Tag Archives: Clive James

“Holding Court” by Clive James

26 Sunday Apr 2015

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Daniel in Ireland

Retreating from the world, all I can do
Is build a new world, one demanding less
Acute assessments. Too deaf to keep pace
With conversation, I don’t try to guess
At meanings, or unpack a stroke of wit,
But just send silent signals with my face
That claim I’ve not succumbed to loneliness
And might be ready to come in on cue.
People still turn towards me where I sit.

I used to notice everything, and spoke
A language full of details that I’d seen,
And people were amused; but now I see
Only a little way. What can they mean,
My phrases? They come drifting like the mist
I look through if someone appears to be
Smiling in my direction. Have they been?
This was the time when I most liked to smoke.
My watch-band feels too loose around my wrist.

My body, sensitive in every way
Save one, can still proceed from chair to chair,
But in my mind the fires are dying fast.
Breathe through a scarf. Steer clear of the cold air.
Think less of love and all that you have lost.
You have no future so forget the past.
Let this be no occasion for despair.
Cherish the prison of your waning day.
Remember liberty, and what it cost.

Be pleased that things are simple now, at least,
As certitude succeeds bewilderment.
The storm blew out and this is the dead calm.
The pain is going where the passion went.
Few things will move you now to lose your head
And you can cause, or be caused, little harm.
Tonight you leave your audience content:
You were the ghost they wanted at the feast,
Though none of them recalls a word you said.

__________

“Holding Court” by Clive James. You’ll find it in his much praised valedictory collection Sentenced to Life. I’ve just ordered my copy.

More from Clive:

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Clive James: Mortality and the Next Generation

28 Saturday Mar 2015

Posted by in Interview

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Bill Moyers: You quote Edmund Wilson, who writes:

The knowledge that death is not so far away, that my mind and emotions and vitality will soon disappear like a puff of smoke has the effect of making earthly affairs seem unimportant, and human beings more and more ignoble. It is harder to take human life seriously, including one’s own efforts and achievements and passions.

Clive James: You know, I believe he was a great man, but I think exactly the opposite. As death approaches, I think more and more of the next generation and their importance. And I just — I just don’t think in the way that he thought.

But that was his limitation. He was a bit of a misogynist, and I’m not. I’m continually astonished by the creativity of human beings and their bravery, especially women. I’ve always been impressed by women’s bravery. They’re on the whole tougher than men… They seem anchored in a way that men aren’t; men are quite often fantasists and idealists. I know I am. It’s my bad tendency, which I have to try and control.

__________

The closing exchange in Moyers’s interview with James on Bill Moyers Journal in 2007.

You can pick up a copy of James’s excellent, expansive survey of civilization Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts or check out more posts and interviews with the Aussie polymath.

And you can also read more:

CliveJames

The Girl Who Wasn’t Anne Frank

28 Saturday Feb 2015

Posted by in History, Interview

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Sophie Scholl

Bill Moyers: You dedicate your book [Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts] to four women. Why?

Clive James: Well, it’s a feminist book really. It’s because many of my generation who grew up during World War II, when the men were away at war — some of whom didn’t come back including my father — and the women were all around us, we got the idea it would be a better world if they were running it. And I still think that.

It’s actually dedicated to women who, in my view, are heroines. Two of them are Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma. But also Sophie Scholl, who was a German. She was a kid, really. A Roman Catholic, she was 21 years old when she was executed by the the Nazis.

Bill Moyers: Why did you choose her?

Clive James: Well, the White Rose resistance group was a fascinating little bunch of kids. There wasn’t much they could do. They could print a few pamphlets. This was late 1942; Stalingrad hadn’t even happened yet. And all they could do was print a bunch of pamphlets and spread them around protesting the Nazi regime and its treatment of the Jews.

They knew what would happen if they got caught. And they got caught, and it did happen. And Sophie actually could have walked away, because the Nazis realized that it would be better PR if she did. But she wouldn’t; she took the hit along with her brother. It’s a great, great story that’s well known in Germany by now but wasn’t during World War II because the Nazis sat on it. Word has since spread, and by now she’s a heroine and should be all over the world.

Bill Moyers: Because?

Clive James: Because she wasn’t Anne Frank. See, Anne Frank, great as she was — Anne Frank was a victim. She was going to die anyway. Sophie didn’t even have to. Sophie did it because of her solidarity with people like Anne Frank. She was saying there’s a basic human bottom line which you can’t cross. You have to stand up and be counted.

