Roger Lewis is a bad-tempered, embittered, foul-mouthed, cantankerous old fart. And I mean that as a compliment. Most people, certainly most people in the public eye, are so bland in their judgments, so circumscribed in their opinions, that it's a genuine delight to meet a hater like Lewis. Nobody has hated on this scale epically, biblically for what seems an awfully long time. Harold Pinter is a "ghastling clanking beast with eyeballs blacker than anthracite"; of the critic Alexander Walker he says: "I was thrilled when the old poof died, I hope crushed by his bouffant hair-do"; and when "sad mother Julie Myerson" asks him if he writes full time, his response is: "Arseholes to you, then."
Seasonal Suicide Notes is inspired by the round-robin letters that people send at Christmas time with their tales of triumph and home redecoration. Lewis's version contains nothing but woe: his own and that which he finds in the pages of the Hereford Times. The book is aimed at people who don't find glossy adverts aspirational but "a ferocious rebuke, [emanating] from a world from which you'll be forever barred, if only because your belly is so big it hides your shrunken willy".
A biographer whose last work, about Anthony Burgess, received "homicidal" reviews, he slaves away at the literary coalface, turning out essays while nursing an unshakable belief that he's being deliberately excluded from a giddy whirl of literary parties, rich sinecures, stylish debauches and favourable notices, all because he's the son of a butcher, went to a south Wales comprehensive and "made the mistake of never living in London".
Now listen, Roger; many of us were educated at south Wales comprehensives without carrying on like it was a Romanian orphanage in the time of Ceausescu, and while it's a lovely idea that "living in London" is the key to a life of almost unimaginable glamour, you're barking up the wrong tree, boyo. What's more, sometimes his moaning is neither mordant nor funny it's just moaning.
On and on he goes about how poor he is ("I am your actual mendicant"). Freelance journalism is shockingly badly paid, it's true, but it's hard to get past the "Gentleman's Residence" in Herefordshire and the holiday home in Austria. And while he despises (rightly) the literary world and seethes at Clive James for claiming "everyone knows everyone", there's blood on his hands too. Already, this book has been the recipient of that most egregious of all literary practices: it was reviewed in the Spectator by Byron Rogers, who, as Lewis tells us, is a great friend of his (Rogers calls Lewis "the beast of Bedwas").
What saves him, in the end, is a self-knowledge that seeps like a wound. "At one time, I thought I'd be a contemporary Ruskin, doing for nutty actors what he did for modern painters or Venice's stones. I'd have settled for being Bernard Levin. I've ended up a disconsolate literatus, clipping out funny stories from the Hereford Times for a toilet book."
