Even as We Speak

by Clive James

  The place of this artist turned out to be in the soup. As I write this note, the second volume of my unreliable memoirs is about to be published, whereupon the full story of how I failed to ignite the Thames will be edifyingly available for any reader still harbouring the delusion that all the Australians who sailed for England in the early Sixties achieved instant success. I, for one, achieved a depth of oblivion from which I could see to climb out only by the light of my lucky stars. George, as ever conscientious beyond the call of duty, or perhaps once again impelled by the self-mortifying requirements of his lay religious order, wrote me fulsome references by air-letter so that I might apply for jobs which a glance must have told him had a dead end. Finally, when I had at last concurred with the otherwise universal opinion that I was unemployable, he wrote the letter which secured me a place at Cambridge.

  Safe inside the oak doors of his old college, Pembroke, I immediately set about betraying his trust by giving my principal attention to Footlights. What reading I found time for was off the course. On one of George’s visits to London I met him for a drink and gave him an account of my progress that was probably the real reason for the sour look which at the time I put down to the unspeakable English beer. My degree was obtained more by turn of phrase that by proof of diligence and I must have been the only graduate in memory who got himself registered as a Ph.D. candidate merely so that he might become president of a dramatic society. Mine was scarcely an academic record. It was almost a police record. Always I read any book except the one specified. But I never stopped reading. Nor did I ever stop listening to music or looking at paintings. In George’s house I had somehow got the idea, more by osmosis than observation, that an education was something you went on acquiring all your life. Perhaps I got the idea too well, and too often postponed what I should have tackled early. But I got the idea.

  The moment when George said mass over his holy book has stayed with me ever since, and now, when I look up from the typewriter at the bookshelves in my office, I can see my own copy of European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Beside it is another book by Curtius, his Essays on European Literature, which includes the two important long pieces about T. S. Eliot. Next comes Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Romanische Philologie, which contains Curtius’s definitive review of Gianfranco Contini’s edition of Dante’s Rime. I bought that one in Cambridge in 1968, before I could read any German. Then there comes Curtius’s pioneering little study of Proust, and then an authentic rare bird, the first edition of his Balzac, Verlag von Friedrich Cohen, Bonn, 1923. Where did I buy that? My inscription on the flyleaf reminds me: Staten Island, two years ago, in a house full of books bought from the descendants of European refugees from Hitler. The thousands of abandoned books stacked two deep in the shelves were a whispering testimony to the cultural disintegration that Curtius first feared, then experienced, and which gave European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages its pessimistic tone. I could write an essay on the subject. It might not be an outstanding essay, but it would touch on the main points. It has taken a long time, but I am some kind of student at last.

  Still not a good student, however. A writer can never be that: not this writer, anyway. Borges, book mad if anybody was, divided the two things neatly in Historia universal de la infamia, when he said that writing comes before reading and is less considered. The same dichotomy is fundamental to Croce’s aesthetics, and I suppose Schiller’s celebrated distinction between the naïve and the sentimental amounts to the same thing. But these are weighty names of learned men, and merely to adduce them is to concede that you can’t be a writer without at least wanting to be a reader as well. A writer who took literally Schopenhauer’s imprecations against book-learning would not be concentrating his energies, he would be inhibiting their renewal.

  We would all like to set our minds in order, and that applies most to those of us who are obliged to lead disorderly lives. As I consume, in the TV studio, hundreds of hours that I might have spent making yet another attempt to get somewhere with Greek, my great teachers are with me as an ideal. (Probably their great teachers were with them as an ideal, when they were wasting their time reading my emptily fluent essays, and certainly when they became, later on, Professors with departments to run.) I remember George Russell standing at a lectern, silently reading a photostat of a medieval manuscript, the hurrying world shut out. I remember H. J. Oliver, when I was in his office for the first time and transfixed by his collection of those first-issue Everyman volumes with the gilt spines, pointing out gently, so as not to daunt, that the real collection was at home. Nowadays I have my collection too: books bought during assignments in Munich, Vienna and Salzburg, in Tokyo, Peking and Hong Kong, in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Tel Aviv. Some of the books I buy I will have to wait to read until I can read the languages they are written in. But at least I know what should be desired. I think it was while George was holding a seminar about the austere dedication of the Brethren of the Common Life that he first mentioned Rachel. She wasn’t a real woman, she was a spirit – the spirit of contemplation. For the monk, to be denied her company was to be left desolate. To forsake Rachel was madness.

