Jonathan Meades has no time for accessibility, which he calls ‘a euphemism for comprehensible by the stupid and hardly educated’. In this spirit, the introduction to his latest collection, Pedro and Ricky Come Again: Selected Writing 1988-2020, is rebarbative rather than inviting. He’s not plumping the cushions or fetching you a cup of tea – he’s eyeing you up, testing your mettle. This is a book for those ‘born without the credulity gene’. Credulity leads to conviction, another euphemism, this time signalling ‘bigotry, intolerance, mono-directional certainty’.
Autodidacts can be just as overbearing as the expensively educated, and Meades’s self-willed capacity for learning and erudition is not available for a fee. His own version of snobbery has nothing to do with institutional approval or credentials, which are useless baubles as far as he’s concerned. To keep up with Meades you need an unusually adhesive mind, an appetite for disagreement, a willingness to pursue the recondite and picayune.
I don’t think I’ve ever written the word ‘picayune’ before. I might even feel ridiculous saying it out loud. Meades’s prose inspires a wider vocabulary, at least in the short term. Open Pedro and Ricky on any page and you're likely to be within glancing distance of at least one of these words: epigone; cynosure; panjandrum; curatocracy; galère; immane; foetid; emetic; dirigisme; legerdemain; pleonastic. Slang, the language that ‘fell off the back of a lorry’, is also important to him – it tells us ‘what people think rather than what we are enjoined to think.’ This meshing of dissonant registers is what makes him such a singular, vital writer.
Like his prose, Meades’s cultural tastes are stringent and tend to exclude the middlebrow. There is very little between the outhouse and Salisbury Cathedral (his proud love for brutalism, itself brandished as a kind of weapon, notwithstanding). He likes Bob Monkhouse and Benny Hill, Anthony Burgess and Vladimir Nabokov. When it comes to what he would call serious music, only the most serious will do. ‘My diet comprises nothing but the very great’ – which excludes Mozart and Bach. He thinks Abbey Road and Let It Be ‘can only be regarded with embarrassment’. Ragged, addled Lou Reed makes the cut, however. Meades much prefers herring to lobster.
He likes to quote Nabokov’s dictum: ‘There is only one school of writing, the school of talent.’ Meades admires the self-created (that hollow tag ‘self-made’ would probably make him wince) and those who shuck off their backgrounds. I don’t know of anyone who remains so fixated on the importance of received pronunciation. For Meades, a strong regional accent is something akin to a verbal cliché announcing a lack of character. RP is worth striving for because it erases your origins and allows you to become who you want to be. He calls the upgrading of regional identity ‘agrophilia’, agreeing with John Honey that ‘the prestige allegedly enjoyed by rural accents is part of that peculiarly English scheme which elevates the rustic and depreciates the urban.’
‘He is surely one of the planet’s best haters,’ wrote Steven Poole in his review of Pedro and Ricky. The competition, these days, is not exactly fierce. Hatred has been siphoned off into meagre online squabbles and ideological skirmishes – there’s no shortage, but it’s all junk. I recommend going back to read some of Meades’s restaurant reviews for the Times, where he served as the paper’s critic for 15 years from 1986. A selection of opening salvos from that period:
Now and again someone claims never to masturbate: Cyril Connolly, religious ascetics and – much the same thing really – assorted fruitcakes, manual amputees who can’t reach, and so on.
Sir Terence Conran has reached an age when many men’s thoughts turn to retirement or to their granddaughters’ schoolfriends.
You could tell, 30 years ago, that it really was the summer of love when Kenneth Halliwell stove in Joe Orton’s head with a Birmingham screwdriver in Noel Road, N1.
There is hell, which is other people. And then there is Planet Hollywood, which is other people plus other people’s children.
Clearly he wasn’t confined by his job description – more often than not he left the eating until the end of the review. This is where AA Gill and Giles Coren found their discursive, bratty styles. Meades on a high-end Thai restaurant of the early 2000s: ‘The puddings look as though someone in the kitchen has been practising his moneyshot on a pile of diarrhoea.’
Meades doesn’t always have a firm hold on his anger. Not that his reviewers seem to mind. ‘[T]he aficionado of Meades is always hoping for the inevitable transformation, the dandyish Hulk rampage,’ wrote Poole. But vituperation curdles over time, and I found myself skimming whole paragraphs of Pedro and Ricky (a tiny fraction of the 980-page whole) when I sensed he was about to go into one of his anti-religion routines or, increasingly, when I came upon the words ‘Tony Blair’. Meades has a large supply of homemade epithets for Blair: ‘God’s Own Bomber’; ‘mistakenly unaborted Blair’; ‘Our Lord Toni’; ‘the Ceausescu of Connaught Square’. Not his best work. In a piece on acronyms Meades comes up with ‘BLAIR (Brit lackey anilingualises illiterating redneck)’ – even worse.
