Clive James is drinking tea in the club-like library of his flat in London’s docklands. “Given five minutes,” says one of the world’s greatest one-liner writers, “I could come up with a glib one-liner and go on air with it. But it’s not enough.”
He’s 67, and he’s got more to do, a lot more. Ideally, this would include learning Arabic, but he can see this isn’t going to happen. What is happening, however, is so bewildering that a full list would fill the rest of this page. However, picking the plums: the fourth volume of his Unreliable Memoirs, this one called The North Face of Soho, is just out; there will be one more, but perhaps two. There’s a book of essays, The Meaning of Recognition, just out, and more poetry. He is about to become a multimedia, internet-based presence. In the near future, he plans, apparently, to write about 20 more books, including a multi-volume novel about the Pacific war called The River in the Sky. “Beautiful phrase, that. It’s what the Japanese call the Milky Way. It’s a great story. Australia and Japan were the two countries that knew least about each other in the world. That war consumed my father... and my mother.”
More immediately, another vast work, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts, is to be published next year. It is a series of linked essays. “The essay at the higher level of journalism is an important form in England. Until now, my collections of essays have been exactly that. I wanted to do that form in a connected way.”
The book happened because, in 2001, he realised his television presence was becoming surplus to requirements. His chat show — the last incarnation of which was Monday Night Clive — was not getting the guests he wanted. He craved the ballet star Deborah Bull; the network wanted Geri Halliwell. Furthermore, his series of Postcard reports from abroad seemed to have ground to a halt. It took ITV 18 months to air his Postcard from Havana.
“They actually said they were waiting for a big news story about Cuba, for Castro to die. I told them I’d try to die in the same week. I stopped doing television before television stopped doing me. For all I knew, those young controllers were about to give me the bounce.”
ITV’s procrastination did us all a favour. It has resulted in a gigantic book, 800 pages, on a gigantic theme, the anatomies of cultures as they fall apart, with a gigantic message: that peace, freedom and plenty are not natural states, but a construction that needs constant maintenance work. “Some time before the turn of the millennium, I thought of doing a book about this from what I’ve learnt in my life,” he says. “I always make notes when I’m reading, so I thought I’d go back to the notes and do a series of essays showing how politics and culture matched up.”
He does so by examining cultures at their moment of dissolution, when things fall apart and the centre cannot hold. So, for example, we can learn about German culture by the refugees from Nazism who transformed Hollywood and helped launch the post-war cultural renaissance of Australia. But the book’s main function is to teach the young and to save them from their own amnesia. “It’s the same thing I’m doing on my website. It’s going to become increasingly important. For years now — all my life, in fact — there’s been something building up in western liberal democracy that should have been foreseeable, but perhaps was too obvious. There will be a penalty paid for prosperity and stability, and the penalty is that the young will forget. Liberal democracy in the West can die of itself. It doesn’t need an enemy, it can create its own enemies.”
The problem is, he thinks, that the horrors of the 20th century were such that they have become all but impossible to contemplate. “There is this wilful ignorance about the import of the recent past. I did an essay on Isaiah Berlin, saying that not even he could face the facts about the holo- caust. There’s a displacement activity that shifts your capacity away from the horrific and incomprehensible to something more comprehensible.”
Intellectuals should consider their role in such a climate of forgetting and denial. “The intellectuals — not as a class, there is no such thing as an intellectual class, but as a calling, a vocation — should feel it is a part of their duty to go on telling the young that the evolution of a civil society has been a complex business, and that it has to be maintained by constant alertness.”
He talks of the multiple betrayals of Jean-Paul Sartre. “He said he didn’t want to know what was going on in the Soviet Union. And then, when they did know, he said it didn’t matter. And then, when it did matter, it was time to say the Chinese were doing better, just when the Chinese were killing more people than the Soviets.”
He plainly feels a heavy obligation on himself not to slip into the same trap of wilful blindness, of la trahison des clercs, the betrayal of the best and the brightest.
