by Clive James
But really there is no such thing as a national literature. There is only literature, and a nation can participate in it only by ceasing to be nationalistic. Nor is there any competition between stars, although the illusion that there can be is the inevitable consequence of literature being granted journalistic attention. It could be said that Murray is to Porter as Heisenberg is to Einstein: Murray dealing with the subatomic world, and Porter with everything from the atomic to the celestial. It could be said that Porter is to Murray as Haydn is to Mozart, with the proviso that nobody can understand Mozart who does not love Haydn. These hyperbolic things could be said, and probably will be: but they should be said only as part of the inexorable buzz of commentary that swarms around a successful literature – a buzz it craves, so why protest? It’s a Condé Nast world. But it’s also a more serious world than that, and Porter has helped to make it so. In doing so, he exults, even as the last things gather to overwhelm him. One of his later collections is called Fast Forward. Perhaps I am especially fond of it because it is dedicated to me: one of the biggest honours I have ever been paid; an honour so big that I have never known how to thank him. The poems in Fast Forward are, as always, mainly flashbacks, but they do point to a future: a permanent future, built on the hope that is left when all disappointments have been faced. You can’t say that of those who have suffered unjustly, and Porter is always careful not to say it. But he does say it about himself, even in the poem called ‘Dejection, an Ode’. If this is dejection, listen to the vaulting music of its opening paragraph. I said earlier that in his first poems you could hear a sonority both colloquial and erudite. Well, here, in 1984, you still could, and even today you still can.
The oven door being opened is the start of
The last movement of Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony –
The bathroom window pushed up
Is the orchestra in the recitative
Of the Countess’s big aria in Figaro, Act Three.
Catch the conspiracy, when mundane action
Borrows heart from happenings. We are surrounded
By such leaking categories the only consequence
Is melancholy. Hear the tramp of the trochees
As the poet, filming his own university,
Gets everything right since Plato.
But the strength of those lines depends on a poet who knows that he can’t get everything right since Plato: he can only desire to, and be as true as he can to the desire. Everything is indeed connected to everything else, but suffering is still suffering; injustice is still injustice; and the four horsemen will always ride. Our consolation is that even our metaphors of destruction are human creations. The same horses once drew the sun out of the sea. They are there again above the portico of St Mark’s in Venice, and one of them shakes its mane in Bernini’s fountain in the Piazza Navona. Art, thought, the humanities, creativity itself: it really is a unity. Until it ends, it can’t be started again; it can only be added to; and Peter Porter, by helping us to see, hear and think in his way, has added to it abundantly. What was it he said about the fifth horse, Phar Lap? It was his simple excellence to be best.
TLS, 13 February 2004. This essay was first presented as a keynote lecture for the Peter Porter symposium organized by the Graduate School of English Studies, University College London, and by the Robert Menzies Centre.
Postscript
At the Melbourne Festival in 2000 Peter Porter and I went on stage to do nothing for an hour except talk together about literature. The unscripted dialogue attracted a gratifying amount of approbation, much of it centred on the fact that we had done a lot of quoting from memory. To the blushing surprise of us both, to quote from memory was hailed as a rare and daunting display of skill from the exotic past, like scrimshaw, wampum and the ability to measure distance in miles instead of kilometres. The dialogue between literati was itself regarded as an unusual form – which, indeed, in the non-English-speaking countries it is, although in Germany and France it is common, and in a country like Argentina it is a staple (Borges and Sabato said some of their best things while talking to each other). In the age of the interview and the profile, two question-and-answer forms that have been worked to death, Porter and James found themselves in the delicious position of having started something new. The word of mouth got out from Melbourne and the media moved in. Radio really counts in Australia – the publishers would rather have their writers on radio than on television – so we had good reason to be pleased when the ABC invited us to try the same dialogue form from a radio studio. The distinguished arts producer Jill Kitson pressed the buttons in Melbourne when Porter and I went into the ABC’s studio in London for our first series of six dialogues. The programmes went to air in Australia as soon as post-production had been completed in Melbourne (post-production consisted mainly of toning down my heavy breathing) and they worked well enough on the national network for Jill Kitson to commission another series, which was duly followed, in the course of time, by a couple more, to a grand total of twenty-four programmes, with, we hope, more to come. In the pub after each recording session we try to make it a rule not to talk away the material for the next one, but the rule is hard to keep. Most writers, when they talk to each other at all, talk about sex, money, physical ailments, and the unending perfidy of their literary enemies. Porter and I talk about those things too, but we have always enjoyed talking about the arts, and the chance to do so on the air has been very welcome. With an uncharacteristic stroke of acumen, I retained the webcasting rights, and all the dialogues can be heard in the audio section of www.clivejames.com, together with, in the video section, a television dialogue we recorded in my living room. (Viewers are free to decide whether faces add anything to voices: I think, in this case, on the whole, not.)
