Jeremy Lewis
One-time publisher and agent who flourished as a biographer and author of brilliantly evocative memoirs of the book world
JEREMY LEWIS, who has died aged 75, was a man of letters or, in his own phrase, a “Grub Street Irregular”; after a spasmodic and unfulfilling career as a publisher and agent, he flourished later in life as a reviewer, editor and biographer, and became one of the best-loved figures in the London literary world.
His habit of extreme selfdeprecation concealed great gifts as a writer – a suggestion that would have detonated one of his characteristic blasts of explosive laughter. Much of his personal charm was conveyed in three splendidly funny volumes of autobiography.
Playing for Time (1987), his first book, grew out of the reminiscences of his school days and undergraduate years that he wrote for the New Statesman and the London Magazine to supplement his meagre salary as an editorial director at Chatto & Windus.
In a preface Lewis acknowledged the absurdity of a “nonentity” who had lived a life “short on incident” publishing an autobiography, and hoped that the book’s existence might be justified by its “being entertaining, evocative of place and a particular way of life, and somehow symptomatic of a good many other equally unimportant lives”.
His aim was to emulate the memoirs of James Lees-Milne, Julian MaclarenRoss and Michael Wharton, books that managed to “combine comicality with an underlying melancholy, vigorous anecdotes with a corrosive sense of the sad absurdity of things”.
He made non-achievement fascinating. He evoked his wretched years at Malvern where he “had made no impression whatsoever as a scholar, a character or, most importantly, as a sportsman” and the happier but barely more noteworthy period at Trinity College, Dublin, where he spent much of his time approaching eligiblelooking girls “with the speed and dash of a glacier”.
As a young man he was, by his own account, shy to the point of unemployability and prone to panic in social situations: at one such event he was obliged to pause when introducing his fiancée to ask her her name.
Playing for Time delighted reviewers, the bibulous historian Richard Cobb declaring that it “kept me laughing every night in my local for a week”.
Lewis’s second memoir, Kindred Spirits (1995), which dealt with his publishing career, was sadder (if no less funny), since the author seemed to be as rudderless as ever in middle age, feeling out of joint with an increasingly commercialistic industry. It was shrewd too, and Diana Athill, his former colleague at André Deutsch, claimed that it “says everything which needs saying about what has happened to publishing, and why”.
By the time he published his third volume, Grub Street Irregular (2008), its cover adorned with a portrait of the author by David Hockney, Lewis had found unexpected (by him, at least) acclaim as a literary biographer and contentment as a freelance journalist. His success robbed the book of some of the poignancy of the previous two volumes, but it contained moving elegies to dead friends such as the poet and publisher D J Enright and the editor of the London Magazine, Alan Ross, both of whom he regarded as surrogate fathers.
Lewis turned to biography aged 50 when, “for no good reason”, he was chosen to write the official life of Cyril Connolly by his widow. For Lewis, Connolly was a kindred spirit, to some extent: “I found his merciless selfknowledge and his romantic yearnings immensely sympathetic, as well as his refusal to commit himself to any one point of view.”
He tried to avoid the approach of excessively reverential previous biographers who, he felt, had ignored the fact that Connolly was a very funny man. Cyril Connolly: A Life, published in 1997, became one of the enduring classics in a fertile decade for British biography. Auberon Waugh hailed it as “one of the funniest biographies I have ever read”.
Lewis’s subsequent biographies did not attain quite the same heights but were always superbly readable, displaying the same flair for brief, vivid, often lethal character sketches that he showed in his memoirs.
Tobias Smollett (2003) was a breezy romp through the life of the cantankerous 18th-century novelist in whose Roderick Random the young Jeremy had gratefully found refuge from the miseries of school life. Penguin Special: The Life and Times of Allen Lane (2005) celebrated the founder of Penguin Books and David Astor: A Life in Print (2016) the “saintly”
editor of The Observer. Shades of Greene: One Generation of an English Family (2010) was a group biography of 12 cousins, among them Graham Greene. It was a valuable corrective to what Lewis described as the “ludicrously self-indulgent and self-obsessed” work of Greene’s official biographer Norman Sherry.
Lewis realised that writing biography had its morally dubious aspects, and felt much the same about the many obituaries he wrote for The Daily Telegraph of authors and publishers he knew. “It’s hard to tamp down the feeling of being an amalgam of traitor, voyeur and spy – the sort of character who might riffle through someone else’s underwear, or steam open letters on the sly.”
