High Life /Low Life

...GORE VIDAL Is the author of Myra Breckinridge a brilliant observer of manners -- as the liberal critics want us to believe -- or just an astute muckraker seeking the annihilation of the conventions that form the rudiments of civilization...

...Incidentally, did you see Richard Three last night...

...Taki prefers hyperbole and outrageous directness...

...No, when you think what a p o u n d ' s worth today, well...

...Tom Wolfe is author, most recently, of From Bauhaus to Our House...

...Taki's fellow rich Greeks are fat and gauche and have repulsive fat children...

...There is a touch of Mishima about Taki (who named the yachts his father gave him Bushido I and Bushido 11...

...At Taki's favorite seaside resort, Vouliagmeni, ten miles east of Athens, once the very picture of quiet luxury, he now finds himself shank to flank with rich Arabs "who keep spitting in front of my cabana as if it were a spittoon...

...Taki--he uses only the one name-writes a column called "High Life," based on his ongoing adventures as the playboy younger son of one of the Greek shipping tycoons, John Theodoracopulos...

...What troubles him most of all is his inability to summon up any emotion...

...No, Basil's right...

...Nothing is more embarrassing, when prose is read aloud--particularly in England, to a d o n - - t h a n purple passages, leaps of the imagination that fall flat, elaborate word play, leg-slappers, slang, sentiment, personal revelations, obvious emotions, or excessive e f f e c t s of any sort...

...To Taki the question of what, besides cocaine, the rich people of the West might be willing to die for is not funny...

...He tells about the moment, the final five or ten minutes, in which he breaks up with a girlfriend of long standing...

...In Taki's book the ultimate decadence of people of wealth and power consists of caving in to feminism, pacifism, or other forms of Left chic rather than defending their own values or even their own class interests...

...He is finally cut off even from the commonplace emotions that would let him feel properly sorry for himself...

...They have grown prematurely old from jogging every morning at dawn, imitating the speech and dress of the English upper classes all day, and cringing "To order, send a check for t15.00 to Jay Landesman, Ltd., 8 Duncan T e r r a c e , London N 1, England...

...Betsy Clarke writes on perhaps the most-hyped contemporary authoresses...

...But through the caricature runs a cold vein...

...An underlying fury at the sight of the West suffocating in its own flab puts iron in the soul of his wild gift for farce and insult...

...Taki tells his readers that, contrary to what they may have read in the New Statesman, the Spectator's IngSoc (English Socialist) rival, rich people are on the whole more pleasant and more admirable than other people...

...Is his writing an attempt to create literature or does he simply put together attractive ideological tracts.a Stephen Tanner takes a look at the .author of Ragtime...

...I'll tell you what...

...Stephen Macaulay studies this prolific author of best sellers...

...Cut it and let's scrap the dissolve...

...In fact, Taki relishes it all, and his hyperbole often takes off into marvelous deliriums reminiscent of C~line's Death on the Installment Plan or a Gillray tableau...

...Are their novels literature or feminist brochures...

...It is not a pretty sight...

...My God...

...It's the kind of writing that earned us the Freedoms Foundation's 1981 Geon:je Washington Honor Medal...

...Then the "TV commercial boys" come in and s t a r t saying, " Y e s , I know, love, but if we cut it t h e r e - - bang,bang--we w o u l d n ' t have to hold him in long shot coming down those s t a i r s looking so dreadfully bored...

...The field demonstration of the above is the past eighty-two years of British history...

...God, the stories I could tell...

...when they mean "Have another...

...Funny though, I should have thought those magazines and things you write for, I should have thought they'd pay very well...

...Mind you, i t ' s all right for some, I dare say...

...Richard Vigilante examines the author of The Naked and the Dead...

...The mooncalf intellectual is soon operantly conditioned, as the psychologists say, to avoid such areas a l t o g e t h e r . After t h r e e years of it he is likely to turn into a polite essayist of consummate grace and wit who will never embarrass himself or a publisher in print for the rest of his days...

...Last year his article in The American Spectator called "Ugly Women"--arguing that ugly thoughts and shrill voices turn the good looks of women like Jane Fonda and Shirley MacLaine into revolting masks--provoked feminist groups to protests and manifestos...

...sional Record...

...When I think of what my body and I have gone through over the past 45 years, I should have thought it would have the decency to hang on a little longer--at least until the hot weather started...

...Bernard often makes note of his own appearance...

...I'll tell you...

...Why not join our growing list of readers.,r Send us your coupon today so you don t miss a single issue of our new sedes...

