Monday, April 26, 2021

Obituaries / Clive James

Clive James

Clive James obituary

Writer, poet and critic who found fame as a presenter of TV shows such as Saturday Night Clive

Stuart Jeffries
Wed 27 November 2019

The writer and broadcaster Clive James, who has died aged 80, once wrote a poem about visiting his father’s grave at the Sai Wan war cemetery in Hong Kong. His father, Albert, who had survived a PoW camp and then forced labour in Japan, died when the plane bringing him home crashed in Taiwan, and James later described this as the “defining event” in his life. The poem, My Father Before Me, ends:

Back at the gate, I turn to face the hill,
Your headstone lost again among the rest.
I have no time to waste, much less to kill.
My life is yours; my curse, to be so blessed.

James, who was six when Albert died, spent much of his subsequent life as a poet, essayist and broadcaster producing articles and song lyrics, many poetry collections and volumes of critical essays, four novels and five books of memoirs, as well as hosting umpteen television shows. That fever of busyness was to compensate not only for his father’s death, but for how his mother’s life fell apart on being widowed. “I am trying to lead the life they might have had,” he said in 2009. “It’s a chance to pay them back for my life. I don’t like luck; I’ve had a lot of it.”

James was born in Kogarah, a suburb of Sydney, Australia. His mother, Minora (nee Darke), named her only child Vivian, after the male star of the 1938 Australian Davis cup team. It could have been worse. There was, James noted in Unreliable Memoirs (1979), a famous Australian boy whose father named him after his campaigns across the Western Desert: he was called William Bardia Escarpment Qattara Depression Mersa Matruh El Alamein Benghazi Tripoli Harris.

Vivian James was spared further feminisation when Gone With the Wind was released. “After Vivien Leigh played Scarlett O’Hara, the name became irrevocably a girl’s name no matter how you spelled it,” he wrote, so his mother let him become Clive after a character in a Tyrone Power movie.

A bright child with an IQ of 140, James went to Sydney technical high school, and studied psychology at the University of Sydney. While there he was not only literary editor on the student paper, Honi Soit, and director of the student revue, but also took part in the Sydney Push, a libertarian, intellectual subculture that flourished in pub back rooms and whose associates included Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes. After graduating, he served for a year as an assistant editor of the magazine page at the Sydney Morning Herald before sailing to London at the age of 22. There, he shared a flat with the Australian film director Bruce Beresford, became friendly with Barry Humphries and spent three years paying the rent as a sheet-metal worker, library assistant, photo archivist and market researcher.

Clive James in the BBC TV series Postcard from Miami, 1990. Photograph: PA Archive/PA Images

He then studied for a further degree in English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, but did not read the required books. Instead, he became president of Footlights and established himself as a critic. “Reading off the course was in my nature. My style was to read everything except what mattered.” He nonetheless surprised himself by getting a 2:1, and began a PhD on Shelley.

“Television brought James the riches and fame he craved,” wrote one hostile critic. “But as far as his ambitions to have been an artist of merit are concerned, he squandered his talent, which is tragic.” Unfair: there was never a sense in which he sought riches, nor was his case tragic. There is an image of him going home after a show by tube, reading Tacitus in the original, which suggests that, rather than tragic, James was interestingly conflicted – or perhaps just culturally omnivorous. In any case, the man who made a TV series analysing the concept of fame knew what it took for a bald man with eyes so deep-socketed they were scarcely visible to have an enduring on-screen career. “The smartest move I ever made in show business was to start off looking like the kind of wreck I would end up as.”

Some made great claims for his literary talents. Writing under the headline As Good as Heaney in 2009, Julian Gough in Prospect magazine championed two volumes of James’s collected verse. But how could one take seriously a TV critic who wrote satirical verse epics such as The Fate of Felicity Fark in the Land of the Media: A Moral Poem (1975) or Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage Through the London Literary World (1976), still less compare them to the Nobel laureate’s?