His scorn for Boris Johnson is just as vicious. A young Johnson was ‘only a rapier scar short of the full Heydrich’ and once he grew up he became Hermann Göring’s ‘doppelgänger’. The ‘People’s Primate’ has created ‘a mask to gull the gullible Little Ingerlanders whose xenophobic legions – think, if you can bear to, of a million Andrea Leadsoms mated with a million beer-bellied fans – are as ever-swelling as their idol.’ You can feel him pulling at the language, trying to stretch it into cartoonish shapes. But the results often fail to reveal anything beyond the red mist of Meades's vision.
He praises Kingsley Amis for the ‘breathtaking despisal that drove so much of his work.’ Elizabeth David, the food writer, was ‘a great hater’. He is fond of quoting Lord Beaverbrook: ‘my father taught me to hate, to hate…’ These are his models. But relishing Meades in hate-mode is like encouraging a rattlesnake to bite your enemy: it shouldn't be mistaken for an alliance. Poole, writing for the Guardian, casts Meades as an opponent of nationalism, Brexit, the wrong kind of sceptics (those who question global warming or mask-wearing, for instance). For Roger Lewis in the Times and Simon Heffer in the Telegraph the book is at least partly a broadside against what Lewis calls the ‘narrow ignorance of “woke” cultural commissars’, some of whom presumably work for the Guardian.
Meades’s fogeyish side is often ignored or underestimated. While he disdains populism, he can’t bear the ‘special pleading’ of minority groups: ‘The tyranny of minorities has caused the atomisation of England and the consequent destruction of a coherent society,’ he wrote in his memoir, An Encyclopaedia of Myself. This sentiment also runs through Pedro and Ricky. In one of several pieces on language he rails against the fashion for ‘vibrant diversity’ which ‘dissolves the glue of society, dismantles nationhood, makes clannishness a virtue, rewards minoritarian special pleading, inhibits mobility, sanctions apartheid.’ He uses an article on Blair’s first Labour Conference speech as prime minister to bemoan his nation’s ‘passive deference’ and ‘uncomplaining acceptance of curtailed civil liberties’ (you could almost be reading Peter Hitchens). Elsewhere, and with some regret, he describes ‘placeism’ as ‘the only permissible expression of prejudice that is left to console a species which craves the ignoble gratifications of judgement, pigeonholing, despisal, malice.’
‘I’m too covert and too shifty to reveal myself in a very obvious way,’ said Meades in an interview with James Sutcliffe. On television he keeps the viewer at arm's length, ‘part Blues Brother, part minicab driver… a look that manages both to conform and to rebel, to be menacing and familiar,’ as AA Gill put it. One of the primary satisfactions of Pedro and Ricky is being in the presence of a writer who refuses to be pinned down.
For Meades the idea of a ‘cult following’ is a ‘horrible, overworked construction’ – he smells worship, religion. But that hasn't stopped him accruing his own fan club. Both Heffer and Vice have referred to him as a cult figure, and reviews for Pedro and Ricky, which was crowdfunded through Unbound, have been unanimously positive. Let’s not take them entirely at face value. Heffer, Poole and Jonathon Green are back-scratching: the collection contains favourable reviews of their own books (and Roger Lewis is listed as one of the book’s ‘supporters’).
Meades isn’t on his way out – a thousand-page novel is apparently forthcoming – but his latest collection does have a valedictory air. It's unlikely that the Times will ever again pay through the nose for a critic as savagely intelligent as Meades, and after years of diminishing budgets his TV appearances have come to an end (his most recent films are linguistically superb but visually hobbled). In interviews he doubts that current BBC brass even know who he is – far-fetched, but close enough. Whether or not they know him, the BBC and the handful of remaining major publishers behave as if they don’t. The media have lost interest in eccentrics and dissidents; pub bores and scolds have replaced them. Which is not to say Meades won’t thrive in the margins – about this, if nothing else, he might find reason for optimism. ‘Less emollient creators and performers,’ he writes, with not just his forebears in mind, ‘are lent vigour by official neglect, by being marooned in a sea of indifference, by their opposition to the artless culture into which they chanced to be born’.