isn't good for the varicose veins.) But perhaps — and you'll probably think it jolly rotten of me to say so — there are would-be living risk-taking writers who need discouraging. I wouldn't want .to discourage a living risk-taking navvy or dish washer by not giving them a grant to bilY a shovel or bottle of Fairy Liquid, bill there's no stopping a man who's determni- ed to write and there ought to be. PeoPle should be encouraged and helped to con- duct buses and not orchestras. The Tos. .caninis will out anyway as will, unfor- tunately, the likes of Jeffrey Archer. Men like that would write with their own blood and what a pity it is that the staff of the Sun don't. The likes of Malcolm Bradbury want to help too many of the wrong people LT the ladder. There are far too many books m the world already, far too many Paintings too on the railings of Green Park. Of course, this nonsense is finely distilled. sour grape juice. When the Arts Council refused to help me write a book about the English pub, which would have involved having a drink in every single one of them, I did turn slightly bitter. I could just abo understand it though. But what I'm still puzzled about, nay shocked, is their refusal to help Richard West with his book on the need for the restoration of the Austro- Hungarian empire. There's no accounting, for taste but I'm beginning to understano Goering's reaction to the word 'culture'. ut
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