Giving Thanks

The one in the back

Life cries for joy though it must end in tears.


On the eve of Thanksgiving, I have learned in the space of only a few hours that two of my heroes have died - Jonathan Miller and Clive James. I dedicated some space to them before here on this blog, Miller ten years ago in A Bitter Pill and James most recently in Clive James is Still Not Dead. I won't revise that last statement, now that they are both immortal.

I first became acquainted with Miller, like we all did, through Beyond the Fringe, the Edinburgh Festival revue that "went viral" in the early 1960s and propelled him and his three co-conspirators, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, and Alan Bennett onto international stages. Strangely, it was the better performers, Cook and Moore, who were the most famous, and who were the first of the quartet to go. Miller and Bennett were just as irreverent, when necessary, but their contributions were more cerebral. Bennett is now the last of the Fringes. Miller was a physician, one of the greatest champions of Britain's NHS, which is in real peril of "privatization" (aka profitization) now that the Tories are being handed their long-awaited license to kill it. He was also a theater, opera, film and television director. In the '60s he made what I consider to be the best film adaptation of Alice in Wonderland.

Clive James

James's achievements are multifarious, including being one of the finest critics anywhere - on every subject. Diagnosed with leukemia in 2010, the only effect it seemed to have on him was to force him to think about death - for nearly a decade. His condition exacerbated his emphysema, so much so that he couldn't stand the long flight home to Australia. So he settled down to die in Cambridge. 

To choose just one of his many famous quotes, there is one that I can actually verify: “Rilke used to say that no poet would mind going to jail, since he would at least have time to explore the treasure house of his memory. In many respects Rilke was a prick.”  

What better way to end than in what sounded like James's fond farewell poem (which he wrote two years ago):

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.


Many thanks to them both. A somber occasion, but my Thanksgiving cornucopia is full to bursting.