‘He refined his prose as though it were poetry’ Clive James
A tribute by Michael Deacon Features,
It was the bricks that did it. I first read Clive James when I was 15. It was, my English teacher said, a review of The Incredible Hulk. entitled “Green Beef ”. Given that it was 1996, I might have been puzzled by the suggestion that we study a newspaper article about a TV series broadcast in 1978. But, instead, I was puzzled by the name of its author.
Clive James? As in, the chat show host? Had he once been a writer?
Apparently he had. “Hulk,” we read, “has the standard bodybuilder’s physique, with two sets of shoulders one on top of the other and wings of lateral muscle that hold his arms out from his sides as if his armpits had piles.” That day, we were guffawing at something we were meant to be guffawing at. “Emitting slow roars of rage, Hulk runs very slowly towards the enemy, who slowly attempt to make their escape. But no matter how slowly they run, Hulk runs more slowly. Slowly he picks them up, gradually bangs their head together, and with a supreme burst of lethargy throws them though a building.”
New paragraph. “Hardly have the bricks floated to the ground before Hulk is changing back into…”
The bricks. The bricks floating to the ground. That sealed it. Yes, James was a writer, all right.
The next day, I went to the library and ordered The Crystal Bucket, his collection of TV reviews. I wolfed the lot, my enjoyment undiminished by the fact that I’d never seen the programmes described. This was the first lesson James taught me: that a review should never just be a review. It should be a form of entertainment: one to rival, or surpass, the form of entertainment it was judging.
As I later confirmed, by reading his reviews of programmes that I actually had seen, James was funnier than the comedies he wrote about, and more illuminating than the documentaries.
Almost always, his reviews gave me more pleasure than their subjects. From there, I moved on to his memoirs and poems. But it was as a critic that I loved him best.
His gift for the visual was matchless. “Wearing very tight striped pants, [Rod Stewart] looked like a bifurcated marrow,” he wrote. Thanks to her make-up, Barbara Cartland’s eyes “looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff ”. Arnold Schwarzenegger resembled “a brown condom stuffed with walnuts”. But the pleasure came not only from the jokes. James refined his prose as though it were poetry. And it showed: read any article he wrote, and hear the satisfying click with which each succeeding sentence slots into place. The following line was the conclusion to a magisterial essay on George Orwell: “To write like him, you need a life like his, but times have changed, and he changed them.”
The wit, the precision, the balance. So easy to read. So difficult to write.
He began writing reviews, initially of books, as a young freelancer in the late Sixties, for magazines such as the New Statesman, New Society and the Times Literary Supplement. “I was in demand for that kind of work, partly because I had established a fatal reputation for getting it done at short notice,” he recalled in North Face of Soho, the fourth of his five volumes of memoir.
Soon he was hired by the Listener magazine to write a monthly radio column, but uncharacteristically he struggled for anything to say, mainly because he almost never listened to the radio. Wearily, his editor shunted him over to the TV column instead. It was an accidental masterstroke. Ever since emigrating from Australia to England in 1962, aged 22, he had watched TV “the way I smoked and drank” (that is, to a heroically unhealthy degree).
The Observer hired him to write its own TV column in 1972. For the next 10 years, he was the best-loved TV columnist – perhaps even best-loved columnist full stop – in British newspapers.
“It felt straight away, and still feels now, almost illegal to be paid for having such a good time,” he wrote in 1977, introducing Visions Before
Midnight, the first collection of his columns. “There were (there still are) plenty of wiser heads to tell me I should avoid lavishing my attention on lowly ephemera, but I couldn’t see why I shouldn’t, if I felt like it. It wasn’t that I didn’t rate my attention that high – just that I didn’t rate the ephemera that low. Television was a natural part of my life… I watched just about everything, including the junk, which was often as edifying as the quality material and sometimes more so.”
That last is a key sentence: James was one of the first critics in England to see that no choice needed to be made between “high” art and “low”; he loved and wrote about both, never patronising his reader. He was also among the first to see that preferring the former didn’t somehow make one a better, or a more intelligent, person than preferring the latter.
In 1982, he gave up writing about TV to spend more time being on TV himself. (“It is time to quit my chair,” he wrote in his valedictory column, “before I find myself reviewing my own programmes.”) But he continued to write literary criticism, the best of which can be found in Reliable Essays, Even As We Speak and The Meaning of Recognition.
In 2011, he returned to TV reviewing with The Telegraph, writing weekly – give or take the odd necessary hiatus on medical grounds – for three years. For a while, when I was a commissioning editor on the TV desk, I had the privilege of editing his column, although the job consisted of little more than pasting his flawless copy on to the page. I would no more have presumed to rewrite Clive James than to daub some extra shadow on a Hockney. I emailed him once to say how my class had roared at “Green Beef ”. He seemed pleased, but also perhaps mildly rueful. “The trick today,” he said, “when a phrase like ‘supreme burst of lethargy’ pops into my head, is to remember it did so once before.” Like so many of his best lines, it still goes on popping into my mine.