  Expounding this concept, George spoke as both a man of religion and a humanist. At the time I had little idea of what he meant. A quarter of a century later I am still proof against religion of any stamp, and will no doubt remain so until my pagan grave. But humanism, the thirst for concentrated meaning that turns a classic text into a fountain of refreshment, has by now become as vivid for me as the river of light became for Dante. I wish I had good enough Latin to read the Annals of Tacitus as I can read his Histories, or to read his Histories as I can read his Agricola. Yet after my first hour with the Annals, an hour spent sweating to unpick even a few of its compressed sentences – whose elliptical density, like that of Shostakovitch’s string quartets, is the guarantee of their truth and of the truth’s private defiance of state terror – I could at last see our horrifying twentieth century for what it has been, a time like any other: a time like all the others. When I closed the book I held my hands above it as if to touch it might burn them, and only later realized that the gesture had been an echo. Benedictus benedicat. So George Russell has had his influence, beginning with a few words and coming to fulfilment far away, as an important part of his pupil’s attitude to life. There are other, better pupils with less erratic tales to tell. But I was the test case, the one sent to try him; and he came through.

  From a Festschrift for George Russell, 1984

  PREFACE TO AN AUSTRALIAN CLASSIC

  By the time I at last met Robin Eakin personally, on the sable d’or of Biarritz in the early eighties, she was called Robin Dalton and had been one of the most influential literary agents in London for half her career. We were introduced by our mutual friend, Michael Blakemore, whose talents as a director extend to real life: wherever he is, the stage teems with creative people, and in those years, in Biarritz every summer, there was always enough prominent human material spilling out of his house and down to the beach for everyone present to have begun a roman-à-clef except the novelists, who were already writing about what happened the previous summer. John Cleese and Michael Frayn came to the house to work on films and scripts; Tim Pigott-Smith came there to be obscure for a while after starring as Merrick in The Jewel in the Crown; and that trim form under the big straw hat, watching the children play in the shallows of the advancing tide, belonged to the exquisite Nicola Pagett.

  But there was never any doubt who was the grande dame of the scene. It was Robin. She had a cut-glass accent that you would have sworn had been first turned and chiselled in the nurseries of Belgravia. I was relishing her company long before I realized that she was Australian, that she was Robin Eakin, and that she had once written a classic book. I had never even heard of Aunts Up the Cross, which sounded to me like a feminist tract about capital punishment in ancient Rome. When I read it, I realized that it was a prize example of a genre I had been looking for: the small Australia
n book that was better written than the big ones, the actual fragment of echt literature with a small ‘l’ that would make me feel less unpatriotic about all those behemoths of Literature with a capital ‘L’ which had been failing to convince me for so long. My party-piece recitative based on the opening page of The Aunt’s Story had been making me feel guilty for years. (I used to get a big laugh on the one-line paragraph ‘And stood breathing’ but I always felt ashamed: perhaps it only sounded ludicrous.) After I read Aunts Up the Cross the guilt vanished. Here at last was the living proof that a civilized, unpretentious, fully evocative prose style had been available in Australia ever since the young Robin Eakin handed in her first school essay. All we had ever needed to do was look in the wrong place. As so often happens, the true art was filed under entertainment.

  To say that Aunts Up the Cross is beautifully written risks making the book sound like a filigree. It is anything but. Social information, moral judgement, comic action and tragic incident are all packed into sentences which have the density of uranium and would also have its weight, if they were not so proportionately constructed that they take off from the page like gliders picked up off a hill by a thermal from its face. Soon you, the lucky first-time reader of this marvellous little creation, will be in the light yet firm grip of its opening paragraph. Before that happens, let us analyse its first two sentences, because there will be no chance to do so once the third sentence reaches back to draw you on. Study this, you upcoming, unreliable memoirists: study this and weep.

  My Great-aunt Juliet was knocked over and killed by a bus when she was eighty-five. The bus was travelling very slowly in the right direction and could hardly have been missed by anyone except Aunt Juliet, who must have been travelling fairly fast in the wrong direction.

  It’s the gift that money can’t buy and no amount of literary ambition can ever find a substitute for: the prose that sounds as if it is being spoken by the ideal speaker. Yet the spontaneity is all designed: ‘very slowly’ is exactly balanced against ‘fairly fast’, ‘right direction’ against ‘wrong direction’, and the impetus would be ruined if an editor – as almost any magazine editor nowadays would, especially if asked not to – were to insert an otiose comma after ‘right direction’. The whole book is as precisely calculated as that, with the result that calculation scarcely seems to enter into it. When you get to the end, however, you find that Aunt Juliet and the bus make contact again, and you realize that you have been led a dance – a dance in a circle that might have been choreographed by Poussin, if Poussin had ever lived in the Kings Cross area of Sydney.

