"The BBC Radio 4 series A Point of View — a ten-minute weekly reflection on a topical issue — has been on the air since 2007. Clive was one of the inaugural contributors, and recorded two series of ten pieces in each of the years 2007, 2008 and 2009. The entire set of sixty transcripts, together with new postscripts, was published in book form, under the title A Point Of View, in 2011. You can listen to a selection of the original broadcasts in the 'Radio' section of this site." [ — from clivejames.com ]

In 2010, when I fell ill, I had no means of knowing that there would ever be a volume of my recent verse called Nefertiti in the Flak Tower, or called anything. All I had was a handful of poems. But I found myself writing more of them even when I was in hospital. “Vertical Envelopment” was written while I was having my life saved in Addenbrooke’s hospital, Cambridge, UK; and “Whitman and the Moth” was written while I was having my life saved all over again in Mount Sinai hospital, New York. Eventually, in 2012, it was time for a volume, and I picked Nefertiti for the title because I have always liked the idea of her imperturbable gaze quivering only slightly as the guns of her latest tomb all went off at once. As a symbol of unshakeable purpose it seemed too good to miss.

Ever since, in Florence in the mid-1960s, my wife introduced me to the miracle of Dante's versification in the Divine Comedy, I wondered how an English translation might get near transmitting the momentum of the original. There were hundreds of different translations that transmitted the historical details, but the way the verse danced inexorably forward was, in my view, part of the subject. Decades went by and finally I thought I had found a way. The actual work took me several years before I fell ill in early 2010, and then afterwards it took several more years to prepare the manuscript for the presses both in New York and London. During that second, long period of reading proofs and fiddling with punctuation, I can remember thinking that it would be a pity to vanish before the book came out. So Dante joined a whole raft of pills and treatments in the task of keeping me alive.

Then, in 2013, the book was published in the US, Australia and the UK. On the whole I can't complain about its critical reception. I thought one or two of the critics were too keen to demonstrate that they, too, knew something about Dante, but I couldn't blame them for feeling proprietorial. Dante is a gigantically great poet but everyone who reads him feels that he is writing for them alone. My only real problem with the book's reception was that I felt anxious about whether or not my publishers would make a return on their investment. Nobody knows how many copies a book consisting of more than fourteen thousand lines of English verse is supposed to sell. One's best hope, surely, was to catch the next generation of students. Failing that,however, there was still the satisfaction of having done one's utmost. I can only hope that my translation has some of Dante's best writing in it, but I am fairly sure that it has some of the best of mine.

I never expected to see Sentenced to Life published in my time. I didn't even expect that there would be enough poems to fill a thin pamphlet. When I got sick in 2010, I wrote some poems while I lay in hospital in either Cambridge or New York — a few of those poems were done in time for the publication of Nefertiti in the Flak Tower — but when I got out of hospital I thought that my energy would keep on draining away; and to complete a poem takes plenty of energy. When its first fragments arrive in your head like benevolent shrapnel, they demand to be assembled: and the process is the mental equivalent of heavy lifting. It's a big ask if you aren't breathing properly. But time went by, I was breathing better, and the drugs got on top of my ailments; so there was no excuse to down tools. Besides, I had too many ideas. Most of the results went into the section still marked Recent Poems, but from that section I have now subtracted the poems that went to form this book, and mounted them here instead, under the heading Extracts. Also there are some of the reviews that the book has already attracted at the time of its publication. (It became, I'm glad to say, the No 1 book on Amazon.co.uk's Poetry list even before it was published.) I have been careful to include any literate review even if luke-warm, although there was one effort I felt justified in leaving out because its author is such a vulgarian that his praise hurts worse than his blame. In these and all other respects — links to the relevant broadcasts are here too — I shall try to make this page the gateway to a complete record of what might well be my last book of poems, although I am informed by some commentators, apparently well qualified in medicine, that my version of leukaemia is no great thing, and that I might live forever. I would dearly like to, so as to get a few more things written: but wishful thinking is no more wise for being ambitious, and as I write I am back on chemo for keeps. Well, it's another subject for verse. Meanwhile, as I write, the gratifying ripples raised by this little book continue to spread. I would be churlish not to enjoy the fuss.

