Clive James: an interview and portrait

[John F]

One of my favorite writers, he's in terrible shape but still hanging on, and writing. This has the feel of a kind of premature, participatory obituary - not despairing or even particularly sober, but looking backward.

Clive James – a life in writing
Interview by Robert McCrum
The Guardian, Friday 5 July 2013 03.45 EDT

"I'm told that I'm looking quite shiny," says Clive James, putting his best face on things with a vintage display of Anglo-Australian stoicism. It's an instinctive optimism that is what you'd expect, but still it is moving.

Almost everything in the life of this great literary polymath is edged with darkness. James now dwells in a kind of internal exile: from family, from good health and from convivial literary association, even from his own native land. His circumstances in old age – James is 73 – evoke a fate that Dante might plausibly have inflicted on a junior member of the damned in one of the less exacting circles of hell.

James's health has lately been so bad that, last year, he was obliged publicly to deny a viral rumour of his imminent demise. Two or three times, indeed, since falling ill on New Year's day in 2010, he has nearly died, but has somehow contrived (so far) to play the Comeback Kid. Perhaps he has found rejuvenation in the macabre satisfaction of reading premature rave obituaries from fans around the English-speaking world. If word of his death has been exaggerated, there's no question, on meeting him, that he's into injury time, with a nagging cough that punctuates our conversation.

"Essentially," he says, as we settle into the rather spartan living room of his two-up, two-down terraced house in Cambridge, "I've got the lot. Leukaemia is lurking, but it's in remission. The thing that rips up my chest is the emphysema. Plus I've got all kinds of little carcinomas." He points to the place on his right ear where a predatory oncologist has recently removed a threatening growth. "I'd love to see Australia again," he reflects. "But I can't go further than three weeks away from Addenbrooke's hospital, so that means I'm here in Cambridge."

In a recent, valedictory poem, "Holding Court", which describes his involuntary sequestration, he writes: "My wristband feels too loose around my wrist." In all other respects, he is tightly shackled to his fate.

Exiled from his homeland, where he has now become a much-loved grand old man of Australian letters, James is also exiled in Cambridge. His wife of 45 years, the Dante scholar Prue Shaw, kicked him out of the marital home last year on the disclosure of his long affair with a former model, Leanne Edelsten. This betrayal also devastated his two daughters, though it has ultimately brought them closer to their father. In "Holding Court", James writes ruefully that "retreating from the world, all I can do, is build a new world".

He is doing that this month in the only way he knows, and in the way he has always done – in print. With a grim appropriateness, his new book is an extraordinary verse-rendering – the fruit of many years' work – of Dante's The Divine Comedy. According to TS Eliot, this is the only book in the western tradition that surpasses Shakespeare. It is typical of James's chutzpah that he has not only tackled this Everest of translation, but has scrambled to the summit in triumph.

James reports that, in Australia, he has been getting "wonderful reviews, which is very gratifying". Now, he waits with some apprehension for the British critical response, knowing all too well that over the years he has been acclaimed as an entertainer but mercilessly criticised as the clown who wants to play Hamlet.

Flak is something he has had to deal with from the minute he decided to leave Kogarah, New South Wales. James comes from that remarkable generation of ambitious postwar Australians – other members are Robert Hughes and Germaine Greer – who felt they had to get out. "We all thought that the real action was overseas," he says. Any regrets about not going back? He has been burned too often by the Sydney media to answer that easily. "Let's just say, yes – and no," he replies. "Australia offers a wonderful life, but I've made my life here." Tellingly, he slips into the past tense to consider his career. "I didn't get a bad ride. I managed to square the circle."

Vivian Leopold James (he adopted "Clive" after Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara made his name seem girlish), born in 1939, has said that "the other big event of that year was the outbreak of the second world war". Challenged with this now, he laughs and says: "Dramatising myself is what I do." A prisoner of his childhood, as he puts it, he landed in England in the winter of 1962, having promised his Sydney friends he would be gone for just five years. But then he went to university in Cambridge. James, slightly older than his fellow students, became a leader of the revels and discovered a taste for mixing erudition with performance. He has been showing off ever since.

