Lewis - Seasonal Suicide Notes My life as it is lived

The author and his father in their younger years

W HO KILLED R OGER L EWIS ? Nick Prescott round and we drank my fathers whisky cupboard dry. (Scotch he d been given free by customers and farmers.) But the prevailing attitude remained if I thought myself so high and mighty and unlikely to be fulfilled standing behind the counter of a butchers shop, then what I had dinned into me was, You made your bed. You lie in it. I had no encouragement, only cheap jeering. Or so I thought. Im probably wrong. I was and remain too fearful and sensitive. Why cant I remember that I had my two-grand Blackwells bill paid off? It was put through the accounts as combine harvester repairs. I still miss old Tog.

The only child in history whose role model was Uncle Quentin, the bad-tempered boffin from The Famous Five, I was an enormous success academically, because what other opportunities were going to come my way? (I wasnt so much of a success that I got frequently kidnapped, however which was Uncle Quentins fate.) But this the First, the prizes, the Oxford junior fellowship never to sit on a Committee or attend a Faculty Board Meeting. Other (still unbroken) vows included never in my life to set foot on a golf course or enter a McDonalds or KFC. But it was perfectly clear in the eighties doing English that if you possessed flash and dazzle, be a journalist.

It also didnt help that I was passionately interested in nutty actors, theatre, movies subjects that a quarter-of-century ago werent able to be studied at Oxford, where the syllabus stopped with Tennyson. Perhaps if Charles Hawtrey was a minor 17th-century figure instead of a mummer in the Carry Ons, Id have been invited to Balliol to conduct my research, but its too late now. Here and there polytechnics might have been starting up courses in media studies, but that wasnt going to be what I wanted to do either. I had a horror of impenetrable academic jargon, and I couldnt see why concision and liveliness were frowned upon why writing badly and boringly was a path to permanent tenure and financial security. So I took the risk and went to France and wrote The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, giving it all Id got; a headlong rococo text people are still coming to terms with, i.e, at 1,200 pages, possibly even now finishing. It did quite well mainly because daughters bought it for their old dads, whod laughed at The Goon Show and had heard of Harry Secombe. Few people saw that it wasnt a book about Peter Sellers it was a book about a person writing a book about Peter Sellers. Laurence Sterne died in 1768 exactly a century before the establishment of my fathers slaughterhouse concern incidentally and I wonder sometimes, crossly, swaggeringly and pompously, if in the meanwhile English literature has advanced a single inch.

If I missed the boat at university they started to want to give jobs to people who knew about Structuralism and Semiotics, things I thought were simply frightful balls; and my simple pleasure in language, paint and performance for their own sakes was considered quaint and old-fashioned, a throwback to the days of David Cecil and John Bayley then I next made the mistake, on returning from Normandy, of never living in London. If I was hiding away in the provinces, it was because I needed a big house for my money, which youd think wouldnt be a controversial decision, or one worth penalising. With three children I was requiring the Gentlemans Residence in Herefordshire, not a bijou former artisans cottage in Ealing or Wandsworth. But this has meant that I have never been part of the London literary clique. I am not an operator. I am part of no network. Sad mother Julie Myerson asked me only the other day, Is writing what you do full-time? Sorry, I probably ought to know this. Arseholes to you, then.