After I fell ill in early 2010 I surprised myself by getting the urge to read more books than ever. But I didn't have a reading programme. I just wanted to read all the good books I had never read before, and also read again some of the books that I knew were good but had forgotten why. This plan, or non-plan, was much aided by the existence of Hugh Hardinge's famous bookstall in the Market Square of Cambridge. From my house to the stall wasn't even a mile by but in my condition it was a slow walk, and the walk back was even slower because I was carrying bags full of books. Even paperbacks weigh something: a full twelve-volume set of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, for example, proved to weigh as much as the beautiful 1936 buckram-bound edition of Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. Being a critic by nature as well as by profession, I had a hankering to write about what I was reading, so when Ben Schwarz of Yale University Press got in touch to ask what I had been reading lately and whether I could care to write a short book about it, I knew just how to answer. Ben had been literary editor at the Atlantic Monthly, where he had published some of my longer pieces in the days when I still had strength. I trusted him completely, so I wrote the book, not expecting so slight a thing to do great business. In blessed fact, it has done quite well: perhaps because it gets back to the original thrill of reading. It's been more than 70 years now, but I still feel the rush. I have appended some of the reviews the book received in the UK, Ireland, the US, Australia and New Zealand. The only point I would add to what the critics have said is that I wasn't really trying to cover the waterfront, but it was kind of people to assume, from its style, that my book might have a greater scope of intention than it actually has.

For this collection I have chosen, from a lifetime's work in verse, only those poems and lyrics that I believe might stand alone. Previous selections — Other Passports, The Book of My Enemy and Opal Sunset — were already winnowings, and this volume makes even more of a point out of setting things aside that once cost many nights of labour. At the time, I thought that anything I wrote was indispensable, but eventually, sometimes after only a decade or so, a sense of proportion came to the rescue. With a few exceptions, my longer poems have been left out on the grounds that they were tied to their time; although one day Peregrine Prykke's Pilgrimage might return in a book of its own, because its picture of the London Literary World still strikes me as true even if most of its cast have by now been carried from the stage. The excitement of that clueless young man as he took his place among the poets and the critics was still with him as he met his doom.

Excitement and poetry ought never to be alien to one another, but there is always a tendency, in the homeland of poetry in English, to look on the fabulously rich literary heritage as an established church. The privilege of the American, Irish and Australian poets — not to mention poets from Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, India and the Caribbean, and there might be one from Belize — is to provide fresh reminders that the tradition is not a litany, but a permanent upheaval, not to say a carnival. As an Australian in England for more than half a century, I have never felt cause to stop setting some of my poems in my homeland. The British readership likes hearing about it, and nowadays even the Americans can make a fair stab at guessing where Australia is. As for the critics, guardians of the ramparts, eventually they have to listen to the readers: and anyway the jokes about Australian culture being a contradiction in terms are by now so out of date that only a politician would use them, out of his head on Australian wine as he does so. There are quite a few poems about Australia here, even more of them near the end than near the beginning; but really they are all about the English language, which is the powerhouse at the heart of the subject. Even a poem about nothing would have to be about that.

Poems about nothing can be useful to anyone who wants to combine cult status with academic respectability, but that combination always struck me as something dependent on an abstract concept of literature, instead of arising from the sung lyricism of the English lyric before Shakespeare — the same sung lyricism that my daughters heard when they bopped around with Abba's greatest hits blasting in their headphones, and that is heard today by my granddaughter, aged ten, as she contemplates on YouTube the enthralling intricacies of Taylor Swift singing 'We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together'. When the poem strays too far from the song it risks death by refinement. Luckily, from my Cambridge Footlights days onward, I was in a position to test this idea through my working partnership with Pete Atkin. Some of the lyrics I wrote for him are here. The music is on his albums, and shows what the form and its punctuation are meant to be like: but the lyric on the page still has the phrasing, which, for me, is the bedrock of the whole thing. If a poem or a lyric does not end up studded with turns of phrase that I had no idea were going to happen, I should not have begun it.

