I never met Clive James, and now I don’t think I ever shall. He is 78, has been on death row for eight years – diagnosed with terminal leukaemia and emphysema – and prefers the company of books. As he says in Latest Readings , “If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.”
And since the rest of us don’t know when our lights will go out either, that is a sound philosophy for everybody to live by.
James is not just reading, he is writing too. Essays, poetry, criticism. The New Yorker once called him ‘a brilliant bunch of guys’, for being a TV critic, novelist, autobiographer, rock lyricist, and documentary maker.
I was a schoolboy when I first met James in one of his books. He began by quoting the poet Ezra Pound and in the next sentence said something like, “But in many ways, Pound was a c**t.” Which schoolboy could resist such a dramatic introduction or fail to be charmed by that combination of erudition and coarseness? I discovered James was an Aussie living in England; it gave his literary judgements an edge missing from polite English writers. “I have never been convinced,” wrote James, “that a lust for anonymity is a better guarantee of seeing the world as it is.”
James will live on in his essays, his autobiographies, and Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time, on the cultural history of the 20thcentury told through essays on its main actors. “A crash course in civilization,” J.M. Coetzee called it.
Despite his range and vision, James is not a ‘great’ writer in the way George Orwell was, but served well as a youngster’s ride through a bookish world. Writers who attract you in the early years are not necessarily the venerated ones, but those who write provocatively, with passion, and with manifest enjoyment.
In 2014, he wrote a poem beginning, ‘Your death, near now, is of an easy sort’. It is about a Japanese maple his daughter had planted in his garden and about wondering whether he would live to see the leaves flame red. “I am in the slightly embarrassing position where I write poems saying I am about to die, and I don’t,” he told an interviewer later.
There is something heroic about a man waiting to die while distilling a lifetime’s experience into his writing. As he says, “The childish urge to understand everything doesn’t necessarily fade when the time approaches for you to do the most adult thing of all: vanish.” There is a website where you can check if James is still alive. Morbid, but cheerful in a way.
If I meet him, I have a story: In a London bookstore once, there were two copies of the same edition of one of his books. One was signed by him. Yet – and James would have loved the irony – the unsigned copy was the more expensive!
Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu
