Sentenced to Life

by Clive James

  Not only to enumerate my wrongs

  But to pay homage to the late sublime

  That comes with seeing how the years have brought

  A fitting end, if not the one I sought.

  Winter Plums

  Two winter plum trees grow beside my door.

  Throughout the cold months they had little pink

  Flowers all over them as if they wore

  Nightdresses, and their branches, black as ink

  By sunset, looked as if a Japanese

  Painter, while painting air, had painted these

  Two winter plum trees. Summer now at last

  Has warmed their leaves and all the blooms are gone.

  A year that I might not have had has passed.

  Bare branches are my signal to go on,

  But soon the brave flowers of the winter plums

  Will flare again, and I must take what comes:

  Two winter plum trees that will outlive me.

  Thriving with colour even in the snow,

  They’ll snatch a triumph from adversity.

  All right for them, but can the same be so

  For someone who, seeing their buds remade

  From nothing, will be less pleased than afraid?

  Spring Snow Dancer

  Snow into April. Frost night after night.

  Out on the Welsh farms the lambs die unborn.

  The chill air hurts my lungs, but from the light

  It could be spring. Bitter as it is bright,

  The last trick of the cold is a false dawn.

  I breathed, grew up, and now I learn to be

  Glad for my long life as it melts away,

  Yet still regales me with so much to see

  Of how we live in continuity

  And die in it. Take what I saw today:

  My granddaughter, as quick as I could glance,

  Did ballet steps across the kitchen floor,

  And this time I was breathless at the chance

  By which I’d lived to see our dear lamb dance –

  Though soon I will not see her any more.

  Mysterious Arrival of the Dew

  Tell me about the dew. Some say it falls

  But does it fall in fact? And if it fall

  Then where does it fall from? And why, in falling,

  Does it not obscure the moon?

  Dew on the hibiscus, dew on the cobweb,

  Dew on the broken leaf,

  The world’s supply of diamond ear-rings

  Tossed from a car window.

  Some intergalactic hoodlum sugar-daddy

  Is trying to get girls.

  Goethe had a name for these flattering droplets:

  Shiver-pearls. Grab a handful.

  Statistics say dew doesn’t fall at all:

  Going nowhere near the moon,

  It just gathers on any susceptible surface

  When the temperature is right.

  There is talk in every arid country

  Of collecting it by the truck-load,

  But the schemes get forgotten in the sun

  As soon as it sucks up those trillion baubles.

  Tell me about the dew. Is it a case

  Of falling back the better to advance,

  By the same veil, shawl or glittering pashmina

  As last time out? But darling, it’s to die for.

  Cabin Baggage

  My niece is heading here to stay with us.

  Before she leaves home she takes careful stock

  Of what she might not know again for years.

  The berries (so she writes) have been brought in,

  But she’ll be gone before the peaches come.

  On days of burning sun, the air is tinged

  With salt and eucalyptus. ‘Why am I

  Leaving all this behind? I feel a fool.’

  But I can tell from how she writes things down

  The distance will assist her memories

  To take full form. She travels to stay still.

  I wish I’d been that smart before I left.

  Instead, I have to dig deep for a trace

  Of how the beach was red hot underfoot,

  The green gold of the Christmas beetle’s wing.

  Transit Visa

  He had not thought that it would be his task

  To gauge the force of the oncoming wave

  Of night; to cast aside his jester’s mask,

  Guessing it was not Ali Baba’s cave

  That would engulf him, but an emptiness

  Devoid of treasure heaped to serve his dreams;

  His best hope, to be set free from distress.

  No guiding light, not even moonlight beams,

  Will lead him forward to find life refined

  Into a fit reward or punishment:

  No soul can well continue when the mind

  Fades with the body. All his store is spent

  Of pride, or guilt, or anything that might

  Have steeled him for the non-stop outbound flight

  Were it to lead somewhere, but it does not.

  That much becomes clear as the sky grows dark.

  He hears the rattle of his childhood cot,

  The rain that fills the creek that floods the park:

  But these are memories. The way ahead

  Will send no messages that can be kept.

  One doesn’t even get to meet the dead.

  You planned to see the bed where Dido slept?

  No chance. It didn’t last the course. Back then

  They forged the myths that feed our poetry

  Not for our sake, but theirs, to soothe them when

  Life was so frightful that death had to be

  A better place, a holiday from fear.

