Grub Street is a destination both real and metaphorical. Dr Johnson's Dictionary defines it as “a street near Moorfields in London, much inhabited by writers”. Long after it disappeared from the London map, Grub Street continued to exist, like Bloomsbury or Fitzrovia, as the geographical expression of a sensibility, a refuge for semi-successful, cash-strapped men of letters - publishers, hacks, eccentrics, hard-drinking afternoon men (and very few women).

In Grub Street Irregular, his third volume of memoirs, Jeremy Lewis revisits this comfortingly seedy realm, now almost obliterated by the commercial monoculture of modern publishing. His book is organised in four sections: “The first touches on aspects of publishing life, the second describes how I became an inadvertent biographer [of Cyril Connolly], the third deals with my infrequent visits overseas, and the last is given over to absent friends.”

What that businesslike description fails to mention is Lewis's tendency to what he calls “hyperbolic anecdote”. He cannot see a digression without meandering up it to see what lies at the end: generally some fearful grotesque such as the demonic Charles Fry of Batsford, described by John Betjeman as “a phallus with a business sense”. None of those about in publishing these days, I'm sure.

A relentless self-deprecator, given to indignant mini-sermons on the virtues of failure, Jezza (as he is known at The Oldie, where he is the commissioning editor) relishes the sight of a discomforted grandee. There is a memorable description of Lord Gowrie at an elegant conversazione at Mrs Drue Heinz's castle on Lake Como, sweltering in lovat tweeds in the Italian heat after his suitcase flies off to Glasgow without him.

Even in the affectionate account of his friendship with Barbara Skelton, Connolly's beautiful, difficult former wife, there is the bat squeak of a hint that Jezza knows the elderly femme fatale wouldn't have given him a second glance in her glorious prime. Sorting through her papers after her death, “I suddenly spotted my name, followed by the epithet, ‘silly arse'. I couldn't bear to read on...but the world went very cold and I felt, as biographers are prone to feel, like an imposter who had presumed on a friendship that had never really existed.”

That searing shaft of self-knowledge exemplifies the curious charm of this memoir. Like John Aubrey (whose busy eye for a sartorial detail Lewis shares - he is particularly hot on slip-on shoes, which, along with “jeans, corduroy jacket and open-necked shirt”, he identifies as “a style of dress pioneered by [publishing] whiz-kids), he excels at the brief pungent delineation of lives that might otherwise have passed almost unrecorded, including his own.

Lewis's assiduously constructed persona of comic incompetence doesn't travel well outside the closed world of Grub Street. In a description of a freebie to Kenya in the company of a couple of young journalists, his bufferish tone seems merely sour, and it fails him in an account of a trip to Auschwitz. As anecdote succeeds anecdote the suspicion grows that beneath the coy veil of diffident failure there writhes an ego of naked self-importance. But then there comes some moment of astonishing candour (as in the Skelton anecdote, or the quietly anguished sketch of his relationship with his alcoholic father that punctuates the Auschwitz trip) and the buffer recedes to reveal a writer of acute observation and fine tragicomic.

Grub Street Irregular Life by Jeremy Lewis
HarperCollins £20 pp352

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