Every Third Thought Read online

  Millions responded to these broadcasts. Steve made himself his own story out of a profound commitment to hard-nosed reporting, as well as a deep humanity: ‘I’m absolutely convinced that the more we talk about cancer – both to our families, friends and loved ones – the better it is for all concerned,’ he said. ‘Above all it’s empowering for them.’ And consoling for him.

  A baby-boomer, born in 1958, Hewlett was, in his final year, coming to address the questions that trouble the generations who have been raised to believe they can enjoy lives of infinite possibility: why am I here? what is my fate? where am I going? As a great correspondent, he did this, quite practically, by reporting on his cancer with painful and unflinching candour, never hinting at self-pity.

  Hewlett’s answer to the conundrum of life and death was wise and existential, and highly articulate. With wry good humour and supreme matter-of-factness, he suggested to his audience that ageing is as natural as breathing. Steve filled the void left by the death of religion and the collapse of faith, to give his untimely exit a sense of ritual and a language appropriately expressive of our need for consolation. In so doing, he conducted a master-class in the noble art of dying well. And he did it, extempore, from what became his deathbed.

  Is the silence of the contemporary endgame not medicine’s most discomforting side-effect? More urgently, in 2016, the enemies of the terminally ill are the social media by which everything gets publicized. Some will say that Facebook and Instagram offer comfort, and perhaps they do. Only the bereaved can tell us if the new accessibility of death is a consolation or a curse. Jenni Diski, who was terminally ill for two years, made her own, dry commentary on this race to the end in her posthumous memoir:

  If it were a race, the first man home would be Oliver Sacks with Henning Mankell a close second. Lisa Jardine won a race of her own, staying shtum publicly, her death a surprise except to the few who knew. So Clive James and Diski still battle it out for third place . . . It’s a delicate balance, this publicising of one’s cancer.

  In Gratitude became the perfect symbol of this ‘delicate balance’: it was published in the very week of her death. Not even Diski’s Cambridge neighbour, Clive James, could have orchestrated such an exit.

  16

  ONE FOOT IN THE GRAVE

  ‘I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.’

  Mark Twain

  The curious case of ‘the late Clive James’, defying gravity at home in Cambridge, is almost as singular as Hume’s provocative exit. In the summer of 2013, on news of his failing health, the world’s press gave James the last rites: valedictory interviews, hushed bulletins, and a posse of shiny blonde Australian TV anchormen and women flying to his doorstep.

  These global obsequies turned out to be premature. Clive James did not die, and when I went to visit him in Cambridge on 3 July 2013, on behalf of the Guardian, as one of many media Boswells, I could not put the nosy Scotsman’s curious enquiries out of mind. The Australian writer is not David Hume, but there were some mundane parallels.

  I probably knew James as well as Boswell knew Hume, which is: well enough. Over thirty-something years we have exchanged intermittent conversations. Literary acquaintances, even associates, we weren’t strangers either. We had shared publishers; occasionally, we’d had dinner. When Sarah published The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British, her account of living in Britain as an American journalist, Clive had been a generous supporter of her work. Indeed, he had declared, in a witty conclusion, that she would ‘be hailed as one of England’s supreme analysts, preparatory to her being executed on Tower Green.’

  Few expats know more about the strange, and sometimes baffling, quirks of English life than Clive James. Ever since he landed here in the icy winter of 1962, he has been engaged in a raucously entertaining argument with our national habits. Like many post-war Australians, James came to Britain to get closer to the source of a literature with which he was mildly obsessed. He claims he was simply joining the herd. ‘I did it because everyone else did,’ he told me. ‘And when I got here I ran out of money. It was sixteen years before I had enough money to get home.’

  The convivial, chimes-at-midnight Clive became notorious for trailing his cultural coat with exquisite references to Pushkin and Mallarmé, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, allusions to Freud and Mandarin poetry, and snatches of Ovid and Catullus. In the process, he virtually invented TV criticism at the Observer, infuriated the poetry establishment, and reminded the British reading public what could be done with the English language if you had been raised in the Sydney suburbs and had the good luck not to go to Eton or Winchester. In short, he found a voice. In its prime, there was nothing else quite like it.

