Cleverer than a boxful of monkeys – the real Clive James

It is four months since Clive James died, and already I miss him. He would have been superb on the coronavirus, seeing in it a host of metaphors and revelations of character while placing it precisely in the roll-call of the world’s afflictions. He would also, I don’t doubt, have mined the rich comedy that so often sits at the side of tragedy.

For more than 40 years, echoing the output of Graham Greene, James alternated “entertainments” – his memoirs and traveller’s tales – with serious criticism, seeking to persuade us that a penchant for Weltliteratur need not preclude a taste for the ridiculous.

But after he was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of leukemia in April 2011 and the laughter began to fade, it was his essential seriousness that he wished us to remember.

With this in mind, the essays are the key books of revelation, more than a dozen in total, not counting his bestselling volumes of television criticism and late-life squibs. All are beautifully written, but before bushwalking with Clive it is always wise to take note of the degree of difficulty involved: easy, moderate or, as they say in Australia, requiring specialised skills, including navigation and emergency first aid.

The collection on which his critical reputation most rests, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time, an 896-page tour de force, published in 2008, requires a degree in Jamesean studies (Clive, that is) just to pick up on its principal references. Nietzsche and Isaiah Berlin might have found it light reading; the rest of us would be advised to take James’s own advice and relax between sessions with an episode of Band of Brothers or Game of Thrones.

In America, the book’s subtitle was changed to “Necessary Memories from History and the Arts,” thus linking it to the author’s 2002 offering, As of this Writing, which defined itself as “The Essential Essays”. The implication was clear. James was offering himself as the editor of our intellectual, historical and cultural lives, separating what we needed to know – i.e. what he told us was important – from what we could readily discard.

As his body slowed, his mind accelerated. He became like a pulsar, drawing all knowledge into his incredibly crowded skull while periodically directing brilliant flashes of insight across the infinity of space.

A true, self-conscious intellectual, as well as a populist, the Australian bi-math (he made no claim to scientific or mathematical insight) enjoyed a high profile not only in the UK, but in the US and his native Australia. Towards the end, with his lateness no longer ironical but imminent, he grumbled against the dying of the light and his own inevitable extinction, but still found time for jokes. To adjust the previous stellar metaphor, he was like a formerly main-sequence star that, having lived through its explosive supernova stage was contracting into an impenetrable hyperdensity.

It was the earlier realisation of his physical decline, preceding his leukemia diagnosis, that prompted his withdrawal from our television screens in 2001, aged 62. Reminded of his mortality by the arrival of his seventh decade, he began, like a President in his last year in the White House, to obsess over his legacy. The choice was stark. If he was to have any chance of being remembered after his death, he had only a limited time in which to raise his endgame beyond postcards, kiss-me-quick memoirs and reprises of Japanese gameshows.

He had written more learned articles for the London and New York Reviews of Books than you could shake a stick at. Yet as far as the public was concerned, his fame rested on his laugh out loud television reviews, his vaingloriously self-effacing memoirs and his stream of small-screen chatshows (Clive James on Television, The Late Clive James, Saturday Night Clive), in which one-liners dropped from his lips like the names of celebrity chefs in a Sunday gossip column. In the field of armchair standup, he had no equal. He was the the Jean-Paul Sarte of slapstick.

But fame came at a price. James was the actor who dreamed of being Shakespeare. It may have been the death of his not-so-secret love, the Princess of Wales, in 1997 that provided the necessary wake-up call. The ultimate Man of Letters was in thrall to Diana. For him, lunch with the woman who self-confessedly had a brain the size of a pea was more sexually fulfilling than a three-month pass to the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. When Diana died, it was as if, for James too, the party was over.

For the next few years he battled on somehow, doing his best to play the funny man. But his heart was no longer in it. Like Archie Rice in The Entertainer, he could see the applause growing fainter and the spotlight dimmer. As for the women … well, at 60, only in his own (bald) head was he still the Kid from Kogarah.

Suddenly, looking like Jack Nicholson at the Oscars, he was an old man in a hurry. He took a substitute mistress, a fact which once revealed saw him turfed out by his long-suffering wife. But, mainly, he spent time at his desk. There were essays to pen, philosophies to plunder, ideas to explore, and poems to write. There was a plinth in the literary Pantheon with his name on it. It was time to replace The Late Clive James with The Eternal Clive James, a thinker for the ages.

But old habits die hard. James may have lusted after the validation that comes with the sound of trumpets. This did not stop him from milking the media for all it was worth. His musings would routinely be introduced to the world via newspapers and magazines, often simultaneously on three continents. At the same time, his online presence swelled to epic proportions.

