Britain has lost not one, but two great writers in the last couple of days: Martin Amis, and the Spectator’s Jeremy Clarke. Since 2001, Clarke had been the magazine’s “Low Life” correspondent, succeeding the grimly compelling Jeffrey Barnard.
In the Spectator, its editor, Fraser Nelson, writes:
Jeremy Clarke, one of the most loved columnists in the history of The Spectator, died this morning at his home in Provence. Catriona, whom he married a few weeks ago, was by his side. Everyone who read his column knew this day was coming, but that doesn’t make the news any easier to bear. Our readers have lost not just a columnist but a friend – and he will be mourned as such. He was one of the greatest writers ever to appear in our pages. But he was also so much more . . .
The focus of the column (a must-read every week for years) was, as its name would suggest, far from glamorous. Clarke’s obituarist in the Daily Telegraph gives an example:
Many of Clarke’s funniest episodes, set in the hardscrabble Devon towns where he spent his middle years, involved a gallery of reprobates led by the femme fatale Sharon, whose “tans always seemed to last longer than her boyfriends” – Clarke was one – and her on-off lover, the explosive “local hard man” Trevor.
One such, from 2002, finds Trevor shoving his love-rival Darren’s head through a pub windowpane, “orange sparks from the cigarette lodged between the fingers of Trevor’s right hand adding a momentarily festive effect”. As the ruckus continues, Sharon’s hair and mascara are ruined by a drenching of Stella Artois – but “she’s circulating with all her usual social adroitness and firing back pints of lager as if nothing has happened”.
It was as though Rabelais and Damon Runyon were co-writing an X-rated version of The Archers [a long, long-running British radio soap opera set in a rural community] But the heart of Clarke’s writing was his empathy with all those whose lives, like his own, failed to follow untroubled paths. That included his father, a heavy drinker who ended up as the uniformed carpark attendant of a nudist beach, his plain little hut “the only place of his own he’d ever had” – until the night it was reduced by arson to “a perfect rectangle of ashes, a pair of door hinges and a padlock”.
The naturalness of Clarke’s writing belied the sweat he put into it, often spending two whole days on an 800-word column and still worrying that he had failed to find a resonant last phrase. But the ending he achieved in a broader sense – recording until he could write no more the agony of advancing tumours, the kindness of nurses and neighbours, the solace of books, birdsong and morphine, and the loving care of Catriona, the partner he married at the last – was high art indeed, followed with admiration and rising dread by a legion of readers.
That last sentence could not be more true. In recent months it has been a relief to see Clarke’s column still there, as he wrote on, determined, unsentimental, a man with something still to say, writing on until almost the last moment. His work should be remembered for much, much more than the columns of those last months, but they were indeed “high art,” all the higher for how unwrought (in two senses) they appeared to be.
Clarke’s columns are available here, but if there is just one that I would single out (an almost impossible task), it is one from January, in which his two best friends from the primary school he had attended between 1961-68 show up, as Clarke puts it, “to say cheerio.” He remembers the school fondly:
My teacher Mrs Asplin was loving and gentle; my fellow pupils friendly and cheerful. First prize for the weekly spelling test was to go and see the headmistress – a hideous, kind-hearted old thing – and kiss her hairy cheek . . .
The school was solidly lower middle class and it seems to me that we were deliriously happy. In the class photograph everyone . . . is laughing, really laughing.
The two friends (they had kept in touch, sporadically, over the years) had claimed, implausibly, to be coming to the south of France anyway, just near where Clarke was living. He was reluctant to see them:
Far better to remember the person I was when we were five. Or 20, when we all lived together in a sort of rock-band commune on a farm owned by East End gangster types.
But he relents:
They flew to Nice, drove doggedly up into the hills in a hire car and first thing next morning texted a photograph of our village quartier with a caption asking for directions to the house.
‘Bugger off,’ I replied, phone in one hand, plastic bowl in the other. ‘I’m not telling you.’
‘Don’t be like that, Jel,’ replied Dotty. Dot is a nice man. I relented. I talked them up the path to the house, then up the stairs, and received them lying in bed. Dot came over and laid a meaningful hand on my shoulder, as he used to playing Sticky Toffee or Off Ground Touch in the playground. Then he ran back out of the door, saying: ‘Found you! Your turn to come and look for us now!’ I laughed. We laughed. Two old men come to visit a terminally ill third, all suddenly five again. Same personalities, same tics, same gait, same jockeying, same puerile sense of humour.
R.I.P.