Could he have become an academic? "I would have been a bad don," he admits. "I was always haring off to London. I would not have been sufficiently interested in my students – that's a character weakness. I'm not humble enough, and the capacity for ordinary work is not in me. The necessary sense of duty to my students would have been missing."

In place of the ivory tower, James gravitated to the pub, the celebrated Pillars of Hercules – centre of the 1970s Grub Street of Ian Hamilton, Karl Miller and Terry Kilmartin. After some false starts, he landed the job of TV critic for the Observer that would shape his career. "Terry Kilmartin, then Observer arts editor, was the key to it," he remembers. "I used the column to analyse British culture, writing about everything."

And, of course, to entertain. Clive James on television became a weekly must-read, importing an Aussie irreverence to rival that of Barry Humphries as Dame Edna Everage. The best of his observations – for instance, that "Perry Como gave his usual impersonation of a man who has simultaneously been told to say 'Cheese' and shot in the back by a poisoned arrow" – had an unequalled, surreal hilarity.

Charlie Brooker, writing in the Guardian, noted that James "has a way of gliding through sentences, effortlessly ironing a series of complex points in a single easily navigable line, before leading you face-first into an unexpected punchline that makes your brain yelp with delight." James, in his prime, could nail any subject with a single phrase. Famously, he compared Arnold Schwarzenegger in "Pumping Iron" to "a brown condom filled with walnuts".

Behind the laughter, James hankered after seriousness, plugging away like Sisyphus at poetry and critical essays, and later some fiction. "I still suffer from a blurred image", he says, "but I don't mind." (I suspect he does.) Defensively, he celebrates the great Italian poet Eugenio Montale's approval of "a joking seriousness". Repeating the phrase in Italian for emphasis, he adds: "The Americans especially don't like humour mixed up with seriousness."

So what is he? At the front of his Dante translation, the list of his works is arranged in an imposing menu of fiction, verse, criticism, travel and autobiography. Is he "a man of letters?" James demurs: "No, no – that's too pompous, and so is 'poet'. I would say that 'writer' is still the best." What about writer-performer? "There you go again," he counters, "blurring the image."

James's five volumes of autobiography have all been bestsellers. He has admitted that much of what he wrote in the early volumes about his unpromising origins are "a palpable fantasy". But the central character was recognisably James's true, imperfect self. He was pulling the classic stunt of sending himself up in the spirit of shameless self-promotion. Who else could get away with comparing himself to Byron? In "Unreliable Memoirs," and the volumes that followed, James managed to make much of a confession that he was conceited and pretentious, all the while being entertainingly both.

Making mischief has never ceased to excite his imagination. In the 1970s, having made friends with the literary musketeers of the New Statesman (Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes), he claims he floated the idea of re-animating what FR Leavis loved to denounce as the "modish London literary world", and suggested that this metropolitan cabal met for lunch. "In retrospect," he explains with relish, "it looks like a conspiracy, and the fun at the time was to make it seem like a conspiracy. But it really wasn't. It was just lunch." The lunching Clive James was renowned for flashing plenty of literary skirt – references to the Russians, allusions to Mandarin poetry, and a touchingly sincere auto-didacticism. The rumours of his legendary self-improvement linger. Tom Stoppard's comment on the news of the Dante translation was to be "faintly surprised he's not trying to translate something from the Chinese or the Hungarian".

When, in 1982, he left Fleet Street to go into TV – another chapter of accidents, reported in a volume of memoir entitled "The Blaze of Obscurity" – he seemed wilfully to compromise any claim to a serious literary reputation. He admits as much, conceding that only "after a quarter of a century" has his reputation begun to recover from his life in the crystal bucket. TV – "Clive James on Television," "Saturday Night Clive" – pitched him into the company of starlets, minor European royalty and, he tells me, "a number of people who are now in jail". There were some encounters – such as his strange passion for Diana, Princess of Wales – that now read like episodes from "Inferno."

