Brillettante on the brink of grandeur

Bevis Hillier

RELIABLE ESSAYS: THE BEST OF CLIVE JAMES by Clive James Picador, £14.99, pp. 349, ISBN 0330481290 EVEN AS WE SPEAK: NEW ESSAYS, 1993-2001 by Clive James Picador, £10, pp. 381, ISBN 03304817621

n the 1860s Marcus Clarke came to Australia from England. He had been at Highgate School with Gerard Manley Hopkins, who described him as 'a kaleidoscopic, parti-coloured, harlequinesque, thaumatropic being'. (Thaumatrope: an optical toy in which images on both sides of a card appear to coalesce when the card is twirled rapidly.) Clarke wrote a classic, flaying novel, For the Term of His Natural Life, in which he exposed the horrors of the Australian penal system.

In the 1960s — in revenge? — Australia sent us back some extraordinary Australians. They included Peter Conrad, Germaine Greer, Barry Humphries and Clive James — conventionally referred to in the press as 'wizards of Oz'. James writes about each of the other wizards in these collections of essays, not always obligingly; and from time to time they have had their say on him, too. In a letter of 1971 to the Australian novelist and Nobel laureate Patrick White, Barry Humphries wrote:

[James's] hero is Scott Fitzgerald. He has copies of everything by Fitzgerald as originally published in Esquire (he got them at Tyrrell's Bookshop for a price he names proudly). He is vicariously interested in the careers of recently dead writers who lived romantic disappointed lives and I would have thought he was predisposed to envy. Despite his unctuousness, I didn't care for him a scrap and felt that [was being introduced to him so that I could be summed up and dismissed from his crowded scholar's mind.

(Quoted, Patrick White's Letters, edited by David Marr, 1994.) Patrick White himself, in a letter of 1973 to the publisher Tom Maschler, wrote: 'I see in the catalogue that you are publishing something by the archturd Clive James.' (Ibid.) Against these unflattering references must be set the very favourable ones of Philip Larkin, who rarely bubbled over with enthusiasm for

other critics' work. After reading The Metropolitan Critic, a book of James's essays and reviews, in 1974. Larkin wrote to Anthony Thwaite;

I find his prose style a bit abrasive, as if one were going ten rounds with John Conteh, but on the whole I think he shows good taste and good sense. I'm glad he has no time for Keyes or Roethke, both entire phonies in my view, and I enjoyed the article on the less attractive aspects of Australia (spiders under the bog-seat, and so on). Just now and again he says something really penetrating: 'originality is not an ingredient of poetry, it is poetry' — I've been feeling that for years ...

(Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940-1985, edited by Anthony Thwaite, 1992.) Eight years later Larkin wrote to his friend Judy Egerton: 'I like Clive James, because he praises my one unsuccessful book. Don't underrate him! He's a formidable character.' (Ibid.) Larkin being Larkin, he was not a full-time fan of James. In 1981, off to watch the Australians at Lord's, he jokingly predicted to Robert Conquest that James would do a streak across the pitch wrapped in the Union Jack, adding: 'His new poem [`Charles Charming's Challenges on the Pathway to the Throne] is not funny enough to compensate for the corniness of mocking the royals'. (Ibid.) In 1983 Larkin told Kingsley Anais that he thought James's new novel, Brilliant Creatures, was 'like a gorilla trying to imitate you. Still, better than a gorilla trying to imitate Wm Golding.' (Ibid.) Joyce Grenfell liked James; but her friend Virginia Graham found him, in a television debate, `clever and nasty'. (Joyce and Ginnie: The Letters of Joyce Grenfell and Virginia Graham, edited by Janie Hampton, 1997.) In the tally of pro-James and antiJames opinions, perhaps the one that counts most is a tacit one: John Gross's including him, with Bacon and Hazlitt, in The Oxford Book of Essays (1991). I would guess that meant more to James than the Order of Australia which was conferred on him in 1992.

It is not just a case of being unable to please all the people all the time that causes the polarising of views about James. Like Marcus Clarke, he is a kaleidoscopic, parti-coloured, harlequinesque, thaumatropic being. With so many strings to his bow, he even more brings to mind Dryden's Duke of Buckingham in Absalom and Achitophel, who `in the course of one revolving moon/ Was chymist, fiddler, statesman and buffoon'. Though only part of that CV applies to James, he is also a television personality, novelist, poet, critic, essayist, serial autobiographer, reporter and chairman of the Internet enterprise Welcome Stranger. As the New Yorker put it, `Clive James is a brilliant bunch of guys.' What he has not yet achieved is a magnum opus, as the other three wizards have done: Conrad in his Everyman History of English Literature (second edition, 2000); Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch; Humphries in the ever-to-be-cherished per sona of Dame Edna.