The truth is most of us don’t stand up to be counted. It takes heroism to do it. She was just a natural heroine. And the story has endless implications. Would you have done this, for example? Do you know anyone who has this kind of courage? Wouldn’t you prefer to get on with your life and let those things happen to other people?

__________

The opening exchange in Moyers’s interview with James on Bill Moyers Journal in 2007.

You can pick up a copy of James’s brilliant, expansive survey of civilization Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts or check out more posts and interviews with the Aussie polymath.

Scholl died 72 years ago this week.

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When Imams Speak English

13 Friday Feb 2015

Posted by in Interview, Politics, Religion

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CliveJames

Bill Moyers: How does a liberal democracy deal with Islamic preachers who get up and preach violence against the country that protects them?

Clive James: Make them do it in English. America does a fine job. It’s easier in America, because all the Muslims that are living in the area of Detroit — that’s the biggest Muslim community outside the Islamic countries — sing the Star Spangled Banner every morning. You know, American patriotism is much easier to induce.

Australia does a pretty good job, better than Britain, and it’s largely for a single reason: because in Australia, a government spokesman — actually the Deputy Prime Minister — had the strength to get on television and say to all Muslims, ‘You’re welcome here. Of course, you are. You’re citizens. But your young people must give up the dream that this will ever be an Islamic republic. Australia will never have Sharia law, so forget about it. What you’ve got here is law. And you must obey the law.’

He actually got up and said it. This made it easier for moderate Muslims. The top Muslim imam had been preaching radical hatred for years, and he really dissed himself when he said that women deserved everything they got if they took their clothes off. Australian women take their clothes off very easily; it’s a hot country. And he said every woman in a bikini was a message from the devil. And he wanted them all treated as if they were enemies. And his own fellow imams managed to force him to step down.

What gave them courage to do that is they realized the state was unequivocally on their side.

Terror has the advantage. For example, terrorism wants to destabilize your justice system. The minute you get people proposing new laws where people can be detained forever or tortured, it means terrorism is winning. That’s exactly what terrorism wants. That will recruit more terrorists. It will turn the jails into Al Qaeda universities which is what is going to happen in Britain unless we’re very careful.

__________

James and Moyers, talking on Bill Moyers Journal in 2007.

What Good Is Art in the Face of 21st Century Terrorism?

09 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by in Interview, Philosophy

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Charlie Hebdo

Bill Moyers: This barbarism we see today, the rise of radical elements of Islam. What good is humanism against it?

Clive James: Well, the constant message of my book is that you must pursue humanism for its own sake. A utilitarian view won’t work. You’ve got to know and love these things for its own sake.

There’s no guarantee that civilization will continue. It’s always shown fairly robust signs of being able to overcome any kind of totalitarian organization. The interesting thing about World War II was that the Nazis were quite well organized and the Japanese were quite well organized — compared with, say, the U.S. and Britain at the start of the war, which weren’t organized at all. I mean, the U.S. had a smaller armed forces than Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s.

But within a very short time the democracies organized themselves better. There’s something about the creative force of liberal democracy which gives you hope that it can overcome any challenge including terrorism.

I’m sure terrorism can punch very large holes in western civilization and probably will. Let’s be fatalistic: yeah, it’s very hard to stop a bomber who’s ready to kill himself — very hard. But there’s every reason to think that civilization is simply too strong to be brought down by terrorist activity. But I don’t want to foist on you any false hopes; and it would be a false hope to say that if you learn enough, if you love Botticelli enough, if you listen to Beethoven enough then the enemy will retreat. It’s not going to happen.

Clive James 2

__________

Clive James and Bill Moyers, talking on Bill Moyers Journal on August 3rd, 2007.

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“Lessons of Darkness” by Clive James

01 Monday Jul 2013

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Clive JamesBut are they lessons, all these things I learn
Through being so far gone in my decline?
The wages of experience I earn
Would service well a younger life than mine.
I should have been more kind. It is my fate
To find this out, but find it out too late.

The mirror holds the ruins of my face
Roughly together, thus reminding me
I should have played it straight in every case,
Not just when forced to. Far too casually
I broke faith when it suited me, and here
I am alone, and now the end is near.

All of my life I put my labour first.
I made my mark, but left no time between
The things achieved, so, at my heedless worst,
With no life, there was nothing I could mean.
But now I have slowed down. I breathe the air
As if there were not much more of it there

And write these poems, which are funeral songs
That have been taught to me by vanished time:
Not only to enumerate my wrongs
But to pay homage to the late sublime
That comes with seeing how the years have brought
A fitting end, if not the one I sought.

__________

Leçons des Ténèbres by Clive James, written and published in the New Yorker this May. Pick up James’s new tour de force collection Nefertiti in the Flak Tower: Poems.