...If 1 could write I'd sit down and write a book...

...E. L. DOCTOROW...

...Both are writing about the borao horus of the twentieth century, the smart number who is too befuddled and deracinated to fight back, even when pushed to the wall: The remarkable thing, in England, is to find two gifted writers who are able to bring that character alive in such an uninhibited way...

...In 1980, at the age of 43, he fought in a New York Athletic Club boxing tournament in the middleweight dlvision...

...Americans--or rich Americans in London, at any rate-are thin and stringy...

...Bernard writes the complementary column, "Low Life," based on his adventures as a drunk, a debtor, a cad, a sloth, a loser, a failure...

...After long nights of wrenching his reticular formation out of shape at Annabel's and Xenon, he is in a mood to insist on patriotism and the warrior virtues of honor, courage, manliness, physical prowess, and chivalry...

...ford Papers which seems to me to include some of the best c~n~.~ative writing of recent times...

...L e t ' s face it, loves, w e ' r e here, basically, to sell the wretched stuff...

...Every week the s t u d e n t writes an essay and then reads it out loud to his tutor, his don, a figure of maturity, sophistication, and c e r t i f i e d wisdom...

...You should write a book...

...She could be the daughter of a duke or a postman...

...What Bernard has done is create a low life that is more dreadful to the readers of the Spectator of London (or Bloomington) than visions of the slums or the Third World...

...They approach BritLit's favorite medium, the essay, with the instincts of a Westbrook Pegler...

...Beginning in the early fall, Professor Taki will auspicate a column of political analysis from his offices in Athens, London...

...some of the best conserval/vewriting of recent times...

...He cheerfully reports that his own family, the Theodoracopuloses, are worth much more than the 200 million pounds mentioned in Nigel Dempster's gossip column...

...In this century there have been scarcely half a dozen British novelists or playwrights of the first rank who have come from out of the g r e a t tutorial u n i v e r s i t i e s . After John Galsworthy and Evelyn Waugh the list p e t e r s out rapidly...

...He has taken the intellectual's gamble--cut his ties with conventional life in favor of dreams of low-wattage glory--and lost...

...His world is that' of the failed middle-class i n t e l l e c t u a l . His columns are like slices of the novel he says he is going to write and keeps cadging advances for and n e v e r sits down to...

...Then it dawns on you that you have been skillfully drawn into the mental atmosphere of a man with a terrific hangover...

...In "High Life" rich Italians are fat and cowardly...

...I mean there just isn't the money about, is there...

...Clubs and resorts are Taki's favorite settings...

...But Taki and Bernard have an In keeping with The American Spectator's long-standing campaign to improve human understanding throughout the world, the editors are pleased to announce that Taki has become our European Editor...

...Starting at the top, the memory banks are now completely empty, the concentration fuses have blown and only a few basic animal instincts remain...

...THE MONUMENTAL LITERATURE OF DWARFS _ 9 CONTINUES_9 THE ROCKFORD PAPERS" new series, "The Monumental Literature of Dwarfs," continues its critical look at contemporary American literature with essays on the following celebrated authors: MARILYN FRENCH and MARY GORDON...

...True, Taki indulges in the perfectly conventional British sport of ridiculing the nouveaux riches, but he has no use for the standard British weapons of subtlety, irony, and the snigger...

...For the umpteenth time in six months I make a mental note to ask some bright spark like Bron Waugh to write a piece actually attacking those people who keep using the word basically when it's not necessary . . . . It makes me think they' re all talking a d i f f e r e n t language which, at this moment in time, basically, is what i t ' s all about...

...advantage over t h e i r colleagues: Neither has ever a t t e n d e d a major English university...

...His hair is "the color of man-made ice" and loaded with dandruff, and a dentist has informed him that all of his top teeth will have to come out on March 20...

...But i t ' s the same for all of us really, isn't it...

...Is he still the great white hope of American literature or an artifact of ideological follies...

...One could never tell them apart...

...One popular London club has even taken out the toilet bowls as redundant...

...and " b a s i c a l l y " when they mean " I dare s a y . " Every so often, however, comes a column in which Bernard--or the main charact e r of "Low L i f e " he has turned himself into--confronts himself directly...

...No sane person, says Taki, goes into the lavatory of a chic nightclub anywhere in the West without " a surgical mask as if in an asbestos plant during an explosion...

...After she left " I f e l t strangely ashamed at not being more upset so I put some Mahler on the record player to see if that would provoke the appropriate misery...