Dante is a first love, and one that is further braided into an old love through Prue Shaw's lifelong study of medieval Italian poetry. If "The Divine Comedy" is, finally, a 500-page meditation on love's ceaseless dramas, then James's translation derives its inspiration from his own nearly 50-year association with a great Italian scholar.

In the introduction to his translation, which is really a love letter to his estranged wife, James recalls the first time, long ago in Florence, that she explained to him the complex subtlety of the Paolo and Francesca episode in canto 5 of "Inferno." "Though it was assembled from minutely wrought effects," he writes, "the episode really did have rhythmic sweep. Every moment danced and the dance was always moving forward."

Whenever the younger James played truant from his Cambridge studies to look at one of the many, often hardgoing, translations of Dante, he convinced himself that "the job was thankless". Instead, for 40 years he threw himself into London's human comedy, diverting himself with a myriad literary and televisual distractions, dazzled a generation, had more than his 15 minutes of fame, then retired.

He returned to "The Divine Comedy" shortly after 9/11, during a holiday in Greece. All at once "I thought I could see how a translation might work," he says. Rather than attempt to render the notoriously difficult music of Dante's terza rima into English ("That's a killer"), he would adopt a more familiar poetic narrative strategy, one that was almost as familiar to him as breathing, and translate the 14,000 lines of "The Divine Comedy" into quatrains.

The result, just published, is a revelation. The reader is swept up in the drama of "Inferno," which James describes as "the action movie, a PlayStation game". He has taken quite a few liberties with the text – which will not please Dante scholars – but only to put rocket fuel into a vintage motor. He has managed to find the right contemporary tone to express the glittering serenity of "Paradiso." The tempo and texture of the poem has an inevitable majesty, but there is also a dancing levity that is suited to James and his "joking seriousness".

He's certainly given it all he's got. The project has been more than a decade in the making. "After I got ill," he says, "I was keen to live long enough to see the book published." The translation has another therapeutic function: to restore his marriage. His wife, he says, has been a great enthusiast for his efforts. So are they reconciled? "That's putting it a bit high," he replies. "It's something I would dearly wish, but it may not be in the realm of the possible. All I can say is that we have been known to break bread together."

For the moment, he is basking in the pre-review attention, planning a sixth volume of memoirs, provisionally entitled "Prelude to the Aftermath," and shaking his head over the horrors of the latest Dan Brown, another rival – of sorts – in the Dante stakes.

I wonder, towards the end of our conversation, if the Italian master has taught him any lessons about how to live. "Don't get exiled," he replies, with a final roar of laughter.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/ju ... ranslation

[John F]

April 19, 2013
This Could Be ‘Heaven,’ or This Could Be ‘Hell’
By JOSEPH LUZZI

THE DIVINE COMEDY
By Dante
Translated by Clive James
527 pp. Liveright Publishing. $29.95.

The perfect translation of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” remains one of literature’s holiest grails. Some translators have captured facets of the poem’s magic, but always at a cost: Charles Singleton conveys Dante’s erudition but flattens his poetry; John Ciardi recreates his music but takes mammoth liberties with the original; and John Sinclair’s “thees” and “thous” date his otherwise deft rendering. If the translator’s task is “to liberate the language imprisoned in a work,” as Walter Benjamin writes, then few literary strongholds come as heavily fortified as “The Divine Comedy.” Written in Dante’s native Tuscan instead of the more prestigious Latin, the poem and its earthy idiom, copious allusions and otherworldy precision burden translators, especially in rhyme-poor English, which struggles to match the momentum of Dante’s terza rima and internal rhymes. No wonder that Dante’s latest translator, the eminent Australian poet and critic Clive James, feared his task would be “thankless.”

