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Author, poet and TV entertainer Clive James is not a well man. But clinging on to life has inspired some of his most beautiful work ever. In an extraordinarily candid interview the beloved Aussie star talks to Juliet Rieden about love, regrets, Diana, Pri
Clive James’ final love letter to Australia
Clive James wants his ashes to be scattered in Sydney Harbour. He’s picked the place and even written an inscription, a poem, for a small bronze plaque to mark the spot. “I’d like a quiet little ceremony at Dawes Point. Don’t forget, I won’t be there,” he says chuckling.
The author, journalist and TV entertainer grew up in Sydney, a Kogarah kid and only child whose playground was the Tempe dump, the fabulous backdrop for his gang’s mischievous games described in hilarious detail in his notoriously unreliable memoirs.
Clive, now 77, knows his failing body can never make the journey back to what he recalls as “paradise”: “the light that streams into the city of my birth”, “the ochre earth”. And so his poignant and rather cunning plan is to return after death. “The harbour waiting to take down my dust.”
“Here I began and here I reach the end,” is the first line of the poem that will undoubtedly have passers-by, if not tearing up, certainly pondering life’s biggest question as they read his two evocative verses etched in bronze.
The pronouncement in his latest book of poetry has caused quite a commotion, he tells me, a puckish grin creeping across his face. “Letters started arriving, including one notoriously crazy young lady from Sydney University who wants to arrange the whole thing. She’s practically hiring a submarine,” he jokes.
The plaque too has “aroused a lot of interest. I was stunned … I’ve more or less got to go through with it now. My family is going to look after it because they’ve realised the potential shambles I got myself into.” He’s laughing, but he’s also deadly serious. “I think most poets want to write their own epitaph if they can,” he adds. And Clive certainly can.
A brilliant career
Clive James sailed out of Sydney for England on New Year’s Eve in 1961. “My mother always felt English. In those days, it was quite common for people to feel that England was home, even though you were fully Australian, even though there was a war on! But I think I started feeling really English on the boat.”
“Passing between the Heads was like being born again,” he wrote in his memoirs. He was intending to be back in five years, but that never happened and although hugely successful in Britain, has never shaken an acute sense of feeling “orphaned”, maintaining a visceral longing for Australia. “I was born and raised in heaven,” he tells me his eyes twinkling and lovesick. “I try and get some of the joy-spring of that into my work.”
Clive has always been smart, erudite and laugh-out-loud funny; an Aussie larrikin with a penchant for literature and learning, a raffish passion for mass-market culture and an endearing running gag in self-deprecation. His hit TV series in the ’80s and ’90s, combinations of talk shows and off-beat, satirical entertainment, were filled
with brash showmanship and he revelled – he confesses too much – in the excesses and glamour that came with his success.
“I misbehaved like shit. Fame gives you too many opportunities, it really does. It’s unnaturally unreal, un-really easy to meet people,” he pleads. “I sometimes think the world is conspiring to get you to screw it up.”
There’s no question he enjoyed the high glamour and fast living, but away from the applause Clive sees himself first and foremost as a poet. And since leukaemia and emphysema have strangled his health and confined him to his home, each day wondering if this will be his last, he’s been producing his finest work. “I got lucky,” he smiles. “If life hadn’t got difficult, I never would have reached this level, that’s absolutely true.”
“Some of the best poems I’ve ever written about Australia I’ve been writing recently, because your memory lights them up. Memories light up further, the older you get, which I love. I find you don’t even have to concentrate. You’ve only got to think of it once and it’s in there somewhere, but it might come back to you with the edges knocked off, connecting up strangely.”
Double whammy
Clive was given his life sentence in 2010. He was in hospital for what he thought was the sort of prostate issue most men of his age eventually own up to, when the doctors spotted leukaemia. A lifetime of smoking had already resulted in emphysema, so the two combined hammered a brutal double whammy. “I had a ticket booked to go back to Australia just after I got sick, which I had to cancel,” he recalls with a sigh.
Clive has felt the breath of the grim reaper on his cheek many times since then – “His murmur is the closest you’ve heard yet /To someone heavy calling in a debt” he writes of “The Reaper” in his sobering new poem The Gardener in White. And yet Clive jokes he’s rather embarrassed he’s still here, since in the past four years he has all but received the last rites in a clutch of valedictory TV and newspaper interviews and penned what he thought would be his final volume of poems. But he certainly wasn’t faking it and it’s only the miracles of modern medicine that have allowed Clive to cling on to the raft.
His lungs are shot; Clive’s voice, always gravelly, is now hampered by punishing shortness of breath and a rasping cough. He shuffles around his home, his socks stretched on swollen feet, a shadow of his former “average” tango-dancer self, and throughout England’s winter he is pretty much housebound. “I haven’t been across the street for several months now. When the weather gets mild I’ll do enough walking to get me to the corner shop, but that’s all,” he says.
Clive’s distinctive full forehead is dappled with remnant craters from carcinomas and the endless medical procedures that are the ebb and flow of his daily existence, while a blackboard in his living room is chalked with his medication schedule, names and telephone numbers of key people from doctors to family and friends, and most importantly, today’s date!
“Every three weeks I go to Addenbrooke’s Hospital to have my immune system pretty well replaced. There’s gallons of the stuff,” he explains. But he’s also surprisingly upbeat. “I meet people there who are worse off, which is good for your character. I’ve usually been a lucky man and I meet a few people who aren’t lucky at all. It does me good.
“I just count my blessings. They are blessings, you know. I was really for the high jump in 2011. I wasn’t going to walk out of that one in a hurry but while it was in remission for three or four years, a whole new set of drugs came online and that’s really why I’m upright at the moment.”
The drug that’s keeping Clive with us is called Ibrutinib, the “little cluster-bomb” he’s penned a poem to. “It gets in there and gives the bastard hell,” he writes. “It doesn’t take the thing away but it keeps it quiet for an indeterminate period,”
I misbehaved Fame gives you too many opportunities.”