Like many of the best things in life, this broadcasting partnership happened by accident, and was followed up more through self-indulgence than through altruism. But every writer cherishes the dream of setting the young on fire, even if only by a cigarette butt tossed casually over the shoulder, and when we meet young people who say that they were inspired by what we said to rush off and read the books we were talking about, we can congratulate ourselves for all those guilty hours when, the last two left after a long lunch, we went on arguing about everything we knew. He knows more than I do, but if I live long enough I might catch up; and that’s the way some of the young Australian writers feel about both of us, or so they say. Not that you can trust them 2.54 centimetres. We’re agreed on that.
WEEPING FOR LONDON
Watching Sydney Harbour Bridge erupt in coloured flames to mark the end of a brilliantly organized Olympics, I wept for London, city of the dud Dome and the invisible River of Fire. Last week I was in Paris and wept for London again. When I first came to Europe forty years ago, the London Underground and the Paris Metro were much of a muchness, even if the Metro had the edge in style. Now the comparison draws tears of blood. I still travel on the Tube, but only when there is no appointment waiting for me at the other end, because it might have to wait forever. Also I am getting to the age when a long staircase starts to matter. The Metro has an unfair advantage there: dug shallow, it needs few escalators. But in all other respects the Metro’s supremacy is a clear case of intelligent management. At St-Germain in the late afternoon there was still room down in the entrance hall for a Piaf-style singer good enough to pull a shower of coins. The train came hissing in on rubber tyres: wheels that don’t wear out rails. In my carriage there was a live jazz band playing Hot Club standards. When I got off at Châtelet, there was a woman on the platform reciting Racine’s Phèdre from memory at the top of her voice. Nobody mocked her and many listened in respect as the perfectly cadenced alexandrines resonated in the station’s tiled vault. She was probably a nut, but might well have been a licensed busker like all the others. Look at the map and you will see that all I had done was cross the river, but the trip was nearly as rewarding as walking across the Pont Neuf, and anyway it was raining. Reme
mber the last time you rode the Tube when it was raining outside? How far did you get? We apologize for the inconvenience caused. Or, to quote the new and even odder version: ‘We apologize for the inconvenience caused to your journey.’ Sir Kingsley: ‘Yes, but it isn’t my journey that’s being inconvenienced, is it? It’s me, you posturing sod.’
With John Prescott in charge of the finances, no doubt the London Undergound will soon be fixed. After all, he was the man who saved the Dome. Without him, it might never have happened, and we would have been deprived of the best long-running entertainment since Nimrod. I have always liked the cut of Prescott’s jib: in this government he stands out like a good man in a bad advertising agency. But it is often a mistake to suppose that honesty precludes cunning. I bet it was his idea to stage the Dome jewel robbery, which would have been a PR masterstroke except for one crucial flaw. The fact that it was a bungled robbery was right in keeping: the spectacle of the blaggers bouncing their hammers off the armoured glass was pure Dome. But the actors playing the Sweeney mucked it up. They should have arrested those children for singing hymns without a licence. Instead they arrested the villains, thus transmitting a fatal air of competence. The essence of Dome culture is that nothing must go right.
A few years of weathering have done nothing for the Centre Pompidou, which still looks like the place where all the world’s sewer pipes come together in conference, but you have only to go up to the fourth floor to see what it’s got that the Tate Modern hasn’t: paintings, properly arranged. Again, the French have a certain advantage. Most of the painters were either born in France or else lived there, so the State had ready access to so much good stuff that not even Goering could manage to take it all away. But as with the Metro, those in charge know how to capitalize on a lucky break. The paintings are grouped so that you can see who’s who, what’s what, and when’s when. (The same applies on the top floor of the Musée d’Orsay: first the Impressionists, then the Post-Impressionists. Get it?) The present arrangement of the Tate Modern is meant to discount all that, purportedly so as to enlarge our comprehension, really so as to make the holes in the collection look less gaping. But the conceptual drivel written on the walls is a fearful price to pay, and the Domish impulse behind the whole effort is neatly symbolized by the glowing plastic cap placed on top of an otherwise impressive building in order to deconstruct its monumentality. Over and above the candy-tipped chimney, or rather below it and stretched out flagrantly ahead, is that unbeatable testament to architectural arrogance, the bridge that rewrites the rules of suspension with such virtuosity that it doesn’t work. Paris has one just like it, but I doubt if its creator will get another commission for anything bigger than a funfair ticket booth. In London, the same genius responsible for our non-crossable bridge is currently erecting a new obovoid office block for the Mayor, who sensibly doesn’t want to move into it. A country in which Ken Livingstone has become the voice of reason is facing an uphill struggle.
Sydney learned its lesson with the Opera House, which looks sensational from the outside, but whose revolutionary inside caused more trouble than it was worth. The architect, rethinking the conventions of theatrical design to fit a restricted lateral space, proposed to work all the major set-changes from the fly tower instead of the wings. It was expensively discovered that the conventions of theatrical design, like the conventions of bridge suspension, are not susceptible of being rethought. The remains of Utzon’s innovatory fly-tower mechanism are now rusting in a paddock somewhere near Broken Hill. Eventually London’s Dome will reach a similarly obscure destination, but not before all the wrong solutions have been explored. The free market has spoken: the Dome site is worth hundreds of millions more without the Dome. But in this instance the government, with its dwindling prestige on the line, can’t afford to listen to the free market. And you never know, the government might be right for once. It was Mrs Thatcher who gave Blair’s Britain the courage to be born. Believing that the State should get out of the economy, she never grasped that a government is either dirigiste or it is nothing. Apart from an utterly buggered broadcasting system, her lasting and festering bequest is the transport chaos for which Blair will have to take the rap. The Dome might not be enough to sink him – he can always blame Heseltine, dump Prescott or hand Simon Jenkins a poisoned peerage – but the trains could lose him the next election.
