When celebrated art critic Brian Sewell waded into a debate on the state of modern television this summer, in the eccentrically pompous way that only Brian Sewell can, he made a speech deriding its “panjandrums” for being seduced by vulgarity. This from a man who, in his memoirOutsider II, reveals the first thing he asked a nurse while recovering from a heart attack was “am I allowed to masturbate?”, before going home to do just that. Sewell must have written that speech on TV roaring with laughter.
But then, it’s not as if anyone will arrive atOutsider II blushing with faux-piety. After all, Sewell’s previous memoir “dealt frankly with the business of being both a bastard and a bugger and how this came about”. It ended in 1967, and Outsider II takes up the story of Sewell’s life after leaving Christie’s. We see him scratching around London trying to make a living as an art dealer, caught up in the public disgrace of his mentor, Anthony Blunt, and crossing the floor into the world of journalism. And at every stage, those who cross him are vilified in typical Sewellian style.
Of his Tatler editors he calls Libby Purves an “ample frump” and Emma Soames “an unloved termagant”. He suggests no one liked, “worse, no one respected”, the Evening Standard‘s former editor Veronica Wadley. If Sewell is to be celebrated as that rarest of public figures who says exactly what he pleases, then there’s also something rather sad about an 82-year-old man painstakingly honing such idiosyncratic abuse.
But for all his revealing jousts with British media and society, it’s Sewell’s ridiculous sexual appetite that dominates here, and rapidly becomes tiresome. His stories of enjoyable gang-bangs in barracks, or riverside shags with willingly passive oarsmen, are simply ribald anecdotes fine-tuned for approving chuckles or shocked glances. Salvador Dalí, for example, is no longer on this planet to confirm that Sewell felt sufficiently acquainted with the surrealist’s sexual problems to send him an implement from London which might be of some succour.
True, Sewell takes care to excoriate himself as much as others. AndOutsider II is also brilliantly written – entertaining in small doses despite its faults, and full of illuminating art-world insights. But do we really need to know that the unfortunate side effect of his belief that MI6 were on his tail was the cessation of “casual sodomy in the third-floor lavatories of Harrods”? Sewell, keen to be “scrupulously honest”, thinks we do.
Copy: The Observer, Sunday 27 October 2013
