Clive James AO CBE FRSL FAHA 1939 - 2019
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AUSTRALIAN ACADEMY OF THE HUMANITIES humanities.org.au Clive James AO CBE FRSL FAHA 1939 - 2019 character played by Tyrone Power in the 1942 film, This Above All. He was born in the Sydney suburb of Kogarah where, with a brief time in Jannali when he and his mother lived there with his Aunt Dot, he grew up. He had no recollection of his father, Albert Arthur James, who with other freed prisoners-of-war died in a plane crash in Taiwan in 1945. James later described this as the ‘defining event’ of his life. His mother (Minora May, née Darke) was thus, in his words, ‘the only pillar of strength available’, and to her fell the task of dragging him off to Wikipedia, CC BY 2.0 school. His Unreliable Memoirs (1980) brings Where to start on the daunting task of writing to irresistible life these early school years and an obituary for a polymath such as Clive out-of-school activities, such as building a James: critic, poet, social commentator, network of tunnels under the garden and author and broadcaster, among other other juvenile pranks in a changing descriptors? He had established awe-inspiring neighbourhood. reputations in so many fields that the only The educational horizons opened to him at safe route is to begin at the beginning. Sydney Technical High School were much less Though ‘the kid from Kogarah’ became known beguiling than, say, sport, ‘the Cubs’ or ‘the throughout the English-speaking world (and pictures’, all of which he threw himself into. possibly in other linguistic locations), he was His obsession with ‘the pictures’, even to the actually born Vivian Leopold James, on 7 point of eating glutinous lollies called Fantails October 1939. However, in that year the film wrapped round with mini-biographies of film of Gone with the Wind was released and, with stars (i.e., fan tales), initiated one of his key Vivien Leigh’s award-winning playing of career strands: he was early becoming a critic. Scarlett O’Hara, the name, as he wrote in his As a writer, he started a wall magazine at first memoir, ‘became irrevocably a girl’s school, inviting others to contribute, though name no matter how you spelt it’ and ‘little he ‘usually decided that hardly anyone’s boys saddled with it went through hell.’ His contributions were up to standard except mother allowed him to choose a new first mine.’ He writes with a deadpan self-praise name and he settled on Clive, the name of the that tells us exactly how to read him in his five OBITUARIES 2019– 20 1 AUSTRALIAN ACADEMY OF THE HUMANITIES humanities.org.au memoirs, though our reading is often with contributing to student periodicals and interrupted by laughing out loud even when with the Footlights theatrical club, of which he alone. became president in 1967. As in his years at Sydney University, putting first things first He graduated from Sydney University with an demanded that course work took a second arts degree with Honours in English in 1961, place. He often said that he loved reading though, considering what else he was doing anything that wasn’t on the course. during his four years there, it is surprising that he was able to spare the time to earn this His third memoir, May Week was in June scholarly outcome. For instance, he directed (1990, sub-titled Unreliable Memoirs the annual students’ revue, became the Continued), chronicles his Cambridge career in literary editor of Honi Soit, the student which he claims: ‘I found my way by getting newspaper in which his first poems were more lost than ever’, and that there: ‘I had published, and fell in with a group of writers landed in the lap of the only kind of luxury I and aesthetes who were known as the have ever cared about – a wealth of Downtown Push, or just ‘the Push’, whose opportunity.’ He undoubtedly made the most eclectic literary and other interests were of this latter abundance he found at regularly lubricated at the Royal George Hotel, Cambridge. He wrote masses of poetry, film and whose other ‘members’ included reviews, whatever was on offer: ‘Soon I was Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes. appearing in every publication,’ he recalled. Shortly after appearing in a number of After landing at Southampton in January 1962, Footlights sketches, he was sent to London for he made his way to London through ‘a familiar what proved the disastrous opening night of landscape made strange by being actual The Charge of the Light Fandango, the revue instead of transmitted through cultural he had co-authored, but subsequent intermediaries [such as British films]’. His Footlights ‘smokers’ attracted serious interest account of a bohemian if rigorous lifestyle from London agents. The latter, involves