The Big Read: Brightness falls

22 September 2014 - 02:00 By Darrel Bristow-Bovey
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Clive James published a new poem called Japanese Maple in the New Yorker this week, in which he looks through the back window of his home at the maple tree his daughter picked out, marvelling at how its leaves glisten in the rain, reflecting that come next autumn those leaves will turn to flame, and musing, gently, that although the next English autumn is a long way away: "What I must do Is live to see that."

It's not only the trees, though. He's also said: "I want to live long enough to see the next season of Game of Thrones. It's good to have a project."

Clive James is an Australian essayist and critic and columnist and translator and memoirist and novelist and travel writer and scriptwriter and pop music lyricist and poet. His poems include Bring me the sweat of Gabriela Sabatini, and the long incantation of literary envy and sweet schadenfreude that every heart-gnashing writer should learn by heart and chant at writerly gatherings like an anthem: "The book of my enemy has been remaindered (and I am glad)."

For 10 years, between 1972 and 1982, he was the television critic for The Observer, and in 1992 I discovered his three paperbacks of collected TV columns in a second-hand bookstore in Grahamstown during a cold and sickly arts festival.

I read them through the long thirsty nights and saw for the first time what language can do when it is taught to dance, then controlled and set to a task.

"All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light," James once wrote, but he could do far more than that. He could use light words to say heavy things and he could thoughtfully, playfully, seriously apply the wheel of scholarly thought to the butterfly of popular culture.

"It's extraordinary how potent cheap music is," Noel Coward once said. James's point is that the music might be cheap but the feelings it evokes are not.

James is a funny, erudite, interesting man. He taught himself to read six languages, including Russian and Japanese. In the 1980s he followed the world Formula 1 circuit around the world like a lovelorn schoolboy. He built a dance floor in his home in Cambridge in order to perfect the tango. Rumours still persist of an affair with Princess Diana.

James is also dying. For some months he has been in what he calls "the departure lounge". After a lifetime of heavy drinking and 80 cigarettes a day he was diagnosed with emphysema and kidney failure ("I have lungs of dust") and then the third whammy of lymphocytic leukaemia. He's too unwell to return to his native Australia but consoles himself that his memories become clearer all the time: "I practically hallucinate the sheer beauty of Sydney Harbour. It couldn't be more vivid in actuality than in my recollection."

There have been many celebrity deaths of late and most have been sudden, but James's slow departure has given him the time to make things right and say goodbye. The year after he was diagnosed, Prue Shaw, a Dante scholar and his wife of 44 years, left him after tabloid reports of his lengthy affair with the wife of an Australian billionaire. Last year he published his translation of Dante's Inferno, turning the 500-page poem into 14000 rhyming lines of quatrains. It's his love letter to his wife, a mash-note of scholarship and passion and the intellectual energy of shared interests. This summer he gave his final reading at a literary festival in London, 90 minutes of monologue and performance that finished with a standing ovation and the words: "I'd love to go on talking to you like this for the rest of my life."

There aren't many heroes any more, but James is one of my heroes. He could be selfish and impatient and irascible but since 1992 I've admired his mind and his life and his writing more than anyone else. I promised myself I'd meet him one day, not to say anything or take anything from it but just to have met him.

I once was offered the opportunity but I was younger then and I had odd ideas of how many chances we get in life. I let the opportunity slip.

At the age of 74 his coming death isn't a tragedy. It's unlucky because he might have had more time, and it's a damn shame because life is still a pleasure for him, still a sensual experience of passion and intensity. I ache to think of the words he'll leave unwritten, but he understands that there are seasons for all of us, and that our seasons all pass but still the world goes on: "It's time to go. High time to go. High time."

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