The Complete Unreliable Memoirs by Clive James
A far bigger success than Supernatural Gas, the May Week revue that year was directed by Kerry Crabbe, who generously included ‘Slow Motion Wrestling’ unmodified as the second-half pre-closer. The audience rioted again. I had other material in the show, including several songs written with Atkin and sung by Maggie and Julie, but ‘Slow Motion Wrestling’ was my apotheosis in the Footlights, Though all three participants in the sketch contributed to its inventiveness, I was its editor. I took out what didn’t work and packed the rest up tight. For hours we shaped the piece until nothing was superfluous and everything flowed. It was a piece of sculpture extended into time, an elastic Laocoon, a brawl by Balanchine. Nothing could justify so much effort and that was its justification. Some of the upcoming Footlights disapproved of us who were now the ancien regime. David Hare, a brilliant talent with a capacity for organisation almost unheard-of among undergraduates, had a look on his handsome face that plainly suggested one or two of us, and especially one of us, had been around too long. He had a case. From the viewpoint of a politically committed young dramatist with big plans for a new British theatre of Brechtian social analysis, there was something irredeemably insignificant about Footlights. But when I stood at the back of the Arts Theatre and watched hundreds of ordinary members of the public rocking with laughter at the antics of my three inspired clowns, I couldn’t persuade myself that such a moment of communal joy was reprehensible, even if it was socially irrelevant. No society worth living in is without the irrelevant.
I wasn’t at the back door of the Arts Theatre every night. Only every second night. Twice with Buffery and once as a solo act I went through the gruelling experience of a May Ball cabaret. There was applause to be garnered but you had not to mind that it was mixed with the popping of champagne corks, the braying of imported Hooray Henriettas, and the splintering sound of furniture being reduced to toothpicks by a scrum of Hearties. The Pembroke May Ball was the occasion of my solo appearance. Somewhere at the back, the Hearties were duelling with empty bottles of Bollinger. Broken glass fell like rain. On the river that year, Pembroke won the Bumps, or the Lumps, or whatever it was called. The runners-up consoled themselves by burning their boat and throwing the college cat on the fire. David Hare and his admirers would have plenty to react against. They would never forgive themselves for having been at Cambridge. I, on the other hand, had always known that I was just passing through. I took the place for what it had to give, gave back what I had in me, and kept the soul-searching to a minimum, protected by a natural capacity for putting off the moment of reckoning. Everything was a prelude.
18. THE KID’S LAST FIGHT
May week was not only in June, it was two weeks long. Did I remember to say that? In the second week Françoise and I got married. My sole but sensational contribution to the organising of the event was to schedule the reception so that it took place before the ceremony. In the garden of New Hall’s Storey’s Way annexe the Footlights gathered, along with all the editors and leading contributors from the university magazines I had burdened with my contributions. Françoise’s friends, some of them from Italy, looked on with apprehension as the theatricals and the literati tanked up on white wine. It was a bright day and the heat helped. Just in time, the whole party headed off down Castle Hill towards the register office. Françoise and I were in the lead, she looking stunning in a white silk two-piece ensemble, I looking stunned in a grey Carnaby Street suit which had already started to fall apart. Stomping along at the rear came a jazz band featuring Atkin, Sizer, Buckman and Davies. They had played better in their lives, but not when as drunk as that. When the registrar recited my full name there was spluttering in the congregation. Clive Vivian Leopold James wasn’t feeling very solemn either. Or perhaps he was, and was covering up. It would have been characteristic. I always was the kind of Bohemian who had to work hard to keep the bourgeois within himself from breaking out. For how but in custom and in ceremony/ Are innocence and beauty born? I wasn’t innocent and I wasn’t beautiful, but she was both. I swayed while she stood still. Then we all went up the hill again to continue the party. The lawn was so crowded that the jazz hand had to stand in the flower-bed. Strad Blantyre had flown in, on the way through to Germany for one last grand tour before he left for Africa. He had news of Marenko. After long thought, Marenko had burned his draft card. This should have given me pause, but there was no pause to be had. Delmer Dynamo arrived. His tour of Britain had ended in Scotland, when the Bentley got stuck on a narrow stone bridge high over a little river. ‘I was actually in a phone booth calling the AA,’ shouted Delmer happily, ‘when I saw the motherfucker start to roll. She swerved off the end of the bridge, she nosed through this ridiculous little wall, she bounced down into the river and she ended up on her back in about three inches of water. I sold her to the guy who owned the pub for a hundred quid and came down by train. Let ‘em have it. You can blow it out your ass.’