  The best of James’s observations – for instance, that ‘Perry Como gave his usual impersonation of a man who has simultaneously been told to say “cheese” and shot in the back by a poisoned arrow’ or that Arnold Schwarzenegger in Pumping Iron resembled ‘a brown condom filled with walnuts’ – had an unequalled, surreal hilarity that, in the words of one awestruck disciple, made ‘your brain yelp with delight’.

  Clive James became celebrated, parodied, acclaimed, patronized, lionized, and disparaged – high and low – but never ignored. In his newspaper days, he was Sunday’s must-read column, a vertiginous mix of literary exuberance, show-off allusion, topical wisecracks, and fuck-you Aussie irreverence. By the mid-70s Clive had become that literary phenomenon, as rare as the hippogriff, a critic who might put Rambo and Rimbaud in the same sentence, and somehow get away with it. In fact, he’d probably done that already, and you hadn’t noticed, being too dazzled by his comparison of Beowulf to Jaws.

  So when, during his ‘last summer’, I travelled up to Cambridge to interview him about his magnum opus, a new verse translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, I was unsure of the outcome. There’d been rumours that he was at one end of the home stretch, and I more than half expected to find him at death’s door. But the old fellow who welcomed me into the terraced house off Chesterton Lane was the same incorrigible Clive with that wicked, conspiratorial smile and sardonic bien être. He was moving slowly in slippers, racked with emphysema, coughing badly, and needing oxygen, but putting his best face on adversity. As well as his admission to intensive care, he was now dwelling in a kind of internal exile: estranged from family, from good health, even from his own native land. His circumstances in old age – James was then seventy-three – evoked a fate that Dante might plausibly have inflicted on a junior member of the damned.

  His health had lately got so bad that he had been obliged publicly to deny a viral rumour of his imminent demise. Possibly he found rejuvenation in the macabre satisfaction of reading rave obituaries from fans. If word of his death had been exaggerated, there was no question, on meeting him in 2013, that he was into injury time.

  ‘Essentially,’ he said, as we settled into the spartan living room of his two-up, two-down terraced house, ‘I’ve got the lot. Leukaemia is lurking, but it’s in remission. The thing that rips up my chest is the emphysema. Plus I’ve got all kinds of little carcinomas.’ He pointed to the place on his right ear where a predatory oncologist had recently removed a threatening growth. ‘I’d love to see Australia again,’ he said. But he dared not venture further than three weeks away from his local hospital. ‘That means I’m here in Cambridge.’ With a vintage display of Anglo-Australian stoicism, James celebrated his incorrigible vitality, quoting the words of the Merrie Monarch, Charles II, about taking ‘an unconscionable time to die’.

  *

  Since then, however, reports of his death had become steadily less credible. As if he had been energized by his stay of execution, his conversation, and his literary output, continued to fizz with wit and wisdom. Just before I began to write Every Third Thought in the late summer of 2015, I went to see him again. He was about to publish another book – Sentenced to Life, a collection of poems –
and had some more things he wanted to get off his chest.

  ‘The end is nigh,’ he said, opening his front door to greet me again, ‘but not that nigh. My obituaries were so fabulous,’ he twinkled, in a preliminary gambit, ‘that I felt more or less obliged to walk the plank.’ Back in 2013, believing he was virtually defunct, he had cooperated with the media’s obsequies, and watched himself being ‘safely buried’. But then, in a cartoonish twist of fate, he didn’t die, after all: he was the Comeback Kid from Kogarah, NSW. It was, he had to concede, with creditable sheepishness, ‘all a bit embarrassing’. At home in a house full of paperbacks and NHS palliatives, this latest conversation defaulted to his afterlife, a subject he treats with sardonic merriment. ‘I’ve got a lot done since my death,’ he remarked, paying tribute to his doctors. He gets his immune system rebuilt every three weeks through a process of immuno-globulin enhancement. ‘It’s quite restful. I sit there all afternoon. I can read a book, and even write something, while they pump in stuff through a tube.’