Seeking to preserve Dante’s “infinitely variable rhythmic pulse,” James makes an inspired metrical choice. His quatrain uses enjambment and unobtrusive rhymes to transmit the cadence of Dante’s terza rima without lapsing into singsong:

At the mid-point of the path through life, I found
Myself lost in a wood so dark, the way
Ahead was blotted out. The keening sound
I still make shows how hard it is to say
How harsh and bitter that place felt to me. . . .

Yet James fails to approximate Dante’s talent for compression. He inserts a “keening sound” that diverges from the original, and elsewhere adds explanatory material in the translation itself to avoid the need for notes. I applaud his wish to release Dante from the scholarly excess that can transform his work into a medieval Who’s Who. But by expanding Dante’s concentrated original, James often dulls its effect, as we see when Francesca introduces herself in the celebrated canto of the lustful: “Born where the Po descends to the seashore / To meet its followers and rest content, / I was a beauty.” Dante’s Francesca doesn’t actually dwell on her good looks here — as a modest lady of high social standing, she wouldn’t dare. And she doesn’t need to, because in Dante’s Italian we feel her appeal, one suggested by her graceful words and fatal charm (when meeting Dante she calls him an animal grazïoso, “gracious being”; she has him at hello). Too often in “Hell” James trusts neither Dante’s power of suggestion nor the reader’s ability to take a hint, as he shackles the poem with asides and explanations that obstruct its celebrated flow.

Some of the more dramatic moments in James’s “Hell” disappoint because his translations are not literal enough. In Canto 27, the fraudulent counselor Guido da Montefeltro delivers the most famous (and perhaps the only famous) triple subjunctive in literary history when debating whether to speak to Dante. To convey the sinuous logic and rhetorical tricks of the brilliant but devious Guido, the translation should capture the winding syntax of Dante’s grammatical construction with its hissing “s” sounds for the Italian subjunctive (credesse, fosse, tornasse). Instead, James’s stiff version falls flat: “If I thought now to afford / An answer to one bound to breathe the air / Again in the fair world, this flame would stand / With no more movement.” Accurate, eloquent even; but not incisive or diabolical enough for lines so memorable that T. S. Eliot included them as the epigraph to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Allen Mandelbaum’s version from 1980 reproduces the interlaced hypotheticals that make Dante’s lines stand out: “If I thought my reply were meant for one / who ever could return into the world, / this flame would stir no more.”

Surprisingly, James’s translation picks up when Dante’s verses slow down. The mellow and hopeful tone of “Purgatory,” announced with an opening image of “the sweet clear tint of sapphire in the east,” suits James’s wistful and autumnal voice better than does the raw energy of “Hell.” Virgil’s parting words to Dante in Canto 27, which have brought a tear to the eye of many a classicist, reveal James’s solemn and tasteful touch:

. . . Of your soul
I make you captain. Most blessed among men,
Move on. You’ll never hear from me again.

James’s no-nonsense clarity also goes a long way toward unpacking the conceptual complexities of “Heaven.” Much of his success in the final canticle comes from his expert handling of Dante’s internal rhymes. In “The Study of Poetry,” Matthew Arnold praised Dante’s “In la sua volontade è nostra pace” (“In His will is our peace”) from “Paradiso” Canto 3 as a “simple, but perfect, single line,” probably because of the lovely sonic links among the vowels in la sua volontade and nostra pace. James follows suit with similar syllabic pairings, ranging from the simple (“for what you will is now ill-willed”) to the exotic (“Of all their folderol and overkill”).

The greatest virtue of James’s translation is his gift for infusing poetry in the least likely places: the disquisitions on Christian doctrine. In Dante’s age, theology was the queen of all intellectual disciplines, and the chief aim of “The Divine Comedy” is to create a song of Christian understanding. But centuries of Dante’s readers have seen things otherwise. Victor Hugo even claimed that “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso” were beyond human comprehension: “We no longer recognize ourselves in the angels; the human eye was perhaps not made for so much sun, and when the poem becomes happy, it becomes boring.” However compelling, this line of interpretation is misleading, and James shows us why. He expresses the staggering beauty of the upper cantos with calm and limpid language, as in this description of divine light:

. . . In its depths I saw, packed tight,
Bound in one book by love, all that is sent
Abroad throughout the universe as leaves
Torn out and scattered.

