The
Best of Clive James
672
pages, Picador
Review
by Pat Black
Clive
James was just “a man on the telly” to me, as I grew up in the 1980s.
Possessed
of a striking Australian accent in the days before they became ubiquitous with Neighbours, he hosted a raucous Saturday
night talk show, as well as an off-beat Sunday night clips compendium which
sneered at television from other countries.
The
latter was a schoolboy staple if you wanted guaranteed boobs (no internet then;
you young whipper-fappers don’t know you’re born), but it also became famous
for screening highlights from Endurance,
a Japanese game show where contestants were effectively tortured for your
amusement. Curiously, it seems more honest, if not more sophisticated, than
most of today’s reality TV.
In
the 1990s, James introduced the flamboyant, tone-deaf Cuban cabaret singer
Margarita Pracatan to an unsuspecting nation, making her a star. She was
discussed and adored in schools, universities and workplaces all over the UK. Satellite
TV was available by then, but by and large British viewing was still restricted
to four terrestrial channels. Whenever Clive James laughed at something, it
seemed everyone in the UK laughed along with him.
James cut a jovial figure on the box –
paunchy, but not avuncular; something like a CEO on a jolly to the tropics,
though a little less carnivorous, with his Speedos kept in a fusty drawer where
they belong. He was someone you suspected enjoyed a couple of beers and a good
laugh, which made him a natural on the telly.
What I didn’t know until relatively recently
was that James cut his teeth in the broadsheets and literary blatts as an
essayist and reviewer of some renown, a noted intellectual and part of a 1970s
literary set that included Germaine Greer, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Christopher
Hitchens and Julian Barnes.
My first taste of this side of James came
from The Oxford Book of Essays, which
contained an evisceration of Judith Krantz perhaps unparalleled in its blend of
brutality and elegance. This whetted my appetite for more.
Although Reliable Essays claims to be the best of Clive James, it doesn’t
feature the Krantzing. There is solid work on George Orwell, classic
photography, the Holocaust, the poetry of Philip Larkin and modern Australian
history. But these were not as interesting as when James dips his toe into shallower
water – such as the craze (heightened these days, if anything) for Sherlock
Holmes; the frigid ballet of Torvill and Dean; Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe
novels; and the stagecraft of James’ fellow Aussie, Dame Edna Everage herself -
Barry Humphries.
Perhaps the best piece in the book is
James’ travelogue as part of the British press corps following Margaret
Thatcher as she tours China in 1984. It’s an excellent portrait of the late
premier’s chilling-to-the-point-of-Bundy personality, as well as a snapshot of
Hong Kong as it neared the end of British rule. James is keen to remind us that
Chinese civilisation was flourishing while most of the British population was
still living in caves. Some journalists, he hints, might have preferred to take
residency in those caves after the Chinese junket ended.
I discovered that James made his name
through his TV reviews and laconic travel writing, and it was these that led to
the Australian transferring to television and national fame. To me, his writing
in the more populist pieces is sharper, clearer, and far more entertaining.
James’ intellect looms over his subjects
like alien invaders, blotting out the light in some cases. He often betrays an
intimidating level of knowledge which hints at more than the reviewer’s
standard post-first draft cramming session. There’s always something to learn
in his work, and it’s usually something worth learning.
My favourite example of this was his
examination of photographer Roland Barthes’ twin concept of studium and punctum. Apologies if this is well-known; I’d never heard of it. Studium is the main subject of a
painting or photograph – to take James’ example, an image of a little boy
holding a toy pistol to his own head. Punctum
is a small, secondary detail which helps bring the whole to life – in the same
photo, this would be the grinning boy’s rotten teeth.
So, Clive James might be the columnist
Gotham needs, but he’s not always the one Gotham wants. As I’ve just demonstrated,
strings of Latin festoon some of his prose, irksome to state-educated laddies
like me. For an admirer of the work of George Orwell such as James, this
affectation is careless. Still, as one of my old teachers told me, you should
never hide your intelligence or your education, whichever comes first.
I feel the same should go for my lack of
both. I have an embarrassing blind spot for poetry. I studied it in some detail
during my undergraduate days; I appreciate its creativity and beauty and the
skill of the artists, and I can analyse it if I need to. But I simply don’t
care for it, and rarely pluck it from my shelves. This, I fully accept, makes
me a philistine. James loves poetry, and he offers a striking analysis of
Larkin’s work at the start of this book. He might as well have been writing in
double Dutch. It almost killed my desire to read on.
