Low Life, High Art

For most of the last fifty years, the correct way to read the Spectator was to open it at the back, flip over a few pages and find out what on earth old Low Life had been up to that week. Had he woken up in a hedge with no memory of the previous twenty-four hours, perhaps? Had he had a brush with the law, or suffered an embarrassing bodily malfunction in a public place? Had he outraged the prevailing middle-class morals of the day in some farcical manner? The purpose of the Low Life column was to give Spectator readers a weekly glimpse of the gutter; a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God insight into the life of the bohemian drop out; a sense of what happens when a man looks at polite society’s prescriptions and says, ‘Not for me, thank you.’ And a proper belly-laugh into the bargain. Two men have been Low Life’s custodians. Both are now dead. The first, Jeffrey Bernard, was the archetypal Soho barfly: cynical, self-pitying, permanently sozzled, spitting out formless but funny poison-pen letters until the booze killed him, aged 65, in 1997. He has become a figure of legend, immortalized in a stage play named after the Spectator’s frequent one-line apology when he failed to file copy: Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell.

His successor, Jeremy Clarke, who wrote the column from 2001 to 2023, may not have Bernard’s notoriety, but the truth is that he far outstripped him in literary talent, breadth of interest, depth of insight and sheer lovability. I’d go so far as to say that Clarke elevated the confessional diary form to a rare and matchless height – and that the death of no other writer has left me so bereft. The documentation of that death – painful, protracted – was ultimately his most profound literary legacy. But before Jeremy Clarke died, he lived . . . Born in 1958, Clarke was a lower-middle-class Essex boy. His father was a hard-drinking sales rep, his mother a quietly religious nurse. Though bright, he coasted uninterestedly through school until a teacher handed him Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall and opened his eyes to the miraculous power of prose. This teenage epiphany made him a curious hybrid: a bookish thug. Despite an enthusiasm for drugs, extreme drunkenness and football hooliganism (representing West Ham), he adopted the literary canon as his guide to life. Inspired by One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, he worked in a mental hospital. After reading Steinbeck, he took factory and labouring jobs, winding up as a binman in Devon. Various calamities and dramas ensued – including fathering a son in a one-night stand with an ex-girlfriend – after which he quit his job, sold up and (inspired this time by the writings of Eugène Marais) took off for the Democratic Republic of Congo. At this point he had two O-levels to his name – four less than his total of criminal convictions (three smash-and-grabs on off-licences, two drink-driving, one possession of amphetamine sulphate). But after four months in Africa, he returned a changed man. Making, in his own words, ‘a conscious decision to join the bourgeoisie’, he gained A-levels at night school then studied African history at SOAS, London. There followed one of the more improbable literary career breaks: his review of a book about ferret husbandry for a student magazine was spotted by the head of English at University College, London, who passed it to his publishing contacts. Briefly hailed as the next big thing, Clarke secured a £50,000 book deal. Back in Devon, back on the drink and drugs, he succeeded in spending the advance but failed to write the book. Nonetheless, he was now a writer of sorts, keeping just above the poverty line with travel journalism and magazine columns – including for the Boris Johnson-edited Spectator, where in 2001 he was identified as the ideal man to resurrect Low Life, dormant since the demise of Bernard four years previously. Suddenly, Clarke’s chaotic lifestyle and calamitous history became not hindrances but qualifications, and everything that had previously made him unemployable now made him unmissable. From the first, Clarke’s Low Life was clearly a different species. Where Bernard’s columns were dashed-off freewheeling rambles, Clarke’s were painstakingly constructed short stories. He would take two days to write 800 words, agonizing over every sentence. True, like Bernard he was hilariously, painfully frank about his own failures. If he soiled himself in public, he told us. If he fell off the wagon, or said something unforgivable to someone he loved, he told us that too. But there was never any self-congratulation in Clarke’s confession. He didn’t flinch from depicting his worst qualities, but nor did he indulge in self-pity. He simply told the plain truth. And where Bernard was misanthropic, snobbish and bitchy, Clarke was sympathetic and acutely sensitive to human nature. A wonderful column from 2005 encapsulates his mode. In it, Clarke describes an encounter at the gym, initially treating a special-needs man and his elderly carer with detached curiosity. The carer seems to be a study in selflessness, tenderly guiding his charge from machine to machine. But Clarke’s perception of him shifts when the carer makes a crass joke about frostbitten penises.

I ceased going up and down on the stepper and looked at him coldly. For several weeks I’d been observing what I imagined to be a supremely conscientious, decent man, a man willing to sacrifice his evenings to escort a chap with special needs to the gym. A man in a thousand. Disillusioned, I neither smiled nor laughed. I just looked at him. And with as much gravitas as I could muster started bobbing up and down again.

