‘Readability is intelligence’

Clive James’s final book was a tribute to the critic he most admired – Philip Larkin. By Tristram Fane Saunders

not just a token of his seriousness but the embodiment of it. His wit is there not only in the cutting jokes but in the steady work of registering his interest.

I’ve cheated. That’s not about Clive James, though it might as well be. In fact, it’s James’s verdict on another Daily Telegraph critic whose reviews left readers doubled over with laughter:

Philip Larkin.

In Somewhere Becoming Rain: Collected Writings on Philip Larkin, James argues that Larkin’s Sixties jazz reviews for the Telegraph

– collected as All What Jazz – hold the key to his thought. That collection represents not only “his most sustained attack on the modernist aesthetic”, but also the clearest demonstration of his aims: “Larkin’s dedication to compressed resonance is best studied, in the first instance, through his prose”. James’s 1982 essay resonated with the poet. In a letter reproduced here in facsimile, Larkin thanked him for this unexpected panegyric to “the one book of mine that no one ever bothers about”.

When Larkin says John Coltrane sounds like “a club bore who has been metamorphosed by a fellowmember of magical powers into a pair of bagpipes”, there’s a

SOMEWHERE BECOMING RAIN

mischievous sense that “writer and reader are in cahoots”, says James, adding that “no wittier book of criticism has ever been written.”

I’d never thought of James’s prose as Larkinesque before, but the qualities he so admired in All What Jazz are on show throughout Somewhere Becoming Rain. As fans of his Poetry Notebook (2015) will know, James wrote about poetry in exactly the same way he wrote about TV: glib, passionate, endlessly quotable. I’d happily trade in 50 august literary critics for one more Clive James.

Somewhere Becoming Rain brings together pieces from 1973 to 2018. Aside from an introduction and coda, they’ve all appeared in print before. If you have 2009’s Reliable Essays, you own most of this slim book already. “Wolves of Memory”, though, is a piece so good it’s worth owning twice.

It’s a review of High Windows, published in Encounter just days after the book came out in June 1974, and it’s nothing short of thrilling. Today, Larkin’s poetry – if not his life – is more-or-less unassailable. He has been absorbed into The Canon, that B-movie blob that sucks in literature and leaves a gleaming trail of theses in its wake.

But “Wolves of Memory” captures Larkin pre-blob, in a voice that owes less to the ivory tower than to the Pillars of Hercules, James’s preferred Soho boozer. You can hear a human being thinking on his feet, making a snap judgment that the latest book to land on his desk might just outlast us all.

James was always more of an aphorist than a scholar. When he attempts an extended argument

(as in a knottier essay here on Donald Davie) he can lose his way. His best criticism comes in brief, piercing flashes. In “Wolves of Memory” those flashes arrive at strobe-light frequency. “The total impression of High Windows is of despair made beautiful”; Larkin “is a self-proclaimed stranger to a good half, the good half, of life”; “Without the limitations there would be no Larkin – the beam cuts because it is narrow”; “The one affirmation his work offers is the possibility that when we have lost everything the problem of beauty will still remain. It’s enough.”

Opening High Windows for the first time, James writes, “it is something of a shock to find in it

James wrote about poetry in the same way he wrote about TV: glib, passionate