But it's easy to lay down the law no, when the light is fading. The trick is to follow your creative principles in the long years before you even know how to define them. I hope that younger readers, especially, will find this book to be a progression from one clarity to the next, even when it seems like one mystery after another. That's just how it was for me.

“Over a period of fifteen years Clive James learned French by almost no other method than reading À la recherche du temps perdu. Then he spent half a century trying to get up to speed with Proust's great novel in two different languages. Gate of Lilacs is the unique product of James's love and engagement with Proust's eternal masterpiece.

With À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust, in James's words, ‘followed his creative instinct all the way until his breath gave out’; and now James has done the same. In Gate of Lilacs, James, a brilliant critical essayist and poet, has blended the two forms into one.

‘I had always thought the critical essay and the poem were closely related forms ... If I wanted to talk about Proust's poetry beyond the basic level of talking about his language — if I wanted to talk about the poetry of his thought — then the best way to do it might be to write a poem. There is nothing like a poem for transmitting a mental flavour. Instead of trying to describe it, you can evoke it.’

In the end, if À la recherche du temps perdu is a book devoted almost entirely to its author's gratitude for life, for love, and for art, this much smaller book is devoted to its author's gratitude for Proust.”

Apart from a few paragraphs of a piece about Mad Men which first appeared in the Weekend Australian Review in 2009, and perhaps a few opinions from a piece about The Pacific that appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in 2010, everything in the book was written in these recent years of my illness, while it went on happily refraining from being fatal. With memories in my head of how Twin Peaks had once held my attention with its long story even though I could barely understand its briefest episode, I sat down with my younger daughter Lucinda to watch a big box of NYPD Blue right through. We had seen it all before, but as in a glass, darkly. Our recurring discussion of the magnificence of Andy Sipowicz set a tone that struck me with its potential for one day becoming a useful critical style. This tone was abetted by reports of water-cooler conversations that Lucinda brought home from her work as civil servant, and from dinner table conversations in my elder daughter Claerwen's kitchen, where I found myself matching her admiration for Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica with mine for Wilma Deering in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. It occurred to me, perhaps because of my medicated state, that a new critical language was developing itself to deal with the onrush of creativity coming to us in the form of box sets: a system of distribution that still strikes me as something new, even though it is already being overtaken by systems that download material directly into the computer. By the time this book is published, the DVD might be as obsolete as the dodo. But the number of shows, if not their quality, can only go on increasing: and the way we talk about them can only become more compulsively attentive than it was a few years back, when I first noticed that Allison Janney in The West Wing was getting the kind of detailed analytical praise that Maria Callas used to get when she sang in Tosca at Covent Garden. I could hear the same fluent critical inventiveness from the discussion groups of writers on Slate when they talked about the first few episodes of Orange is the New Black: some of the writers sounded as if they were having at least as much fun talking as they did writing.

“This book finds James with more time on the clock than he had anticipated, and all the more determined to use it wisely — to capture the treasurable moment, and think about how best to live his remaining days while the sense of his own impending absence grows all the more powerfully acute. In a series of intimate poems — from childhood memories of his mother, to a vision of his granddaughter in graceful acrobatic flight — James declares ‘family’ to be our greatest blessing. He also writes beautifully of the Australia where he began his life, and where he hopes to ‘reach the end’. Throughout Injury Time, James weaves poems which reflect on the consolation and wisdom to be found in the art, music and books which have become ever more precious to him in his last years. The poems in this moving, inspirational and unsentimental book are as accomplished as any he has ever written; indeed the unexpected gift of James's Injury Time shows him to be in the form of his life.”

“At the opening of The River in the Sky, a book-length poem, we find James in ill health but high spirits. Although his body traps him in his Cambridge house, his mind is free to roam. The River in the Sky takes us on a grand tour of ‘the fragile treasures of his life’. Animated by powerful recollections, James presents a flowing stream of vivid images. He moves from emotionally resonant personal moments, such as listening to jazz records with his future wife, to unforgettable encounters with all kinds of culture: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony sits alongside ‘YouTube’s vast cosmopolis’. As ever with James, he shares his passions with enormous generosity, making brilliant and original connections, and fearlessly tackling the biggest questions: the meaning of life and how to live it. In the end, what emerges from this autobiographical epic is a soaring work of exceptional depth and overwhelming feeling, a new marvel for the modern age.”

