Clive Drive

Unreliable Memoirs (1980) and Always Unreliable: The Memoirs (2001), Clive James

I first came across Clive James on TV and wasn’t impressed. He’s smug, unfunny and trivial, I thought as I watched him making laboured gags about cheap targets like Japanese endurance-shows. So when I later came across books by him in libraries or second-hand bookshops – The Crystal Bucket (1981) and North Face of Soho (2006) are two titles that come to mind – I didn’t even bother picking them up. Lit’s long, life’s short, and all that.

But one day I came across Unreliable Memoirs (1980), the first volume of his autobiography. And I’d had an interesting literary experience by then. Out of idle curiosity, I’d tried Going to Sea in a Sieve (2012), the autobiography of Danny Baker, someone else I disliked from seeing him on TV (and hearing him on the radio). Before reading Going to Sea, I thought Baker was a brash, loudmouthed vulgarian. Oh, and unfunny and trivial too. But Going to Sea turned out to be one of the best-written, most entertaining and most intelligent autobiographies I’ve ever read. It made me re-think some of my preconceptions not just about Baker but about a lot of other things. Okay, it wasn’t ground-breaking literature and it didn’t reveal the secrets of the Universe, but Baker obviously deserved his success and wasn’t what I thought he was. Going Off Alarming (2014) and Going on the Turn (2017), two further volumes of Baker’s autobiography, were also very good.

Well, if I was so wrong about Danny Baker, perhaps I was wrong about Clive James. So I tried Unreliable Memoirs and discovered that there was no “perhaps” about it. I had indeed been wrong about James. He wasn’t smug, unfunny and trivial. Or not all the time, at least. Certainly not in his vivid and often hilarious evocations of his ’50s childhood and ’60s youth in Australia with a widowed mother. The book gets less good as he grows up and by the time he’s at university the writing is less evocative and less memorable. It’s merely good rather than excellent. In Falling Towards England (1985) and May Week Was in June (1990), the two further volumes of autobiography in an omnibus edition I picked up later, he doesn’t match the best of Unreliable Memoirs. The writing is good, not excellent, and the soon-to-be famous people he’s meeting are less interesting than the never-famous-at-all people he met as a child. But he’s still coming up with clever gags at his own expense and with vivid descriptions of the new places he encountered after leaving Australia for London, Cambridge and Europe. Here he is describing his first visit to Venice:

Before the vaporetto was halfway down the Grand Canal I was already concussed. Heat focused by a nacreous sky like the lining of a silver tureen dissolved the water into a storm of sparks, which were projected as wobbling bracelets of pure light on the otherwise maculate façades of crumbling marble and rotting plaster. The whole place was being eaten alive by liquid luminosity. It was a vision of eternity as soluble as a rusk, God’s love made manifest as a wafer in the world’s wet mouth. – ch. 10, “Attack of the Killer Bee”, May Week Was in June

I like that. I don’t rank Clive James with Evelyn Waugh and Clark Ashton Smith as masters of English prose, but he could certainly turn a phrase. And Italy was where he began turning himself into a remarkable autodidact, able to read and appreciate prose and poetry in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Japanese. He says that at Cambridge he spent most of his time roaming off the curriculum and felt very lucky to earn the 2:1 that allowed him to take a PhD. I don’t usually admire scholarship in the arts or degrees in subjects like EngLit. They’re not serious and they’re mostly pursued by third-rate minds. But I take art and literature themselves seriously. And I admire and even idolize those who can do them well.

From what he writes about professors at Cambridge, James thought pretty much the same. He certainly knew that criticizing great art is not to be compared with creating great art. He himself tried to do both and was obviously a highly intelligent and talented man. A charismatic man too. And an attention-seeker with an unstoppable drive for self-publicity, which is why he ending up wasting his talents on the triviality of TV and the mass media. As Danny Baker is still doing. And yes, okay, like Danny Baker again, James wasn’t writing ground-breaking literature or revealing the secrets of the Universe in his autobiographies. But I can definitely recommend them, especially Unreliable Memoirs. It’s funny, poignant, self-revealing and self-lacerating. Like Baker, James was a much more complex and interesting man than his clowning on TV made me suppose.