  But now we know that paradise is here,

  As is the underworld. To no new dawn

  He gets him gone, nor yet a starry hour

  Of silence. He goes back to being born

  And then beyond that, though he feels the power

  Of all creation when he lifts a book,

  Or when a loved face smiles at his new joke,

  Which could well be his last: but now just look

  At how the air, before he turns to smoke,

  Is glowing in the window. If the glass

  Were brighter it would melt. That radiance

  Is not a way of saying this will pass:

  It says this will remain. No play of chance

  From now on includes you. The world you quit

  Is staying here, so say goodbye to it.

  Japanese Maple

  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 colours 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.

  Balcony Scene

  Old as the hills and riddled with ill health,

  I talk the talk but cannot walk the walk

  Sav
e at the pace of drying paint. My wealth

  Of stamina is spent. Think of the hawk,

  Nailed to its perch by lack of strength, that learns

  To sing the lark’s song. What else can it do,

  While dreaming of the day its power returns?

  It is with all my heart I write to you.

  My heart alone is what it always was.

  The ultrasound shows nothing wrong with it,

  And if we smile at that, then it’s because

  We both know that its physical remit

  Was only half the task the poor thing faced.

  My heart had spiritual duties too,

  And failed at all of them. Worse than a waste

  Was how I hurt myself through hurting you.

  Or so he says, you think. I know your fear

  That my repentance comes too easily.

  But to discuss this, let me lure you here,

  To sit with me on my stone balcony.

  A hint of winter cools the air, but still

  It shines like summer. Here I can renew

  My wooing, as a cunning stranger will.

  His role reversed, your suitor waits for you.

  The maple tree, the autumn crocuses –

  They think it’s spring, and that their lives are long –

  Lend colour to the green and grey. This is

  A setting too fine for a life gone wrong.

  It needs your laughter. Let me do my best

  To earn that much, though you not find me true,

  Or good, or fair, or fit for any test.

  You think that I don’t know my debt to you?

  High overhead, a pair of swallows fly,

  Programmed for Africa, but just for now

  They seem sent solely to enchant the eye

  Here in this refuge I acquired somehow

  Beyond my merit. Now a sudden wave

  Of extra sunlight sharpens all the view.

  There is a man here you might care to save

  From too much solitude. He calls for you.

  Here two opposing forces will collide –

  Your proper anger and my shamed regret –

  With all the weight of justice on your side.

  But once we gladly spoke and still might yet.

  Come, then, and do not hesitate to say

  Art thou not Romeo, and a Montague?

  Be wary, but don’t brush these words away,

  For they are all yours. I wrote this for you.

  Sunset Hails a Rising

  O lente, lente currite noctis equi!

  – Marlowe, after Ovid

  La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée.

  – Valéry

  Dying by inches, I can hear the sound

  Of all the fine words for the flow of things

  The poets and philosophers have used

  To mark the path into the killing ground.

  Perhaps their one aim was to give words wings,

  Or even just to keep themselves amused,

  With no thought that they might not be around

  To see the rising sun:

  But still they found a measure for our plight

  As we prepare to leave the world of men.

  Run slowly, slowly, horses of the night.

  The sea, the sea, always begun again.

  In English of due tact, the great lines gain

  More than they lose. The grandeur that they keep

  From being born in other tongues than ours

  Suggests we will have time to taste the rain

  As we are drawn into the dreamless sleep

  That lasts so long. No supernatural powers

  Need be invoked by us to help explain

  How we will see the world

  Dissolve into the mutability

  That feeds the future with our fading past:

  The sea, the always self-renewing sea.

  The horses of the night that run so fast.

  A Note on the Text

  In the poem ‘Only the Immortal Need Apply’, the scene at the Russian Ballet (Tableau! Scandale! as the central figure might have said) is taken from Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s biography of Gabriele d’Annunzio, The Pike.

  The title of ‘Sunset Hails a Rising’ started life as a line in a poem by Francis Webb, an Australian poet of the previous generation who spent much of his life as a mental patient. His poems rarely cohered but some of them contained fragments too beautiful to forget. In the same poem, the line from Doctor Faustus about the horses of the night was taken from Ovid by Marlowe, who left it in the Latin, changing only the word order. The line from Valéry can be found in Le Cimitière Marin, best translated by Derek Mahon; although the two translations here, like the two translations from Marlowe’s Latin, are both my own.

