Drink and dyslexia
Pour Me A Life
by A A Gill
Weidenfeld & Nicolson £20
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A A GILL hangs his ferociously entertaining autobiography on his youthful spell as an alcoholic, hence its title, which is quite the worst thing about it. He insists that it is not a misery memoir or, as he puts it with typical delicacy, a book to give ‘the friend who struggles with his cravings like a randy fat girl squealing “no, no, no” as her hand shimmies up your shirt’. Unavoidably, though, to some extent it is.
He remembers little of his lost decade – now sixty, he has been sober for thirty years – but nonetheless rehearses the usual repertoire of the ex-drunk, with grimly comic scenes from bars and clubs, and confused fragments between blackouts, garishly lit by guilt and shame. He rakes over ‘the pathetic ashes of my life, in all its grubby, foul-breathed motiveless hopelessness’, and declares that giving up drink was ‘a born-again new person makeover’. But Pour Me is more than an extended act of ‘sharing’ at an AA meeting. (Does he introduce himself there as ‘I’m A A’? Given his inordinate egotism and delight in wince-making puns, he probably does.)
He also writes about the many aspects of his life that are much more interesting than his drinking, such as his family. His father, whose death from Alzheimer’s he describes with great poignancy, was a newspaper sub-editor turned pioneering television producer, so it is strangely apt that A A should suffer from dyslexia and have become a television critic; he dictates all his work from ‘unpunctuated, ungrammatical type on a screen’ to a former copytaker, who turns it into prose.
His mother, who is still alive, was
an actress turned speech therapist, and as a child he had a terrible stammer; elsewhere in the book he gives a bravura portrait of Sir Lawrence Gowing of the Slade, for whom speech was ‘a continuous series of self-administered Heimlich manoeuvres’, which might have been cruel had it not been written by a fellow sufferer. And he tenderly recalls his younger brother, a chef who won a Michelin star before disappearing in his twenties, never to be heard of again, who must have contributed to the tremendous store of gastronomic knowledge Gill displays in his restaurant reviews.
He gives a hilarious account of his education at a Church of England primary school, and at a co-educational vegetarian boarding school run by Quakers, where he was bullied and friendless until one day he decided to pretend to be someone else, stammer-free, popular, on easy terms with girls: ‘Like a spy in deep cover, I am still pretending to be the person I made up on a dreary Sunday in September.’ This is rather a motif (‘Over the years I’ve method-acted some sort of learnt English version of human’), and it is touching that he has yet to realise that everyone else does the same.
Gill left school at seventeen with no qualifications, a failure that has impelled him to acquire the prodigious and eagerly imparted erudition of the dedicated autodidact, which he recognises (he is nothing if not critical) as ‘an intellectually insecure nervous tic’. He is scathingly dismissive of universities, which he says offer ‘bus tickets for journeys that are already over’ (which is a bit rich from a television critic), and fail to tell their students ‘that the real value of education is taking out the rubbish’ (actually they do).
He managed to secure places first at St Martin’s School of Art and then at the Slade, and when he left the ‘realisation that I wasn’t going to be a great artist was a profound sadness’. Still, he writes brilliantly about art – in a superb account of Géricault’s ‘Raft of the Medusa’, for example – as he does about anything he turns his hand to, most surprisingly about the plight of refugees. He has a terrific relish for simile – Lucian Freud in chef’s trousers, for example, ‘looking like a buzzard who’d eaten the cook’ – though some are more successful than others: ‘She let out a laugh, like a string of pearls breaking into a urinal’. His favourite is ‘like a slap’, which is what his writing is like; that or an electric shock: in any case, always stimulating.