“Clive James’s book-length poem The River in the Sky is superb, an epic lament, written in late life, filled with exact and moving observations about life and culture. ‘If my ashes end up in an hour-glass,’ he wrote, ‘I can go on working.’ ”

About the poem, and an extract

Until a few days ago, I was a patient in Addenbrooke’s hospital, here in Cambridge, while a busload of nurses and doctors strove to persuade my temperature to stop acting like a wobbling yo-yo. Or anyway I assume they arrived by bus. I myself arrived by ambulance, strapped down against any tendency to slide on to the floor like a speeding custard.

It was a low moment in my recent me dical history, but once again the combined efforts of my family and the Addenbrooke’s crash-cart crew dug me out of the hole, so that I have emerged in time to witness the launch of my epic poem, The River In The Sky.

Beautiful title, isn’t it? I can ask that rhetorical question in all modesty because I didn’t think of it. It’s what the Japanese call the Milky Way and nobody in the west has ever heard the phrase without immediately starting to write a book.

I started writing my book the year before last, or I started to write a poem with that title. More precisely, I finally admitted to myself that a sheaf of unfinished poems belonged together. It’s conceivable that they belonged together in the wastepaper basket, and there might soon be critics who say so; but it seemed to me that a small stack of would-be poetic fragments were adding up to the same story, the story of a mind heading into oblivion.

I could imagine the cheer that would go up from my publishers when they heard what I was hatching. The cheer would be the sound of a sock-drawer full of baby mice being fed milk from an eye-dropper.

There hasn’t been, they might pipingly point out, a hit long poem since Tennyson’s Maud, and even Tennyson, a shrewd operator for a dreamy poet, tended to overestimate the initial appeal of any poem longer than a snappy lyric. Maud was a showcase for his technical virtuosity but it was still a whopper.

There is a true anecdote, which all would-be epic poets should bear in mind, about Ruskin’s wife fatally admitting to Tennyson at some social gathering that she had not yet read his poem Maud, which she had heard a lot about. (That last bit was probably the fatal trigger.) Generously keen that she be no longer deprived, Tennyson recited the whole thing to her from memory. Having detected signs of restless inattention on her part, he recited it to her again.

Reeling against the sceptical uproar of the sock-drawer mice, all I can say about my new, and perhaps terminal, poetic project is that it’s not your usual kind of epic. For one thing, it’s quite short. In that regard it’s bang up to date. The great scholar John Carey, the world expert on Paradise Lost, has tacitly conceded, by editing a trimmed version, that a bit more shortness was what Milton’s epic needed.

Christopher Ricks, Professor Carey’s only living rival for cleverness (how like Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum they are, dominating the horizon with mighty use of arms) has pointed out that when a poet makes an allusion to someone else’s poetry he should be offering a bonus, not demanding an entrance fee.

Mindful of this admonition, I have been careful in my own poem to keep everything mine, as it were — partly out of a conviction that if you aren’t ready to start again, you shouldn’t start. Hence my mini-epic spends almost none of its time proving that I have read Shakespeare. As somebody deservedly obscure once said: I tried him once, and he was full of quotations.

Nor does my epic have an epic hero. Instead, it’s got me, going nowhere. In the text, apart from the occasional side-trip to the Great Barrier Reef, I don’t even get to Heaven, except to the extent that Heaven is here on Earth. But that’s something I’ve been convinced of since I was a child, and saw my mother weeping at the news of my father’s death: that Heaven and Hell are both here, with us.

Heaven is here in the way my granddaughter seems continually to pick up speed when she drives my wheelchair, as if she were heading for Andromeda, which is in the poem, too: zillions of light years away but on its way here, unless we’re on the way there. Scientists, I understand, are divided on the subject.

