by Clive James
I think of time’s hourglass and bladed stave,
Of how we waste the few days that we’ve got,
Of how my youth is gone and shan’t return.
I must turn over or my back will burn.
I’m writing now in the supine position,
A posture more conducive to high thoughts
Of Culture and the means of its transmission.
From here on in I think you’ll find all sorts
Of pundits prophesying the perdition
Awaiting you, complete with boils and warts,
If you should go on proving so appealing
To the unclean, unthinking and unfeeling.
I don’t imply, I hasten to assure you,
Your fate’s to be a pop star like Kate Bush.
Though seas of spellbound faces stretch before you
The bodies underneath won’t pee or push.
I know the more you’re buttered up the more you
Will stay as untouched as the Hindu Kush.
Endowed with inspiration of such purity
You’d gladly follow it back to obscurity.
It’s obvious that you’re a heavyweight:
Your harshest critics can’t say otherwise.
Your status would remain inviolate
Though Jeff Nuttall should praise you to the skies.
In that regard you’ve got it on a plate,
Whence comes the shamrock tinge of certain eyes.
While hitting the jackpot in all essentials
You’ve managed to hang on to your credentials.
You write intensely and you’re entertaining.
For those of us less apt to do the first,
Apart from silence there’s one course remaining –
Which is to do the second. At the worst
(And when this happens it’s no use complaining)
The public clamours to be reimbursed,
But on the whole there’s some cause to be proud
If what one writes makes people laugh aloud.
Or so I think when critics in terms drastic
Inform the world my feet are half trochaic.
It seems my scansion’s absolutely spastic.
Even my best iambics are spondaic.
The poor fool’s sense of rhythm is elastic!
His diction is archaic Aramaic!
As for his rhymes, let’s send him back to Kogarah! Hell,
The stuff he drivels isn’t even dogarahhell!
It’s useless to invoke the semi-vowel
And point out ‘bevel’ is a rhyme for ‘Devil’.
The cloth-eared scribes who write prose with a trowel
Will smugly wonder if I’m on the level.
One really might as well throw in the towel.
Fulke Greville’s brother was called Neville Greville …
No, let the critics stew in their pale juice:
A joke’s a joke and it needs no excuse.
Far out on their twin-fin potato chips
The young star surfers sprint to climb astride
A wave as smooth as spit feels on your lips
And when it breaks you see them there inside –
Born acrobats trained to their fingertips.
Meanwhile here at the thin edge of the tide
A man pretending he’s a submarine
To please his children’s also in the scene.
A Boudin painted by Tiepolo,
A beige and azure fresco two miles long;
The sky brushed pink, the sable d’or aglow,
The plump swell dimpled like a silver gong;
The beach lit by le ciel, laved by les flots,
An airy glittering shantung sarong,
Unfolds into the south where with a stain
Of Monet nenuphars France turns to Spain.
And though down there the Basques will bomb your car,
Up here they are a people touched with grace.
They know the sweet years only go so far
And life is more than just a pretty face.
However poor and sick and old they are
The sun shines for them, too. They have a place.
A fact which would provoke me to deep thinking
Were not the sun now on the point of sinking.
Clear plum juice simmers in the solar disc.
The soft light off the pale blue water stipples
With gold the green cliff-clothing tamarisk.
The breathing sea sends in its silken ripples.
High on the sea wall the last odalisque
Looks down with mute approval at her nipples.
La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée.
But that’s enough of versing for one day.
I’ll get up now and put on thongs and hat.
I’ll gather up your books and these few pages.
I’ll shake and roll my tatty rattan mat
And up the cliff trottoir by easy stages
I’ll dawdle with a feeling of that’s that –
Great talents may write poems for the ages,
But poetasters with their tongues in fetters
When all else fails at least can still write letters.
To Gore Vidal at Fifty
To Gore Vidal at – how should I commence?
The trick is to strike sparks and still make sense.
To Gore Vidal at fifty – sounds a lot.
Should I be flippant about that, or not?
To Gore Vidal at fifty years of age –
That slights the sprite, though it salutes the sage.
To Gore Vidal at fifty years of youth –
A trifle twee, but closer to the truth,
Since you (I speak in awe, not animosity)
Remain the incarnation of precocity,
A marvellous boy whose man-sized aureola
Still scintillates like fresh-poured Pepsi-Cola
(If I can mention safe from repercussions
The formula that Nixon sold the Russians),
Whose promise is renewed in the fulfilling,
A teenage thrill that goes on being thrilling,
A pledge kept firm with no recourse to perjury
Save incidental, mainly dental, surgery.