As happens with all empires, the moment of fruition marked the beginning of decline. My academic career was to linger for another six months before I packed it in, but effectively it was all over. My time at the university was almost up. Later that year I directed the Footlights for the Edinburgh Fringe and had the biggest success I was ever to experience in the theatre. If the show had come to London it would have run for a year and my life might have taken a different course. Equity wouldn’t let the show transfer. At the time I thought it was a personal tragedy on a Sophoclean scale. I fought a long delaying action in a doomed attempt to regain the lost momentum. Probably it would have made no difference in the long run. Theatre didn’t really suit me. It didn’t occur to me that this was because the audience was too small. I thought it was because the audience was too large. My picture of myself was as a lonely writer. On a trip to London I met Ian Hamilton at a pub called The Pillars of Hercules in Soho. He had asked me, by post, to write for his influential little magazine The Review. I was already working on my first article, a long piece about E. E. Cummings. Other poets and critics from whom Hamilton had commissioned or was about to commission articles dropped into the pub on the strict understanding that they were staying for only one drink or perhaps two. Ten rounds later they were all still there. Almost instantly I felt about Soho the way I had once felt about Cambridge. Over the umpteenth combination of a pint of bitter with a straight scotch for a chaser, I explained to Hamilton that I had reached another decisive point in my life. ‘You’re a very complicated character,’ Hamilton observed sardonically. I wasn’t, but I resolved to become one as soon as possible. Literary London! I could already see myself in that setting: shy, self-effacing, trembling on the edge, but there. The metropolitan critic.
That story, if I tell it at all, belongs in another book, which will have to be a collection of fragments. It might be a more reliable account than the one I have written up to now, but of necessity it will be less complete. My unreliable memoirs, in which I have tried to tell the full story even if only in edited form, must now come to an end. I could give up my own privacy as I chose. Where other people are concerned there is no choice. Nor should there be. Beyond the point when it ceased to be my own, my life gets harder to write about, and not just because I must tread carefully. There is so much more to say. In a multiplicity of nuance, only fiction can catch the essence. To rearrange the facts is no longer enough. A young man on the make is a comparatively simple mechanism.
Let us take a last look at him, in Cambridge, in that lovely late spring of 1968. The poetry magazine Carcanet has brought out a special issue with a lot of his poetry in it and not much of anybody else’s, which is not necessarily the way he likes things, but if that’s the way they feel, well, let them be happy. A finely burnished piece called ‘Cambridge Diary’ has just appeared in the New Statesman. In the Arts Theatre, actors are saying his words. His songs are being sung. He has married a don. He is on top of his little world. Against a willow tree across the river from the Wren Library, he sits writing in his journal. He has just told it that he is
Epilogue
All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light. There was a time when I got hot under the collar if the critics said I had nothing new to say. Now I realise that they had a point. My field is the self-evident. Everything I say is obvious, although I like to think that some of the obvious things I have said were not quite so obvious until I said them. In my younger and more nervous years, I sustained myself by thinking myself remarkable. It took time to accept the fact that I was ordinary, and more time to be thankful. Born without a sense of proportion, I had it imposed on me by the weight of evidence. My solipsism was already crumbling when I played my World Record Club 12-inch LP of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony over and over at top volume until it drove my mother mad. It was in the glazed«in back verandah of our house in Kogarah, the year I turned eighteen. My Pye carry-gram, with the lid that split into two stereo speakers, had been hefted into position on a chair, with a book underneath to bring it level Willem van Otterloo conducted the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam. I danced to the scherzo. During the adagio I sat on another of the wooden chairs, closed my eyes, and rocked slowly back and forth so that the front legs of the chair lifted an inch off the linoleum. That must have been how Blinky bought the farm. Blinky was my mother’s budgerigar. When the day was cool enough to permit the closing of the Cooper-Louvres, Blinky was allowed out of his cage to roam the floor. On that day he must have roamed under one of the front legs of the chair and been crushed just enough to limp away and die under the crockery cupboard. Though I decline to admit culpability, the thought was never to leave my mind that I might be someone who loved art so much he could kill while in its thrall.