My poem also touches Heaven, or tries to, when dancers dance to its incidental music. The narrator dances the tango with a blind girl in Buenos Aires, on a stone terrace beneath the weeping stars. It really happened, or I think it did: there is always the possibility that I was dreaming even at the time, and only thought I was treading clouds of bliss.

But unless I miss my guess, even the best and most beautiful things about Heaven are here now, or were here just recently. In my text, the Everly Brothers are still singing harmony. But aren’t they doing that still, and won’t they always?

And Hell is here, too, but happening to other people, if you’re lucky. I’m still one of the lucky ones, and that’s the very thing that my quarrel with the Almighty is about. It’s all very well saving me from the killer microbes yet again, but what’s He doing giving a mishmash of a spine to that little girl down the corridor, the little girl whose mother is wearing out from anxiety right there before your eyes? What the devil is He thinking of? Perhaps He isn’t thinking of anything, which would kind of leave it with us. This is the main reason, in my view, that epic poems are bound to grow shorter: because the titanic war in the beyond will be continually rescaled as a crap-shoot in the back of a garage. Milton had rogue angels falling through space from crystal battlements. We will have dusty children bursting from hunger, and grown men behaving like smug maniacs because they honestly think that they are worth more than women.

But there will still be epic poems, because every human life contains one. It comes out of nowhere and goes somewhere on its way to everywhere — which is nowhere all over again, but leaves a trail of memories. There won’t be many future poets who don’t dip their spoons into all that, even if nobody buys the book. And anyway, who says it will be a book? Maybe it will just go bleep. There is a multi-wheeled camera running loose on Mars that doesn’t even know where it is, but it can still go bleep.

At which point, growing tired again now — I’m back in my office, but it takes an effort to walk from one end of it to the other — I should thank my elder daughter Claerwen for painting the book’s starry cover, and for pointing out to its dim-witted author that the reason the thermometer showed a higher reading back then was that his temperature really had gone up through the roof.

Now that I am home again, my wife has taken over the job of ramming the thermometer into my ear, and it seems to me that she is doing so with more finesse lately, perhaps partly because I have dedicated my epic to her. Try it boys, along with the bunch of roses.

‘All is not lost...’

The opening verses of The River In The Sky

All is not lost, despite the quietness
That comes like nightfall now as the last strength
Ebbs from my limbs, and feebleness of breath
Makes even focusing my eyes a task —
As when, before the merciful excision
Of my mist-generating cataracts,
The money-spiders dwindled in their webs
Between one iron spandrel and the next
On my flagstone verandah, each frail web
The intermittent image of a disc
That glittered like the Facel Vega’s wheel
Still spinning when Camus gave up his life,
Out past the journey’s edge. Just such a dish,
Set off with dew-drops like pin-points of chrome,
Monopolises my attention here
In Cambridge as I sit wrapped in the quiet,
Stock still and planning my last strategies
For how I will employ these closing hours.
But no complaints. Simply because enforced,
This pause is valuable. Few people read
Poetry any more but I still wish
To write its seedlings down, if only for the lull
Of gathering: no less a harvest season
For being the last time. The same frail wheel
Could decorate my father’s clean white headstone
In the cemetery at Sai Wan Bay, Hong Kong:
One of my gateways to the infinite
First built when I was just a little child
And flew a silver Spitfire through the flowers —
Clumps of nasturtiums sopping with their perfume —
As if they were low-lying, coloured clouds
There in Jannali, in the summer heat.
Now, one last time, my fragile treasures link
Together in review.
In ancient days
Men in my job prepared for endless travel
Across the sea of stars, where Pharaoh sailed
To immortality, but now we know
This is no journey. A long, aching pause
Is all the voyage there will ever be.
Already it is not like life. I shan’t
Caress the hetaerae of Naukrates,
Only their images: paint on a wall,
Not vivid like a bowl of porphyry,
But pale, chipped, always fading. Here forgive me
When you come kindly visiting, as both
Our daughters do, for you three built the start
Of this tomb when you helped me weed my books
And then arrange the ones left, walls of colour
The sunlight will titrate from spring to autumn.
Rich shelves of them, these lustrous codices,
Are the first walls I see now in the morning
After the trek downstairs, though when I walk
On further, painfully, I see much more —
Boats in the windows, treasures on the terrace,
As if I weren’t just Pharaoh’s tomb designer
But the living god in the departure lounge
Surrounded by his glistering aftermath —
Yet everything began in these few thousand
Pages of print and plates. Books are the anchors
Left by the ships that rot away. The mud
The anchors lie in is one’s recollection
Of what life was, and never, late or soon,
Will be again.