Gough argued: “James is an absolute master of surface, and the great critic of surfaces, not because he is superficial but because he believes that the distortions on the surface tell you what’s underneath. Style is character. His simplicity isn’t simple and his clarity has depth. With the essays and the poems – which I think you have to consider as one great project – he’s built an immense, protective barrier reef around western civilisation.”

Perhaps. But questions remained. Would Endurance, the Japanese game show in which contestants were buried up to the neck, bitten by ants and licked by lizards and upon which James spent so much tittering airtime, be inside that protective barrier reef? And, more importantly, was James a highbrow hypocritically conniving at what he affected to disdain? Probably not. He wrote in the introduction to Glued to the Box: “Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.”

Clive James with his book Cultural Amnesia, 2007, a collection of biographical essays. Photograph: Shannon StapletonJames claimed to have an “ungovernable ego” but was quite capable of uxoriousness. He was married to Prue Shaw, a Cambridge scholar, with whom he had two daughters: Claerwen and Lucinda. James protected all three from media intrusion, though he gave an insight into his admiration for his wife when he produced her book on Dante for an interviewer: “That’s the real McCoy. That will always be there. The kind of stuff I do is more conjectural. I am still trying to impress her.” He once said: “I think marriage civilised me. It may sound sexist, but it is one of the roles of women to civilise men.”

He betrayed his wife by having an eight-year affair with a former model, Leanne Edelsten. When Shaw discovered the affair, in 2012, she threw him out of their Cambridge home, and he moved to a London flat. “I am a reprehensible character,” he told one interviewer. “I deserve everything that has happened to me.”

His mainstream TV career ended with the 20th century, but James was not done. He set up clivejames.com, billing it “the world’s first personal multimedia website of its type”. He did an internet show, Talking in the Library, including conversations with Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes and Terry Gilliam. He reviewed widely for the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the TLS, the New Yorker, the Australian Book Review and the Guardian, and wrote Cultural Amnesia (2007), a collection of biographical essays on mainly 20th century writers, artists and politicians. He made 60 broadcasts for the BBC Radio 4 series A Point of View (2007-09) and in 2008 performed two comedy shows at the Edinburgh festival.

Clive James interviews Ruby Wax for his internet series Talking in the Library

In his later years he worked harder than ever. He told one interviewer: “You get into what my friend Bruce Beresford calls the Departure Lounge, and two things happen: suddenly time really matters, you can hear the clock, and also you have all these freedoms, because you’ve got more of life to reflect on.”In January 2010, he was diagnosed with terminal leukaemia. One of the greatest annoyances his cancer and its treatment caused him was that he was not allowed to fly – thus stopping him visiting his beloved homeland. But he kept writing, including a weekly TV review for the Daily Telegraph for three years until 2014.

An Indian summer of writing was just beginning, long after the valedictory interviews were done. He wrote a translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy (2013), a collection of essays, Poetry Notebook: 2006-2014 (2014) and an analysis of the radical change in TV viewing habits, Play All: A Bingewatcher’s Notebook (2016).

In 2015, he published a volume of poetry, Sentenced to Life, that expressed the loss and guilt he felt for his infidelity and betrayal of his wife and daughters. This book and the Dante translation became bestsellers, and both were dedicated to Prue, with whom he had reached a reconciliation. In the poem Landfall he wrote, “I am restored by my decline / And by the harsh awakening it brings”. The poem Event Horizon ends with the following reflection:

What is it worth, then, this insane last phase
When everything about you goes downhill?
This much: you get to see the cosmos blaze
And feel its grandeur, even against your will,
As it reminds you, just by being there,
That it is here we live, or else nowhere.

That year he published a further collection of literary essays, Latest Readings (dedicated to “my doctors and nurses at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge”) and found a new berth as a columnist, with Reports of My Death, in the Guardian’s Weekend magazine, which ran until 2017. He also released an album with his longtime songwriting partner Pete Atkin, The Colours of the Night, and went on to produce another poetry collection, Injury Time (2017) as well as the epic poem The River in the Sky (2018).

He was appointed CBE in 2012 and AO in 2013. In 2008 he was awarded a George Orwell special prize for writing and broadcasting, and in 2015 he received a special award from Bafta for his contribution to television.

