Collected Poems (1958-2015)

by Clive James

  But little Julie Manet had a try.

  To represent the young, Paul Valéry

  Delivered half a speech and then broke down.

  He missed his master’s deep simplicity.

  Then everybody started back to town.

  Among those present were Rodin, Bonnard,

  Lautrec, Mirbeau, Vallotton, Maeterlinck

  And Misia’s eternal slave Vuillard.

  But Renoir, who had painted her in pink,

  Knew ways to tame her when she got annoyed

  At how they laughed instead of looking glum.

  He thought such moments ought to be enjoyed.

  Had not mortality been overcome?

  Said Renoir, who had been the poet’s friend:

  ‘A Mallarmé does not die every day.’

  A sly hint of his own approaching end?

  There are such things as mean too much to say.

  ‘I’ve left that great page blank,’ said Mallarmé.

  A Gesture towards James Joyce

  My gesture towards Finnegans Wake is deliberate.

  Ronald Bush, T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style

  The gesture towards Finnegans Wake was deliberate.

  It was not accidental.

  Years of training went into the gesture,

  As W. C. Fields would practise a juggling routine

  Until his eczema-prone hands bled in their kid gloves;

  As Douglas Fairbanks Sr trimmed the legs of a table

  Until, without apparent effort and from a standing start,

  He could jump up on to it backwards;

  Or as Gene Kelly danced an entire tracking shot over and over

  Until the final knee-slide ended exactly in focus,

  Loafers tucked pigeon-toed behind him,

  Perfect smile exultant,

  Hands thrown open saying ‘How about that?’

  The gesture towards Finnegans Wake was deliberate.

  Something so elaborate could not have been otherwise.

  Though an academic gesture, it partook in its final form

  Of the balletic arabesque,

  With one leg held out extended to the rear

  And the equiponderant forefinger pointing demonstratively

  Like the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus,

  Or, more correctly, the Mercury of Giambologna,

  Although fully, needless to say, clad.

  The gesture towards Finnegans Wake was deliberate,

  Its aim assisted by the position of the volume,

  A 1957 printing in the yellow and orange wrapper

  Propped on a sideboard and opened at page 164

  So that the gesture might indicate a food-based conceit

  About pudding the carp before doeuvre hors –

  The Joycean amalgam in its ludic essence,

  Accessible to students and yet also evincing

  The virtue of requiring a good deal of commentary

  Before what looked simple even if capricious

  Emerged as precise even if complex

  And ultimately unfathomable.

  The gesture towards Finnegans Wake was deliberate,

  Being preceded by an ‘It is no accident, then’,

  An exuberant ‘It is neither accidental nor surprising’

  And at least two cases of ‘It is not for nothing that’,

  These to adumbrate the eventual paroxysm

  In the same way that a bouncer from Dennis Lillee

  Has its overture of giant strides galumphing towards you

  With the face both above and below the ridiculous moustache

  Announcing by means of unmistakable grimaces

  That what comes next is no mere spasm

  But a premeditated attempt to knock your block off.

  The gesture towards Finnegans Wake was deliberate

  And so was my gesture with two fingers.

  In America it would have been one finger only

  But in Italy I might have employed both arms,

  The left hand crossing to the tense right bicep

  As my clenched fist jerked swiftly upwards –

  The most deliberate of all gestures because most futile,

  Defiantly conceding the lost battle.

  The gesture towards Finnegans Wake was deliberate:

  So much so that Joyce should have seen it coming.

  Even through the eyepatch of his last years.

  He wrote a book full of nothing except writing

  For people who can’t do anything but read,

  And now their gestures clog the air around us.

  He asked for it, and we got it.

  Thoughts on Feeling Carbon-Dated

  No moons are left to see the other side of.

  Curved surfaces betray once secret centres.

  Those plagues were measles the Egyptians died of.

  A certain note of disillusion enters.

  Were Empson starting now, no doubt exists

  That now no doubt exists about space–time’s

  Impetuosity, his pithy gists

  Would still stun, but no more so than his rhymes.

  Physics has dished its prefix meta. Science,

  First having put black shoes and a blue suit on,

  Controls the world’s supply of mental giants.

  A Goethe now would lack words to loathe Newton.

  It’s forty years since James Joyce named the quark.

  Now nobody’s nonplussed to hear light rays

  Get sucked down holes so fast they show up dark.

  Nor would the converse of that news amaze.

  It all gets out of reach as it grows clear.

  What we once failed to grasp but still were thrilled with

  Left us for someone else, from whom we hear

  Assurances about the awe they’re filled with.

  One night in Cambridge Empson read to us.

  He offered us some crisps and seemed delighted

  So many young should still want to discuss

  Why science once got laymen so excited.