But he enjoyed working on his biographies more than anything else he had done in his working life, and was guided by the hope “that the detailed and sympathetic recreation of someone else’s life could be worthy to stand alongside the labours of the great novelists: it attempts, after all, the resurrection of the dead, and what could be more miraculous than that?”
Jeremy Morley Lewis (the family claimed what he felt was a dubious kinship with the statesman John Morley) was born in Salisbury on March 15 1942. His father George Morley Lewis, known as Mo, was on the victorious Cambridge team in the 1936 Boat Race and became a urologist; the mantelpiece in the family home was decorated with marble-sized bladder stones.
His mother Janet (née Iles) was a beauty who, much to his mortification, aroused the admiration of his schoolfellows.
His parents made, he recalled later, “a fine-looking couple”, her ebullience making up for, and complementing, his reticence. Mo Lewis had gone into Belsen with the Allied liberators as a medic and subsequently suffered from depression and alcoholism, and during Jeremy’s childhood his restless father went from job to job. At one point the family emigrated to Canada, but returned to England after six months. Jeremy adored his father but struggled ever to talk meaningfully to him.
At Malvern, Jeremy, despite his burly physique, showed little of his father’s aptitude for sport. He did manage to reach the finals of the heavyweight boxing competition, owing to two peculiarities of style that disconcerted his opponents: “Whenever I was struck, I let fly an inadvertent fart, and whenever I lashed back I did so to the accompaniment of profuse apologies, so that the familiar grunts and hisses of the ring were replaced and overridden by staccato, booming cries of ‘Oh gosh I am sorry’ and ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ ”
To his surprise he was turned down by every college he applied to in Oxford, Cambridge and London. His mother, who felt reading was bad for the eyes, encouraged him to go into advertising instead of further education but after nine months as a trainee he was sacked, and went to read History at Trinity College, Dublin. He then “wasted” a year teaching English in Paris, and another taking an MA in European Studies at the University of Sussex.
After a brief spell in the Features department of the Guardian, where he mixed up Tony Crosland and Richard Crossman in print, he drifted into a job in publicity at the publisher William Collins, then became an editor for André Deutsch.
In 1970 he went to work as a literary agent for AP Watt and proved totally inept at the business of negotiating with publishers. He did manage to place the young Ian McEwan with Tom Maschler at Jonathan Cape, despite seeing no merit in his writing, but was sacked after six years, and returned to publishing as an editor at the Oxford University Press.
In 1979 he went to Chatto & Windus, run by the fierce septuagenarian Norah Smallwood (“the walls were briny with secretarial tears”) until she was ousted by Carmen Callil, who “could charm or savage with equal effect, with not a great deal in between”.
With his old-fashioned fondness for long lunches and habit of publishing brilliant but unsellable books such as The Lone Conformist, Roy Kerridge’s account of his experiences as a lavatory-cleaner, Lewis came to feel that he had become a relic of a world that had gone, and did not mourn when Carmen Callil sacked him in 1989.
He happily embarked on the freelance life, cutting down on the lunches but often spending his evenings crashing literary parties with like-minded friends such as the travel writer Sara Wheeler, drinking as much as possible until they were thrown out.
For many years he held a part-time editorial job at the Literary Review and since 1997 he had worked on The Oldie, editing copy and writing a column, latterly as deputy editor.
In his final column, published last month, he recalled working with Jilly Cooper at Collins, the publishers, in 1967. He remembered Cooper lying “with her arms crossed on the keyboard of her typewriter and her long, fair hair streaming down either side of it, recovering from one of the long, bibulous lunches that were so congenial a feature of publishing and journalism before the Perrier invasion of the early Eighties”.
He was Secretary of the RS Surtees Society from 2000, a trustee of the Royal Literary fund from 2007 to 2016, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1992.
A bespectacled, bear-like man, he objected to Anthony Powell’s description of him as resembling a friendly Labrador. The writer Roger Lewis, his cousin, felt him “prone to overdo his silly ass act”, but the Wodehousian benignity was unfeigned.
His habitual passivity prevented him from holding strong political or religious beliefs. “I felt that one day I should grapple with the all-important question of God,” he explained, “but kept… the old gentleman waiting in the wings like some luckless tenant farmer wringing his hands in the expectation of a possible reduction in his rent.”
In Playing for Time Jeremy Lewis recalled being introduced to “a cheerful, very dear person with black eyes (like those of an Outer Mongolian) and hair like a badger, and within a month or two we were married.” Petra Freston, whom he married in 1968, also became a literary agent; she survives him with their daughters Jemima and Hattie. He wrote little about his domestic life in his memoirs, as he felt that Jemima had covered the ground so entertainingly in her family life columns for The Sunday Telegraph.