He is survived by his wife and daughters.

THE GUARDIAN

Saturday, April 24, 2021

'He returned to what he really was' / Clive James's daughter on his poetic farewell

Artist Claerwen James, aged three months, with father Clive. Photograph: Martin Pope

Interview

'He returned to what he really was': Clive James's daughter on his poetic farewell

Artist Claerwen James on growing up with an extraordinary father – and how she bonded with him in his final months when they compiled an anthology of his favourite verse

Rachel Cooke
Sunday 27 September 2020

Ten months before his death last year at the age of 80, Clive James underwent an eight-hour operation to remove a tumour on his face. Already very frail – he had been suffering from leukaemia for a decade – afterwards it took him almost a week to emerge fully into consciousness. “And even then, he was foggy,” says his daughter, the artist Claerwen James. “He couldn’t really see, which meant he couldn’t really read – and that had never been the case before.” For her father, this was not a small thing, whatever the size of his other problems. Words were his life raft.

But all was not lost. “The resource that he did have was the poetry he knew,” she says. “And he wanted to hear it. He’d recite a bit – sometimes, he’d have only a verse – and whoever was sitting with him would look up the next part, and read it to him. He loved this, and then he would often say a little about it. He’d tell us when he had first heard the poem, or point out which bit was most difficult to say.” Together, he and his readers got into a rhythm. “We started writing down all the poems he wanted to hear, and the relevant anecdotes, and in this way a manuscript began to emerge without him willing it.” If this felt at the time like a small miracle, it was also, in context, perfectly ordinary: “He was always working on something. There was literally never a moment when he wasn’t – and now, there was this. A pile of poems.”

At home again, the pile grew. “He went on adding to it. At first, he’d dictate. Then we got these enormous letters you stick on top of a computer keyboard, so he could type, if the font was blown up to the absolute max.” Clive had long thought of putting together an annotated anthology of poems “to get by heart and say aloud” – the idea had emanated, years before, from Claerwen’s mother, Prue Shaw – and now this notion became, through the haze of illness, a reality. He called it The Fire of Joy – the French expression feu de joie refers to a military celebration when a regiment’s riflemen fire one shot after another in close succession – and he would go on to finish it only a month before his death last November. Dedicated, in valedictory fashion, “to the next generation”, its lovely, consolatory epigraph is from Homer: “The race of men/Is like the generations of the leaves – /They fall in autumn to return in spring.”

Claerwen James at home in Cambridge with her cover art for her late father’s poetry anthology. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

For both father and daughter, this last project was a blessing, in the most complete sense of that word. In the last years of his life, Clive lived in the house adjoining Claerwen’s in Cambridge, a permanently open door connecting her kitchen to his sitting room, a realm that became his entire world at the end. (This is where we are now: Claerwen, my friend of more than 25 years, at one side of the long table at which he worked, and me on the other, the pair of us surrounded by his books, pictures and photographs.) And there, they made the book together. Even while he slept – he could work for only an hour a time – Claerwen was painting designs for its cover, one eye on her brush, the other on him. “The thing I brought to it was my ignorance,” she says, with a laugh. “But I think my ignorance was important! I was receptive. I had nothing, except my enthusiasm. The book isn’t for the poetry aficionado necessarily. It’s just him, picking the bits he loves best and talking about them in a straightforward, simple way – and I was helpful with that because I felt the things he thought were completely obvious were not at all completely obvious.

“The book is about how poetry sounds; the fact that it’s supposed to be said aloud. There were people who sat with him who were good at reading poetry, and knew a lot about it. But sometimes, it was me, and I don’t know anything about poetry, and I prefer not to read poetry aloud if I can possibly help it.” She pulls a face. “I find it embarrassing when other people do it, and poetry generally … I’m mostly a prose reader. Poetry feels like you have to be initiated, sufficiently romantic, and prepared to deal with the obscure. But then he would talk about it, and I would suddenly feel: ‘Oh, this isn’t a closed book, after all.’” Her father gave her rules when it came to reading aloud, encouraging commandments that can now be found at the beginning of The Fire of Joy. “They were really basic. Don’t go too fast. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Pause at the end of a line. If it’s a good poem, he thought, the rhythm somehow gives you the meaning: it springs out. I found this to be true when I read to him, and that discovery was incredibly moving to me.”

