CLIVE JAMES (1939 - 2019)
If I cast my mind back to 2007, I can recall that, at the time, I considered myself very well read. This wasn't entirely wrong of me. For a good deal of the previous decade, it wasn't uncommon for me to read one hundred books per year. Mainly classics, and mainly fiction. I devoured penguin classics like they were tim-tams.
Then, in 2007, Clive James published a book called 'Cultural Amnesia'. And it's fair to say that it changed my life.
I was familiar with James. He was that drily witty television personality, and in print, that erudite raconteur with a flair for imagery that bordered on the gymnastic. I remember when I read 'Falling Towards England' - the second of his five autobiographies - on the train. Or at least, I tried to read it. Never have I had to try so hard to supress laughter. To this day, his recount of a first (failed) attempt to do his own laundry is one of the funniest things I've ever read.
But this wasn't the James I encountered in 'Cultural Amnesia'. This was James, the intellectual powerhouse. The polymath. The man who'd read EVERYTHING. Page after page of gloriously rendered insight. Essay after essay of far-reaching critique. I was seriously in awe. Humbled. My own body of knowledge quickly reduced from whale to whiting. Raymond Aaron. Paul Celan. Egon Friedell. These and countless others were introduced to me. Each one, life-altering.
But like the whiting so often is, I was hooked. James raised the literary bar to a position higher than I thought possible. And I've made it one of my life's missions to reach it ever since.
James proved to me - and to the world, I think - that humour and serious intellect are not mutually exclusive. In the space of a paragraph, he could dance from a critique of an author's syntax to an appraisal of cultural discourse, via a metaphor seemingly made of elastic silk. He rendered words with the dexterity of a calligrapher. And it was clear that his own writing pleased him. It gave him satisfaction and delight. Easy to dismiss this as a kind of arrogance - which it was - but it was also evidence of a man writing for the sheer value of the pursuit. A process of personal enrichment; an expression of heightened humanity.
James could be annoying. His grasp of Australian identity was one of overreach from his 1950's context, and his position on climate change one of wrong-headed condescension. His adultery was shameful, and his wit, at times, could border on cruel. That being said, he seldom took aim at soft targets, and his public penitence for infidelity appropriately sincere.
James took language for joyrides in sleek sports cars. Tops down. Blue sky above. We, his readers, were passengers; the wind of free-flowing expression in our faces, with imagery whizzing by. It was a delight to be in his company.
But now, the maple leaf has fallen. Let the wind carouse it home.
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