  I was fascinated to explore the creative dividends of writing with one foot in the grave. This late surge in output is not unprecedented, but many writers half his age and twice as fit would be thrilled to be so productive. As well as publishing his verse translation of The Divine Comedy, a collection of essays, Poetry Notebook: 2006–2014, with other volumes already in the pipeline, he has made so many ‘farewell appearances’ (first in London and then in Cambridge) that his friend P.J. O’Rourke had advised him to ‘soft-pedal this death’s door stuff because people will get impatient’. There had been just one problem with this game-plan, however: its star player.

  Clive Vivian Leopold James had not yet wearied of himself. Far from it. For James, his trips to A&E were an alarm call that perked him up no end. He responded to finding himself in extremis with all the equanimity of a drowning man. Above all, he got serious. ‘I am restored by my decline’, he writes in Sentenced to Life, ‘And by the harsh awakening that it brings.’

  Ever since 1958, Clive James has always written poems that exhibit a strong bias towards entertainment. ‘The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered’ is a classic of light verse. In old age, fulfilling his claim that he is ‘a late developer’, he found a big subject, possibly the biggest, his own last exit. The best blooms from this late flowering, collected in Sentenced to Life, were older, sadder, and wiser, the work of a clown who has found his circus inexplicably dark.

  James, however, remains an Australian ‘larrikin’ with a megaton of inner resource. His glass is never less than half full. He divides his poems into ‘lovelies’ and ‘funnies’. In Sentenced to Life, there are just two ‘funnies’, cabaret turns, ‘about death, doom, and destruction’. This, the Boswell in me discovered, was as close as he would get to the difficult questions surrounding oblivion. More typically, his title poem (‘Sentenced to Life’) describes ‘a sad man, sorrier than he can say’, who confesses that ‘my sin was to be faithless’ and who describes seeing himself afresh ‘with a whole new emphasis’, something perilously close to regret:

  What is it worth, then, this insane last phase

  When everything about you goes downhill?

  This much: you get to see the cosmos blaze

  And feel its grandeur, even against your will,

  As it reminds you, just by being there,

  That it is here we live, or else nowhere.

  Montaigne once observed that we laugh and cry at the same thing, and James has been an old master at playing both sides of the street. ‘Japanese Maple’, which went viral in 2013, caused him some embarrassment, he says. ‘The poem more or less promised that I would only live till autumn. But then autumn came – and there I still was, thinking, “Shucks!” ’ The lyrical maple sapling, meanwhile, has matured into a sturdy young tree, happily flourishing in his back yard.

  Another potential source of awkwardness in his highly public endgame, to which he seems to have become well attuned, is the curse of sentimentality. How does he deal with that? ‘You can’t deal in feelings without running the risk of being sentimental,’ he instructs, and then spins a brilliant summary. ‘ “Sentimental” really means “an excess of feeling without sufficient cause.” I think there’s plenty of cause in my work.’

  That’s an explicit reference to the central theme of Sentenced to Life, the poems written to his wife, Prue Shaw, the dedicatee of the collection. This theme in the book already came with a health warning. When we met in 2013, husband and wife were estranged and James, who had misbehaved badly with another woman back in Australia, was in the middle of a campaign for reconciliation with Prue which, characteristically, he conducted in print. Some of the best poems in the new collection were for her, again. ‘Balcony Scene’, riffing on Romeo and Juliet, closes with this appeal:

  Be wary, but don’t brush these words away,

  For they are all yours. I wrote this for you.

  James’s valedictory melancholia is a powerful source of inspiration. Speaking of the poems addressed to Prue, his friend Tom Stoppard observes: ‘One of the most moving chords ever struck in English literature is the sound of a man falling in love with his wife.’ When I embark on a tactful exploration of this marital minefield, I soon discover that the poet himself has his own splinter of ice firmly in place within. ‘There’s a dilemma,’ he says. ‘I hope that she [Prue] is pleased, and I hope she likes them. But finally the poet writes for himself. I think that what Prue likes about my poems is that they are written for myself.’ A mischievous chuckle. ‘Maybe she thinks my “self” has improved . . . !’

