Soho Bohemia
“Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be,” the hypochondriac Mr. Wodehouse says in Jane Austen’s Emma. Proverbially never healthy was Jeffrey Bernard, whose weekly column in the Spectator was frequently substituted with the notice: “Jeffrey Bernard is unwell.” What began as a euphemism for the fact that Bernard was too drunk to write his column or even – which happened a few times – to resubmit an old column in the hope that it had been forgotten, in later years became a bitter truth. His Low-Life column which he had been writing since 1978 and which was generally held to be a suicide note in instalments, ended with Bernard’s death in 1997 after he had willingly stopped the dialysis necessary for his survival. That he had his own ideas about life, he had already made apparent earlier: Asked to write his autobiography he promptly put a small ad in the New Statesman, enquiring whether anybody knew what his movements between 1960 and 1970 had been. Continue reading Guest Feature | Philip Mann, “For thirty years I hid my fame in taverns”