The book was a place in which they could get lost, just for a little while – though it was, for Clive, much more than a distraction. “It was partly that he needed to be making something. But also, he would have felt he had no identity if he hadn’t been. Doing this, he was still him.” What did he feel about her part in it? “Oh, I don’t know! I’ll cry if you ask me that. It was … lovely to do it together. It feels right now, because it is such an emanation of that time. It’s difficult, dying. It’s really hard. To the extent that it’s possible, we travelled that road together.” To be with someone in their last months and weeks is, she believes, to be given an immense gift. “It is a privilege, an enormous one. He was sort of incandescent, really. It felt like he had passed through something. At the end, you’ve passed through all the lies you tell yourself about what life is about, and what you might accomplish. You know what’s coming. He just appreciated everything in this astonishing way, and because I saw everything through his eyes, it was as though we were feeling the same things.”

I travelled to Cambridge to interview Clive a few weeks before he died. What struck me then, though he still had me collapsing into laughter, was that he was a better listener than of old. “Yes, listening was not his primary quality,” Claerwen says, drily. But she agrees. At the end, it was as if time had expanded, even as it was running out. “His world had shrunk to this room, and that terrace,” she says, looking towards the balcony. “He never went anywhere, he saw almost nobody, he could eat almost nothing – and yet, every aspect of his life was filled with meaning. The fact that there was an apple on that tree; whether it was rainy or sunny. Everything was extraordinary.” It was this sense of repletion – the limitless wonder to be found in the everyday – that made looking after him a privilege. “In our society, the fact that we put away the things we’re afraid of, so as not to look at them – and with a story about how it’s kinder, better, for professionals to do this [work for us]. I think it’s wrong. You don’t understand the shape of a life, if you don’t see the end of it.”

A portrait of Clive James by the Observer photographer Jane Bown. — A 1978 portrait of Clive James by the Observer photographer Jane Bown.

The shape of Clive James’s life was unlikely: for myriad reasons, in my mind’s eye, I can’t help but picture it as a boomerang. His Australian childhood was marked by loss after his father, Albert, who had survived a Japanese PoW camp during the war, was killed when the plane bringing him home crashed in Manila Bay – and it was this event that would go on to define his life; to create it, in a way. “It wasn’t only that he wanted to be happy, to make the most of life,” says Claerwen. “It was that he thought it was his absolute responsibility to do so; a duty. He’d been given something; someone else had sacrificed something – an entire generation had sacrificed something – so that he, and people like him, could live their lives.” The fact of his having been born in 1939 gave him a sense of proportion that stayed with him all his life. “He would think: this is bad; this is complicated and fraught with argument. But it’s also good, because we are in the realm of the lucky. He was not a despondent person, ever. He didn’t want to die. He was sad to go. But those were positive emotions. He wasn’t morbid. He never thought: poor me.”

The public perception of Clive James generally divides into two: there are those who think of him as a brilliant journalist – as the funniest critic ever to have written about television (a job he did at the Observer for 10 years) – and the author of a series of hilarious autobiographies (Unreliable Memoirs, Falling Towards England, May Week Was in June); and then there are those who remember him mostly as the presenter of prime-time chat shows, of series about weird foreign television, and of travelogues in which he goofed around in places like Las Vegas. But there was, and is, a third James, the author of books of poetry, of four novels, of high-minded essays and reviews, and even of a translation of The Divine Comedy (Prue Shaw is a Dante scholar; he once said that he never gave up trying to impress her). It was this third persona that he occupied, almost exclusively, in the last decade of his life, and it brought him full circle: literature was his first love, both in school and, later, at university in Cambridge where, having completed his second degree, he embarked on, but never completed, a Shelley PhD.