In the U.S., where he was regarded as the clever Australian who isn’t Robert Hughes, Cultural Amnesia was extensively serialised on Slate.com (“a sumptuous aggregate”), while meaty extracts appeared in the posh papers in Britain and Australia. The North Face of Soho, his fourth volume of autobiography, was serialised on Radio 4, narrated by the author, and promoted across the UK in a series of readings and “incidental commentary” – and he had still only memorialised himself as far as 1982! He had become Boswell to his own Johnson. No other autobiography of modern times has run to anything like the length of Unreliable Memoirs – this despite the fact that, by its own admission, it isn’t even gospel.

And let us not forget the collected verse and worse of Australia’s greatest rhymster since Banjo Paterson. The Book of My Enemy is one of the funniest and most savage pieces of score-settling of the twentieth century. It’s opening stanza is an incendiary masterpiece.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered

And I am pleased.

In vast quantities it has been remaindered

Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized

And sits in piles in a police warehouse,

My enemy’s much-prized effort sits in piles

In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.

Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles

One passes down reflecting on life’s vanities,

Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews

Lavished to no avail upon one’s enemy’s book —

For behold, here is that book

Among these ranks and banks of duds,

These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns

Of complete stiffs.

Wonderful! For some reason, I particularly like the phrase, “the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs”. We have all visited those, shuddering as we leave. But though James is a master of invective, he is not truly a poet, any more than he was ever, really, a novelist (who now reads Brilliant Creatures?). His poetic parodies, such as The Fate of Felicity Fark in the Land of the Media (1975) and Charles Charming’s Challenges on the Pathway to the Throne (1981) can never have been intended to last, and duly haven’t. Similarly, his many volumes of television criticism, though crammed with wit, can no longer even be appreciated for the jokes. The programmes to which his barbs referred have been erased or gone to VHS heaven; most of the actors and sports stars he tormented have long since left the scene.

It was vintage stuff, but inherently unmemorable. Reviewing the BBC’s coverage of the wedding of Charles and Diana, James paused to consider the contribution of the then Anglican Primate.

‘“Here is the stuff of which fairy-tales are made,’ drivelled the Archbish, adding further fuel to the theory that he’s the man to hire if what you want at your wedding is platitudes served up like peeled walnuts in chocolate syrup; he’s an anodyne divine who’ll put unction in your function.”

Funny? Yes. At the time. But 38 years on it’s hard even to remember the unfortunate Archbishop’s name and one is put in mind of breaking butterflies on a wheel.

It was in his day job, writing for the Observer, that he single-handedly invented modern tv criticism. He realised that television came and went in an instant, so that even “classic” productions were quickly dated. All that could usefully be done, in critical terms, was to invite a smile, or, where possible, a belly laugh.

By collecting his tv crits in book form, he was denying this central truth, but making a few bob along the way.

No harm in that, you might say. His “serious” criticism is something else. James prided himself – rightly – on the breadth and depth of his knowledge. Few literary or artistic figures of any substance from the previous hundred years – and beyond – escaped his scrutiny. They are all there, the more obscure the better: interior decorator Mario Pratz; art historian Theodor Mommsen; poets Eugenio Montale and Osip Mandelstam; pianist and literary hostess Misia Sert. But also Diaghilev, Gore Vidal, Anthony Burgess, Malcolm Muggeridge, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis. Everyone who was anyone was grist to the Jamesean mill.

His brain, crammed to the gunwhales with facts and opinions, was as George W Bush might have said, awesome. He had read everything. He really had. Foreign languages were no impediment to his inquiries.Though I never heard him speak in other than his famously flat Australian, he boasted of knowing seven or eight European languages and even made some strides in Japanese – no doubt better to grasp why Rising Sun contestants liked to slide down razorblades wearing only nappies. Few scholars in the world were as learned as James, who appeared to take in Pushkin, Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov as easily as the rest of us tackle Harry Potter.

No surprise, thn, that he sometimes showed off. In a reference to Robert Hughes in his 1988 collection Snake Charmers in Texas, he wrote: “The Australian expatriate, the stay-away-writer, loots the world for cultural references. If he can write like Hughes, he may combine these into a macronic, coruscating prose that would be precious as cento or an Anacreontic odelette if it were not so robust, vivid, and clearly concerned with defining the subject, rather than just displaying his erudition.”

Strewth! I hope you got all that.

As we have seen, he could be cruel with lesser creatures. With no apparent awareness of the sort of professorial prose he was himself capable of visiting on an undeserving world, he once took a critical sledgehammer to the celebrated, and cerebral, columnist Bernard Levin, who would later of loneliness and Alzheimer’s.

“The long-windedness is the style,” said James. “Bernard Levin is simply a verbose writer … As a theatre critic [he] is less dimwitted than most of his colleagues but probably no more reliable. Levin’s jokes leave you straight-faced.”

But after the stiletto, the coup de grace.: “Levin employs Latin tags copiously and almost always leaves them untranslated. I feel pleased at being able to puzzle some of these out, but not as pleased, I fear, as Levin must have felt when he found ways of dragging them in. There is a lot of Greek in Cicero’s Latin but there is even more Latin in Levin’s English. Who does he think he is?”

