Easily one of the most non-dramatic death watches of the past several years has been the decline, the dying fall, of Clive James. Since his diagnosis, or death sentence, of leukaemia, severe emphysema, and kidney failure in 2010, his inability to die has become a macabre joke, especially to James himself, who seems to spend much of his time announcing his survival. I must admit, living in the Boonies like I do, that I have to check up on him occasionally to make sure he is still there. My mother had an expression, "One foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel," that might fit James, except the banana peel has turned into something more like the abrasive Non-Skid used to surface the weather decks of aircraft carriers.
Like Poe's "M Valdemar," who was hypnotized - or "mesmerized" - moments before his death and who continued to speak as his body gradually putrified, James' condition has seemed to place him somewhere between life and death, so that he continues to write and appear occasionally on television from the precincts of his home in Cambridge - confounding even the most generous medical prognoses. His late, late poem "Japanese Maple," seems like it was written just a few months before his imminent quietus:
Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.
So slow a fading out brings no real pain.
Breath growing short
Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain
Of energy, but thought and sight remain:
Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree
And saturates your brick back garden walls,
So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?
Ever more lavish as the dusk descends
This glistening illuminates the air.
It never ends.
Whenever the rain comes it will be there,
Beyond my time, but now I take my share.
My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that. That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same:
Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,
A final flood of colors will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone.
How unpoetic of James to live beyond such a lovely imagined end. Yet he lived well past autumn (in 2014) and into a wondrously lovely winter:
This Being Done
Behind the trees across the street the sun
Takes down its last pale disc. This being done,
No soft pale light is left for anyone.
There is a further comedown in the night.
Outside, unheard, asphalt is turning white:
White swarms of butterflies in the streetlight.
The morning comes, and through the spread of snow
In candy-coloured coats the children go.
Listen awhile and you can hear them grow.
"Japanese Maple" was published in a best-selling book of James' poems called Sentenced to Life. "This Being Done" is from a subsequent collection called Injury Time, an allusion to the extra minutes added at the end of a football (soccer) match. His Guardian column, Reports of My Death, follows Mark Twain's proof of life rebuttal to news reports that he was dead. I have always liked him - the man, Clive James - regardless of what he did. I can hear his distinctive voice in everything he has written. He has been a television critic (he likes television a lot more than I can), literary critic, novelist, and translator. He was the host of some irreplaceable TV travelogues (available on YouTube, dear reader), my favorite of which was Postcard from Bombay that contains a terrific gag. He is expiring from the heat and hails a taxi believing the moving air will cool him. He climbs in the back and waits for the taxi to move. "An oven would've been cooler," he says. When the taxi doesn't start and the driver gets out to push it, "An oven would've been faster!" His multi-volume memoirs, Unreliable Memoirs, is one of the best ever written. Now otherwise indisposed, he has returned to television viewing, which inspired his latest book, Play All: A Bingewatcher’s Notebook.
His poems are formal. No vers libre for James - it's really all about rhythm and rhyme, cadences that can be sung. He doesn't fuss about it. It works for him. He is an admirer of fellow Australian A. D. Hope, who was once described as "the 20th century's greatest 18th-century poet." In "A Perfect Market" he explains why:
Recite your lines aloud, Ronsard advised,
Or, even better, sing them. Common speech
Held all the rhythmic measures that he prized
In poetry. He had much more to teach,
But first he taught that. Several poets paid
Him heed. The odd one even made the grade,
Building a pretty castle on the beach.
But on the whole it’s useless to point out
That making the thing musical is part
Of pinning down what you are on about.
The voice leads to the craft, the craft to art:
All this is patent to the gifted few
Who know, before they can, what they must do
To make the mind a spokesman for the heart.
As for the million others, they are blessed:
This is their age. Their slapdash in demand
From all who would take fright were thought expressed
In ways that showed a hint of being planned,
They may say anything, in any way.
Why not? Why shouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t they?
Nothing to study, nothing to understand.
And yet it could be that their flight from rhyme
And reason is a technically precise
Response to the confusion of a time
When nothing, said once, merits hearing twice.
It isn’t that their deafness fails to match
The chaos. It’s the only thing they catch.
No form, no pattern. Just the rolling dice
Of idle talk. Always a blight before,
It finds a place today, fulfills a need:
As those who cannot write increase the store
Of verses fit for those who cannot read,
For those who can do both the field is clear
To meet and trade their wares, the only fear
That mutual benefit might look like greed.
It isn’t, though. It’s just the interchange
Of showpiece and attention that has been
There since the cavemen took pains to arrange
Pictures of deer and bison to be seen
To best advantage in the flickering light.
Our luck is to sell tickets on the night
Only to those who might know what we mean,
And they are drawn to us by love of sound.
In the first instance, it is how we sing
That brings them in. No mystery more profound
Than how a melody soars from a string
Of syllables, and yet this much we know:
Ronsard was right to emphasize it so,
Even in his day. Now, it’s everything:
The language falls apart before our eyes,
But what it once was echoes in our ears
As poetry, whose gathered force defies
Even the drift of our declining years.
A single lilting line, a single turn
Of phrase: these always proved, at last we learn,
Life cries for joy though it must end in tears.
There is some comfort in thinking that one is behind the times, when the times are currently what they are. We are all the beneficiaries of his experimental drug treatments. Perhaps James will find tears of joy at the end. If it can come too soon, it cannot possibly come too late.
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