One of the most important books about life and death you’ll ever read

The first “Low Life” columnist for the Spectator magazine was Jeffrey Bernard, who was unwell so often Keith Waterhouse wrote a very successful play called Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell; and Bernard died, very unwell, in 1997 at the age of 65. His column was taken over by Jeremy Clarke, and he filled the post for over 20 years until he died, aged 66, last year. If you are going to write a column every week about the seedier side of life and be honest then you’re not going to make old bones. (Full disclosure: I write a similar column for the Spectator’s mirror-universe counterpart, The New Statesman.)

Clarke was an excellent writer, good enough for a selection of his columns to be published while he was still hale. Collections of journalism are usually more of a pat on the back than a decent go at literary immortality, but many readers, including me, wanted more; and now we have it, in these chronicles which start with the diagnosis of prostate cancer in 2013, and end with the muzzle of death’s gun half an inch from his face in 2023. It takes a high degree of professionalism to be able to keep filing copy under those circumstances, but Clarke’s columns performed a duty, both to his readers and to his own powers of observation, which is why this particular collection of journalism isn’t just a pat on the back but one of the most important books about life and death that you will ever read. This is a hyperbolic claim to make but I mean it.

It starts merrily enough, if you skip the introductions by Eric Idle, Professor Brian Cox and David Goodhart (but read them once you’ve finished). Clarke enjoyed a drink, to put it mildly, and it begins with him at the Spectator summer party, getting sloshed, and finally breaking a self-imposed promise not to tell anyone of his cancer diagnosis. “Come the end I was using it as a chat-up line.”

He lives for longer than he or his doctors dared hope: so there is much here that is joyful, for he knew how to celebrate life. There is also much that is hilarious: the literature of hangovers in English writing may be voluminous but his account of a hangover is one of the funniest things you will have ever read in your life, even if you have read a lot.

He might have been sloshed a lot but the prose never is. It took him two days to write one of his columns but you wouldn’t know it: his words glide as smoothly as conversation. There is no sign of overwork here. Just the right words at the right time. At one point he quotes a description by Graham Greene of Evelyn Waugh’s prose: like the pre-war Mediterranean, “you could see all the way to the bottom.” Clarke might have been describing his own writing.

But there is more to good writing than a smooth prose style. You also have to have something to write about, and what really makes Clarke outstanding is not just the care he put into the words but what they were describing in the first place. He noticed everything. At one point he asks how the patrons of a crowded restaurant could bear it, being surrounded by so many stimuli; when he describes his fellow expats in Provence he lapses into a rare outburst of anger: after having, for much of the book, described the sights and sounds and smells of Provence so vividly you imagine, while reading, that you are actually there, and for the purposes of this particular column, describing the slow process of integration that the Englishman with scant French makes into village life, he turns his eye on his compatriots: “I’ll tell you what they do. They sit on their fat arses in front of the telly and watch sodding box sets. They all do. And how do I know? Because whenever I go out to dinner, everyone talks competitively about the box sets they’ve watched, describing the twists and turns of the plots to each other as if they are actual events that have happened to real people. And they think they deserve a medal. I’m sorry, I just do not understand it.”

The final pages of the book are not much fun to read but are grimly fascinating. “Unflinching” might be the word. If, as Clarke is, you are so finely tuned an observer that you can describe the sound of a dog barking across the valley a mile away, then when you are confined to the apparatus of deathbed and catheter, those will be your subjects. But this is the dark backing that allows us to look in the mirror. Put away the box set and read this book.

Low Life: The Spectator Columns: The Final Years is published by Quartet at £21.99. To order your copy call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books