Reading Dante in translation, and James’s version in particular, can be as demanding as the climb up Mount Purgatory. The sheer number of characters and themes — each canto is a world in itself — merges with Dante’s universe of secular and spiritual concerns to frighten away all but the most scholarly and literary, and the lack of notes in James’s edition makes it hard for the nonspecialist to gain traction. It does not help that Dante’s persona is as opaque as his poetry. Toward the end of his journey, he grants us a rare glimpse inside: “If ever it should come to pass that my / Long sacred poem — to which Heaven and Earth / For many years, twisting my life awry, / Have set their hand — should prove its proper worth. . . . ” But just when we think we’re starting to know him, he snaps back into character: the rest of the canto is a meditation on Christian hope.

Despite these barriers to entry, James’s austere volume achieves something remarkable: It lets Dante’s poetry shine in all its brilliance even in those technical patches closer to Aquinas’s syllogisms than to Virgil’s hexameters. Eliot, James recalls, once said that the last cantos of “Paradiso” were as good as poetry gets. After an uneven start, James’s translation reminds us just why.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/books ... james.html

[Tarantella]

Recently a one hour interview with Clive James was aired here in Australia and conducted by one of our leading television journalists. It was recorded inside a room in the library at Cambridge University. Clive looks frail, appears breathless and is obviously a physical shadow of his former self. But he's in top form intellectually!

I've been reading "The Biography of Martin Amis" (brief review to follow) and Clive features in this as a member of the Amis coterie, and he was very much a part of the shenanigans of the left intelligentsia in the UK during the 60s, 70s and 80s. Only much later did he succumb to the role of television critic and purveyor of popular Japanese "reality" TV programs. Actually, I thought it was an odd suit and most of the time I kept thinking what a crashing bore James had become. Not so on the writing and academic side of things. He remains an excellent public intellectual and writer/translator/researcher, albeit running on batteries which are quickly running out of power.

James talked, during the interview, about his life and how he was "cold and detached" and how this affected his relationships. He spoke about his life as the child of an absent father (James's father was killed in an aircraft accident en route back to Australia after fighting and incarceration during WW2) and his relationship with his self-sacrificing mother. As is often the case, men who have serial sexual relationships often have very ambivalent attitudes towards women. James says he loves women, but he has done (what he considers now to be) the wrong thing by his long-time academic wife Pru. Having had a long extra-marital affair with the ex-wife of a renown and flamboyant Sydney GP - and after her life with that same doctor spent in the headlines as a result of their decadent behaviour - one would consider a subsequent match with James as "improbable", at best. But there's never any accounting for the male ego, no matter what the age!! His formidable wit and intellect would make James attractive to any woman.

I commented earlier about Martin Amis: there's more than a tangential link here to what I've said about James. Kingsley Amis (Martin's father) was a serial philanderer and I remember a critic reviewing Kingsley's memoires, some years ago. The critic, observing Kingsley's many infidelities, made a sharply perceptive observation: that men have a great capacity to hurt women - much more than the reverse (for historical reasons to do with sexual roles and male power). He went on to suggest that the man who really likes women won't treat them like this. Apposite.

[John F]

Thanks for your comments. I think we generally agree, though of course not on every detail.

he was very much a part of the shenanigans of the left intelligentsia in the UK during the 60s, 70s and 80s. Only much later did he succumb to the role of television critic...

Actually, his long run as TV critic of The Observer was from 1972 to 1982. I have all three collections of his reviews and read them with not just pleasure but delight. It's this aspect of his career at the time, not his essays in literary criticism (which also I like a lot), which brought him to attention in America as a repeat guest on Dick Cavett's PBS talk show. As for his work in television, all we saw here was the series on fame, and I thought it was both superficial and rather boring, a waste of his time and special talents. But people will do what they want to if they can, and it can't be helped.

