26 | November 6, 2014 | cambridge-news.co.uk | Cambridge News
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THE HEADLINER: CAMBRIDGE LITERARY FESTIVAL
Writer, presenter, poet and national treasure, Clive James is nothing less than impressive, and rather lovely to boot. On the eve of a rare public appearance at Cambridge Literary Festival, ELLA WALKER visits him at his Cambridge home.
Editor: Ella Walker email: ella.walker@cambridgenews.co.uk For breaking entertainment news for the city, visit cambridge-news. co.uk/whatson Follow @CamWhatsOn on Twitter
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MUST admit, I was born too late to remember watching Clive James on TV. He says as much as soon as he opens the door to his Cambridge home, built more out of books than bricks: “You’re very young.” My already jangling nerves jangled some more. It is a daunting thing, interviewing the man who spent decades quizzing the giddily bright and famous for ITV and the BBC. “Well, I’m a daunting person,” he says wryly when I admit my fears. “I’m so threatening, haha.” The Australian author, who celebrated his 75th birthday in October, has gently grilled everyone from Stephen Fry and Billy Connolly to Frank Sinatra and the Spice Girls, wielding a mastery over the realm of television throughout the 80s and 90s that was only ever challenged by the prowess of Parkinson. “I was hoping to interview [Fidel] Castro but it didn’t come off. On the whole I met them all,” James recalls. “I’d had enough by the end, I can tell you that.” You wouldn’t have guessed it, but he was always more comfortable presenting straight to camera, and is rather happier being the interviewee these days. “I was always pretty embarrassed about interviewing people. I could never ask them awkward questions and I didn’t like being asked awkward questions myself,” he remembers. “Interviewing was hard work. Sometimes the ‘customers’ as I used to call them, were as nutty as fruitcakes.” James doesn’t fit the term ‘nutty’ himself – he’s funny, engaging and fantastically bright – but his career has had elements of the madcap to it (not limited to his launching of Cuban novelty singer, the perpetually happy Margarita Pracatan, on The Clive James Show). He has been culture critic at The Observer, TLS and the New York Review of Books, was great friends with Princess Diana, has written five memoirs (most notably Unreliable Memoirs – he has plans for a sixth), spools of arts criticism, numerous forays into fiction, as well as a recent, much-applauded translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Prolific doesn’t begin to cover it; neither does the term ‘national treasure’. “Haha, which nation is that?” he says self-effacingly. “I think I was a national treasure in New Zealand once, which was a bit odd.” When we meet it is to discuss the release of Poetry Notebook, a beautiful edition of James’s critical
Cambridge News | cambridge-news.co.uk | November 6, 2014 | 27
THE HEADLINER: CAMBRIDGE LITERARY FESTIVAL
‘I’d quite like to write my obituary. What the hell, I’ve had a good spin.’ thoughts, essays and snatched musings on poetry from the past 50 years, which he’ll be talking about during a rare public appearance at Cambridge Literary Festival. He promises to recite a few of his own poems on the night, as well as answering questions, and explains it’ll be a “sit-down stand-up routine” because he hasn’t got his “usual energy”. Born Vivian James in 1939, and named after a tennis player, the writer first came to Cambridge in 1964 to study English literature at Pembroke College (“I used to read off the course and 50 years went by and I’m still doing it”). Despite a lacklustre approach to lectures, he swiftly became president of Footlights (“Shamefully extracurricular activities were what I did best”), and made the University Challenge team: “I won for my team in the first week supplying a crucial answer and in the second week I messed it up, supplying the wrong answer at the crucial time. I Poetry take the blame!” k, Noteboo by He was persuaded to published out return to the city for good is Picador, ced by his eldest daughter now pri after being diagnosed with .9 £14 9. leukaemia and emphysema in early 2010. Clive James is dying, you see, and has been for some time thanks to an energetic abuse of booze and fags in his youth (he once claimed to smoke 80 cigarettes a day). He needs to be close to Addenbrooke’s (“which I think is the most marvellous place, they’ve saved my life three or four times”), where he goes every three weeks to have his vanished immune system
When I finally got out of hospital in 2010, I had to decide whether to just lie down, eat some grapes and have a drink, or whether I would get on with my work. I chose the second course and I don’t regret it
recharged and replaced, but, he says, it’s no true hardship being confined to Cambridge: “It is astonishingly lovely”. Death is not something James discusses in hushed tones. In fact, he speaks about it so candidly that the finality of it seems like the much delayed punchline of a long-running joke that is far funnier than its finale. In fact, dying has given him a “whole new topic to write about”, and he’s surprisingly jolly about it. “A lot of my poems are about how ill I am and how I probably won’t live beyond next week. I publish a poem and everyone says ‘cluck cluck, how wonderful, how brave’, but then embarrassingly I’m still here! You see the problem?” he laughs. “Approaching death doesn’t scare me, just that I won’t be able to write about it any more.” Physically, his voice is more fragile, his face less rounded and his ears less amenable (“I am awfully deaf”) than in the YouTube footage of him I’d mainlined in the run-up to our chat, but he is just as sharp, just as witty and just as determined to keep on working. “Everything I ever did was writing,” he says forcefully. “Nothing will stop me except one thing and until then I appear to be writing unstoppably about it. It’s a natural event, I’m very lucky that it’s a natural event. “There’s nothing brave about it because one’s had a life. Also I have a version of my diseases that doesn’t hurt, which is a great stroke of luck. But I was born into a time, the 1940s when the Second World War was on
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28 | November 6, 2014 | cambridge-news.co.uk | Cambridge News
THE HEADLINER: CAMBRIDGE LITERARY FESTIVAL
“MAINLY QUITE CHEERY”: Clive James; above, in the University Challenge team in 1968; below, in Ely Cathedral’s Lady Chapel promoting his book Angels over Elsinore in 2008
You’d like to be a poet? What do you want to do, starve? Clive James on . . .