James is a clever prose stylist, but his vast
knowledge of his subject – indeed, of most subjects – sometimes hobbles the reader.
Obscure references pile up, and unfamiliar names are scattered like breadcrumbs
on the path to a gingerbread house. If you’re going into some of these essays
in a state of ignorance, they can be extremely difficult to digest.
Fortunately, while I may need footnotes or net searches to understand what
James is talking about, the way he talks about it is pleasure enough.
James’ erudition can be especially grating
when he betrays his lust for linguistics, examining in minute detail where
prose goes wrong. An inappropriate word placed here, a tautology there, honest
malapropisms, careless repetitions, shonky grammar, redundant phrasings and tarty
clichés all cause James to purse his lips like a convent school English master.
He goes into far too much detail at too great a length. He enjoys it. He is a
pedant.
If our choice of pornography is one area
in life where we truly, honestly reveal ourselves, then perhaps picking up on
others’ mistakes is what turns Clive James on. I imagine he’d uncap his red pen
with a flourish to match Zorro’s were he ever to read this. Here, the critic
comes across as less of the free-wheeling philosopher than a priggish, uptight
sub-editor of too many years’ standing, with a big belly, a rancid pullover and
an insufferably arch tone. It’s almost a tragedy James’ heyday came around 15 years
too early for a guest slot (and perhaps even the presenting gig) on QI – an enjoyable show, but, alongside Only Connect, a facilitator for some of
the most annoying arseholes in Britain.
During one of the post-scripts of his own
reviews, James admits that his mind can run away with itself. Sub-clauses are
fecund things, springing up in the flowerbeds exactly when they’re least wanted.
As I struggle to contain my own addiction to parentheses, semi-colons, brackets
and simply blowing hard, I loved this withering self-analysis. Note to self:
don’t fall out of love with full stops.
James can be cynical, but he is not above
getting a bit floral over objects of admiration. He accepts that his appraisal
of Barry Humphries’ career skirts close to panegyric, and in obliterating the
oeuvre of Sherlockologists, James betrays a childhood crush on Conan Doyle which
places him closer to his quarry than he might care to admit.
In his appraisal of Torvill and Dean, who
held the whole world spellbound with their figure skating displays throughout
the 1980s, James opens with a brilliant comic figure to illustrate his lack of
learning on the subject – the author himself, “ankles at 90 degrees, knees at
the level of the eyebrows”, trying to ice skate with his daughter. Still, his
admiration for his subjects is apparent. In revealing Torvill and Dean’s
universal appeal, he encapsulated the times perfectly and triggered a wave of
nostalgia in me. I recalled my father – as natural a fit for the world of ice
dance as a bull elephant - being spellbound by the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo where
Torvill and Dean swept the board to Bolero.
This was class-free mass appeal, a factor which James clocked almost
immediately.
One or two beatings are delivered. He gets
medieval on some Australian historians, and can barely contain his disdain for
the writing style of one in particular. He also takes on Norman Mailer’s Marilyn
Monroe biography, more or less accusing that sour old grizzly of losing the
plot in trying to attach mystical significance to an all-too-human Norma Jean.
There’s a cracking footnote to this, when James reveals that not too long after
the piece was published, he ended up in the same limousine as the famously
pugnacious Mailer. He realised that he might have to look lively, or perhaps
hail a cab.
That Mailer not only didn’t punch him, but
didn’t even mention the article, despite almost certainly having read it,
perhaps speaks volumes about James’ skill and the esteem other writers hold him
in. This is heavy praise, not faint.
James has been in the news rather a lot in
the past few years, as he has spectacularly failed at dying. Although still very
ill and professing to be “near the end”, he has confounded a bleak cancer
diagnosis in 2012 which had given him a matter of months to live. While he may
not quite have gone down the Wilko Johnson “Lazarus” pathway, I pray that
modern medicine continues to sustain him and that he stays with us for a long
time yet. With the Reaper held in abeyance for a little longer than anticipated,
and with Clive James still writing and entertaining us, I thought I’d pen this
essay while the going is good. He is the master at what he does, and we should
celebrate him.
James explains that the work of the critic
and artist are intimately tied. Without appraisal of art, the art itself would
struggle to make itself known. And art helps make life worthwhile. To borrow
Frank Zappa’s phrasing about music and time, without art to decorate it, life
would be very dull indeed. While Clive James has too much humility to make any
claims of creating art himself, this explanation of why criticism exists and why
it might matter reminded me of why I bother my backside writing these bloody
things.
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