For many, he was a face on TV. But Clive James was one of the most prolific writers and speakers around. Samantha Laurie reports.
It’s been over 10 years since Clive James slipped from our TV screens to embark on what must be the most prolific retirement yet: three new volumes of autobiography, a 900-page best-selling cultural history of the 20th century, an extraordinarily ambitious multimedia website, numerous collections of essays and several books of poetry, all interspersed with endless speaking tours of the UK.
The man who turned TV reviewing into a comic art form, whose ironic wit and chat show cheese made him the best-known Aussie on British TV, spent the past decade producing a legacy of such glittering and prolific erudition as to tire one just listing it.
Recently, however, all this breakneck brilliance has faltered. In January, 71-year-old James was diagnosed with a chronic lung illness that put paid to public performances and nearly put paid to him.
Consequently barred from flying to the US to promote his book, he went by ship instead and developed a blood clot that put him in intensive care in New York.
“I should have told the world how sick I was so people can appreciate how well I look now,” he observes wryly.
He continued writing through his illness, but it was in the live events that the multiplicity of his character shimmers. Here, fast on his feet, he is critic, novelist, raconteur, wit, historian and poet. He is the man The New Yorker once described as “a brilliant bunch of guys”.
At the heart of his performance will be poetry. This, he insisted, was always the most important part of his work, even if it sold the fewest copies.
The one good thing to come of his illness is that, in the middle of it all, he wrote: “my best poems yet”.
“You do start summing up life as you lie watching the ceiling,” he reflects.
Opal Sunset (2008), a selection of half a century’s worth of verse, was well-received in the US, giving James exposure in American literary publications and an enhanced reputation as a poet, further consolidated by his most recent volume, Angels over Elsinore.
“I’ve never not been writing a poem. For every essay I’ve written I’ve been compiling a poem in my head at the same time. My poetry is received much better now, but it will always be compromised by my TV reputation. I don’t mind that. I’m not interested in being regarded as a poet –only in my poems being interesting.”
A momentary pause.
“Mmm…that sounds rather like an odd epigram. Let’s dismantle that: it helps to have a name, of course, but the poem is what counts, not the poet.”
It is a curious and rather endearing aspect of talking to James that he is continually self-correcting, like a craftsman returning to polish and buff.
“Let me put that less aggressively,” he interjected. “Let me make that sound less pompous…”
This lexical deftness is at the heart of all he does. Language is everything: few can turn a sentence like James. Nor are there many who can decimate a character so cleanly.
Describing a lunch meeting in his memoirs he sums up an egocentric and affected Peter Sellers: “His beautifully-produced BBC English had the unmistakable gleam of a freshly-forged banknote.’ Of Barbara Cartland’s make-up: “Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.”
And his praise is equally precise. Of the late Alan Coren, a journalist he admired immensely: “The sprawling palace of his achievement has so many rooms he has scarcely bothered to look into.”
Indeed, few would get away with standing over the compositors as he did in his early days as a TV critic on The Observer, changing his prose as it hit the hot metal, checking for the extra commas that “got under my skin like mosquitoes that had got into the net on a hot night”.
This mastery of language transferred well to TV and James became known for countless primetime chat shows and travelogues. But when, in 2000, ITV gracelessly told him that they were waiting for a big news story – such as the death of Fidel Castro – to screen his travel programme Postcard from Havana, he sweetly offered to try to die the same week. He retired shortly after.
“The type of thing I did was poised between seriousness and entertainment which was getting harder to air amidst all the reality TV,” he said.
But it has scarcely been the retirement one would imagine. During the week he lives in a flat in London’s Docklands, a student-like existence surrounded by books and – until recently – cigarettes, returning at weekends to his family in Cambridge: his wife Prue, an academic, and two grown-up daughters.
He writes – and agonises over writing –compulsively.
“Thomas Mann said a writer is someone for whom writing is harder than it is for other people…absolutely true.
“I am a great believer in getting out of bed early and using your time productively. The world is full of brilliant people who never get up early enough. Overwork is a made-up problem if you enjoy what you do. I love what I do. I don’t need a yacht or a house in LA or a ski chalet in Switzerland. I don’t need distractions.”
At the holidays he is hopeless. Weekends are largely spent reading in preparation for the following week’s work. Every spare scrap of waiting time in his TV career went on writing and teaching himself to read in other languages (eight).
He baulked at no challenge. Cautious of technology – he didn't carry a mobile or engage with social networking – he has nonetheless created a multimedia website (www.clivejames.com).
It’s partly an archive of his own material, but it also showcases clips of brilliance, great essays, poems, interviews and opera. A guide to the treasures of the internet, he bills it.
Such chronic productivity surely has its roots in childhood. James’s father, an Australian soldier, survived a POW camp but died when the aircraft taking him home crashed. His son was just six.
“I grew up in a house where the Grim Reaper was a house guest,” he says bluntly. “My parents were robbed and I’m paying them back, leading their life maybe.”
Describing the death of a close friend in his memoirs, he writes: “The most telling phrase that Horace attached to ‘carpe diem’ was ‘spem non pone secutas’. Put no faith in the future.”
His illness spurred him further. His sixth – and final – autobiography, another book of essays and the third volume of his acclaimed tome on 20th-century civilisation, Cultural Amnesia.
Perhaps the press of mortality has also made him more critical, more doubting.
“Oh yes, my professional life is a great success from the outside. But it doesn’t feel like that from within. I do question myself constantly. The older I get the more I would have done things differently. I would certainly have been kinder. It took me 30 years to learn elementary courtesy.”
To whom would he have been kinder?
“Oh, maybe my girlfriend. But that was 60 years ago. She’s probably forgotten.”
Perhaps decades of treating his life as material have made him unhealthily self-critical.
In his memoirs he paints himself as a blunderer: impulsive, ambitious and excessive in his appetites – food, drink, cigarettes. But what he doesn’t say is more revealing.
In thousands of pages of the text, he barely mentions his family, bound by a deal to keep them out of public life. By default, the real Clive James remains quietly somewhere private.
“If you’re out there long enough people get an imprint of you. They say ‘I enjoy your show’ – as far as they’re concerned you’re still on there. I’m a TV imprint.”
But behind the imprint was a man desperate to leave a legacy of his other faces – the essayist, the historian, the poet. Once squeezed into the side rooms of his TV career, these parts are now his legacy.
“I don’t want to blackout now,” he concludes. “I’m just getting good.”
