Feature
Just watch me
by Diana Wichtel
Continued from page 1...
“No, we don’t lead a separate existence.” The trouble is he’s always working. There was an interview with James and his daughter Claerwen, a painter. James talked about growing up without a father. He was six when his father died in a plane crash as he was returning from war, leaving the only child to try to make it up to his devastated mother. The bizarre excesses of grief James poured out in the New Yorker after the equally untimely death of sometime lunch companion Princess Diana – “Hundreds of millions of people who loved her must have been crying like this” – begin to make sense.
In the interview, Claerwen James talked about growing up without a father, too: “I have no reason to believe he was involved in the practicalities of my upbringing … I don’t think he knew the name of my school.”
“She dropped me in it, didn’t she?” says James. “There was one Australian journalist who regarded that piece as prima facie evidence that I was some kind of monster who had neglected my family.” He tries, not entirely successfully, to laugh it off. “I think my daughter was having me on a bit. Ha ha.”
He was an absentee father. “What she left out is that I’m an absentee even when I’m there. That’s the real drawback of having a writer in the house.” To be fair, she does mention the upside of having a cultural phenomenon for a dad. “Yeah, the jokes were always good.” And he’s clearly proud of his part-time ménage. “My wife is a truly important scholar.” Of his daughter: “If you look on my website in the gallery section you’ll see some of her pictures. She’s a wonderful painter.”
I have. Lucky him to have them on his walls. “I can’t afford to have them on the walls any more. People like Cate Blanchett buy them two at a time.” They’re arresting portraits of solitary, impassive girls. “There’s a great loneliness in some of them,” James has noted. “I hope I’m not responsible for that.”
Yes, he says, he’s probably happiest when he only has to worry about … him. “I mean I think I’m a reasonably good provider and I run a tight crew. But on the whole, yeah, I’m in business for myself.
He says, “I’m not kidding when I say I’m the idiot of the family.” Well, they always attract the most attention, don’t they? “That’s exactly it. Out there in the street, running in front of cars and chasing dogs.”
In Cultural Amnesia, James has no time for post-structural theorists – “Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Jean Baudrillard and the other artistes in the flouncing kick-line of the postmodern intellectual cabaret”.
Yet he all but invented wacky, postmodern television in the late 80s. Shows like Saturday Night Clive were well ahead of their time, mixing the highbrow, the lowbrow and, if you count his TV interviews with Jackie Stallone and the Spice Girls, the no brow. Banks of screens beamed out multiple images of James as he alerted viewers to the cultural significance in everything from Willi the Hamster to insane Japanese gameshows.
“There was a time when you’d get a lot of criticism for that. Before postmodernism became a recognised stance, it was regarded as very paradoxical to be interested in these substandard things. Nowadays it’s become so fashionable that people are interested in nothing else, which wasn’t the idea.”
The criticisms never bothered him.He says. But he’s happy that in the US he’s not known as an entertainer. “That doesn’t get in the road of my serious reputation. In Britain it always does. Journalists would like to put you in one box … Some countries are used to it. In France they know there’s always going to be someone like Cocteau and of course Cocteau was about half-a-dozen different people. Which one was him?”
No matter how weighty the topic, James can always inject a laugh and/or a beautiful woman. His essay on Sophie Scholl, a 21-year-old German resistance fighter executed by the Gestapo, includes a digression on Natalie Portman. “Oh, you should see Beautiful Girls and Leon,” he explains. “What you must not see is any Star Wars prequels where she plays Amidala, Queen of Naboo, the bad-hair planet.”
Too late. But popular culture, which he mainlines like the monkey gland the rich used to take to stay young, has kept him from ossifying. One of the joys of the book is that he often writes like a much younger man. “I’m debarred from being a curmudgeon by my fundamentally childish nature,” he says. He hopes for young readers. “But there’s no such thing as a young writer’s version of this book. You really have to be around for a while before you can write a book like this.”
The book has sometimes been dismissed as just a bunch of essays. To make it more than that was a struggle. “I had this theory that the themes would actually provide the structure internally, rather like DNA. It took a while for that to happen. Several times I thought that I was lost.”