  Johnny Weissmuller Dead in Acapulco

  Apart possibly from waving hello to the cliff-divers

  Would the real Tarzan have ever touched Acapulco?

  Not with a one-hundred-foot vine.

  Jungle Jim maybe, but the Ape Man never.

  They played a tape at his funeral

  In the Valley of Light cemetery of how he had sounded

  Almost fifty years back giving the pristine ape-call,

  Which could only remind all present that in decline

  He would wander distractedly in the garden

  With his hands to his mouth and the unforgettable cry

  Coming out like a croak –

  This when he wasn’t sitting in his swim-trunks

  Beside the pool he couldn’t enter without nurses.

  Things had not been so bad before Mexico

  But they were not great.

  He was a greeter in Caesar’s Palace like Joe Louis.

  Sal, I want you should meet Johnny Weissmuller.

  Johnny, Mr Sal Volatile is a friend of ours from Chicago.

  With eighteen Tarzan movies behind him

  Along with the five Olympic gold medals,

  He had nothing in front except that irrepressible paunch

  Which brought him down out of the tree house

  To earth as Jungle Jim

  So a safari suit could cover it up.

  As Jungle Jim he wasn’t just on salary,

  He had a piece of the action,

  But coming so late in the day it was not enough

  And in Vegas only the smile was still intact.

  As once it had all been intact, the Greek classic body

  Unleashing the new-style front-up crawl like a baby

  Lifting itself for the first time,

  Going over the water almost as much as through it,

  Curing itself of childhood polio

  By
making an aquaplane of its deep chest,

  Each arm relaxing out of the water and stiffening into it,

  The long legs kicking a trench that did not fill up

  Until he came back on the next lap,

  Invincible, easily breathing

  The air in the spit-smooth, headlong, creek-around-a-rock trough

  Carved by his features.

  He had six wives like Henry VIII but don’t laugh,

  Because Henry VIII couldn’t swim a stroke

  And if you ever want to see a true king you should watch Weissmuller

  In Tarzan Escapes cavorting underwater with Boy

  In the clear river with networks of light on the shelving sand

  Over which they fly weightless to hide from each other behind the log

  While Jane wonders where they are.

  You will wonder where you are too and be shy of the answer

  Because it is Paradise.

  When the crocodile made its inevitable entry into the clear river

  Tarzan could always settle its hash with his bare hands

  Or a knife at most,

  But Jungle Jim usually had to shoot it

  And later on he just never got to meet it face to face –

  It was working for the Internal Revenue Service.

  There was a chimpanzee at his funeral,

  Which must have been someone’s idea of a smart promotion,

  And you might say dignity had fled,

  But when Tarzan dropped from the tall tree and swam out of the splash

  Like an otter with an outboard to save Boy from the waterfall

  It looked like poetry to me,

  And at home in the bath I would surface giving the ape-call.

  Reflections on a Cardboard Box

  Hostathion contains Triazophos,

  Controls seed weevil, pea moth, carrot fly.

  Of pesticides Hostathion is the boss.

  Pests take one sip, kick up their heels and die.

  They never find out what Hostathion is.

  Triazophos remains the merest word,

  Though partly echoed by the acrid fizz

  Which suddenly grows too loud to be heard.

  Hostathion was once Achilles’ friend,

  Staunch at his elbow before Ilios,

  But now that name brings pea moth a quick end

  Assisted by the cruel Triazophos.

  Heroic words are too brave for the deeds

  They do, yet maybe now they do less evil –

  Ferocious but in service to our needs,

  Venting our wrath for us on the seed weevil.

  Forests of swords on the Homeric plain

  Are momentarily invoked. Well, then,

  It says much for this age where we complain

  Men die like flies, that flies should die like men.

  Triazophos sailed with Hostathion

  Through centuries as if this were their goal:

  Infinite enemies to fall upon,

  Killing so common it is called control.

  But all the old insanity is gone.

  Where are the funeral pyres, the shrieks of loss?

  You need to watch only Hostathion.

  Hostathion contains Triazophos,

  Who once reaped heads by night in no-man’s-land

  Obeying no man’s orders but his own.

  Look at him now, Hostathion’s right hand –

  Cleaning their guns beside the telephone.

  The Philosophical Phallus

  Female desire aims to subdue, overcome and pacify the unbridled ambition of the phallus.

  Roger Scruton

  The unbridled phallus of the philosopher

  Was seen last week galloping across the South Downs,

  Flame spurting from its flared nostril.

  The phallus being a horse in which

  Both mane and tail are bunched together at the back end,

  This unharnessed piece of horseflesh was of necessity unable

  To accompany with a display of shaken neck-hair

  The tossing of its head,

  But the tossing of its head was tremendous nevertheless,

  Like that of Bucephalus, the steed of Alexander.