Somebody of James's rare gifts should have aspired to be more than a brillettante. (I hope I am inventing that word; but James, with his prodigious range of cultural reference, will probably tell me it was minted by Sainte-Beuve or Eugenio Montale.) From his career so far, you might imagine that his top priority was to be a star in café society. The Clive James whom people know best is the one on television. I do not think `unctuousness' is a fair description of his telly manner; but the oxymoron `aggressive sycophancy' might serve for the chat shows in which, for example, he asked ZsaZsa Gabor. who had biffed an LAPD cop, `and what will you wear in prison?' James's scholarship, acute perceptions and underlying seriousness are masked by his television image as a manic purveyor of wisecracks. (The temptation to apply to him, Humphries and Greer Noel Coward's gibe about the Sitwells — 'two wiseacres and a cow' — is strong, but must certainly be resisted.) He was the best of the television critics, not excepting the two hyphenated Smiths, Nancy Banksand Victor Lewis-. In the Seventies some people bought the Observer solely for his television reviews. (A. A. Gill is probably doing the same trick for the Sunday Times today.) James's novels and verse booklets are fun, but not much more: I except the terrific shorter poem 'The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered', which simply has to end up in The Oxford Book of Bile. His three autobiographies are very funny and very honest (`When I tried to kiss her, she laughed') and James is writing about the subject that interests him most in the world — Clive Vivian Leopold James. They are not self-serving accounts, as James rightly says Bertrand Russell's memoirs were. At the same time, they are not much more than enjoyable jeux d'sprit. James excels as a reporter: his recent campaign-trail reports reminded me of Norman Mailer's masterpiece of an article about the young J. F. Kennedy: `Superman comes to the supermarket': it is a pity they appeared too late to get into the collection of James's recent writings.

In the well orchestrated publicity for the two new books, the Evening Standard ran a profile of James by Andrew Billen, illustrated with a colour picture of James wearing a cowboy outfit. (You don't find Professor John Carey or George Steiner capering about in stetsons when they have books out — but there has to be a first time for everything.) Most of the essays OK-corralled contain insights of the kind Larkin admired. One grouch: as the same publishers have issued both volumes, they might have avoided including the same long essay on Orwell in each of them. It is like turning from Channel 1 to Channel 3 at 10.00 pm and finding that the news is on both, and that it is the same news.

In these two books we witness an internecine struggle between James the scholar and James the entertainer, He can be a dryasdust pedant at times. (`This habit has something to do, I suspect, with a confusion between the English past participle and the Latin ablative absolute.), but James the entertainer predominates. `Wit' is one word that will go under his name on his eventual blue plaque. Wit dances about over almost everything he writes like a Mexican jumping bean. This can result in an incongruous flipness. Often you get the impression of an academic trying to show he is one of the lads — like William Hague in his baseball cap. In an essay on Casanova (didn't it just have to be entitled 'Casanova comes again'?) we learn that the great lover did `a stretch in a Spanish slammer' and that the Inquisition 'got' him, `not as a victim but as a fink'. In the role of a paid informer, 'how could he screw up?' James asks. In Vienna, Casanova 'got lucky' by ingratiating himself with a count. In 1789 he began writing his memoirs 'he had gone legit at last'. All this on the same half-page. But the same writer who can inflict this laddish, nudge-nudge stuff on us can, in ex cathedra mode, blind us with show-off allusiveness. On Orwell;

The theoretical work that disenfranchised all total transformations was done by others, such as Karl Popper, Raymond Aron, Leszek Kolokowski and Isaiah Berlin.

One of the few essays which is notably unfair is that on Malcolm Muggeridge, 'Little Malcolm and his Struggle against the Masses'. At first I wondered whether this was because James saw Muggeridge, in the lengthening perspective of television history, as a rival — more forensic, more entertaining, more famous than he. (He is exceptionally unfair about Muggeridge's writings: Muggeridge's essay on Madame Tussaud's is one of the most anthologisable pieces of 20th-century English I know.) But then I realised the true reason for James's slighting of the older man. It was that James had known him only in his later avatar as St Mugg, friend of Mrs Whitehouse, crusader against 'permissiveness', a denouncer of the sins of the flesh in which he had revelled as a young libertine. James never saw — as he would have done if he had grown up in England — the fearless,

sceptical. iconoclastic Muggeridge of the 1950s, usually to be found grilling a hapless cleric or nun about his or her beliefs, or publishing, as editor of Punch, cartoons of the senile Churchill that enraged Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.

In reviewing a book on Australia by Michael Davie, an Englishman who had lived in Australia about as long as James had lived in England, James asserted: 'Nothing quite beats being born and brought up in the country you want to pontificate about.' And this has put an idea in my head, nebulous at the moment, but rapidly firming up. He is not like the other Mr James, from America, who went all soppy about England and wrote those circumlocutory novels. Clive James is more than objective about us. Now, it may be as fruitless as to advise Anita Brookner to lay off writing about lonely women for a while; but I think the great adventure for James could be to go back to Australia to 'find his roots'. As he reminds us, the impressions made on the infant mind are the most potent. I feel that he may be able to muster his arsenal of talents for some Australiabased work of grandeur, just as the art critic and historian Robert Hughes did. If Scott Fitzgerald is still James's idol, why not a Gatsby-like novel about an Australian newspaper proprietor? I have even thought of a title for it: Ozziemandias. Home, James, and don't spare the gas.