Jovial writer whose books evoked a vanished literary world
Jeremy Lewis, who has died aged 75, was a writer, editor, publisher and memoirist – and “one of the best-loved figures in the London literary world”, said The Daily Telegraph. A “Grub Street irregular”, was how he described himself. Bear-like, bespectacled and amiable, he was almost pathologically self-effacing. But his “silly ass act” – in the words of his cousin Roger Lewis – was a carapace that concealed his gifts as a writer: a perceptive observer, he wrote several acclaimed biographies, and “three splendidly funny volumes of autobiography”.
In the preface to the first, Playing for Time, Lewis acknowledged that it was absurd that a “nonentity” such as himself, who had lived a life “short on incident”, should be writing an autobiography; he said that he hoped its existence would be justified by its being “entertaining, evocative of place and a particular way of life”, and by capturing some of life’s absurdity and sadness. And indeed, “he made non-achievement fascinating”. His memoirs were witty, insightful and moving, beautifully conjuring a vanished postwar world of distant parents, chilly boarding schools, and congenial publishing offices peopled by corduroy-clad eccentrics, where work started late, lunches were long, and editors were unconstrained by commercial targets.
Born in 1942, Jeremy Morley Lewis was the elder child of George, a urologist, and his wife, Janet. His mother was a “life force”, said The Times – the daughter of a farmer, “with the demeanour of a dowager Duchess”. A fearsome woman, she once unapologetically hoovered up his entire litter of baby hamsters, having mistaken them for cornflakes. His father, a former Cambridge rowing blue, had been present at the liberation of Belsen. Jeremy believed that he never recovered from this trauma, and that it precipitated his withdrawal from family life, and descent into chain-smoking alcoholism. Jeremy loved his father, but he was a very different sort of parent to his own children, Jemima and Hattie. “I have deluged my daughters with affection and encouragement, and embarrassing emanations of paternal pride,” he said.
Burly but maladroit, Lewis had inherited none of his father’s sporting prowess. At Malvern College he did his best to avoid games, but nor did he excel as a scholar, which further dented his confidence. He was happier, if not much more successful, at Trinity College Dublin. Cripplingly shy, he recalled approaching girls at parties with all “the speed and dash of a glacier”. But later, in London, he met an attractive fellow Trinity graduate named Petra Freston, “with black eyes (like those of an Outer Mongolian)”. They married in 1968.
In the late 1960s, he drifted into a job at William Collins, then joined AP Watt as a literary agent. It wasn’t a success: he was terrible at negotiating deals and hopeless in a crisis, “rushing about, lamenting loudly”. He was dismissed after six years and went to OUP, and thence, in 1979, to Chatto & Windus. But by then, the industry was becoming commercialised, and Lewis – with his fondness for publishing books that were “brilliant but unsellable” – began to feel at sea. He “did not mourn when Carmen Callil sacked him in 1989”. After that, he decided – supported by Petra, who worked at a literary agency – to embark on a new life as a freelance writer. Auberon Waugh described his Cyril Connolly: A Life (1997) as “one of the funniest biographies I have ever read”. Lewis’s other subjects included Tobias Smollett and David Astor. In 1996, he took a part-time editing job at The Oldie, where he shared a ramshackle office with its editor, Richard Ingrams; he also wrote a monthly column for the magazine, which he kept up until his death, from cancer.