(This article was published in The Guardian, September 1, 2018)

Jacket Copy

“A love letter from one of the world’s best living writers to one of its most cherished poets.

Clive James is a life-long admirer of the work of Philip Larkin. Somewhere Becoming Rain gathers all of James’s writing on this towering literary figure of the twentieth century, together with extra material now published for the first time.

The greatness of Larkin’s poetry continues to be obscured by the opprobrium attaching to his personal life and his private opinions. James writes about Larkin’s poems, his novels, his jazz and literary criticism; he also considers the two major biographies, Larkin’s letters and even his portrayal on stage in order to chart the extreme and, he argues, largely misguided equivocations about Larkin’s reputation in the years since his death.

Through this joyous and perceptive book, Larkin’s genius is delineated and celebrated. James argues that Larkin’s poems, adored by discriminating readers for over half a century, could only have been the product of his reticent, diffident, flawed, and all-too-human personality.

Erudite and entertaining in equal measure, Somewhere Becoming Rain is a love letter from one of the world’s best living writers to one of its most cherished poets.”

Coda

In whatever month of whatever year — anyway, about fifty years ago — Pete Atkin and I were doing what we thought would be our last tour of the country to promote our most recent album of songs, and one of the venues was the Student Union bar at Hull University. We didn't know at the time that our songs, mainly thanks to YouTube, would one day be back in business, so the occasion could have been funereal. But the joint was jammed. Among those jamming it, I eventually noticed, was a tall figure looming at the back of the room. Before the end of the show, I'd realised it was Philip Larkin, and wondered why a deaf man should have come to hear us perform. Among the students he looked like a plain-clothes policeman among vagrants.

After the lights came up, I asked him why he was there, and he told me that although he couldn't hear very well, he had been keen to find out what exactly I was doing. I think it was the idea of going public in such a blatant way that fascinated him, or perhaps appalled him. I can remember him saying that he didn't pretend to be interested in any sort of popular music except pre-modern jazz, but he was intrigued that I thought poetry could be popular entertainment. He couldn't imagine himself standing up to perform, while I couldn't imagine myself not doing so.

Later on, I realised that his attendance at our show had been one of the great compliments I'd been paid in my life. At the time, I was too young, and too obtuse, to understand that he was a busy man, with every hour of every day spoken for. I knew he was famous, and thought, even then, that he was deservedly so. He was, as yet, far from writing and publishing 'Aubade', but there was something about him that was already saying goodbye.

I was left with the impression of a generous and courteous man. This impression was confirmed several times by letters which were kindly interested in their recipient's welfare, even while he himself was ill, and, finally, dying. He was a gentleman, and his gentleness was something he was trying to offset when his poetry was savage.

This book is a gathering of all the times I felt compelled to register my admiration for his work. And even in the times between, his books were always within reach, especially when his detractors were closing in. The critical focus is, even now, so exclusively about his personal failings. I felt the need to add here, at the end, this reminiscence of his decency and politeness. Old-fashioned virtues indeed, as he would no doubt have been dryly aware.

1: October 29th, 1975

2: Clive misremembered here: it was the Smash Flops website and its associated discussion forum Midnight Voices which sparked the revival of interest in the James/Atkin canon in 1996, with Pete's first CD re-issue following in 1997, then Pete's concert at Buxton Opera House with Clive in 1998 and their international tour in 2003.

YouTube was not created until 2005 and the first videos of Pete Atkin appeared there around 2010 — Archive Ed.