  *

  The phone rings. It’s Addenbrooke’s Hospital booking him to check the wound on his scalp. ‘This stuff happens all the time,’ he says, seeming temporarily lowered by the intrusion of medical concern.

  A beat. ‘I’m a natural inhabiter of the limelight,’ he continues, explaining his ability to work so close to extinction. Surely, at this late stage, he must have a choice about how to live in these final days? ‘That’s the strange thing. I got confined to – ’ he gestures round the kitchen in which we are sitting – ‘to my burrow, but the lights haven’t been switched off.’ He perks up again. ‘It’s very gratifying. The condition of most writers is to be forgotten, and while they’re alive, too. That must be tough.’ He preens irrepressibly, comparing himself en passant to Madonna. ‘Luckily, I’m a story.’

  I imagine that the incorrigible Boswell would ask if he fretted about posterity, but James is already onto that one. ‘Posterity?’ he challenges, with a kind of spooky intuition. ‘It’s here and now. I’ve always thought that it was here. If you play to the gallery, that’s posterity. The best you can hope for is another gallery after you’ve gone, but you won’t see it. Statistically, it’s unlikely that much of what one does will be read for ever. It may just be one or two poems.’ He defaults to another joke. ‘My “Japanese Maple” poem is famous among people who own a Japanese maple.’

  Clive James’s appetite for the limelight is only a small part of the explanation for the show he’s putting on in his final years. He is too steeped in the classics to be ignorant of ‘the Art of Dying’. Sentenced to Life contains a poem of homage, ‘Compendium Catullianum’, whose title was cooked up for him by his neighbour, the classicist Mary Beard. From memory now, he begins to recite some of Catullus’ ‘Carmen 101’, written in memory of the poet’s dead brother, which inspired his own poem.

  Multas per gentes et multa per aequora Vectus

  advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias,

  ut te postremo donarem munere mortis

  et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem.

  ‘It goes on,’ he says, ‘to that famous last line, “atque in perpetuum, frater . . .” ’ He glances out of the window towards the Japanese maple in the garden. ‘Ave atque vale. I learned a lot of Latin poetry here,’ he says. ‘That’s the great thing about a place like Cambridge. So many great minds. It’s like being in Los Alamos.’

  In the closing poem of Sen
tenced to Life, he admits himself to be ‘dying by inches’. This, more than the ironic bravura of his most recent platform appearances, seems to represent the real Clive James, a writer whose commanding voice contains a constant variety of colour and tone. Regretting his frailty, he has become, he says, ‘the echo of the man you knew.’ Death, as much as love, is perhaps the poet’s truest inspiration. ‘I think I’m writing better now than I ever did. That’s where lyricism comes from. The love lyric is always full of approaching sadness.’

  In retrospect, on the train back to London, I wondered if I had not hoped for one last, definitive exchange here that would have nailed the posterity question once and for all:

  Me: You’ve lived so long, and defied the odds so well.

  CVLJ: I have.

  Me: Do you ever have fantasies of immortality?

  CVLJ: My work will be immortal.

  Me: All your work?

  CVLJ: My poems, novels, songs – don’t forget my songs. Let’s face it. Prose is for drongoes. The love lyric is the supreme form of literary self-expression.

  Me: I like that.

  CVLJ: Of course you do. That’s Clive Vivian Leopold James in a nutshell. Your supreme Australian writer.

  Me: Here’s to your immortal memory.

  CVLJ: Hey, that’s not original.

  Me: No, but it’s a good one.

  CVLJ: Fair dinkum.

  Clive James never admits this – why should he? – but he burns with the will to live, and its corollary, a determination not to be forgotten. Almost wistful, he returns to talking about Australia, ‘the land of my youth, the land of permanent youth. I think about that all the time.’ Putting aside, if he can, this area of regret, there’s the relentless tick-tock of failing health. At least he’s in no pain. ‘What I’ve got doesn’t hurt. I’ve been lucky. I don’t know if I could concentrate if I was in pain. I’ve never had to stop.’ I’m impressed by Clive James’s refusal to leave the stage without several curtain calls. In his own show-off way, his response to a highly exposed endgame has been generous and dignified.