But then the snow turned to rain

My daughter when small came home from school one night singing these extraordinary lines: ‘Fortune, my foe, why dost thou frown on me/ And will thy favours never lighter be?’

My daughter when small came home from school one night singing these extraordinary lines: ‘Fortune, my foe, why dost thou frown on me/ And will thy favours never lighter be?’ Five hundred years on, this Tudor ballad, said to have been played at hangings, provides the theme, and the structure, of Seasonal Suicide Notes. Only, this being the 21st century after all, it is bawled, not from a cart to Tyburn but from a converted convent in Bromyard, being Roger Lewis’s latest book.

Once Professor Lewis had it all, for he was a butcher’s boy from Bedwas, which meant that in Wales he was of the upper class, so his childhood was full of sausages, also cine cameras, puppet theatres and a donkey called Emily. His career thus shadows that of Cardinal Wolsey, another butcher’s boy, and, like the Cardinal, he too enjoyed early academic success; but while the one rose, the other, as he himself reveals, fell. From dawn to dewy eve he fell, a summer’s day, the prize-winning graduate and Oxford don plummeting like Lucifer, only in his case into freelance writing. Except that, unlike Lucifer (and Wolsey), Professor Lewis revels in his fall.

It has allowed him to brood happily, and biliously, in Bromyard on kill fees and indifferent publishers and the even more indifferent dyslexics who run the literary pages of national newspapers, also on the rise of the great Craig Brown, another freelance writer, whose shadow now falls inexorably on every publication except Yellow Pages. This is one of the strangest books you will ever read.

It is also the funniest. And the most reckless. How he got it past the libel lawyers must be the great mystery of our time, equivalent to their passing a history of the state of Israel, written in exile by some survivor of the Third Reich. On the other hand, perhaps not.

For in the cellar of the House of Special Purpose in Bromyard they are lined up, father, mother, wife, children (only one of whom has flown the coop, in his case to become a circus performer), various aunts, a mysterious housekeeper called Mrs Troll, and the short, fat and ‘hairy-arsed’ mothers of South Wales. Actually all Welsh women are there (‘I personally think the veil should be made compulsory in Wales, for if there is such a thing as an attractive Welshwoman I’m a Dutchman’). So the Beast of Bedwas counts his victims, checks his lists and the Kalashnikovs are cocked. It is a very crowded little cellar.

Craig Brown is not there, being glimpsed from afar, with awe, the way scientists watch water-spouts. But the eminent English academic Sir Christopher Ricks is, plucked from his life’s work of preparing the Variorum edition of the sonnets of Bob Dylan and from presiding over a dynasty of circus owners. Also present is the Professor’s own cousin, Jeremy Lewis, who, it is said, runs a writing school in, of course, Puglia, or some other place in Italy. Clive James is also there, ‘a professional nincompoop … a prat’, as the Professor once judged him. But, surprisingly, Anthony Burgess is not in the cellar, being here hailed as a hero.

Except that in his earlier biography of Burgess the Professor celebrated him as ‘a lazy sod’, ‘a pretentious prat’, ‘a complete fucking fool’. But then the Professor’s biographies are not like those by other men, for, while most end up quite liking the object of their research, Roger Lewis has adopted a novel approach based on the professional expertise of the Aztec priesthood: the victim is hustled up the steps, the obsidian knife plunges, and the steaming heart is displayed, only in his case the hearts are dry, his victims being safely dead before their rendezvous on the pyramid. If you haven’t read them I recommend his biographies to you, on Peter Sellers, Laurence Olivier and Charles Hawtrey (the Professor is a devotee of bad films); you will never have read anything remotely like them. Yet it is with some nervousness that I find in his list of Forthcoming Attractions, billed in the opening pages as in some cinema foyer, that these include a biography of Jesus. The Professor describes it as a gospel, this being a literary form Craig Brown as yet shows no sign of attempting. There is also a compilation of madrigals to be called ‘When I was Young and Twenty and I had a Dainty Quim.’

In case you think I am making all this up I should assure you that there is a converted convent where, given the lack of such amenities in Bromyard, the Professor, unlike the late Dirk Bogarde who denied his to all, allows passers-by free use of his many lavatories. Some even emerge afterwards, one having advised his host to avoid orgies in Golders Green on the grounds that in each one he would encounter a fat man naked on the stairs eating a ham salad. This piece of advice seems to have proved so helpful the Professor includes it, misquoted and with the wrong attribution, in his book. But then of course he is a book reviewer.

If you like black comedy, and bad taste, you will find yourself in Narnia here. His father dies, ‘of cancer of the bumhole’, and his sole inheritance is spare bumper packets of Coloplast Direct Wetwipes. The coffin cost £2,995 plus VAT, for the Professor is fascinated by money, having received a £60,000 advance for his Burgess biography, of which £58,346.83 remains to be cleared. Alan Coren dies, leaving £3,173,948 (‘he must have been involved with organised crime’). This kills the glee he reserves for the deaths of his famous contemporaries.

Everything is fair game. He has a sharp pain in his testicles due to his being so fat his thighs crush them when he lies down. Forced to slim, he coughs so much he sucks his trousers up his bottom. Mrs Lewis’s gynaecological problems are beadily described, and every door in the house is left ajar (‘What with my farting and Anna’s snoring, our bedroom to a casual passer-by must sound like the rehearsal hall for Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass’). He watches the afternoon matinee of Rebecca, identifying only with the first Mrs de Winter, who is of course dead. Smugly he informs his readers that he has not talked to his brothers since 2003. So time passes for the Grand Bâtard de Bromyard.

Perhaps it will change. Perhaps Craig Brown will be kidnapped by aliens, perhaps messengers will come with news that he, Roger Lewis, is the rightful Duke of Calabria. But not yet, eh? He is far too busy choreographing his misery, and you sense his unease as he examines one rare, unexpected, moment: ‘In Austria, drinking mulled wine by the log fire in the town square, wearing my father’s old coat, I was almost happy. Then the snow turned to rain.’

I loved that.

Buy the book, and be grateful you don’t live next door.