My mother survived the shock of Blinky’s death, and of all the other outrages I have since perpetrated. Readers of the first two volumes of this autobiography often ask me whether she lives and thrives. The answer is that she does both, although she is a different person from the one I have portrayed — no less kind and brave but much more sophisticated, a natural psychologist whose prose, in her letters, has a rhythm and an easy-seeming perspicuity of detail which I would be pleased to hear it said that I had inherited. The point is that I didn’t realise any of that until later. Not realising things until later is the story of my life. This applied, still applies, to the awkward philosophical problem generated by the existence of other people. Even the people I knew best I seldom paused to appreciate. There have been those I loved who had to disappear before I saw their outlines. Usually it was only my story that they dropped out of, so as to continue theirs. Perhaps, in order to forestall enquiries, I should close by giving a quick account of those personages in these three volumes who, having played a formative part in my own dazzling course, influenced it still further by their daunting ability to have destinies of their own. The Australians, in particular, showed a disconcerting tendency to forget that I was meant to be the captain of the ship they filed aboard, laughing and waving, on that summer night, almost thirty years ago, when the band played and the cicadas sang and we all went sailing to adventure.
As I recounted in Falling Towards England, Lilith Talbot went home to marry Emu Coogan. She thought better of it when she got there, perhaps because as a husband he would have been out of his role, which was to be a radical, a gambler, a battler and a legend. A woman can marry a man like that and still stay sane, but she can’t teach school, which was Lilith’s vocation. The year after she went home, Lilith was taken ill with meningitis, and for a further year was on the point of death. Her great beauty melted into the pain. But she was saved, and her marvellous looks returned, and now, at a huge school in the Western Suburbs of Sydney, she has taught a whole generation of young Australians from different ethnic backgrounds how to construct an English sentence — the lesson at the foundation of our democracy, and one which the old country needs to learn again. Much loved by the thousands of pupils who are the children she never had, Lilith lives alone in an apartment at the edge of the harbour. From her window in the evening can be heard the tinkle of the moored yachts, like wind-chimes in a water garden. After twenty years I found her again, and although I do nothing for her except invite myself to tea, I am a better suitor to her now than I ever was when we were lovers. My past, of which she was a crucial part, served to civilise my future, and now, in the present, and despite the handicap of my frozen heart, our friendship, restored through good fortune after being broken by neglect, will last until one of us dies, to be mourned by the other.
Robin was three different women, all Catholics: a Holy Trinity. With an overwhelming two-thirds of this group I failed to establish the intimacy here recorded. One by one they went home to Australia, where they now think of London as a part of their upbringing, in which — so one of them secretly assures me – I featured as a marginal, affectionately tolerated part of the geography, like Soane’s Museum or Madame Tussaud’s. At the time I preened myself as no end of a rogue. Now I see that my love-life was a cliche outclassed by that of any tom-cat. The tremendous, condemnatory last act of Don Giovanni was written for Don Juan, not for a feckless young opportunist whose beard had grown because he was too lazy to shave. From the women I did not marry I took what I could get away with, including—a gluttony which can look like generosity in the right light – pride at having given pleasure. More often I gave pain, and probably more often than I thought. It would be hypocrisy, however, to say that I didn’t enjoy being a free agent. It would also be ill-advised to say that I did. Marriage is supposed to put a stop to all that. Françoise is not the woman I married, who certainly has the quality of innocence, but only in the sense of being incorruptible by the knowledge to which her high intelligence gives her access. She knew all about me. She knows all about me now, and knows above all that the real blank in this book is not where she should be, but where I should be. In our prurient time, this true age of revelations, even the most sensitive sometimes find it hard to accept that the lasting involvement of two human beings must remain a mystery. The reader has the right to know, however, that something like the wedding in the last chapter happened something like that, and that something like the same marriage is still in existence twenty years later. The long storm of divorce that has blown away the marriage contracts of our generation continues to leave my hair unruffled — what there is of it, and for what such an exemption is worth. Perhaps my house is being saved up for last. Anything more specific I will have to say in a novel, where one can pile in all the right facts, as long as they lead in the wrong direction.
Some of the Australians went home, some stayed away, and much has since been made of who fulfilled his duty and who betrayed it; but the truth is that it all came down to personality in the end. Brian C. Adams, who had struck me as the prototype of the prematurely middle-aged academic, just as I had struck him as the extreme case of the delayed adolescent, went back to Adelaide to begin a university career which I loudly condemned in advance as a caricature. As things have turned out, he has played an important part in furthering the movement to give the study of Australian literature its due dignity without succumbing to provincialism. Particularly impressive, in every article he writes, is his mature, humane judgment, which I would once have said — did often say — that he could never possess. Some people develop, and sometimes they have to do that by throwing off the limiting estimation of those who know them. The privilege I always claimed for myself, of putting off until later the onus of knowing better, I should have more readily extended to others. It might even have been preferable, in the matter o