But there is a further twist. Later, in the changing-room,

the carer was helping the bloke with special needs get dressed . . . he took a long time dressing because something in his mind made him chuckle to himself every so often. The carer couldn’t have been more patient with him. ‘What’s he laughing at?’ I said, a bit hostile still. The carer said it was something he’d stopped trying to find out about a long, long time ago. ‘So how long have you been looking after him, then?’ I said. The special- needs bloke let out another chuckle, and the carer looked affectionately at him. ‘Forty-three years,’ he said. ‘I’m his dad.’

And to prove it, he took the special-needs bloke gently by the ears and tenderly kissed his forehead.

It’s quite possible Clarke never passed judgement on anyone ever again, since the distinctive feature of his Low Life is a profound empathy with his fellow humans, no matter how pathetic, eccentric, ugly, beautiful, feeble or violent. His stories teem with characters. Trevor, the town psycho with a fondness for fights, and Sharon, the doomed femme fatale with whom Clarke was hopelessly, repeatedly entangled, are recurring ones, as are his beloved grandsons Oscar and Klynton. But even the most fleetingly encountered are rendered with tenderness and wit: they are vivid and fully alive, not merely devices. His ear for dialogue was impeccable. Clarke could report an overheard conversation with the comic timing of Wodehouse, but without ever sounding like he was inventing it. A turn of phrase, a malapropism, a non-sequitur muttered into a pint glass ‒ Clarke understood precisely how much to include, and where to cut. He never signposted the joke; he simply placed it on the page and let it work. And he was funny. Not wry or gently amusing, but properly, audibly funny – the kind of funny that makes you fall off your stool and splash your drink across the bar. In 2013, Clarke was diagnosed with prostate cancer. True to form, he broke the news to his Low Life readers with all the decorum of a man who had once been jailed for an off-licence smash-and-grab. He attends the Spectator’s summer party, intending to keep the diagnosis to himself, until,

all too predictably, there came a point in the evening when someone said, ‘How are you?’ and I replied, ‘I’ve got fucking cancer.’ And now all sense of decorum deserted me. I started telling everyone I had cancer – friends, strangers, even the bar man. First I told it bitterly, then boastfully, then hilariously. Come the end I was using it as a chat-up line.

He continued writing Low Life for another decade, rarely mentioning the cancer until the very end, when the treatment and pain finally came to take up the whole of his experience. But the style didn’t change. There was no tremble in the prose. He remained funny, observant, filthy and honest. His later columns are full of French oncologists, botched injections and bodily indignities ‒ but also light, wonder and small mercies. It was also a love story. Back in 2011, at the launch party for a collection of his columns, he had met Catriona Olding, a nurse. She was there as the winner of a competition to send Clarke the most tasteless possible joke, so, unsurprisingly, they clicked. They stayed in touch, and when her marriage collapsed three years later they were finally free to ‘double somersault into love with a half-pike and a twist’. Clarke, dishevelled and cancerous, might not have seemed the obvious romantic lead, but Catriona saw what his readers saw: Clarke, dishevelled and cancerous, might not have seemed the obvious romantic lead, but Catriona saw what his readers saw: compassion, wit, spirit. While Clarke was still caring for his dying mother they carried on a long-distance relationship – she in a con verted cave in Provence, he in Devon – until he joined her permanently in 2020. And so his final years were spent with Catriona in the hills above Cotignac, reading and writing in a home that was, by all accounts, happier than anyone could reasonably hope. He wrote until he no longer could; she nursed him until the end. The last ever Clarke Low Life, published on 6 May 2023, just a fortnight before his death, is entitled ‘The Pros and Cons of Kissing’ and ends thus:

Mouth fungus, apparently, is an inevitable side result of these cancer treatments. Unfortunately, by kissing her too frequently and too passionately, and vice versa, I have passed mine on to Catriona.

But I’m sorry. Wouldn’t you kiss passionately, deeply and often the lady who loves you so much that she is willing to care for your each and every need, as Catriona does with mine, 24 hours a day, instead of packing me off to a hospice, and letting them do it all? Yet this amazing woman does it and kisses me deeply and passionately, no matter what the consequences for her own health.

When I read out that final paragraph to her just now, however, she says: ‘Early doors yet, as they used to say.

Following a diarist is unlike other reading experiences. Their voice becomes part of your inner life, you chart their highs and lows, notice when they’re off-colour or on particularly good form, pick up on their obsessions and habits (mostly vile ones, in the case of Low Life). It is a curious intimacy with someone you don’t know at all – and more so with Clarke because, like the best comedians, he gave you the sense that you were in on something: a shared understanding of how ridiculous and precious life is. He didn’t flinch or pretend, and because he never strained to be liked he was irresistibly likeable. There is on YouTube a video of the extraordinary memorial service for Jeremy John Clarke held at St Martin-in-the-Fields church, attended by over 600 readers wanting to thank him for all those wonderful words. Would the former hooligan-binman-petty criminal have believed such a thing possible? Probably not – no more than he could ever really believe the bagfuls of fan mail comparing him favourably to his literary heroes. I didn’t go to the service and never got round to sending him a fan letter. I wish I had but it’s too late now. This article will have to do.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 89 © Andrew Nixon 2026