‘Lunch’ with the master of lunching

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/09/2009 (6122 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Keith Waterhouse, one of the best comic novelists of the 20th century and creator of Billy Liar, died last Friday in his London, England, home at the age of 80.

His best-known work, Billy Liar, published in 1959, is the funny yet touching story of Billy Fisher, a young man with elaborate fantasies and a habit of trying to lie his way out of trouble.

Waterhouse and Willis Hall wrote a successful stage-play version that jump-started the career of Albert Finney. Their screenplay became a 1963 John Schlesinger movie that launched Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie into stardom. Then there was a musical called Billy, with Michael Crawford, an English TV series and a separate American sitcom.

But Waterhouse was the author of 14 other fine novels, among them There Is a Happy Land, a marvelous re-creation of childhood; Office Life, a lovely satire, Bimbo, a look at the world of tabloids, narrated by a “Page Three Popsy;” and Palace Pier, a send-up of literary festivals.

He wrote or collaborated on many other hilarious books, like The Joneses: How to Keep Up with Them (under the pseudonym Lee Gibb); Mrs’ Pooter’s Diary, an answer to the Victorian classic Diary of a Nobody; and The Book of Useless Information, which includes gems like “Eagles mate while airborne.”

Waterhouse was a fierce custodian of the English language. His Waterhouse on Newspaper Style and English our English became standard reference books. He was disturbed by people’s misuse of punctuation and formed the Association for the Abolition of the Aberrant Apostrophe (citing, for example, the too-common use of it’s as the possessive of it). Waterhouse’s knowledge was said to be encyclopedic — all self-taught.

He wrote television material for such programs as The David Frost Show and That Was the Week that Was. He wrote scripts for radio and children’s TV. He wrote stage-plays and screenplays with and without Willis Hall; his 1989 comedy Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, starring Peter O’Toole, rivaled Billy Liar in popularity.

But Waterhouse’s lifeline was his twice-a-week newspaper column. For nearly 60 years, it appeared Monday and Thursday, first in the Daily Mirror and then, for the last 23 years, the Daily Mail. He gained a reputation for being “a brilliant choronicler of modern life” and “a scintillating satirist.” He was not only loved by millions of readers, in 2004 he was chosen by his peers as United Kingdom’s best national columnist. A 1994 report set his annual income from journalism at 130,000 British pounds, and an equal amount from his books and plays.

He came from humble beginnings, the fifth child of a Leeds, Yorkshire, costermonger and his wife, who worked as a cleaning woman. The father died when Keith was three; unable to afford university, Keith left school in his mid-teens. One of his first jobs was with an undertaker, an experience he’d use in Billy Liar. After a compulsory stint in the RAF, he landed a reporting job on the Yorkshire Post. That led to his relocating in London and catching on with The Mirror.

Early on, according to City Lights (Vol. 1 of his two-part memoir), he wanted “to become a proper writer, not just a hit-or-miss churner-out of froth at a guinea a thousand words.” The fact is, though, once he became a fine British novelist, he continued as a churner-out.

“If I only did books,” he once said, “I’d probably sit around consumed with self-pity. As a journalist and playwright, I can live the gregarious life.”

He wrote everything on an old portable typewriter, believing that “the word processor is doing for the English language what mono-sodium glutamate has done for cookery.”His favourite part of the day was lunchtime; in Who’s Who he claimed his only hobby was “lunch.” He devoted a whole book to The Theory and Practice of Lunch; it’s an hilarious but practical volume that should be in every businessperson’s library. An excerpt: “Lunch, as opposed to dinner, is where you can invite a charming lady without her boring husband. . . . Dinner is an obligation or even a retaliation. Lunch is free will.”

Waterhouse considered a liquid lunch the best kind. I had the good fortune to discover this first hand. In 1975, my friend Dave Humphreys (then managing editor of the Ottawa Journal) and I visited London and, being Waterhouse fans, we’d set up a meeting for one day at noon at the FP Publications office, just off Fleet Street. When Waterhouse appeared, right on time, he suggested we repair to a local spot called El Vino for lunch. We’d have an enjoyable chin-wag first and conduct a more formal interview afterward.

El Vino was crowded with journalists from London’s major dailies. Waterhouse cleared room for us to stand at the bar and we enjoyed a glass of Chablis each, then another. (Much has been written about Waterhouse’s daily booze consumption — minimum of a bottle of champagne and, at six o’clock, a large-size vodka martini he called a zonko.) Humphreys and I gently inquired about food. Waterhouse had the bartender bring us tomato sandwiches. Waterhouse had another glass of Chablis and did not eat.

I didn’t count the number of drinks we had, but there came a time when Humphreys and I decided we’d better get on with the interview while we could still think.

Back at FP, we started our tape recorder and Waterhouse’s answers were lucid and witty. He told us it was his reading of Dylan Thomas’s prose that taught him you could write about your own experience in your own way — you didn’t have to adopt some literary style.

He graciously talked about his Yorkshire youth, his friendship with Willis Hall, the novel he’d just finished — a sequel called Billy Liar on the Moon — and his compulsion to write every day. He kept his many jobs separate by scheduling each on a different day — Monday, TV; Tuesday, novel; Wednesday, column, etc. He thought that, of all the actors who’d played Billy, Tom Courtenay had come closest to Waterhouse’s idea of him. Of the five novels he’d written up to then, he considered Jubb (about a middle-aged voyeur) his best.

We wound up the interview. Waterhouse thanked us and left. We stopped the tape and rewound it. We played the tape and could hear nothing but a murmur — Humphreys realized we hadn’t adjusted the volume. I scrambled to write down what I could remember, cursing the lunch.

But perhaps it was the lunch that let us see this Fleet Street genius the way he preferred to be seen, relaxing in his favourite habitat, enjoying the gregarious life.

Dave Williamson is a Winnipeg novelist and reviewer whose most recent short story Harassment appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of Prairie Fire.