From page 27 and young people were getting killed by the million in Europe. I never forgot that and I think it’s a great blessing to have been given a life to lead that’s lasted so long.” He adds thoughtfully: “I don’t seem to have deserved so much luck. That’s why I don’t like luck, it’s not fair.” What he sees as luck, most would see as sheer hard work, regardless of his protestations that he’s “actually a lazy chap”. James’s still-rising poetic profile is a case in point. It’s been subject to a “late flowering” in the words of The Spectator, thanks to his most recent poem, the crushing, heart wrenching Japanese Maple (“Your death, near now, is of an easy sort”). James laughs that he’s already getting a taste for “posthumous fame”. “That tree’s famous now,” he tells me, nodding towards the garden, where fronds of orange and red lick against the window. “It’s already changing its personality; it had sweet simplicity when I first met it and now it’s carrying on like Lindsay Lohan! I’m afraid that fame did the same to me, but I try and control it.” Aside from Poetry Notebook, a compact piece, jauntily and brightly written, full of insight that knowingly points out how he will not allow his mortality to hamper his writing, James is as prolific as ever with “a couple of books on the go”, and has plans for a flurry of new works next year: the sixth memoir, a shiny new edition of his Collected Poems, called Sentenced To Life (“It’s on the schedule even if I’m not,” he quips), a sequel to Cultural Amnesia and a
book on his literary consumption for Yale University Press in America, titled Latest Readings. “I don’t accuse them of cynicism but I’m sure some clever editor realised that that would be just the right little book that would end with dot dot
dot,” he grins. Is it strange to work on something you know you may not finish? “When I finally got out of hospital in 2010, I had to decide whether to just lie down, eat some grapes and have a drink, or whether I would
get on with my work and I chose the second course and I don’t regret it,” says James. “I’d like to write my own obituary anyway. I write quite good obituaries, I’ve spent several years now writing them for almost all my friends. It would be [strange], but what the hell, I’ve had a good spin.” You toe the line between the morbid and the cheery marvellously well, I tell him. “I’m mainly quite cheery,” he agrees. “I spring about shedding sweetness and light! It’s not really my view of the world, which is very tragic and pessimistic. In fact I sometimes wonder why mankind is still here, it’s made such a mess of things. But when you consider what mankind can do, that’s quite inspiring. “So I’ve got a double personality, but then most writers do.” He explains that it is at this crossroads where poetry starts. “The joy of poetry is in the shape, the way it springs along and within that you’ve got control of the form, the movement, the dynamics of it, within that you can be as sad as you like.” Our conversation ends on the far less morose topic of poets and sex appeal, namely the late Felix Dennis – “Poets don’t normally have that many female fans!” – and Lord Byron – “He was running away from them most of the time!” We talk of the bear Byron kept in his rooms at Trinity, Cambridge, which he’d take for walks on a leash through the quadrangle. “Byron’s bear,” James murmurs, lost in thought. “I’d forgotten that. I should write a poem from the bear’s angle; the bear talking; the bear slightly pissed off. That’s a good idea.” You see, he never stops working.
Poetry in schools: “I think it should be banned. And I think anyone caught dealing with it should be put in jail, and anyone caught consuming poetry should have to go around doing public service, cleaning up litter. All in all there should be an atmosphere of punishment, fear and terror, and then the young people might get interested, but they usually don’t get interested if you stand up there and tell them how wonderful it is.” Rappers: “I want them all dealt with. When I come to power there’ll be a special punishment for rappers. I haven’t worked out what it is yet. I think it probably involves crocodiles. I am not impressed.” Fame: “It’s too silly, fame. It’s ruinous actually. You have to be very careful. It’s bad for your personality, of course it is. Luckily, if you’ve got a family they’ll cut you down to size; my family spends most of its time cutting me down to size.” Making money: “No one really gets rich out of writing books.” Today’s chat show hosts: “They all work very hard, but I don’t envy them. It’s a very hard way of making a dollar, or in Jonathan Ross’s case, millions and millions of dollars. I think Graham Norton is probably the cleverest.” His advice for budding poets: “I would get out there and discourage anyone writing poetry, I’d say: what do you want to do, starve? Do you want to reduce your parents to tears? Do you want to add to the world’s stock of only slightly better than mediocre artworks? I’d get a terrible reputation. There are enough poets.”