Comic writer with few equals
Clive James is dead. He wrote so well that the best way to honour him would be just to quote him. But he wrote so much and in so many forms it’s hard to know what to quote from. James saw himself as a poet first and everything else second. But I prefer the everything else. Little of his poetry sings to me, except the splendidly bitchy, ‘‘The book of my enemy has been remaindered, And I am pleased.’’
He wrote three novels. I once read half of one of them. I think he knew they were no good. Though he was a writer to the core of his being he was neither a novelist nor a poet.
I wouldn’t quote from his television shows, either. They were popular and no doubt lucrative but they weren’t as funny as they set out to be. TV is visual. Clive James was verbal. On screen his face got between the viewer and the joke. He wasn’t a comic: he was a comic writer. And what a comic writer.
He may not have been funny on television but he was the funniest ever about television. I first came across him as a TV critic in the 70s. What he wrote transcended what he wrote about. The programmes he eviscerated were forgotten the next day. The eviscerations live on. Open a collection of them and the blood’s still fresh on the knife.
I do that right now and land on a review of the Christmas specials of 1977. ‘‘Perry Como gave his usual impersonation of a man who’s been simultaneously told to say ‘cheese’ and shot in the back with a poisoned arrow . . . The Best of Benny Hill showed no more signs than usual of being significantly different from the worst . . . The Osmonds aren’t even phoney: they’re sincerely vacuous.’’
As a reader you find yourself grateful for both the truth and the laugh. And that’s the point of Clive James: the truth and the laugh were the same thing. James himself said that a sense of humour is just ‘‘common sense dancing’’. And he urged us to distrust the humourless like Trump. They were subhuman.
I never met Clive James nor heard him speak in the flesh, nor wanted to. You don’t get more from a Brandenburg concerto by meeting Bach. The point is the art, not the man. And it seems that Clive James the man was as flawed as the rest of us: unfaithful to his wife; beset with vainglory; terrified of dogs. But that’s the soil from which the rose grows.
His masterpiece was his autobiography, Unreliable Memoirs. It begins ‘‘I was born in 1939. The other big event of that year was the outbreak of the Second World
War.’’
There you have James in two sentences: the cocksure masculine vanity and the mockery of cocksure masculine vanity. A fool whose fuel is his own folly. It’s funny, but the fun is revelatory truth.
I used to teach Unreliable Memoirs to 16-year-old boys. It didn’t take much teaching. Most relished it, and not just because, though certainly partly because, there’s a whole magnificent chapter on masturbation.
There are few things James didn’t write about and none that he couldn’t. He delighted in making the language sparkle. And he blew up the myth that comedy and seriousness are mutually exclusive and that seriousness matters more. He’ll still be read for his comic truth when a thousand earnest writers have shrivelled to nothing.
James had been knocking on death’s door for a decade. Now it’s opened and let him in. In Auden’s words he’s ‘‘become his admirers’’. I’ll always be one of them.