  Robin Eakin did live there, in that unlikely Arcadia. When I was growing up after the war, Kings Cross was featured in the newspapers and magazines – not yet subsumed under the collective name of The Media – as Sydney’s Montmartre, Schwabing, Soho and Greenwich Village, a reputation which seemed mainly to be based on the occasional appearance in the streets of Rosaleen Norton weighed down by mascara, sometimes as late as 11.30 in the evening. When Robin Eakin was growing up there before the war, Kings Cross, for her family at any rate, spelt something more interesting than any Bohemia – gentility in reduced circumstances. She grew up in a house full of life; a house full of lives. In that nest of gentlefolk – Turgenev is one of the many names with whom she can be mentioned in the same breath – there was drama on every floor. The Madwoman of Chaillot was being staged on the mezzanine. Les monstres sacrés inhabited the verandah. No wonder she has spent so much of her time in and around theatres: she was born in one. She revelled in it. For her, Heaven was other people. She shames me in that regard. When I look back at my own book of memoirs, I see that its first critics were right: there is only one character in it, and everyone else is a walk-on. Aunts Up the Cross is just the opposite: its only half-realized character is the author herself.

  If the book has a fault, that’s it. When she casually lets slip that she had read all the major novels of Meredith before she was twelve years old, you want to know everything else about her education, and there is nothing like enough about the young love life of a woman so striking in her maturity. Though her evocation of Sydney in the war years ranks with the on-leave passages of T. A. G. Hungerford’s The Ridge and the River, you can’t help feeling that her American service personnel are miraculously well behaved. But the book was written in what was still an age of reticence, and the upside of that is better than the downside: where tact rules, frankness really startles, and no text of such brevity ever had so many flashpoints of shock. Aunt Juliet making contact with the bus is the very least of them. I mention no more because nothing should be allowed to dissipate the economy with which every telling vignette and intermezzo is prepared and resolved. I only say that the moment when the author’s mother causes the death of the plumber is one of the great throwaway paragraphs in modern Australian letters. Read it, and then imagine how Xavier Herbert would have thrown it away. He would have thrown it away like an old refrigerator full of house-bricks: it would have taken him a hundred pages plus.

  Aunts Up the Cross is all over in two hundred pages minus. A fan’s foreword should show the same regard for brevity, so I will back out with one last unreliable memory before her reliable ones begin. I think it was while we were walking along the esplanade of the Côte des Basques (by which I mean we could equally have been in the drawing-room of her holiday-home maisonette, but I would rather you heard waves in the background) that I upbraided her for having written no more than this one perfect book. She fobbed me off with another drink – all right, it was the drawing-room – and politely neglected to state the obvious, which was that she had written something so sensitive to its own past, and so responsive to its own present, that it contained its own future. All the books she might have written later were already in it. What she was too modest even to think was that all the books the rest of us wrote later are in it too.

  From an introduction to the reissue of Aunts up the Cross, 1997

  RUNNING BESIDE RON CLARKE

  One tries not to fall for the lure of the freebie, but when an Australian national hero offers membership of his gymnasium in return for a preface to its prospectus, it would be a churl who turned him down.

  Having run 5,000 metres against Ron Clarke on several occasions and matched him shoulder to shoulder in the home stretch, I can give other distance runners of our calibre the following tip for defeating him tactically: start ten minutes earlier. If you and he are both running on adjacent treadmills at Cannons gym, it can be done. A lot of things can be done for the human body at Cannons. Things have been done even for my body, which was probably the nearest to a total wreck that ever stumbled out of the locker room in baggy shorts and a too-tight T-shirt. I didn’t get back my youth. I didn’t get back the full splendour of that original V-shaped figure that stunned the beach so long ago. But I got my weight reasonably under control, regained the habit of exercise, and above all rediscovered the pleasure of a healthy sweat.

  When I was young in Australia I swung upside down from trees, half-killed myself clown-diving at the baths, and rode my three-speed bike for twenty miles at a time through the storm-water channels of the Sydney suburbs. I burned energy as fast as I generated it. Then about thirty years went by when I burned no energy at all, with results that most of you can guess at and some of you know all too well. It is this latter group that I address now: we of a Certain Age, victims of Time’s depredations, the invasion of the body-snatcher. The greatest danger we face, when we try to get our bodies back, is of overdoing it. The great virtue of a properly run gymnasium like Cannons is that we aren’t allowed to. The staff are on the alert, making sure that no new member with one foot in the grave will try to pull it out so fast he sprains a thigh. The watchful dedication of these young guardians is eloquent testimony to how the health movement has calmed down from its initial wild enthusiasm and become part of the landscape instead of just a craze like the hula-hoop or Rubik’s cube.

  A craze was what it used to be. It all st
arted with jogging. The so-called health editors of the Sunday newspapers filled pages with copy advising out-of-condition executives about where, when and how often to jog. One health editor was so impressed at his own easy breathing after a six-mile jog that he went off to do the same course again. Before he was halfway around he wasn’t breathing at all. The following week there was a new health editor. Like his predecessor he was really an out-of-condition executive himself. Jogging shattered many a calcified Achilles tendon before the general realization dawned that it had to be done under controlled conditions.