Clive James, who died in 2019, was a TV presenter, critic and poet. He wrote five volumes of ‘unreliable memoirs’, several poetry and essay collections, and a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Foot plumps for Aslef but as if in spite The TUC does not and the strike’s broken. Foot’s coiffe should go a purer shade of white Unless his fiery gesture was a token To make him look a tough nut in a fight For all those gritty doctrines he has spoken On that day when they have to be renounced And Arthur Scargill’s strike bid must be trounced.
Admirers of Godfrey Smith’s ‘Sunday Times’ column, one of whose principal concerns is the various promotional free meals to which he is invited, were not surprised to learn, from a recent feature article by him in the same newspaper, that lunch is his idea of heaven.
When Godfrey Smith goes up to Heaven He’ll see more cream teas than in Devon And angels in...
As fifty thousand people in Warsaw March for Walesa and for Solidarity, They rate, beside the South Atlantic war, The same space as a fun run staged for charity. The Falklands dwarf even El Salvador, Which ought to be a ludicrous disparity, But clear-cut issues fought out to a finish Have sex appeal no slaughter can diminish.
No Australian poet before Christopher Brennan was fully conscious of the artistic problem posed by isolation from Europe, and no Australian poet since has been fully disabled by it. Brennan’s life and death dramatised the problem once and for all. It was and is a true problem, not just a difficulty. Brennan, whether he wanted to or not, lived the problem to the full, and thereby, on everybody else’s behalf, got it out into the open. His messy crucifixion was all the more thorough for the degree to which he co-operated, and it doesn’t have to happen again. If it does, then someone is being pretentious. Brennan spent too much of his time acting as an awful warning. That was one of the main reasons why his achievement fell so far short of his ambition: he put less energy into writing poetry than into being the poet. It was an aberration in which personality conspired with circumstances, creating a tangle which Axel Clark, in this admirably hard-headed critical biography, does much to sort out.
As Amersham achieves Privatisation And sells the way hot cakes do when dirt cheap We realise with a sickening sensation, As of a skier on a slope too steep, That if the soundest firms owned by the nation Are flogged, the duds are all we’ll get to keep – And when the auction ends they’ll sell the hammer. We’re heading downhill faster than Franz Klammer.
Everyone agrees that The Divine Comedy is wonderful. Just a shaft of song from the spirits in paradise, a phrase or two of Marco of Lombardy in purgatory explaining the birth of the soul, or even...
‘An onlooker’, Clive James writes in North Face of Soho (2006), the fourth instalment of his memoirs, ‘might say that I have Done Something. But I’m still not entirely...
Recently in this journal C.K. Stead explained the dilemma of being a popular Australasian performer in England: ‘He can only be fully understood at home: but there he’s likely to...
The qualities these Australian writers have in common, apart from their nationality, are exotic industry, autobiographical fluency and, to adapt what somebody once said about Ford Madox Ford, a...
Among Australians, there are punishments for making one’s career abroad, just as there are for living and writing at home. Few of these punishments have come Clive James’s way. His...
The more Britain affects a déclassé manner while Thatcherism increases the gulf between rich and poor, the more it comes, superficially, to resemble Australia. Linguists speculate...
It was the young Auden, writing at about the time he was composing his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, who declared that you could tell if someone was going to be a poet by considering his...
Opera and opera-going proliferate at very strange times. The opera revival of the last decade is a matter of considerable interest, since in some ways it seems so inappropriate, so profligate,...
‘What a chapter of chances,’ Tristram Shandy’s father says, ‘what a long chapter of chances do the events of this world lay open to us!’ The thought is echoed in the...
‘He is stuck on himself. It isn’t all that easy to see why. He is, after all, only a literary journalist.’ Clive James hardily dispatches someone who is a television celebrity...
The first ‘poems’ by Clive James I can remember seeing were in fact song lyrics written to go with the music of Pete Atkin. I call them ‘poems’ because that’s what...
It is common knowledge that British publishing is in the doldrums. This is generally thought of as a temporary state of affairs, but it is conceivable that something irreversible is taking place....
A little over a year ago, a very good play was screened on BBC Television, Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills. A troupe of adult actors climbed into shorts and re-enacted the days of...
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