Even as We Speak

by Clive James

  Going light on the consonants is a very good general trick for joining up those scary little black dots at the top of the stave. All trained singers, no matter how illustrious, use it as a crutch. It’s the reason why their consonants, during the bravura bits, tend to sound like Henry Kissinger’s. Even Björling, probably the greatest tenor after Caruso, sang in French as if it was his native Swedish, and sang in Swedish as if he was half drunk. (A lot of the time he was, but that’s another story.) Joan Sutherland got through her entire career without uttering very many consonants at all. Often she turned a whole aria into a cadenza, and if you’re still looking for an argument-winning reason to prefer Callas for the title of top diva of the modern era, you could suggest with some justification that Callas sang the words, whereas Sutherland sang only the music. And we singers don’t sing just to make a nice noise, we sing to give back to the language the wings it lost when the angels fell.

  After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Knowing a little bit more about the technicalities now, in the opera house I have become, if no less easy to please, at least a bit harder to fool. For a tired tenor to transpose a high note downward isn’t as heinous as Mike Tyson biting the other guy’s ear off to get out of the fight early, but it isn’t honest either. From here on, I’ll know when to sit on my hands. Let us, however, not kid ourselves, dear boy: those singers up there can really sing. They’re doing it for a living, and all I’m doing is dreaming aloud. But at least the dream is no longer confined to the interior of my head. My current practice number is ‘Fenesta che lucide’, a funeral song in dialect variously attributed to Bellini and to that prolific Italian composer Ignoto. Grittily catchy as a dirge from The Godfather, plangently lovely beyond all measure, it laments, in phrases that pulse like pent-up weeping, the death of the singer’s sister. Whether or not I have truly mastered its haunting melody, people certainly look haunted when I sing it. I sing it in the street, like Mario Lanza yodelling as he toddled in The Great Caruso. Heads turn.

  And even the most deeply buried dream of all has come true. I have sung the duet in the restaurant with the pretty girl. When Frank Johnson and Petronella Wyatt took me to lunch at Simpson’s in the Strand for the purpose of inveigling me into writing this suicidally inadvisable piece, the subject came up of which show songs were harder than operatic arias. I suggested Cole Porter’s ‘So in Love’, which bristles with lethally placed examples of the most awkward sound to sustain beyond a quaver, the long ‘i’ diphthong. In that blackberry-stained mezzo voice of hers which is so much more enchanting than her politics, la Wyatt began to sing it, and after the first stanza I joined in, pianissimo but con amore. As our last notes faded away, the whole restaurant burst into applause. It might have been because I had stopped singing, but I like to think it was a tribute to our joint impact – just as I like to think that Mr Johnson’s twitching smile throughout the performance was a sign of envy rather than embarrassment, and that he pulled his jacket over his head only because the beauty of what he heard was too much for him to bear.

  Spectator, 19 December, 1997

  PETER COOK

  In the restaurant on top of Ajax mountain at Aspen, Colorado, my wife and I had just started eating lunch when Barry Humphries suddenly appeared beside us and said that Peter Cook had died the day before. I hadn’t known, and hated not having known, guilty that I had enjoyed the previous evening’s dinner. I ate my lunch but didn’t taste it. Later on I was glad that it was a fellow comic writer, one of my masters, from whom I had found out that another of my masters was no longer with us. It fitted the way that Peter’s influence worked. He got used early to the adulation of a wide public and eventually decided that he could do without it: long before the end, fame had to chase him far harder than he chased it. But among his fellow practitioners his lustre was undimmed, unequalled and unchallenged, a large part of the binding force that joined them even as their individual ambitions forced them apart. Just as the astronauts riding up on their rockets all worshipped Chuck Yeager, the jet pilot who never joined them in space because he flew too well with wings, so the media millionaires all knew that Cook was the unsurpassable precursor who had done it all before they did, and done it better. Indeed his superiority was easier to take after he ceased to exercise it. In his last years, when he sat at home reading newspapers while defying alcohol to dull his brilliant mind, he was a cinch to love. Early on, when we were all struggling to get started and he was effortlessly up there dominating the whole picture, to feel affection for him took self-discipline. Admiration was too total. You couldn’t write a line without imagining him looking over your shoulder, not very impressed.

