I thought I was a goner two weeks ago... I’m embarrassed to still be here
His looming death. The roving eye that wrecked his marriage. And how he’ll spend what time he has left in front of the box. Clive James tells More why he ‘won’t lie down and wait for the end’
It’s been nearly two years since Clive James announced that leukaemia was about to kill him, provoking a rush of tributes that turned out to be premature. He wrote a poem saying he’d never see the leaves on the Japanese maple in his garden turn green again, and everyone took that as his big goodbye, but it was the tree that died first. ‘We’ve had it replaced,’ he says.
But while the outspoken Australian writer and broadcaster is grateful to be hanging on to life with the help of an experimental new drug, the 76year-old who shuffles to the door of his Cambridge home is clearly weakened and doesn’t know how much time is left.
‘I thought I was a goner two weekends ago when I woke up at 4.30 in the morning with a tongue bigger than my mouth,’ he says in a croakier version of that flat, wise-guy Aussie voice so widely imitated during his glory days as a TV star. James was the bonzer boss of prime-time in the Eighties and Nineties, a bald-headed bulldog in a suit, a graduate of the Cambridge Footlights utterly convinced of his own brilliance and the absurdity of others. Squinting at the camera, he introduced witty reports from far-flung places and bizarre clips from TV stations around the world.
Clive James On Television was the Saturday-night hit series that first brought us the eye-watering Japanese marathon Endurance and gave birth to every clip show since. Then there were the interviews with the likes of Frank Sinatra and
Katharine Hepburn.
‘I was never much of an interviewer,’ he says, then changes his mind. ‘I managed to ask the hard questions sometimes, in the case of Roman Polanski, for example.’
Face to face with the controversial film director, who had run away from America after accusations of raping a 13-year-old, he asked flat out if Polanski liked little girls.
The answer was pretty much yes, although he preferred to call them young women. ‘The question hangs on how young,’ said James, refusing to back down. He could be tough at the right time and funny at others, a voracious consumer of high and low culture able to quote both Homer and Homer Simpson.
Now James is the one answering the questions, a much slighter version of his old self, with wisps of white hair rising on his forehead. He’s still a hell of a talker, but also a little breathless.
‘I know I’m lucky to be here,’ he says, talk-
ing of friends who have gone on before him. The one he doesn’t mention is Princess Diana, of whom he once famously declared in a vivid prose poem: ‘I did meet her and I did love her.’
That was a little over the top for some, but then his enemies always did accuse him of vanity and arrogance. There was never any doubt, though, that he was – and is – a writer with rare gifts. Unreliable Memoirs was an international bestseller with several sequels. There have been novels too, books of criticism and countless columns. In the past few years his poetry has finally won the acclaim he always felt it deserved.
‘I feel like I’ve had a whole other career since I got sick. My problem as a poet before was that people thought I could not be serious, I was a TV face. But when you’re on the point of death you look pretty much as serious as you can get.’
Now he’s publishing a magisterial book of essays about the best examples of the box set. Play All covers The Sopranos, The Wire, Game Of Thrones and many others, but before we can get much into that he coughs, nastily. ‘Sorry I’m not just doing this for drama.’
The drug that keeps him alive is called Ibrutinib. ‘Great name, isn’t it? Sounds like a Game Of Thrones name or an Arnold Schwarzenegger character from the post-Conan phase.’
We’re in the back room of a simply but elegantly furnished terraced house adapted for this last season of his life. Sunshine spills through the skylights in the long space that serves as his kitchen, his living room and his library. James lives here alone, having been asked to leave the family home by his wife Prue four years ago, because of infidelity after a long-term mistress turned up from Australia to confront him.
‘I’ve made every possible mistake,’ he says. ‘But I’m still here, still married, which is quite incredible, considering my weaknesses.’
He met Prudence Shaw, a scholar of Dante, in their university days and they married in 1968. ‘When I first knew her she was the most beautiful girl in Australia. In the world. A long time has gone by now and she still is. Things got bad because I wanted to feel that way about every other beautiful girl in the world.’