Postscript
Though the Dome went on costing three million pounds a month even to keep empty, its hollow thunder was eventually stolen by the Diana Memorial Fountain, a purpose-built safety hazard whose running expenses perpetually increase as new dangers are revealed. So far it has not bred sharks. In Edinburgh, the Holyrood parliament building was the most ludicrously overpriced folly of the lot, but you had to go north of the border to get its full impact: it was never a joke in England. It should be said that a building project can go a hundred times over budget and still be worth it. Australians justifiably proud of the Sydney Olympics should remember that their beloved Opera House cost its weight in lottery money. The question turns on whether something considerable has been created. It doesn’t have to be admirable: just considerable. I don’t especially like either the Centre Pompidou or the Mitterrand pyramid at the Louvre, but I would have to admit that there are many people who do. About the Dome, no conflict of opinion is possible. The number of people who find it even faintly interesting would be lost in one corner of it, if it had any corners. My invention of the Dome Culture was meant to be a joke in passing, but as time went on I started to wonder whether it might not be possible for a whole nation to contract a case of butter fingers. Christopher Booker put in some valuable work when he identified the virus of Neophilia, but Dome Culture goes far beyond that. Dome Culture is not just an urge to make it new, but to make it ridiculous. The disease may have started with the inexplicable decision of the Post Office, back in the 1970s, to paint a few pillar boxes yellow, to see if the public liked it. The public hated it. So the experimental pillar boxes were painted red again. But that was not true Dome Culture as we have now come to know it. If the Dome gnomes had been in charge, every pillar box in the country would have been painted yellow, and the response to the subsequent outcry would have been a vast multi-media publicity campaign to prove that red is bad for your eyes.
An extra note – This book was already at the stage of its first proofs when the London transport system was attacked on July 7th, 2005. For a while I thought of removing the above piece, because for once the London Underground was no source of mirth. But within a month people were making the same old jokes again, especially the one about the stupidity of any terrorist who thought that the tube needed to be bombed in order to be brought to a halt. I don’t think it was a case of people revealing their essential callousness: they were merely revealing their sense of proportion. I, for one, had spent too much time earning my Freedom Pass to waste any more of it by not using public transport: a free ride is a free ride. The next bunch to attempt an outrage seemed to lack the secret for building bombs that went off, and one could look forward to the day when young people clever enough to succeed in such an enterprise would lose the urge to try it, having noticed, perhaps, that the older men who encouraged them to seek martyrdom were seldom keen to seek it themselves.
ATTACK OF THE KILLER CRITICS
The recently published ninth edition of the excellent Chambers Dictionary, which has always prided itself on keeping up with new words, gives only one meaning for the noun ‘snark’. It’s ‘an imaginary animal created by Lewis Carroll’. The tenth edition might well carry a second meaning: ‘an adverse book review written with malice aforethought’. If the dictionary were compiled on historical principles, like the OED, it might mention that the word ‘snark’ was first used in this sense by Heidi Julavits in a long and fascinating article about book-reviewing which she published in The Believer. Elsewhere in the literary forest, Dale Peck, writing in The New Republic, had attempted to bury Rick Moody’s novel The Black Veil under an avalanche
of abuse. Generating a small but widely reported kerfuffle, this event was one of the stimuli for Julavits’s contention that the killingly personal review might be reaching such epidemic proportions that it needed its own monosyllabic name, like plague.
Plausibly claiming to have identified an industry-wide rise in the prevalence of a snide tone, she called such a review a ‘snark’. Since the noun derives from the accepted slang adjective ‘snarky’, one would have thought it a rather understated label for an attack whose intent is often not merely snide but outright murderous. Better acquainted with the concept of gangsterism in public life, the Germans call a killer review a rip-up and the Italians a tear-to-pieces. But this new, English word – English tempered by an American determination to believe that serious people can lapse from high standards only in a temporary fit of civic irresponsibility – is probably violent enough, and it certainly captures the essential element of personally cherished malice.
The desire to do someone down, or indeed in, is the defining feature. Adverse book reviews there have always been, and probably always should be. At their best, they are written in defence of a value, and in the tacit hope that the author, having had his transgressions pointed out, might secretly agree that his book is indeed lousy. All they attack, or seem to attack, is the book. But a snark blatantly attacks the author. It isn’t just meant to retard the author’s career, it is meant to advance the reviewer’s, either by proving how clever he is or simply by injuring a competitor. Since a good book can certainly be injured by a bad notice, especially if the critic is in a key position, the distinction between the snark and the legitimately destructive review is well worth having.
