Jeremy Clarke, Reader: A Mini-Appreciation
With a Jeffrey Bernard, Drinker, Micro-Kicker
It was arguably the most popular column in Britain’s oldest newspaper.
The Spectator’s “Low Life” column entertained readers from 1975 to 2023. For many of those years, it ran opposite Taki Theodoracopulos’s “High Life” column.1 It was an autobiographical column dedicated to the seedier and less conventional side of life, often brutally honest and (like all honest writing) featuring self-deprecatory observations.
Its first columnist, Jeffrey Bernard, wrote about gambling, heavy drinking, misadventures, and his generally chaotic lifestyle. He was so forthright in his self-immolation that critic and filmmaker Jonathan Meades described the column as “a suicide note in weekly installments.” You can find an entertaining assortment of his columns in Low Life—Irreverent Reflections from the Bottom of a Glass (2019), which includes an autobiographical introduction by Bernard about how he came to love the low life.2
He continued the column until he died in 1997, during the same week that Princess Diana and Mother Teresa died, which makes it one of the more noteworthy trifecta mortalities (number one is today, November 22, 1963: JFK, C.S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley).
After Bernard’s death, The Spectator threw various writers into the column’s space until 2001, when Jeremy Clarke moved in.
Clarke had been a trashman, football hooligan, factory worker, and psychiatric nurse. These experiences, along with his drinking, partying, and general life of mayhem, provided rich material for his columns.
But Jeremy wasn’t a drinker like Bernard. He was a drinker, yes, but not like Bernard (which few men are . . . toward the end of his life, he was drinking nearly two bottles of vodka a day, no poseur he).
Jeremy was more of a reader than a drinker. In fact, he was more of a reader than a writer. “Jeremy described himself,” said his wife Catriona Olding, “as a reader who writes. . . . He spent so much time in bed reading that some weeks he had nothing to write about.”3
Clarke had already accumulated a large library by the time his Mother died; he then brought 2,500 books from her house and jammed them into his already book-jammed house.
He loved books. He never wrote in them, opting instead of writing out passages in his notebooks.4
Most people read literature for the stories. Not Clarke. He was interested in the authors themselves, as revealed in their works. He was also interested in their prose: how they crafted and styled the English language.
Plot interested Jeremy little. It was the quality of writing that mattered. His writers were masters of prose. They were outsiders; often destructive, sometimes tragic, and many struggled with mental illness or addiction. Pursued by furies they were, and, in his darkest moments, so was Jeremy.
This great reader died in May 2023, at age 66.
The “Low Life” column died with him.
Taki himself wrote a book about the low life in his (fairly brutal) autobiographical account of going to a British prison in the 1980s for possession of cocaine. Nothing to Declare: A Memoir. I don’t remember a lot about the book, except it was hard to read (prose was great; subject matter sad) and his account of the screen tough guy Stacy Keach, who got sent to prison for drug possession and was beaten up by thugs who simply wanted to beat up a movie tough guy, even though Keach had a “sensitive nature in real life.” p. 44.
He writes of first arriving in Soho in the 1950s: “There was a café they used that was full of artists, poets, amateur and professional philosophers, writers, actors, bums, layabouts, a few genuine Bohemians, eccentrics, lunatics and pretty girls. There were also thieves, who then as now plundered Foyle’s bookshop, ponces, bookies’ runners and con men. It was heaven.”
Samples:
evanesce: fade out of sight
adventitious: coming from outside
accidental: casual
The novel is a kind of discourse and a frame of mind. As a frame of mind, it questions and subverts all totalizing systems by the liberating power of laughter and the celebration of the body.