He is, like his friend and compatriot Robert Hughes, culturally conservative and politically left-wing. “I was brought up on the proletarian left, and I remain there. The fair go for the workers is fundamental, and I don’t believe the free market has a mind.” He sees, rightly, the failure to understand the importance of cultural transmission as one of the great failings of the left. And, of course, he intends to write a book about where the left went wrong.
But he also sees threats to culture from the right, not least in television, the medium that made his name, first as a critic, then as a performer. Most important, there was a shift from the post-war bipartisan consensus that nothing was too good for the working man — therefore, he should be given the best — to the harsher free-market view that the working man should consume what he liked and not be imposed on by advocates of high culture.
“I remember when Rupert Murdoch gave a lecture and said, very plausibly, that it was a patronising assumption to try to impose high culture. I think he was wrong, but it’s a very strong argument.
If you believe in freedom, you have a paradox on your hands if you also say there are things that should be imposed on people. So we’ll give them Morecambe and Wise, which they love, then we’ll give them some opera, which they didn’t know they liked, and some will cotton on. I think it’s a great truth and a great weapon in the hand of enlightenment.”
But the Murdoch argument was in the ascendant. “Margaret Thatcher took out the quality requirements from the ITV franchise bid, and the BBC followed to keep up its ratings. It was all irreversible.” He points out that what was BBC2 is now BBC4, and that, in the next phase, all the high culture will move to the net. Those seeking it will find, but there will be fewer cases of people stumbling on something of which they had no prior knowledge.
His own web presence is startlingly ahead of its time. His site, www.clivejames.com, has been carefully constructed over years to include audio and video, the latter including interviews conducted in his library with, among others, Martin Amis, Jung Chang and Jonathan Miller. He is now ready to promote this site and will be covering some of the costs by sharing his material with Artsworld, ironically a channel part-owned by Murdoch, and possibly with Slate magazine in America. “I realised that what would make this work was my name. My name is a brand. I finally found a use for fame. Fame has done nothing but f*** me up for years. I’m not a businessman, but I am told this is pioneering territory — me, of all people, in pioneering territory!” All of this brilliance and hyperactivity raises questions about the man himself. At the strictly personal level, these are not going to be answered. He is bound by a family deal to keep his wife and daughters out of his public life (except for his painter daughter, Claerwen), and still lives an existence split between the pad in London and the family home in Cambridge. He has managed to write four volumes of memoirs more or less without breaking this deal.
But what the memoirs do reveal, and what he confesses to with the most chagrin, is that he is a man with alarmingly obsessive appetites. “My excessive personality is my great regret. If I could change one thing, I’d change that, I’d be a moderate man.” He was an epic drinker and industrial-strength smoker: the latest memoirs recount how he used to fill a hubcap ashtray daily. He has a cough now and fears the damage may have been done. He has, periodically, given up both vices — as well as obsessive eating — with varying degrees of success. “I drink socially now, and get drunk very quickly. At the launch party for this book, I got drunk in about 20 minutes — it was world-record stuff.”
There is an all too obvious link between these obsessive appetites and his hunger, in his work, to do ever more, to drive himself to the limit of what is possible in one lifetime. It is not just that he writes a lot, but that he writes with intense perfectionism. Cultural Amnesia was supposed to take three years, but he took another year to rewrite the whole thing. And he delivers his gags in North Face of Soho with the same honed elegance as he did in his Observer television column. Two of them — one about the adverse effects of an enormous joint that finally weaned him off marijuana, and another about Ralph Roister Doister and a flaming fart, greased pig act — rendered me helpless.
Roger Scruton said, admiringly, indeed enviously, of him: “He never stops communicating.” That is exactly right. James has a much bigger ego than he ever lets on — the displays of modesty in his books are a little too flamboyant to be entirely convincing — but he does genuinely put that ego at the service of the people. The “fair go for the workers” is heartfelt.
I think he means it when he says: “Our work isn’t as important as what nurses do, it’s just more interesting. And, luckily for us, the nurses find it interesting too.”
But he’s not entirely right on that point. Nurses will only continue to work if we keep the culture together, and that is what he’s now trying to do. He can do it, he is a big man. And a funny one.
North Face of Soho: Unreliable Memoirs Volume IV by Clive James (Picador £17.99)