And yet you will admit you are no chicken.
Admit? Insist. The Peter Panic-stricken
Might cling to childhood out of self-delusion,
But that or any similar confusion
You’ve always held in absolute contempt –
The only absolute that you exempt
From your unwearyingly edifying
Assault on mankind’s thirst to be undying:
A hope you’ve never ceased to make a mock of
Or boldly nominate what it’s a crock of.
Small wonder you admire that far-off era
The clear lens of your style brings that much nearer,
In which, as Flaubert wrote (and here I quote,
Or, rather, quote what you said Flaubert wrote)
The gods were dead and Christ was not yet born,
A quick, cold night dividing dusk from dawn,
When man was quite alone, with nothing holier
To call his own than clear-eyed melancholia –
That penetrating gaze into infinity
Revealing it devoid of all divinity
And transcendental only in its endless
Detachment from our dread of feeling friendless –
A universe which neither plans our grief
Nor pampers us in payment for belief,
But rings its changes utterly unheeding
Though sadist die in bed or saint lie bleeding.
Committed in its course beyond retrieval,
Indifferent to all talk of good and evil,
Unreachable by prayer, untouched by curses,
It tirelessly assembles and disperses,
Created and destroyed and recreated –
Reduced, reprocessed and repristinated;
Its triumphs tragedies, disasters dances,
Its involuted curves of time and distance
All adding up to one fierce, flat insistence –
That its immensities will still be there
When we are not. It simply doesn’t care.
This is the void that you with the cool grace
Of your prose style help teach us how to face.
This is the pit from which none can escape
Your wit lights up that we might see its shape.
But to convince the world the soul of Marcus
Aurelius must perish with his carcass
Was hard even for him. Most men prefer
To hide their heads in warm sand and not stir.
That public probity, not sexuality,
Is really the foundation of morality –
That justice plays no active part in fate,
Not even when fate leads to Watergate –
That all the prayers and powers of the Kennedys
Buy not one moment’s rest from the Eumenides –
That Caesar is not God, nor the good Lord
Someone who walks and talks like Gerald Ford –
With facts like these we find it hard to grapple,
And much prefer to think Eve plucked the apple
Specifically so that redemptive love,
Beamed down on her descendants from above,
Could ease the pangs of her initial blunder
And make us grateful as we knuckle under.
My own view is that mankind would be worse
Than ever should that cloud of dreams disperse,
But your view is the one we’re here to praise
For how it penetrates the wishful haze
Which forms when all-too-human self-delusion
Allied with solipsism breeds confusion –
A mist that men call vision as they grope
And choking on it give the name of hope.
So dense a fog will be a long time thinning
So let’s call your work thus far a beginning,
And for our own sake wish your life that too –
And, friends before, years more be friends to you.
The Great Wrasse: for Les Murray at sixty
Mask wet and snorkel dry, I’m lying loose
On the glass roof of time, and forty years
Straight down I see it teeming, the bombora
Of Manning House. Tables like staghorn coral
Chewed at by schools of poets. Frensham girls
(Remember Xanthe Small and Joanne Williamson,
Those blouses and tight skirts? You little beaut
We breathed into our fried rice. God, what dreams:
By now they must be grandmothers) glide by
Like semicircle angelfish. Psychologists
With teeth like wahoos turn their heads as one,
Torn from discussion of the Individual,
Their Watch Committee late-lunch seminar
Prorogued pro tem.
Poised Andersonian squid
Explain to freshettes peeping from their shells
If dualism allows no real division
There can be no real connection. Fusiliers,
Trevallies, sweetlips, damselfish, hussars
Patrol in Balbos, split up, feed, re-form,
Waved at by worshipping anemones.
The food chain and the mating dance, the mass
Manoeuvring, the shape-up and the shake-out,
The pretty faces pumping pain through spines:
It’s all there, displayed in liquid crystal,
No further than my fingertips adrift
(A year in time is just an inch in space) –
And there you are, and I can see you now
For what you were, most brilliant of the bunch,
The Great Wrasse.
But to know that, I had first
To see the thing itself, in all its glory,
Five years ago. Sleeping on Lizard Island,
My family was recovering its strength
From too long in the cold. On the second day
We woke at noon and rolled into the water
To join the turtles feeding on the seagrass
Between the beach and sandbar. Serious fish
Were just around the point, at the big bommie.
We drifted off the platform at the back
Of the launch and let the current take us over
A chunk of reef that came up to arm’s length:
Just what the doctor ordered. We could see
The whole aquarium in action, hear
The parrotfish at work on the hard coral
Like journalists around the Doric porch
Of some beer-froth tycoon whose time had come
To be cast out of Toorak.