  Where the lush grass curves up to the rim of the chalk cliffs

  So that they drop away where you cannot see them

  When looking from inland,

  Such was the cyclorama against which ran rampant

  The unbridled phallus of the philosopher,

  Pulling lawn like an emerald treadmill incessantly beneath

  The unravelling thunder of its hooves –

  Accoutrements which a phallus does not normally possess

  But perhaps in this case they were retractable

  Like the undercarriage of some large, cigar-shaped aircraft –

  The Starlifter, for example, or the C-5A Galaxy.

  See where it comes across ‘the ontological divide

  Separating men and women’!

  The unbridled phallus in its frightening hauteur,

  Gushing suds with each procreative snort –

  Not the small, dog-skulled horse of the Greeks and the Etruscans,

  But the horse of the Persians as noted by Herodotus,

  Big, built thickly, hefty-headed,

  Its two great globular hindquarters throbbing

  Like the throats of rutting frogs.

  The prancing pudendum curls its lip but says Yes to Life:

  It is a yea-neigher.

  Not only does it say ‘ha-ha!’ among the trumpets,

  But in the landscaped gardens of fashionable country houses

  It trumpets among the ha-has,

  And the pulsing vein of its back is not afraid.

  Though fleet-footed as an Arab it is stronger than a Clydesdale,

  Shouldered like a Shire, bulk-bodied like a Suffolk –

  A standing, foam-flanked reproach

  To all those of us more appropriately represented

  By the Shetland pony,

  Or that shrunken, shrivelled toy horse with the mule-tail

  Equus przewalskii, Przewalski’s horse

  From the Kobdo district of western Mongolia.

  At nightfall the women of storm-swept lonely farms,

  Or at casement windows of the grand houses aforesaid,

  Or women anywhere who languish ‘unfulfilled qua women’,

  Feel their ontological divide transformed to jelly

  At the vibrant snuffle in the distance –

  Long to subdue it, to overcome it, to pacify it,

  Willing it homeward to its chosen stable,

  Which will suffer its presence all the more exquisitely

  For being neither deep nor wide enough wholly to contain

  The unbridled ambition of the philosophical phallus.

  Egon Friedell’s Heroic Death

  Egon Friedell committed suicide

  By jumping from his window when he saw

  Approaching Brownshirts eager to preside

  At rites the recent Anschluss had made law.

  Vienna’s coffee-house habitués

  By that time were in Paris, Amsterdam,

  London, New York. Friedell just couldn’t raise

  The energy to take it on the lam.

  Leaving aside the question of their looks,

  The Jews the Nazis liked to see in Hell

  Were good at writing and owned lots of books –

  Which all spelled certain curtains for Friedell.

  Friedell was cultivated in a way

  That now in Europe we don’t often see.

  For every volume he’d have had to pay

  In pain what those thugs thought the fitting fee.

  Forestalling them was simply common sense,

  An act only a Pharisee would blame,

  Yet hard to do when fear is so intense.

  Would you have had the nerve to do the same?

  The normal move would be to just lie
still

  And tell yourself you somehow might survive,

  But this great man of letters had the will

  To meet his death while he was still alive.

  So out into the air above the street

  He sailed with all his learning left behind,

  And by one further gesture turned defeat

  Into a triumph for the human mind.

  The civilized are most so as they die.

  He called a warning even as he fell

  In case his body hit a passer-by

  As innocent as was Egon Friedell.

  Homage to Rafinesque

  The ichthyologist Constantine Rafinesque-Schmaltz

  (Who was pleased to be known as quite simply Rafinesque)

  And John James Audubon the famous student of birds

  (Whose folios are generally thought too gorgeous for words

  Although when opened they envelop your entire desk)

  Teamed up in America as if they were dancing a waltz.

  It was neither fish nor fowl crabbed their double act.

  The flap in their cabin was caused by a humble bat

  Which Rafinesque with the nearest thing to hand attacked,

  Thus pounding Audubon’s beloved violin out flat.

  The revenge Audubon took was oblique but sure.

  He returned from the Ohio River with drawings, life-size,

  Of fish Rafinesque hadn’t seen hide nor hair of before,

  But belief in Audubon’s pencil put scales on his eyes.

  He published a book which his enemies loved for its faults.

  To pay with his fame for a fiddle was clearly grotesque.

  With the object of leading his friend up a similar creek

  He might justly have fashioned a phoenix claw or orc beak,

  But he showed the forbearance implied by his name, Rafinesque.

  Now Audubon’s plates are hoarded like gold in the vaults

  And only the fish honour Constantine Rafinesque-Schmaltz.

  Will Those Responsible Come Forward?

  May the Lord have mercy on all those peoples