The Ex-Friends Syndrome

The more you think about it, the less clever a bit of Polonian wisdom seems the line, "Dress British, think Yiddish." The Anglo and Hebraic traditions are bound by a lot more than Isaiah Berlin. Consider the comedy of Albert Brooks: Things are never quite so bad that they can't get worse. Well, well knew that from Waugh, Wodehouse and Amis, didn't we? The basic plot structure of the Jewish sitcom — from Maude to Seinfeld — evokes the gambols of Bertie and Jeeves, where every mess manages to get cleaned up at the end of the half-hour (which is usually how long a Wodehouse short story takes to read). In politics, too, the filiations are many and profound: Neoconservatism survives outside the United States only in the United Kingdom: Tony Blair, seethes his Tory critic Geoffrey Wheatcroft, might as well have studied under Bloom and Strauss for all the good he's done us. And the noble history of English radicalism is at least as noble as that of the Jewish variety: Why else did Marx choose the British Museum to formulate his class-based social theory?

I bring this up because there's another fascinating trend that I've just realized does double duty in New York and London: Call it the Ex-Friends Syndrome. Some grubby little excrescence waits around until his old chums are dead to squat and defecate on their corpses, usually at a per-word rate that staggers the euphemism-befuddled obituarist. "I never liked him, anyway" is the typical refrain here, suggesting not just bad faith but transparent bad faith. Why'd you hang back from telling us, then, until he hadn't got the breath to defend himself?

I don't have to name names. Colin Wilson hemorrhages them:

John Osborne ("utterly without talent," according to Colin Wilson – and he's one to talk) ended up bankrupt in Shropshire, begging money to fix his teeth from the Royal Literary Fund. Kingsley Amis became a bulging-eyed boozer and misanthrope, being funny in the Garrick with his zip undone, and virtually incapacitated by his phobias – flying, folk dancing, hailing taxis and sitting on his own, to mention only a few.

Philip Larkin succumbed to "depressive nihilism", expiring of oesophageal cancer in Hull surrounded by his ugly birds, the devoted Maeves, Monicas and Bettys. John Braine ("contrived and perfunctory") drank heavily, grew "downright stupid" and "bored everybody silly". His Room at the Top archives failed to sell at Sotheby's and for Christmas he went to the community centre and lunched with tramps.

John Wain kept churning out unreadable epics about Oxford, went blind and died "short of money", living off handouts from the Society of Authors. Kenneth Tynan's cheques bounced, too, and he died of emphysema, weighing less than eight stone. Before that, his obsession with sadomasochism got the better of him, and he broke a blood vessel in his penis, which took on "the shape of an egg-timer". He also needed to wear a truss.

So it goes on, Wilson prodding his betters with a toasting fork. Terry Southern wrote a fable about a nymphomaniac and "a demented hunchback", grew fat from loafing in Hollywood, and exemplified "stupidity and coarseness". After Candy and Blue Movie, says Wilson, he "published nothing more" (which is not true: there was his satire The Magic Christian).

There's a simple justice in all this. When Wilson bites it, no one will think to tell of what a nasty-minded mediocrity he was, least of all the publisher of The Angry Years.