Then it was there –
Beside us, as if to share our view:
Materializing, as is its marvellous way,
With no preliminary fanfare,
Like an air-dropped marching band that opens up
Full blast around your bed. Lord, I can see,
I said in silence, smiling around my rubber
Dummy like a baby. Powered by pearls
On fire inside its emerald envelope,
The Wrasse comes on like a space invader
In docking mode, filling the vision full:
The shock of its appearance stops the swimmer
Dead in the water, flippers frozen solid,
Stunned by a sudden nearness so aloof.
As if the Inca, walking his lion’s walk
In soft shoes, were to pass by from behind
Preoccupied by his divinity,
So with this big fish and its quiet storm,
Its mute Magnificat.
Bigger fish yet
Plumb deep holes of the Outer Barrier –
Potato cod in mottled camouflage
Like Japanese Army Kawasaki fighters
Parked in the palms, franc-tireur Tiger sharks
With Kerry Packer smiles, the last few marlin
To keep their swords – but nothing quite as massive
As the daddy of all wrasses, the Daimyo number,
Shows up at the bombora, and nothing as bright
Is known the whole reef over.
Over the reef,
You realize, is where this fish belongs –
Above it and not of it. Nothing is written there,
Enjoyed or cherished. Even the beautiful,
There in abundance, does not know itself.
‘Sex is a Nazi’ you once wrote, and so
It is here. Killing to grow up so they can screw,
Things eat, are eaten, and the crown-of-thorns
Starfish that eats everything looks like
A rail map of the Final Solution,
But all it adds to universal horror
Is its lack of colour.
Even in full bloom
The reef is a jardin des supplices:
The frills, the fronds, the fans, the powder puffs
Soften the razor’s edge, the reign of terror.
Lulled by the moon snail and the Spanish dancer
With choreography by Carlos Saura,
By feathery platoons of poules de luxe
Cute as the kick-line of the Tropicana,
The tourist feels this is the show for him –
Atlantis in an atrium, a rumpus room
For slo-mo willy-willies of loose chips
From bombed casinos, a warehouse arcade
For love seats, swansdown pouffes and stuffed banquettes
That he could snuggle up to like a prayer
Of Hasidim against the Wailing Wall
And soothe his fevered brow in yielding plush –
But only an expert should ever touch it
Even with rubber gloves.
Buyer beware,
The forms of death a
re not just for each other
But for us too, and not all are as ugly
As the stonefish, toadfish, puffer and striped Toby
In his leather jacket. Even a child can see
That these are kitted out for bio war:
They pull the face of neurotoxic venom.
But the cone shells that beg to be picked up
By writers are like antique fountain pens
Proust might have held except he would have written
A short book, and that dreamboat with the sulk
Like Michelle Pfeiffer lolling in the glass
Elevator in Scarface is a breed
Of butterfly whose class would set you raving
At closer quarters, anguish cloaked in floating
Come-hither chiffon veils that spell curtains
At the first kiss.
Rising above it all,
A benign airship poised over New York –
The Hindenburg without the Hakenkreuz
Or parking problems – just by its repose
The dawdling Wrasse siphons up Hell’s Kitchen
And turns it to serenity, the spectrum
Of helium in Rutherford’s radon tube,
The clear, blue light of pure polonium,
The green, fused sand of Trinity, the silent
Summary, the peaceful aftermath.
Something, someone, must be the focal emblem,
The stately bearer of the synthesis
To make our griefs make sense, if not worthwhile.
That the young you, in a red-striped sloppy joe
Like Sydney Greenstreet cast as Ginger Meggs
Progressing through the Quad the very year
Of the first Opera House Lottery draw,
Would be the Great Wrasse, few could guess
But now all know, glad that the time it took
Was in their lives, and what you made of it –
Those new and strange and lovely living things,
Your poems – theirs to goggle at when born:
Born from your mouth.
Born fit to breathe our sea,
Which is the air I surface to drink in
(My mask a nifty hat by Schiaparelli)
Having seen wonders – how our lives once were,
Nature’s indifference, time’s transparency,
Fame’s cloud of pigment, fortune’s blood-tipped needles,
And finally, most fabulous of all,
A monumental fish that speaks in colours,
Offering solace from within itself.
To Leonie Kramer, Chancellor of Sydney
University: A Report on My Discipline, on the
Eve of My Receiving an Honorary Degree, 1999
The brief is to report on what’s been done –
