He is, of course, expelled as a result of the escapade. This is so fantastically strange that one begs for him to tell us more: there is something almost schizoid in his attempted erection of an indestructible shell of personality around himself. There is some recapitulation of this here, including a memorable account of one of his schoolboy truancies in London, when, instead of attending the proceedings of the Sherlock Holmes Society, he spent a few days propping up the bar at the Ritz, dressed in his grandfather's clothes, smoking Balkan Sobranies. From an early age, he followed his impulses with reckless indifference to the consequences, till finally they led him to a cell in one of Her Majesty's prisons. This is who I am, he cries, isn't it extraordinary?Īnd extraordinary it is. You will get reams of brilliant and often unflattering self-description, but of probing you will find little: a great deal, as he himself might say, of what, but almost nothing of why.
If it is something more than pleasure that you want - if you want an insight into what has made him the uncommon creature that he is - you may be a little frustrated. His expansively amiable, slightly professorial, presence in our lives is nothing but a blessing, and his book gives nothing but pleasure. He is convinced that we hold all these things against him, but we don't. He has, it is true, much to apologize for: charm, wit, inventiveness, enthusiasm, generosity, an encyclopaedically well-stocked mind, astounding good luck, considerable wealth. His only stylistic vice is his constant apologising, for which, in the first sentence of the book, he apologises.
Quite unnecessarily: it is verbal Vivaldi, gurgling and burbling deliciously along in its perfect cadences, its occasional unexpected harmonies, its calculated quirks, ever and anon modulating into a more tender, more reflective passage, hinting at, but never too deeply exploring, emotional depths, before speeding off into a joyous allegro vivace of infectious comic bravura. Early on, he even disparages his literary style. There is nothing that anyone could say about him, or his book, that he does not say, and say more cruelly, of it and himself, in its pages. So clever is he - and he is the cleverest by a mile of all my contemporaries - that he has written a book which reviews itself. One word is conspicuously absent from the catalogue of Cs: cleverness. E ach section of this cunningly constructed causerie of a second autobiographical volume is headed with a word or words starting with the letter C.
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