  In ‘Mysterious Arrival of the Dew’ every line of the first stanza, with the addition of only a single word, is a trouvaille taken from a single paragraph of one of Patrick O’Brian’s later novels in the Jack Aubrey sequence.

  When I was young, the name of the Sydney suburb Tempe was so closely associated with industrial waste that I later thought Keats was joking when he used the name Tempe as short-hand for Arcadia. Later still, while I was living in England, Tempe Dump disappeared among the new constructions for the railway approach to Sydney airport. Sic transit gloria mundi.

  The two separate mentions of Ava Gardner are a coincidence, although I should confess that when I was twelve years old her appearance in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman marked me for life, and that I was forever afterwards the Dutchman, played by James Mason as the commander of a ghost ship who was given to reciting quatrains from the Fitzgerald translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam while he sailed in perpetual search of the woman who would redeem him from his anguish. Later on, when I met my future wife, it turned out that she was in perpetual search of James Mason.

  The title of Compendium Catullianum was devised for me by Mary Beard in collaboration with Dr Rupert Thompson, the Orator of Cambridge University.

  The dedicatory epigraph is my own translation of a fragment from Rilke.

  ALSO BY CLIVE JAMES

  Autobiography

  Unreliable Memoirs Falling Towards England

  May Week Was In June North Face of Soho

  The Blaze of Obscurity

  FICTION

  Brilliant Creatures The Remake

  Brrm! Brrm! The Silver Castle

  VERSE

  Other Passports: Poems 1958–1985

  The Book of My Enemy: Collected Verse 1958–2003

  Opal Sunset: Selected Poems 1958–2008

  Angels Over Elsinore: Collected Verse 2003–2008

  Nefertiti in the Flak Tower

  TRANSLATION

  The Divine Comedy

  CRITICISM

  The Metropolitan Critic (new edition, 1994)

  Visions Before Midnight The Crystal Bucket

  First Reactions (US) From the Land of Shadows

  Glued to the Box Snakecharmers in Texas

  The Dreaming Swimmer Fame in the Twentieth Century

  On Television Even As We Speak Reliable Essays

  As of is Writing (US) The Meaning of Recognition

  Cultural Amnesia The Revolt of the Pendulum

  A Point of View Poetry Notebook

  TRAVEL

  Flying Visits

  Acknowledgements

  I should thank Prue Shaw, Deirdre Serjeantson, Tom Stoppard, David Free and Stephen Edgar for reading these poems as they came out, and for saying what they thought. As in my two previous collections, Don Paterson helped me choose the order and bring the manuscript to a workable finality. I owe special thanks to my elder daughter Claerwen for planting the Japanese maple tree in my garden. As for my younger daughter and my entire family, and for how they looked after me at this fragile yet busy time, I lack the words to thank them sufficiently, except to say that the words might be somewhere in this little book; too much decked out with the trappings of premat
ure sorrow, perhaps; but any strength of form is surely a reflection of how well I was guarded against despair by the joy and kindness with which I was surrounded. As often happens with poetry, the ostensible meaning and the deeper meaning might be at variance. To put it less grandly, you can say that you’re on your last legs, but the way you say it might equally suggest that you could run a mile in your socks.

  There are editors and poetry editors to thank: of the New Yorker, the Yale Review, the New Statesman, the Spectator, Standpoint, Quadrant, the Australian and the British Medical Journal: Supportive and Palliative Care. But above all other editors I must thank Alan Jenkins of the TLS, who encouraged me in the notion that a poet who is up against it might well make a subject out of being up against it. At my base in Cambridge, Susie Young and Dawn Crow combined their efforts to guide a stream of electronic manuscripts into my website and out again. I should also thank the editors and anchor-persons of various radio and television stations in the UK, Ireland, Australia and Canada who kindly asked me to read some of these poems aloud: an offence, perhaps, to those who believe that a poem should be merely overheard, but an unbeatable way of barking for one’s act.

  This electronic edition published 2015 by Picador

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

  Pan Macmillan, New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-1-4472-8406-2

  Copyright © Clive James 2015

  Jacket Design by Stuart Wilson, Picador Art Department

  Jacket images © Shutterstock

  The right of Clive James to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.