  To imagine him doing that was particularly easy if you were coming up to Pembroke College, Cambridge, which I did in 1964. His legend haunted the place with an intensity unrivalled even by that of Ted Hughes. The poet, after all, had only begun to practise his art there. But the comedian was already the leading man in his field before he went down. I thought, perhaps incorrectly, that I could write poetry of my own without worrying too much about Hughes. But there was no question of doing comedy without worrying about Cook. When Eric Idle drafted me to assist him in producing the Pembroke Smoker in the Old Library, he made it clear to me that the tradition begun by Cook had to be kept up, even if it was unlikely that our concert would emulate Cook’s in forming the basis of a West End hit revue. Cook created Pieces of Eight while still in statu pupillari. He had two revues running in the West End before he sat the Tripos. At the porter’s lodge, so the story went, his accountant was told to wait because a Hollywood producer had not yet left. Stories about Cook grew with the telling, but only because of the magnitude of the initial impetus. It would be our task, Idle informed me, to be worthy of his example, at least to the extent of not perpetrating a disaster. Together we built a stage out of beer crates.

  In subsequent years, when I had installed myself as perennial sole producer of the Pembroke Smoker, I always had Cook’s damnably precocious originality in mind to keep me humble. When Germaine Greer did her famous Striptease Nun routine, or her sensational rendition of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ in which her mouth moved out of synchronization with the words while the audience fell thrashing out of their chairs, I would stand proudly in the wings, confident that he would have approved. I only wished that I could have been as confident about my own efforts. Most of them were comic monologues, and none of us ever delivered one of those without remembering who had been on before us. That tiny beer-crate stage could feel as big and lonely as a Roman arena.

  We had all felt his influence long before that, of course. With mingled envy and awe I had memorized the whole of the Beyond the Fringe LP, including the liner notes, the year I arrived in London. But in Pembroke those four indecently gifted young people started to become real, simply because I could hear the exemplary echo of Cook’s footsteps on the flagstones. He was practically a physical presence, although strangely enough he was the last of the quartet that I actually met in real life, and it was more than twenty years later before I experienced the delights of his conversation. When I finally did, it immediately became apparent why he was producing less for the public. It was because he was lavishing it on his life. He gave it away to his friends. In an hour of casual talk he spilled out enough wit and perception – in him the two things were uncommonly near allied – to keep anybody else going for a whole television season. That was the cruel fact which so few of his obituarists, even at their most laudatory, could bring themselves to face: he wasn’t just a genius, he had the genius’s impatience with the whole idea of doing something again. He reinvented an art form, exhausted its possibilities, and just left it. There is always something frightening about that degree of inventiveness. Leonardo used to scare people the same way, by carving in ice, painting on a wet wall, or just never getting around to creating any more of the masterpieces that everyone – wise after the event – knew that he was capable of. But he knew that better than they did. Cook, mutatis mutandis (he couldn�
�t paint, but then Leonardo couldn’t imitate Harold Macmillan), was in the same case. He didn’t lose his powers. He just lost interest in proving that he possessed them.

