Vanity fair and foul

The plumber came this morning — £75 including VAT. He was still expensively engaged when a bike brought Frederic Raphael’s Rough Copy in a paperback version whose glued spine is in constant contest with the reader. Anyway, surely an opportunity to recoup the plumber’s fee. Strangely, the author himself raises the question of my financial plight on page 164 — I was into the index in a flash — when he disobligingly records that in 1973 I had ‘no income whatsoever’, despite mouths to feed. And, he adds, I have been unemployed ever since. Admittedly FR is merely reporting the confidences of the famous Professor X, but with no palpable reluctance.

It transpires that FR was at that time hired to turn a ‘flagellating’ novel of mine into a film for the tycoon Norman Jewison while keeping as much distance as he could from the novel’s grim pages. I didn’t know this at the time but I had read his disparaging review of another work of mine in the Sunday Times and would not have recommended FR’s services (if asked) because of mutual ideological puking.