Clive James, 80, treasured as a joker and intellectual
LONDON — Clive James, an Australian journalist, joker and intellectual who had a long career as a writer and broadcaster in the U.K., has died. He was 80.
James’ representatives, United Agents, said he died Sunday at his home in Cambridge, north of London, and a private funeral was held Wednesday.
James been diagnosed with leukemia and emphysema, and he suffered kidney failure in 2010.
“I am a man who is approaching his terminus,” James said in 2012. He later assured well-wishers that he intended to live a few more years — and he did, continuing to write and broadcast until almost the end.
“Clive died almost 10 years after his first terminal diagnosis, and one month after he laid down his pen for the last time,” United Agents said in a statement. “He endured his ever-multiplying illnesses with patience and good humour, knowing until the last moment that he had experienced more than his fair share of this ‘great, good world.’ ”
The poet, essayist, author and entertainer had a gift for tickling the divergent sensibilities of the readers of highbrow literary magazines and the audiences of Saturday night TV in Britain, his adopted country.
James was treasured for his comic gift, such as describing Arnold Schwarzenegger as looking like “a brown condom stuffed with walnuts.”
In one of his best-remembered book reviews, James pronounced an official Soviet biography of president Leonid Brezhnev as so dull that “if you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead.”
James, in his self-deprecating way, once imagined an acquaintance describing him as “the boy from the bush who could quote [Ludwig] Wittgenstein,” the philosopher.
He was born in 1939 in the Sydney suburb of Kogorah. He was an only child whose father survived a Japanese Second World War prison camp only to die on the flight home, when his son was six.
Though James said he had no memory of his father, he looked back on his father’s death and his mother’s despair as the defining moment of his life.
“I understood nothing except that I could not help,” he wrote in Unreliable Memoirs, the first of five autobiographical volumes.
“Eventually in my mid-30s I got a grip on myself,” he added. “But there can be no doubt that I had a tiresomely protracted adolescence, wasting a lot of other people’s time, patience and love.”
Christened Vivian after the Australian tennis star Vivian McGrath, James won permission from his mother to choose an unequivocally masculine name. He picked Clive from the character played by Tyrone Power in the 1942 film This Above All.
A scholarship for war orphans paved his way to Sydney University, for which he claimed to be unprepared.
But he read hungrily, contributed to the school’s literary journal and became its editor.
After a stint at the Sydney Morning Herald, he decamped to Britain and Cambridge University. He was already bridging the worlds of academia and showbiz, and served as president in 1966-67 of the Footlights, the university club which spawned stars, including Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry, Germaine Greer, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle and Sacha Baron Cohen.
Despite academic success, he fell into depression in his 20s.
“The proof that I was getting ready to jump off a cliff or stick my head in an oven — that I was serious — was that I was giving my books away,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times in 2007.