the difficulty of finding adequately unsurprisingly, were attracted by the likes of paid employment and moving from one Peter Cook, Eric Idle, and others he would austere dwelling-place to another. As he later interview when he became a hugely wrote in his second memoir, Falling Towards popular TV host. England (1985), he was at one point: ‘Jobless in winter in a paper bag’, the latter having Perhaps not many people, not even contained a mattress bought by a flatmate. celebrities, have five volumes of memoirs to their name, but as well as the three noted After three years and an unlikely series of above James later authored a further two – jobs, such as library assistant and sheet-metal North Face of Soho (2006) and The Blaze of worker – anything to pay the rent and fund Obscurity (2009), which documented (though addiction to film, theatre, opera and that sounds more ‘reliable’ than he would cigarettes – he was accepted into Pembroke have allowed) the television career that made College, Cambridge to read English. The word him a household name. As a memoirist, he ‘read’ needs some qualification: ‘Reading off had a remarkable gift for interweaving the the course was in my nature. My style was to manoeuvres of his wildly diverse personal read everything except what mattered.’ That career(s) with a most resonant sense of the he finally achieved a satisfactory degree can times and places in which these took place only be a tribute to his dazzling intelligence and the many others who became part of his rather than his diligence, because for so much life. of his time at Cambridge he was preoccupied OBITUARIES 2019– 20 2 AUSTRALIAN ACADEMY OF THE HUMANITIES humanities.org.au For instance, May Week Was in June evokes phenomenal. In 1972, he became the not just his adjusting, as a ‘radical socialist’, to television reviewer for The Observer. If this the very much more conservative culture of weren’t enough, there were also seven the University’s historic portals, and its volumes of his articles, which evince not just presence as ‘an aggregate of colleges’. With the dazzling wit and lethal intelligence of his never-flagging wit, he shares his reaction to prose but also the sheer prolificacy and the habits of dons, to the differing astonishing range of his interests and demeanours of public school alumni, to intellectual grasp. colonials like himself, to the odd American’s Take for example, The Meaning of ‘newly anglicised diction’, and the ferocities of Recognition, which was published in 2005, the Leavisite disciples and of their opponents. several years after his retirement (to use the Mind you, he was himself capable of the odd latter term loosely). In this volume of 367 waspishness, claiming of Leavis that his ‘views densely-packed pages, he ponders matters as were almost impossible not to misrepresent, disparate as a new translation of Madame because they were designed so that only he Bovary, the prickly relationship between press could hold them.’ and politics in the days of Blair and Despite his reluctance to spend time reading Mandelson, the role of philosophers (‘they prescribed works when there so many more should illuminate realities’), the non-working enticing activities that clamoured for his marriage of Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise as attention, he did graduate with a better result part of his reflection on the function of (a 2:1) than he’d expected – or, in some ways, celebrity in society, or of how ‘Australian deserved – and then began a PhD on Shelley. voices help to project the English language’ in But Shelley never made the claims on his time an account of some of his fellow artists in the of other pursuits such as weekly film critic for UK. And so on…and on. the Cambridge Review or the endless The first of his collected pieces, Visions Before demands of the Footlights revue that would Midnight (1977), is, in his terms, ‘the take him to London or the Edinburgh Fringe or incidental result of my first four years as the his passion for music ‘and the very idea of my Observer’s television critic’, ‘incidental’ PhD thesis slipped further back into the past’. because he had ‘only fleeting notions of He was by now, in his own words, ‘a serious preserving any of it for posterity’. Well, he was writer.’ wrong about that, as his reviews selected here Another distraction was his marriage to and in the next such anthology, The Crystal Prudence ‘Prue’ Shaw (or ‘Françoise’ as she is Bucket (1981) remain as richly rewarding and known in the memoirs) in 1968, also a provocative decades later, full of insight into Cambridge scholar and rather more devoted the range of television offerings and into the to that calling than James. They had two period that gave rise to these.