Feature
Just watch me
by Diana Wichtel
Clive James mixes the highbrow, the lowbrow and even the no brow, but with an eye on being taken seriously.
The Telecom operator announces, with an exotically accented flourish, that “Cleeve Jams” is joining the conference call. From London come the arch, adenoidal tones. “I’m very impressed we’re in a conference. How many of us are there?”
Good question from one routinely described as “a brilliant bunch of guys”. Sadly – he loves an audience – it’s just the two of us. One struggling to get a word in while the other champs at the bit – “What can I say? What do you have for me?”– for a topic to wrestle into submission.
So much to talk about. Clive James is one of a flock of cultural galahs who migrated from Australia to London in the 60s. Germaine Greer posed naked. Barry Humphries climbed into a frock. James has done everything but to attract our attention as critic, novelist, essayist, television star, songwriter, poet and the most unlikely tango dancer this side of Rodney Hide.
Ask about the “brilliant bunch of guys” line and you get a Wikipedia entry. ”Yeah, I love that quote because the guy who said it was a terrific critic, the New Yorker’s jazz critic. His name was Whitney Balliett. He was a wonderful writer. I think he’s dead now. He was one of the writers who got me onto the idea of writing about popular culture in a very precise and evocative way …”
His career-long yearning to be taken seriously is constantly doing battle with his compulsion to entertain, which makes James terrific company. And hopelessly easy to flatter, taking as a compliment anything that isn’t nailed down. Pointing out his deficiencies just provides him with fresh opportunities to parade his multitudinous complexities. “This is music to my ears, what you say,” he cries when I tell him I’ve had to stop reading North Face of Soho, the fourth volume of his Unreliable Memoirs, on public transport for fear of making a spectacle of myself. “You have my permission to go on interrogating me in this ruthless manner as long as you like.”
This is not strictly true. An interview with James is measured out by the minute, which is tricky considering his latest work, Cultural Amnesia, comes by the kilo. It’s a great wodge of entertaining intellectual one-upmanship encompassing history, arts, philosophy and the semiotics of Richard Burton’s hairstyle in Where Eagles Dare – “a key cultural moment in the 20th century,” James assures me.
It’s subtitled Notes in the Margins of My Time. Those margins are crammed with everyone from Tacitus (under “T” with Margaret Thatcher) to Tony Curtis (“C”, for Cocteau, Coco Chanel and Dick Cavett). “H” for Hitler, “B” for Beatrix Potter. It’s a bit mad.
But James’s best enterprises always are. He had me when I discovered the 70s television reviews he wrote for the Observer, taking the piss as only a true lover of the medium who has swallowed a dictionary can. Readers were alerted to the joy of sports broadcaster speak – “Harry Commentator is your carpenter” – and sent running to look up such words as “rebarbative”.
Nevertheless, two minutes into talking about Cultural Amnesia, it’s necessary to tell him to cut the crap. The new book, he’s said, is either his masterpiece or his folly. So has he decided which? “No, I still haven’t.” It’s been a commercial success. The reviews have mostly been good. But still he broods: “It might still be a bad book … I really thought it would sell 10 copies and then roll over and sink.”
Please. Even a born performer must find it difficult to keep up this elaborate dance of self-deprecation. “Ye-es. And I suppose you’ve caught me in a strategem. It’s generally wise to lower expectations if you can.”
Take the one-man show that’s bringing him to Auckland. “I usually tell people when I’m going on stage that I’m just going to shamble on and do nothing but talk for an hour and a half. Since that’s roughly true, that’s a wise thing to say.”
James may have invented the cunning New Lad ploy of admitting sheepishly to everything with no intention of changing anything. “Solipsism is definitely my limitation,” he agrees, when it’s put to him that he’s really always writing about himself. “I think most people are writing about themselves most of the time. They just disguise it. But I do have attention deficiency syndrome when it comes to other people. I’m working on it, but it’s getting a bit late.”
Then there’s his routine about his private life. “I’m really not allowed to talk about my family”, he says repeatedly, usually just prior to talking about them. “It’s at their insistence. They didn’t sign on for being public figures. The only time I really got into trouble with my family is when they’ve been dragged into it.”
James has been married for 40-odd years to Dante scholar Prue Shaw. They have two daughters. Home is in Cambridge, where he spends weekends. Most of the week he’s in London. “My redoubt is somewhere south of the Thames and only I have the key,” he writes in North Face of Soho.
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