I didn't know about James's involvement with the "left intelligentsia," and am surprised to hear that said. As I remember from reading his reviews of history and political books by the likes of Robert Conquest and Solzhenitsyn, he was anti-Soviet and anti-Marxist. But no matter, doubtless you know more about this aspect of his work than I do, especially any of it predating his move from Australia to England.

At this stage of his life, following the betrayal of his wife and his physical decline, James seems to be rather wallowing in self-criticism and indeed self-pity. He's always seen through himself, his many volumes of memoirs constantly take the mickey out of himself, but in an entertaining and humorous way - it's been his shtick. When he's dead serious about himself, he becomes ordinary, which is another sign that he's wasting his talent and whatever time he has left.

[Tarantella]

Robert Conquest is a name which keeps appearing in the Amis biography and Amis himself was staunchly left-wing. This political orientation was and is virtually a rite of passage in universities. The strange thing about these people is that they tend to self-select with respect to ideologies of the left: denying the catastrophe of Soviet Communism, for example, whilst embracing another, more 'liberal' and 'humanitarian' version of their own creation. It's a sort of "club", if I can be just a little cynical.

When I worked in television here in Australia in the 1970's we had 'chardonnay socialists' who belonged to that 'club' and espousing its virtues (vague though these always were) provided one's entree into "the club". From where I stood it was what you DIDN'T tolerate which made you a valued 'member' of the 'club'. These same people had earlier held connections and shared similar 'convictions' with people such as Clive James, Germaine Greer, Bruce Beresford - all from that alma mater of exclusive progressivism, Sydney University. One need not read too much into the sincerity of the clique as, of course, Amis himself is staunchly right wing these days. They'll often change horses mid stream and they differ from the rest of us in having the 'benefit' of a microphone!!

[John F]

Robert Conquest is an interesting case. He definitely began as a leftist, very much so; his Wikipedia article says he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in the 1930s. But after the War, presumably disillusioned (cf. "The God That Failed," 1949), he "joined the Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), a unit created by the Labour government to 'collect and summarize reliable information about Soviet and communist misdoings, to disseminate it to friendly journalists, politicians, and trade unionists, and to support, financially and otherwise, anticommunist publications.'" I don't know about Martin Amis, but Clive James was born in 1939 and came to England in 1962, so he couldn't have known Conquest in his leftist period, and the books by Conquest that James refers to are anti-Soviet.

[Tarantella]

Clive James belonged to the Amis coterie of leftists in the 1970's. By that time Conquest was a Conservative, by inclination and association with Kingsley Amis.

Bradford refers to James and his role in the company of those intellectuals who gathered around Martin Amis. They regularly met up in a drab flat in Belgravia, drinking copiously and wanting to change the world, but I'll let Bradford tell the story:

"Of the revellers as a whole it would be difficult to imagine a more unlikely combination of affinities and inclinations. Conquest in works such as The Great Terror was responsible for exposing to the liberal intelligentsia of Europe and the USA the tyranny of communism in practice and the gigantic scale of Stalin's genocide while Kingsley, in his Conservative Party pamphlet Lucky Jim's Politics (1968) had declared similarly that left-wing ideology was by its nature authoritarian. Hitchens was an unapologetic disciple of Trotsky, avowing that the drawbacks of Socialism in one country could be rectified only by global revolution and Communism for all. Clive James was his raffishly liberal associate- rather like Kingsley to Conquest. Martin was, at this point, enthusiastically indifferent but if pressed would probably have confessed to being centre-left.

Clive James: 'At the time of the launch I was spending a fair amount of time with Ian Hamilton of the New Review, as well as doing some work for The New Statesman.....It was difficult to imagine how Hitch, Fenton, even Clive James, could have ended up as mates of Kingsley and his fellow Tories'"(105).

So you see, to all intents and purposes Clive James was left-leaning by inclination and imagination - and certainly in practice because The New Statesman was and is a left-wing journal.

Here's a newspaper article about the Bradford biography:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/ma ... 5888229651