Australians, in my experience, however deeply transplanted, still crave the
cerulean skies and bright light of their birthplace – which is why it is
unexpected to find Clive James, on the sunniest of English spring mornings,
in a curtain-drawn lair of such impenetrable gloom that the atmosphere seems
to fizz with electricity from all the wattage. Or, perhaps, that’s just the
effect of his personality.
His London pad is in a converted warehouse near Tower Bridge. It’s wine-bar
territory rather than the sort of coffee-house bohemia that is his preferred
habitat but that’s precisely why James chose it – all the easier for him to
guard his anonymity and get on with the serious business of writing and, ah,
tango dancing.
Most of the walls are covered with thousands of books: old Penguin novels with
their classic orange and white design, and titles covering every subject
that could conceivably prick the curiosity of their owner’s magpie mind.
(This is a man who, after all, has painstakingly acquired at least six
languages, including German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian and Japanese,
in order to read certain books in the original.) There are also paintings by
his artist daughter, Claerwen, many photographs of beautiful women,
including his wife, various objects from his travels and “Postcard from...”
television programmes, and a loo full of Schiele-like nudes.
We sit at a dining-room table in the hall on high-backed Mackintosh chairs
(only repro, James assures me) and get stuck in. His new book, Cultural
Amnesia, is an 800-page whopper, which has taken him four years to write and
all his life to collate. The subtitle is Notes in the Margin of My Time, and
although there are many different figures in it, both well-known and
obscure, the one that weaves through them all is the author himself.
This is Culture with both a large and a small C as befits the man who dubbed
himself a premature post-modernist: “Hard to say, isn’t it?” he says, “Crazy
name! Crazy guy!” – so under M, you will find Thomas Death in Venice, The
Magic Mountain Mann, preceded by Michael Miami Vice, Manhunter Mann,
sandwiched by Norman Mailer and Mao Zedong. American talk-show host Dick
Cavett, Coco Chanel and Tony Curtis are given equal billing to Cocteau,
Camus and Chesterton.
Several times in our interview – when we talk about lust, for instance, or
sensitivity to criticism (neither of them foreign to James) – he directs me
to one or other essay in his book. Ernesto Sábato, an Argentinian writer –
“take this down”, James dictates, spelling out his name – is quoted: “Only a
thick skin can defend itself, and the characteristic of an artist is an
extreme delicacy of skin”, which prompts our cultural guide to ponder how
the statement might apply to himself – “If I had my time again, I would
never react publicly to criticism, no matter how unjustified.”
A page or two on, and he’s into the tango – “a sad thought, dancing” (coined,
not by Sábato – we learn – but by a vernacular poet, Enrique Santos
Discépolo, in the Thirties; the book is full of such snippets of what James
is proud to call useless knowledge) – and he’s off again: “Undoubtedly it
was the sight of old goats with pretty young women in their arms that helped
draw me into the tango world, a man in winter longing for a touch of
spring”, and on through a dazzling and sometimes beautiful series of
seemingly unconnected connections – like a jazz riff, the notes scattering
and cohering – to his conclusion: “A man who wants to find out who he really
is should try watching the woman he loves as she dances the tango with a
maestro.”
There is more along the lines of this Old Man Winter refrain, prompted only
partially by my first question. In the introduction to the book, James
suggests that such a colossal work – based on four decades of jottings and
notes – was something he had planned to write towards the end of his life.
So is the publication of Cultural Amnesia accompanied by the sound of a bell
ominously tolling? “I’ve been feeling towards the end of my life-ish since I
was about 24,” he wheezes and laughs. “I used to have some very bad habits
including drinking, and I thought I’ll never last at this rate, especially
at the rate I smoked. I always feel like I’m living on borrowed time... So I
do feel this is the last round-up,” his voice taking on that ironic Jamesian
swoop, “but as my friend P. J. O’Rourke has already warned me, I can overdo
this last-ditch stuff. You can’t spend 20 years saying this is the last
gasp.”
But you’re not really all that old, are you? “No, I’m a fairly young 67,” he
says, a little smugly. “I’m just wearing the internal effects of having
smoked since I was nine.” He tosses aside the suggestion that this sounds as
though he’s hinting at something sinister: “I’ve got the lungs that anyone
would have who’s smoked since that age.” And then: “I’m not sick. I haven’t
got time to be sick… I’ve no time to die.” He goes on to introduce his
comments, several times, with the portentous words: “If I am granted
life...” which seems to intimate a certain preoccupation with his own
mortality.
England has been his home since James arrived here aged 21, but he has always
been bewildered by the prevailing attitude that there is something suspect
about throwing yourself into learning for learning’s sake; that it is bad
form to wear your erudition as unlightly as he has been known to do. In the
old days, some of this hostility may have been attributed to a strain of
anti-Australian snobbery, what James considers was “a licensed
anti-semitism, particularly among the Private Eye crowd.” But there are
plenty of towering English talents – Peter Brook and the late Anthony
Burgess, to name two – who have also despaired of their own country’s
anti-intellectualism.
Cultural Amnesia is aimed at the clever young – perhaps, like his whizbang,
multimedia website, of which James is inordinately proud, it is another bid
at longevity. “The hardest thing when you’re a young person going into
university or the world is to figure out how it all ties up; the answer is
that it doesn’t, and it takes a lifetime to find out why. It’s always handy
to have voices somewhere up ahead of you, which I always did, and they tend
to be the writers we worship – in my case, people like Scott Fitzgerald and
Camus. Camus is one of my her-ow-ww-ws,” James says dragging out the vowels,
like a dog howling at the moon. “And I wanted to write a book that would do
that job for the next generation.”
The whole book – and I cannot pretend to have read all 856 pages – is like a
free-form jazz piece. He assures me that “it’s designed to be dipped into –
I hope that people when they dip, won’t be able to stop dipping”. It is also
meant to be useless, he says: “It has no obvious use. Learning is not
utilitarian. It should be pursued for its own sake. I wrote the book for its
own sake. Although I do hope to get my money back.”