  In a television special called Postcard from London I filmed a conversation with Cook and we did a good deal of incidental chatting while the magazines were being changed. More recently, in his last years, I had the pleasure of his company when he sweetly agreed to descend from his mountain fastness and become the most adventurous guest in every season of my weekly talk show. On screen he was invariably magisterial, but off screen he was even better than that. Most good speakers husband their resources, especially when it is getting late. Few of them will play to an audience of one. He would give his whole wealth without hesitation. I wish we had spent more time talking about the Dear Old College but it didn’t work out that way. In my experience, he wasn’t much of a one for reminiscence, and he wasn’t kidding about his profound indifference to Establishments of all types. It would be sentimental to suggest that Pembroke, or even Cambridge, formed him. It would be truer to say that he formed them – to the extent, at any rate, of providing one of those periodic injections of concentrated intelligence which our venerated institutions depend on for their continued vitality. He did the same for the whole country. A supreme master of the language that unites this nation, he was the laughter in its voice: sceptical, critical, yet always joyful, revelling in the verbal heritage which for him was the tradition that really mattered. (It was a pity that he never read from The Anatomy of Melancholy, because there are whole stretches of it which you would swear he wrote.) If his college ever puts up a statue to him, it should be rigged to speak, as a reminder that the illustrious roster of Pembroke poets which began with Spenser surely included Peter Cook.

  Pembroke Magazine, 1995

  MY LIFE IN POP

  The music business being what it is, it’s practically impossible to quote a song lyric without paying through the nose. But I can quote this one for free because, about thirty years ago, I wrote it. ‘Perfect moments have a clean design,’ sang Pete Atkin last week, launching the first stanza of his opening number at the Everyman Theatre during the Cheltenham Literary Festival. ‘Scoring edges that arrest the flow/ Skis cut diamonds in the plump of snow/ Times my life feels like a friend of mine.’ Pete was centre stage, accompanying himself on guitar, and the pretty melody already held his audience breathless: not an empty seat in the place, and not a sound except from him.

  Feigning casualness in my chair at stage left, I arranged my weary eyelids to yield an appropriate aperture for conveying serious humility while simultaneously counting the house. Terraces of angelic people went up into the sky like the final scene of Dante’s Paradiso, and not one of them was eating popcorn. Would they all still be there after an hour and a half of this stuff? Worry about that later: so far, so good. It was a perfect moment.

  Much of the perfection lay in its unexpectedness. Until very recently, I had thought that the hundred or so songs James and Atkin wrote between the late Sixties and late Seventies had been consigned irretrievably to the same warehouse as the Sinclair C5, the Sony Watchman, Albert Finney’s record album and Naomi Campbell’s novel. For the forgotten fad, there is always a place in nostalgia. For the bright idea that never catches on in the first place, there is nothing that lingers except the disappointed sigh of its creator. At the time when Atkin and I were active as songwriters, young men wore sideburns, flared trousers and round-tip Paisley-pattern shirts with a high content of polyester. If any of that hideous kit ever comes back, it will be because there was too much of it for the embarrassed folk memory to burn. Some young pretender to John Galliano’s crown will find a heap of his father’s quondam glad-rags in the back of the broom cupboard and get the idea that what was popular once might be popular again.

  But our songs were never popular in that sense. Hundreds, and then thousands of people liked them, but not millions. The Atkin albums – there were six of them all told – achieved respectful reviews and even respectable sales: if I had published collections of poetry that sold in those figures I would have been a happy man. People who bought the albums rarely got rid of them. As the years went by, their resale price went up and up: they are notoriously hard to find second hand. The trouble was that in the years when they were coming out they were hard to find first hand. Record company executives didn’t know how to classify what we were doing, and the shops didn’t know where to put it in the racks. Pop? Rock? Jazz? Folk? All too often we were filed under Easy Listening, which was the last thing we were. Whichever way you sliced it, by music business standards we were a minority interest. And in a mass medium, the penalty for being a minority interest is the kiss-off, usually without hope of resurrection.

  When Lazarus emerged from the tomb, none of his friends wanted to hear about what it felt like to come back to life. They wanted to hear about what it felt like to be dead. Did it hurt? Well, yes it did. We put ten years of effort into trying to break through, and it all ended with a funeral bell. After that, there was a Clive James compulsively active in several fields of various repute and there was a Pete Atkin with an increasingly important career in BBC radio, culminating with his magisterial production of This Sceptred Isle, a hit series whose collected earnings on audio tape – none of which go to him – will contribute a large chunk to Sir John Birt’s retirement package. There was a James and there was an Atkin, but there was no more James and Atkin. There was a him and a me, but there was no more us.