Clive James, perhaps. Ironically, the dedication in Snake Charmers in Texas opens with a lengthy quotation from Marcel Proust, in French. No translation is provided. In Pensée Persons, an essay in the 1982 collection From the Land of Shadows (in which he takes poor Levin to task), he refers to a passage in the novel Kalki, by Gore Vidal, in which a character quotes Pascal, in French. James scoffs at the presumption, but gives us no assistance. We are supposed to realise that, even if the rest of are floundering, for the Kogarah Kid it’s no sweat.

As the unforgiving critic of those who dared to discern the thoughts and motives of others cleverer than themselves, he had few equals.  Here he is on Raymond Rosenthal, the hapless translator of The Drowned and the Saved, by Primo Levi:

“One doesn’t want to berate Mr Rosenthal, who has toiled hard, but one might be forgven for wishing that his editors had noticed when he needed help … a Geheimnisträger is a bearer of secrets. If Geheimnisfräger means anything, it would mean an asker of secrets, which is the opposite of what Levi intended.”

Having dismissed Rosenthal as in essence a blithering idiot, James goes on to condemn as “intolerable” his translation of Zurückschlagen as [colon] answering blows with blows. “The word should be zurückschlagen, with a lower case ‘z’ because it is not a noun, and a ‘k’ instead of the first ‘h’. Worse, and probably because the word has not been understood, the first comma and the colon have been transposed, thereby neatly reversing the sense.”

And so on and so on. For two whole pages. Pretentious? Lui? Be grateful, you were not a fellow pupil in James’s Japanese class.

What, though, of the time when few, surely, would bother to take his strictures into account? In 2004, apparently anxious less his legacy should fade before it could be fully appreciated, James started an innovative website, CliveJames.com, that he believed was the truest repository of his essence.

The site, which lingers on but is clearly destined for the scrapheap, is suitably baroque, like an online version of a U.S presidential Library, and infused at every turn with the personality of its hero. James – no shrinking violet – is quick to tell us what it is we are witnessing.

“Somewhere between a space station and a free university campus,” he wrote, “the machine [his website] is now embarked on its true voyage, dedicated to the premise that values can be stable and permanent, even when they are packed into a dot in the middle of nowhere, where nothing weighs anything and all the signals move at the speed of light.”

Wise to the possibility that he could be accused of placing himself on an equal plane to that on which his usually august subjects reposed, James leapt at once to his own defence. “Since a successful liberal democracy pretty well depends on enlisting human weaknesses on behalf of the general welfare, I can do something to exculpate the vaulting effrontery of my own ego by emphasising the altruistic form of its expression.”

Quite so. His ego may have been monumental, but it was essentially benign, and instructive. No Ozymandias he, but Moses the Wisecracker.

Though thoroughly rooted in its creator’s sense of self, the virtual James is not wholly, not entirely, not one hundred per cent, about him. It has, for example, sections devoted to painting, photography and sculpture. Introducing the sculpture gallery, James writes: “Lest my own tastes, from Donatello through to Brancusi and beyond, prove too predictable, Cécile Menon [a French translator]has joined me as co-curator, with a list of young sculptors who deal in concepts beyond my imagination, although I am invariably glad for the experience when my breathing is restored.”

Jameseans will recognise the conceit. Our hero, as director of his airborne museum, is a mere mortal, sat at the feet of the truly talented. But he is also uniquely well informed and ready to absorb all that is left to know.

Illustrious fellow scribes also get a look in. The most popular part of cj.com has to be his Talking in the Library section, in which the author shares videoed insights with his ageing pals, such as Martin Amis and Julian Barnes. An upmarket version of Wayne’s World, this is the bit that allows James to rap with the large numbers of great and good who were privileged to visit his one-time riverside home in London’s docklands.

James’s body of work is considerable. His learning, as the most consummate autodidact of our time, is beyond question. If he were a movie actor, he would be eligible at the very least for a lifetime achievement Oscar. To the last, he remained witty, shrewd and observant, with an astonishing depth of understanding derived from reading more books on more subjects than just about anyone else on the planet. At his brilliant best he remains a joy to read. But it was not enough – at least not for him.

The prodigious energy he lavished on his legacy looks to have been a vain attempt to change the inevitable and secure his admission to the Valhalla of his dreams, where he would play Call My Bluff for ever with Goethe, Shakespeare and Voltaire, with Casanova and Peter Cook for light relief. But a virtual afterlife is not the same as immortality. Time is the great leveller. All that we are is quickly forgotten, and the long-term fate of Clive James, like that of Bernard Levin, and even Chris Hitchens, is likely to be that of a fat smudge on the windscreen of life, erased the next time the wipers come on.

It’s too bad, Clive. We all feel for you. We really do. We share your dismay in the face of your mortality. But, swipe me, that’s just the way it is. You have to laugh.