Poetry was injected into his veins at his school in Hurstville, Sydney, whose “supposedly playful regime” was, he writes in the introduction to The Fire of Joy, symbolised by a rule that every pupil had to recite a memorised poem before he was allowed to go home: “a fantastic combination of Parnassus and a maximum security prison”. At the University of Sydney, he met “actual living poets” during his first week – they were fellow students, of course – and by the second week, he, too, was wearing a long scarf and brothel-creepers, and carrying an armful of books by Ezra Pound: “I had decided to become a poet, although there was nothing bold about this decision, as it was already clear, even to me, that I was useless for anything else.” Claerwen remembers her parents reciting poetry to each other “on holiday, after dinner, walking along the beach, each of them supplying the lines the other couldn’t remember. Poetry was demotic in Australia – everyone knew The Man from Snowy River [by the Australian bush poet Banjo Paterson] – and it was also, then, where it was at. It was sexy.”

A familiar image of James mixing with celebrities – in this case Jerry Hall at the Bafta awards – from the 1990s. Photograph: PA/PA Wire/PA Images

It’s this version of her father, she feels, that was the authentic Clive: the reader, and the romantic. “He was insanely romantic. I mean, absurdly so. It was that thing of the armour plating of being funny to protect you from the fact that you absolutely wear your heart on your sleeve.” And it was this Clive who was restored to those who loved him towards the end of his life. “He had so many miraculous escapes: he would get to the end of his treatment, and they would invent something new, he would try it, and it would stop him getting worse for a bit. But in my more mystical moments, when I’m trying to make meaning out of this, I feel he was … purified in some way – and I think he had quite a long way to go! I don’t think it’s good for people to be famous. I think it’s really bad for them. I think it makes them mad.” So his illness was, paradoxically, a recovery period, like rehab or something? “Yes, I do feel that. That he was returning to what he really was.” Did being ill give him permission to stop being the more famous Clive James? “Yes. It gave him permission to watch TV and write poetry, which is what he really liked doing.”

Among the poems he loved best that are in The Fire of Joy are verses by Keats (Ode on Melancholy), Shelley (Ozymandias), Yeats (An Irish Airman Foresees His Death); Clive thought Yeats was a “fool and buffoon in later life”, but a great, great poet) and his beloved Larkin (An Arundel Tomb). But there are surprises, too; obscurities. Wild Peaches by the high-born bluestocking American poet Elinor Wylie (“her technique was perfection”) and Craftsmen by Vita Sackville-West, which begins, unimprovably, with the line: “All craftsmen share a knowledge. They have held/ reality down fluttering to a bench” (as Clive writes, whatever you may feel otherwise about Sackville-West, the author of a poem “as good as this can never die”). But the one that he and Claerwen would, together, come back to most often was Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold. “I’d never read it before,” she says. “It really knocked me over. I was reading it to him, in this state of great anxiety, and we got to ‘its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’… it’s an out-of-body experience. We were both quietly mopping up afterwards.”

Clive was not, perhaps, the easiest, most straightforward of dads. His ego was vigorously healthy. He could be selfish. There was bad male behaviour of the usual kind. But she would not have had any other sort of father. She will take his flaws, because they cannot be separated from his vividness: “If you’re robust enough to cope with the fallout, which can be considerable, your horizons are so much bigger. He was so much fun to be around. Everything was interesting. Everything was material. ‘Hmm, I’ll learn Arabic,’ he’d say. ‘Why not?’”

He widened her world. He made her feel she could do anything – and she duly did, swerving dramatically at one point in her life from science to art. (When she and I first met, she was a molecular biologist. But having finished her PhD, she got a place at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she graduated with a first, and suffice to say, I could not possibly afford one of her paintings now.) “My mother was always there, providing good sense and stability,” she says. “But my sense of what the world was, is, and can be – of what a person can accomplish, and in particular of what a person can teach themselves through the simple act of application – is so enormous because of my father, and I’m so grateful for it.” She smiles. “When I discover something new, he’s still the person I want to talk to about it.”