  Over the last twenty years I have spent as little time as possible wondering what became of us, because the sense of loss was too piercing. ‘I Wonder What Became of Me’, a miniature masterpiece by Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen, was one of the Broadway show tunes that Atkin and I found we shared an admiration for when we first started to write together. It was a downbeat, near-suicidal song, and so, it would turn out, were a lot of ours. We were always careful to crank out the occasional jollified show-stopper to avoid the possibility of our listeners hanging themselves, but on the whole we, and especially I, inclined towards melancholy. My favoured thematic area at the time was the absurdity of love in a world dedicated to destruction, and quite often I wasn’t even as funny as that. Pete would make even a death threat sound like a murmur of desire, but there must have been times when he looked at one of my sketches for a lyric and wondered whether it might not have been better tackled by Captain Nemo sitting at his pipe organ near the bottom of the Atlantic.

  Yet even our most doom-laden efforts were written on a tide of optimism. We had a terrific time, and I think some of that afflatus got into what we turned out, giving a joyous lilt to even the bleakest dirge. We used to meet late at night in the Footlights club-room, which in that era was a first-floor walk-up in Petty Cury, a decrepit lane which has since been replaced by the kind of blond-brick shopping mall where people in training shoes buy fluorescent haversacks. Snugly installed with a pint each from the bar, we put our songs together at the old upright piano, Pete changing the melodies to fit my words, me changing the words to fit the melodies, both of us working towards each other like tunnellers from different sides of the world. Upstairs, the massed hearties of the University Yacht Club were either dancing a reel or else attacking the floor with sledgehammers. Downstairs, the loosely stored merchandise of Macfisheries sent up the odour of the ocean after a thermonuclear blast. But nothing could break our concentration or poison the atmosphere of shared endeavour. We knew what we were after. Total expression, and popular success.

  Pete loved rock and roll. He had a fierce, though not undiscriminating, interest in everything rock was turning into, from Fairport Convention at the soft end all the way across to Randy Newman at the ragged edge. But he also loved the traditions of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley. He wanted to get everything into his melodies. I felt the same about lyrics. I wanted to get every form of writing into them: poetry, drama, reportage, aphorisms, gags. But I also wanted to get every form into them. I liked the grab-bag lyrics of Bob Dyl
an but would have preferred them tightly rhymed; vowel rhymes were too loose. I wanted those clinching syllables to match up, as they always had from the courtly love lyrics of the troubadours all the way through to those stomping numbers Leiber and Stoller wrote for Elvis Presley. Word play, slang, literary allusions: let’s have it all. Why not?

  There was nothing Pete couldn’t set. I could write a long, complicated verse full of tricky internal rhymes and he could make it soar and swoop like an aria. Even better, I could follow the flashy verse with a childishly simple chorus and he could fill every black-and-white phrase of it with emotional colour. Remembering Sydney Harbour on a Saturday afternoon, I wrote: ‘Between the headlands to the sea/ The fleeing yachts of summer go.’ He set the two syllables of ‘fleeing’ to the same note-length as the single syllable of ‘sea’ and the yachts sped up in front of your mind’s eye, as if their spinnakers had been snapped open by the wind. Here were melodies you could touch, and my words were there inside them like amber-breathing butterflies, transfigured and vivified into a sumptuous compound that would never come apart. Talk about a lucky break!

  I loved what we were doing. Better yet, when Pete sang our numbers in the Footlights revues on the Edinburgh fringe the audience loved what we were doing. Better even than that, when the albums came out – Beware of the Beautiful Stranger, Driving Through Mythical America, The Road of Silk, A King at Nightfall, Secret Drinker – the people who bought them loved what we were doing. They wrote letters to tell us. Strange, wild-eyed young men would come up to me in the street, quote a phrase and give me their blessing. I didn’t see how we could lose. What could go wrong?