By the age of 19, he was on minesweepers in the Mediterranean, and participated in turning back ships of Jews fleeing Nazi Europe - an experience which seared him. After the war, rather than go back to Oxford, he went to Camberwell Art School, and then became a scene painter and backstage factotum at the Theatre Royal, Deptford, the beginning of a raffish bohemianism which, with his Jack Hawkins-like good looks, battered roll-up cigarettes and conversation-fueling glass of whisky, marked him as one of the first members of the post-war British Beats.
Like his Oxford contemporaries and friends, John Wain and Kingsley Amis, he had a war-fed dislike of falsity, and a sense of writing as one of the few unstained tasks worth attempting. Unlike them, Jeremy was never conservative. Even his idea of what was a classic was challenging, something constantly to be remade, never at rest. Yet what would now be called his “lifestyle” (a phrase that would offend his acute literary taste) was open, experimental, romantic and daring. Yet he was a man with a prodigious sense of responsibility, providing for his painter wife Eleanor and his four children, Josephine, William, Margaret and Polly, through ceaseless productivity. Marrying and beginning a family led him to move to Wales, where he rented a ramshackle idyllic cottage from Clough Williams Ellis, the inventor of the nearby mock-Italian town of Portmeirion. Jeremy worked there as an occasional wine-waiter, which gave him insights into the folly of the British at play.
His fiction aspired to, and often achieved, a Chekhovian mixture of comic concision and pathos. Jampot Smith is a small classic about the delight and pain of sexual awakening; it will outlast its period and provincial setting.
He brought the same feeling precision to his versions of five plays by Gorky, directed by David Jones and Terry Hands; they moved Gorky out from under Chekhov's shadow. He also translated Gogol (a wonderful Government Inspector in which Paul Scofield dazzled), Chekov, Ibsen, Ostrovsky, and with his close friend Adrian Mitchell, Dylan Thomas' A Child's Christmas In Wales, which became a perennial seasonal favourite worldwide. Most of these stage versions were for the RSC. Later he worked closely with his “neighbourhood theatre” at Clwyd, for whom he made a magnificent version of Medea, starring Eileen Atkins.
He was a nurturing and conscientious “dramaturg” for Peter Hall's Royal Shakespeare Company from 1962. Sharing an office with him I saw how he gave younger writers, me among them, the best kind of advice: tangible, practical, rigorous but gentle. He was the sort of wordsmith who made you think art was demanding, but maybe within your reach.

Michael Kustow