...Of course, basically, it's a really boring play, particularly if it isn't done well, but I thought . . . " For some reason this drives him to the edge...

...Our writing'on such issues as the Cold War, liberalism, education, the media, the New Right and the Moral Majodty~has brought favorable mentioo in publications as diverse as the Washington Post, New Oxford Review and the Congres...

...Orwell, Shaw, O'Casey, J o y c e , Lawrence, Maugham, Pinter, Burgess, Behan, and Conrad, like Dickens, Hardy, and Kipling before them, were spared the opportunity...

...Nothing...

...HIGH LIFE / LOW LIFE Jeffrey Bernard and Taki/Jay Landesman, Ltd...

...Gstaad, and Monte Carlo...

...I should have thought y o u ' d be doing very well...

...NORMAN MAILER...

...This may explain why they are so popular in a country that produces graceful and witty essayists in job lots but very few exciting ones...

...Peregrine Worsthome, assocSate editor of London's Sunday Telegraph, says: "1 always benefit from reading...

...They write for the Spectator of London, in whose venerable ecru pages they stand out like a couple of yobbos looking for a brawl...

...Taki is himself a karate adept and tennis star who has represented Greece in both sports in international games...

...He does it so well, however, to such applause, he may be writing himself out of a role...

...The most ordinary barroom touches i r r i t a t e him, starting with the sign behind the bar: "You d o n ' t have to be mad to work h e r e , but it h e l p s . " The r e g u l a r s at the bar are saying: "Squire--neck of the woods--ding dong (for Bells whisky)--my better h a l f - - t i n c t u r e - - a t this moment in t i m e - - g e e and t e e - - l o n g time no s e e - - I ' v e only got one pair of hands--similar?--don't tell my bank manager--cold enough for you...

...Like most aching drunks he tries to transform what is really troubling him into those demons, Other People, the people who say "Similar...

...Through them scamper such characters as Bianca Jagger, who he insmts is ancient, Halston, whom he calls "Dracula," Diane von Furstenberg, who he says is a nonentity from Belgium who trades (in the rag trade) on the name of the "gay prince" she married, and John Aspinall, a gambling club operator and wild animal tamer whom he admires...

...Their children do biggies in the swimming pool and the place has to be drained after every meal...

...He is one of the few highly vocal foes of feminism outside the ranks of the Upland Baptists...

...I mean, I know you've got to let it all hang out and stay loose which is quite incredible and absolutely amazing in a basic sort of way, basically, that is, but it's really beginning to bug me...

...Meantime, Jeffrey Bernard's "Low Life" is scarcely what Orwell, Steinbeck, or the proletarian novelists had in mind when they wrote about being clown and out in the 1930s...

...Of course, you know what you ought to do...

...Every daughter of the rich wears "a pair of tight jeans with pencil-thin legs, a hot-green tube top, a purple belt, a yellow plastic bracelet, highheeled shoes, frizzy hair and two bright spots of pink rouge on her cheeks...

...I t is here that Bernard's low life and Taki's high life converge...

...His chances of becoming a good novelist or a lively journalist, however, are remote...

...Basically, I'm pretty tolerant but if I go on hearing that word I think I might flip...

...Fleeting moments of lust and 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1982 greed occasionally threaten to turn the motor over but the spark is weak...

...The barmaid is saying: " P l e n t y of work about for you,Jeff...

...All of them, young, old, Arabs, Greeks, Englishmen, Americans, the lot, are sinking into the ooze of their own rhinal catarrh, thanks to the only thing in the world they are willing to die for: cocaine...

...farmers and suchlike...

...6.95 pounds" Tom Wolfe every night before their ownhideous snarling wives, who free-base testosterone...

...In fact, I sat t h e r e listening to the syrup feeling distinctly irritated...

...The Rock...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY t982 31...

...I couldn't agree more...

...Both writers subvert the customary literary approaches to the upper and lower orders...

...They throw open the door and blurt it out...

...Jeffrey Bernard, who dropped out of Britain's Naval College, and Taki, who bounced around schools in Europe and America, are English journalism's latest evidence of the exuberant literary life just over the buttressed wails...

...Most bright young writers in England go to u n i v e r s i t i e s such as Oxford and Cambridge, which operate on the tutorial system...

...Many columns begin with our half-toothless hero sitting in a saloon in the middle of the day...

...Masses of humanity sniff, snort, sneeze, cough and expectorate...

...I mean it's really draggy and, basically, out...