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Cat in the BackgroundPlate Tectonics

“Plate Tectonics” by Clive James

03 Friday May 2013

Posted by in Poetry

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Cat in the Background

In the Great Rift, the wildebeest wheel and run,
Spooked by a pride of lions which would kill,
In any thousand of them, only one
Or two were they to walk or just stand still.
They can’t see that, nor can we see the tide
Of land go slowly out on either side,
As Africa and Asia come apart
Inexorably like a broken heart.

We measure everything by our brief lives
And pity most a life cut shorter yet.
Granddaughters get smacked if they play with knives,
Or should be, to make sure they don’t forget.
So think the old folk, by their years made wise,
Believing what they’ve seen before their eyes,
And knowing what time is, and where it goes.
Deep on the ocean floor, the lava flows.

__________

“Plate Tectonics” by Clive James, which you’ll find in his excellent anthology The Book of My Enemy: Collected Verse 1958-2003.

Picture: my backyard in Houston last summer.

We Are Not Provided with Wisdom

22 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by in Literature

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Proust

“There is no man… however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man—so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise—unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. I know that there are young fellows, the sons and grandsons of famous men, whose masters have instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement in their schooldays. They have, perhaps, when they look back upon their past lives, nothing to retract; they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile.

We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you are not the result of training at home, by a father, or by masters at school, they have sprung from beginnings of a very different order, by reaction from the influence of everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory.”

__________

From Within a Budding Grove, the second volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

A selection of this passage is quoted in one of the books I’m currently reading, Clive James’s expansive and brimming collection of essays Cultural Amnesia. On the bus home tonight, as I fanned through its pages, I came across this passage and immediately felt a cool and clarifying sense of uplift — the kind that washes over you in that moment when a paragraph or lyric or painting somehow expresses a thought you had but couldn’t recognize or express until something else spoke it to and for you. This passage from Proust did exactly that, and while I haven’t read his formidable series of novels, this paragraph certainly indicates why they are so loved and lauded.

Women Are Really Much Nicer Than Men

25 Tuesday Sep 2012

Posted by in Literature, Poetry

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Kingsley and Hillary Amis

Between the Gardening and the Cookery
Comes the brief Poetry shelf;
By the Nonesuch Donne, a thin anthology
Offers itself.

Critical, and with nothing else to do,
I scan the Contents page,
Relieved to find the names are mostly new;
No one my age.

Like all strangers, they divide by sex:
Landscape Near Parma
Interests a man, so does The Double Vortex,
So does Rilke and Buddha.

“I travel, you see”, “I think” and “I can read’
These titles seem to say;
But I Remember You, Love is My Creed,
Poem for J.,

The ladies’ choice, discountenance my patter
For several seconds;
From somewhere in this (as in any) matter
A moral beckons.

Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart
Or squash it flat?
Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart;
Girls aren’t like that.

We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff
Can get by without it.
Women don’t seem to think that’s good enough;
They write about it.

And the awful way their poems lay them open
Just doesn’t strike them.
Women are really much nicer than men:
No wonder we like them.

Deciding this, we can forget those times
We stayed up half the night
Chock-full of love, crammed with bright thoughts, names, rhymes,
And couldn’t write.

__________

“Something Nasty in the Bookshop” by Kingsley Amis.

The Austrian satirist Carl Kraus made the impeccable observation that a girl’s sexuality is to a guy’s as an epic is to an epigram. And that’s basically what Kingsley Amis is saying here: love is, for a woman, a deep and lasting emotional experience, and for guys it’s, well, more of an intense, spasmodic event.

Hence, when approaching a bookshelf — as Kingsley is doing in this scene — guys go for Landscape Near Parma, The Double Vortex, and Buddha, because, after all, “our stuff can get by without it.” Girls, on the other hand, don’t think that’s good enough; they’re drawn to I Remember You, Poem For J. or Love is My Creed. So a man’s love is of his life a thing apart, but girls aren’t like that.

Still, a man’s desire to communicate “I travel,” “I think,” and “I can read” through what he picks up off the shelf has an essential role to play in romance. As the great wit and womanizer Clive James said in a recent interview: “I don’t think that if you use sex as a cure for your solitude you’re going to end up very well. You have to be capable of self-sufficiency. In order even to be interesting to the woman you desire. I have found it very common in relationships that if one person is fulfilling themselves through the other, then the writing is already on the wall. They both need to be fulfilled. Two interesting people can be together or apart or in constant contact, and it will last. But if one person is living through the other, then the whole thing is heading towards a collision.”