Good Things from Britain #2: Great Drunks

This morning while reading James Lileks daily Bleat, I came upon this wonderful throwaway line. He was talking about Peter O'Toole, who apparently appears in "Troy" with Brad Pitt. (We here at Casa Querencia don't see many movies because the nearest theater is 26 miles away, and the nearest good one closer to 100). The line was "Peter O’Toole showed up, although you weren’t sure it was really him – didn’t he die of advanced O’Toole Syndrome fifteen years ago? No? So you don’t need a liver or lungs to live, then. Rockin’ good news".

Now it happens that O'Toole, no mean boozer himself, played the absolute king of excess, Jeffrey Bernard, in a one- man show called "Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell", which opens with the hero waking up under a table in a bar. If ever there was a man whose writing made always honest and usually hilarious art out of his life, written in installments that he called a "suicide note in weekly installments" (though he lived to be 74) it was Bernard, who is virtually unknown in the US. There are three (I think) collections of his Spectator "Low Life" columns, but the best place to start is probably with Just The One , his biography, which includes both hundreds of stories about him and plenty of quotes from his writing (the title refers to having just one drink,which I doubt he ever did in his life).

A quote from one of the UK Amazon reviewers gets it right.
"This is one of the funniest books around, certainly one of the funniest I have read. Bernard staggers through life, vodka glass in hand, writing brilliantly funny little columns on racing, gambling, drinking, all the while dying slowly of self-inflicted smoking and drinking (a doctor wrote him off thirty years before he actually died).

"Bernard is wonderful at a distance, but I have to say I would not want him as a relative, friend, neighbour or even stranger propping up the same bar (he had a tendency to tell people to **** off!). Who else but Bernard could vomit on the Queen Mother, throw away his wives like chaff and have his hand held out for baksheesh for half a century?"