They live apart but she visits him often. ‘No matter how bad things got, we have all this to share and can’t do without each other in that way,’ he says, looking around him. ‘Books, music, sculpture. It pleases me greatly that she’s a great scholar. I find that an endlessly renewable source of interest and love.’
Prue and his daughter Lucinda live ten minutes’ walk away, while his other daughter, Claerwen, is just next door with her family. ‘This house was rebuilt for me according to the plan that I could live completely alone but they would visit me every five minutes, which is what happens,’ he jokes. ‘Like an open prison!’
Can we assume he has been forgiven? ‘It’s not for me to reach that conclusion but the evidence is building. One of the reasons I’m grateful for this extra time is that I’ve been able to think about my real life, my track record and bring it to some sort of conclusion and be grateful that I’m a better man than before I got sick.’
Claerwen, an artist, says his close brush with death has changed him enormously. He agrees: ‘I’ve got more time for them, for her and everyone. And I must be more considerate. I couldn’t have been worse. I was like a lot of driven people. I made that an excuse for not stopping to listen.’
When he was first diagnosed with kidney failure and emphysema in 2010, James carried on working as before. ‘The choice was: do you lie down and wait for it or do you go on? I just went on, quite naturally.’
The threat has become sharper again lately. James was alone upstairs in bed when he had his recent attack. ‘It was scary; you can’t believe you can breathe because you can’t swallow. I was nine hours at Addenbrooke’s Hospital getting antihistamines pumped into me through a vein.’
The doctors don’t know if it was a side-effect of the Ibrutinib. ‘I am faced with the prospect that the thing keeping me alive is trying to kill me.’ How does he feel right now? ‘My legs are very weary. They’re heavy and I can’t walk far. So I’m that unwell… but on the other hand, I’m that well. I’m here, I’m talking to you. My brain is apparently working quite well. That’s a tricky one, though – how do you know?’
Well, for a start you could have a look at his new book. The writing is superb and insightful but it’s startling that someone in his condition should watch so much television. Is that the best use of what time he has left?
‘My immediate answer would be, “No, of course not”. It’s time to read Boswell’s Life Of Samuel Johnson again. But I’ve done that. I read and write in the daytime, and in the evening I’ve found myself watching television. Also, I’ve got a sense of theatre enough to know it would be interesting to people that I was sitting there watching television on the point of death. So I was being mischievous, writing this book. That’s OK. That plays. It brought you here.’
James likes attention, describing this as ‘the fatal weakness of my personality as a lone, maverick artist’. Claerwen says he is both a showman and a recluse. ‘She got it exactly right. She’s sharp as a whip, that one.’
He certainly enjoys the attention of Stephanie, our French picture editor, as she tells him where to sit for the photographer. ‘I could keep you talking like that forever. Stick around. I’m a tremendous flirt in all languages.’ When she’s gone, he sighs. ‘She doesn’t know it but she’s got a smile that could start a war.’
So she has, but he is also obviously thrilled to have company. ‘I’ve been out of the house this winter – which is over now I suppose – maybe twice in all that time. If I shuffle the 800 yards down into town I have to sit on every low wall there is.’
How does he deal with the inevitable longing to be elsewhere, on a beach maybe with a beautiful companion? ‘That’s how I deal with it,’ he says, gesturing towards the books. ‘I write those. Yeah. Maybe watch Téa Leoni in Madam Secretary [the US political TV drama series]. Libido doesn’t vanish entirely, but I deal with the longing mainly as I’ve always dealt with it, as a writer.’
That’s not entirely true, as we both know, but love of a different kind has inspired Play All, which emerged from hours spent watching TV with his daughter Lucinda after he became ill. This is their way of being close. ‘It removes the strain of interpersonal relationships. The people on the screen are having them so you don’t have to. You’re transferring your whole set of mental conflicts onto the screen. It’s inherently relaxing. Also, these things are very good.’
