George Melly. SLOWING DOWN. 221pp. Viking. Pounds 17.99. 0 670 91409 6.
Diana Melly. TAKE A GIRL LIKE ME. Life with George. 280pp. Chatto and Windus.
Pounds 14.99. 0 7011 7906 6.
"In my late seventies I am still able to play at senility, enjoying supportive friends, singing albeit seated and wearing an eye-patch, drinking Irish whiskey, fly-fishing for trout and listening to Bessie Smith", George Melly tells us in the opening pages of his guide to the perils and pleasures of an exuberant old age.
The perils include deafness, impotence, incipient emphysema (he remains an unrepentant cigar-smoker, much to the annoyance of his wife Diana) and incontinence, luridly evoked: prone to attacks of violent diarrhoea, he is taken short in the Victoria and Albert Museum and has to find relief in the ladies; the pills he takes to combat water retention make it hellishly hard to control his bladder, and he is caught by the beam of a constable's torch peeing up against the wall of a police station near his home in Shepherd's Bush. And, to top it all, he has been equipped with a granny-mobile, in which he flashes along at speeds of up to 6 miles per hour.
All this may seem a sad falling-off for the flamboyant figure who made his name in the 1950s as a vividly suited jazz singer, champion of the Surrealists and scriptwriter for his friend Wally Fawkes's Flook cartoons: yet he describes advancing decrepitude with an admirable absence of self-pity, and a good deal of gusto. On trips down "mammary lane", he describes old friends like the painters Edward Burra and John Banting, as well as steamy sexual encounters with the eager scrubbers who haunted Ronnie Scott's club in Soho; he remembers how his mother, then beginning to lose her marbles, asked her daughter to help her fill in a form to "JOIN THE RAF AND LEARN TO FLY", and how, one night in Ronnie Scott's, he was so drunk that he passed out under the piano and John Chilton interrupted the proceedings to announce that "the Captain is no longer in charge of the ship".
Risking the wrath of the "WingCo" -Mrs Melly -he mounts a fierce if familiar defence of smoking, and tells us of the pleasure he still gets from Oldie lunches at Simpson's in the Strand. Rambling, incontinent and uneven, Slowing Down reads as though it has been dictated on the hoof -or in the granny-mobile -but is none the worse for it.
One day in the early 1960s, George and Diana Melly found themselves, not unexpectedly, in Muriel's, the Soho drinking club then favoured by painters, writers and assorted riff-raff. Just as they were leaving, Francis Bacon lurched up to them and, after embracing George Melly, jabbed an accusing finger in the direction of his young and beautiful wife. "I've never quite seen the point of you", he told her. To her credit, Diana Melly seems happy to tell this story against herself (and Francis Bacon): but, sad to say, much the same could be said of her memoir, which disappoints both as an evocation of la vie de boheme and as an account of a life which, it seems, has been unhappier than most.