One of the best essays in the book begins: ‘Like anyone both adult and sane, I had no intention of watching Game Of Thrones…’
When I ask why, he snorts. ‘Swords and dragons? Give us a break. I still wouldn’t watch it, given the choice, but I got sucked in by the first few episodes when I realised what was going on. This is man before politics – people are trying to survive in conditions of arbitrary violence. But I wouldn’t have got that far if I hadn’t been caught by the characters.’
Tyrion Lannister is the one he really likes, as played by Peter Dinklage. ‘It’s level-one originality to cast a dwarf as your hero. That was brilliant. And of course he was fabulous.’
James was born in Kogarah, a suburb of Sydney, in 1939 and brought up by his mother. His father survived a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp but died in a plane crash on the way home. ‘The circumstances of my father not coming back shaped my life. I am still overcoming it.’
He was originally called Vivian, after a male tennis player, but hated everyone thinking it was a girl’s name. ‘I told my mother, “Look I’m extremely unhappy being called Vivian, could we change it?” She agreed to that. My mother had an extremely bad habit of doing what I wanted. That ruined me and it also created me.’
He found his new name on screen. ‘I saw a movie with Tyrone
‘I’m not scared of dying. It’s all been an adventure and a blessing’
Power playing a character called Clive and I chose that. I must have been ten years old.’ Does any part of him still feel like Vivian? ‘Yes, all the time. Things grow complex and stay with you. I don’t think you solve them.’
After graduating in Sydney he read English at Cambridge University. Then he went off like a rocket, in the wake of near contemporaries such as Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, becoming a big voice in his adopted culture. Looking back on his career, does he have any regrets?
‘I’m lucky that I’m inherently a merry man, even though I have a tragic vision. I enjoy life. I might have done a bit more dancing. I might have had singing training, but I certainly have no regrets that I chose this course. Well, it chose me.’
Faced with the end, is there any chance of him changing his mind about being an atheist? ‘No. If there was a supreme being, he would have intervened. He would have come to Auschwitz at Christmas when the snow was falling. He never did. No, of course there’s no beyond. This is beyond. We’re already there.’
Is he scared of dying? ‘No. That I’ve got going for me. I’m not afraid of death at all, not afraid of not being here. I don’t like the idea of the actual dying but it’s been a pretty smooth run so far. I daresay I’ll get taken away in some quiet manner.
‘I’m not being heroic when I say I’m not scared. It’s all been an adventure and it has been a blessing to have the extra time. I’ve never written better because my mind has never been clearer or with fewer distractions.’
The critics agree, describing his collection of poetry Sentenced To Life as some of his finest work. The poem of the same name has a line that says he is ‘a sad man, sorrier than he can say’. When I ask if that’s true, he grunts: ‘Yeah.’ But he says it like a man who knows he is not alone. If his eyes go, as they might with his condition, he has a plan that is almost unbearably poignant.
‘I’m saving music up. My wife and I were sitting here a few months ago on that couch and I was playing her one of the Beethoven late string quartets, Opus 131, which is a towering work of art. If the time comes when I can’t see, I’ll start listening to all the old stuff. I could spend a couple of years just listening to Stravinsky, so I’m not going to run out of material.’
Easing himself up to make tea, he explains that he has left instructions for his ashes to be scattered at Dawes Point in Sydney Harbour. ‘People of my generation will remember that the boat we got on sailed from just nearby, the international terminal.’
He has written a new poem, Return Of The Kogarah Kid, which he hopes will be engraved on a small bronze plaque on the shoreline when he has gone. Reading it aloud now, the strength returns to his voice, which regains all its old authority. ‘Here I began and here I reach the end…’
These are the words with which he wants to leave us, on that plaque, describing himself as one of those who ‘went out across the globe to find fame’ but will return to Australia as ashes cast on the wind: ‘And sink from sight, where once we sailed away.’
But as I leave his home, and his granddaughter runs in laughing from next door, I very much hope Clive James can stay a little longer yet.
‘There is no beyond. This is beyond. We’re already there’