by Clive James
Into the holes from which they had attacked.
It might have been a scene from Starship Troopers:
But no, I had returned to the real world.
They sent me home to sleep in a dry bed
Where I felt better than I had for months.
No need to make a drama of my rescue:
Having been saved was like a lease of life,
The thing itself, undimmed by images –
A thrill a minute simply for being so.
The Emperor’s Last Words
An army that never leaves its defences
Is bound to be defeated, said Napoleon,
Who left them, and was defeated.
And thus I gather my remaining senses
For the walk, or limp, to town
Where I have a haircut and visit
The Oxfam bookshop near the bridge.
Only a day out of Addenbrooke’s
Where another bout of pneumonia
Damned near nailed me,
I walk slowly now, sitting on low brick walls.
But the haircut is successful,
Completing my resemblance to Buzz Aldrin
On the surface of Jupiter,
And in the bookshop I get, for my niece,
The Penguin Book of English Verse
(John Hayward’s excellent anthology)
And the old, neat, thin-paper OUP edition
Of the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation
Of War and Peace, so handy for the pocket.
Still in her teens, already reading everything,
She wants to be a writer, and when she visits me
She gets a useful lesson
On how a writer can end up.
But things could have been worse:
I could have been married to Laura Riding,
Whose collected poems I purchase for myself.
Have fifteen years of death improved her verses?
No, still stridently incomprehensible, befitting
The way she won an argument with Robert Graves
By throwing herself backwards from a window:
A token, no doubt, of an artistic commitment
The purity of whose achievements was proved
By being intelligible to nobody at all
Except her fellow fruit-cakes.
Well, she sure left her defences.
Almost everyone wants to be a writer.
My niece, however, has got the knack:
That feeling for a sentence, you can’t mistake it.
The only question is how far you will go,
Even walking ever so slowly,
Away from your fortress. All the way to Russia?
But Tolstoy, himself an awful husband,
Waits to make a midget of your memory.
You escaped from Elba
But not from St Helena.
Had you stayed in Corsica
None of this would have happened.
But you left, and now every nut ward in the world
Has one of you at least.
The Maudes were married more than fifty years.
In two days’ time, the Tour de France
Will go past here
Where I now sit to gather strength
For my retreat from this hot sun.
It’s time to go. High time to go. High time.
France, army, head of the army, Josephine.
Bugsy Siegel’s Flying Eye
In Havana, at the Hotel Nacional,
Lucky Luciano, or so the story goes,
Persuaded a reluctant Meyer Lansky
That Bugsy Siegel, who had squandered the mob’s money
On taking years to finish the Flamingo
And might even have skimmed from the invested capital,
Would need to have his venture in Las Vegas
Brought to a sudden end.
But the execution happened in LA
With Bugsy unwisely sitting near a window.
The first bullet took out his right eye
And flung it far away across the carpet
Into the tiled dining area.
He should have known that something bad would happen
Because when he got home he had smelled flowers
And when there are no flowers in the house
But you still smell them, it means death.
After the window shattered, the smell of jasmine
Seeped through the house, but that was no premonition,
Because Bugsy was already dead.
Scholars still ask the question why
He never guessed that he would soon get hit,
Even after closing down his dream-land
For yet another re-design. He was
An artist among gangsters. The others weren’t.
When I got to Vegas, the original Flamingo
Had been torn down, with a garden on the site,
But in Havana, at the Nacional,
I met the waiter who had built a long career
Out of once having slept with Ava Gardner,
And I sat to drink mojitos where Meyer Lansky
And Lucky Luciano might once have done the same
While they pondered what to do about Bugsy.
Maybe they did. It was mob business
So nothing got written down. Nobody can be sure
Of anything except that flying eye.
Only the Immortal Need Apply
‘I am as the demon of the tumult’
Gabriele d’Annunzio, quoted by Lucy Hughes-Hallett in The Pike
In Paris, at Diaghilev’s Cleopatra –
Decor by Bakst, choreography by Fokine,
Ida Rubinstein in the title role –
D’Annunzio and his powerful halitosis
Sat beside Robert de Montesquiou,
The model for Proust’s Baron de Charlus.
Rubinstein, who could not dance a step,
Merely stood there looking beautiful
Or adopted the occasional Egyptian pose,
While d’Annunzio laid his plans.
Backstage in her crowded dressing-room
The Nile-nymph recovered from her exertions
By lying back in her couch.
D’Annunzio was six inches shorter than she was
But her posture put him within range.
He fell to his knees and kissed her lovely legs
Upward from toes to crotch.
As he plunged his face into the tarte tatin,
Barrès and Rostand bowed their heads in awe
And Montesquiou adjusted his moustache.
Later on a man in the street was arrested
And charged with not being famous.
He remains nameless to this day.
Plot Points
On the rafting ice
The afterbirth of seals
Leaves stains like pink blancmange.
Glyco proteins in the fish
Keep them from freezing.
M13 in Hercules
Is a globular star cluster –
A glitterball that my mother
Could have danced the Charleston under.
She had lovely hands.
Renoir, choosing models, always looked
At their hands first.
After the war, at Lodz,
On a tour of the concentration camp,
Rubinstein said ‘I was born here.’
In Melanesia, the House of Memories
Contains the treasures of the tribe.
The Somme chalk was good for tunnels.
When the barrage broke them,
The parapet bags spat white.
At Kokoda, the treetop phosphorescence
Turned the night to Christmas.
The Aussies in Tobruk
Brushed dust from bully beef.
In the dry valleys of Antarctica
Dust is raised by the katabatic wind.
With the Wehrmacht stalled in front of Moscow,
Even the grease froze. The 88s
Were jammed by their own shells.
Rasputitsa was the mud
Of spring thaw and autumn rain.
On a hard day in the Alhambra
The Sultan sent an apple
To the virgin of his choice.
The logo on your MacBook
Is an echo of the manner
In which Alan Turing killed himself.
In the battle for Berlin
The last panzers were overrun
Before they reached the start-line.
A dead hippo in the Tiergarten
Had an unexploded mortar bomb
Sticking out of its side.
While you were reading this
Millions of stars moved closer
Towards their own extinction
So many years ago –
But let’s believe our eyes:
They say it’s all here now.
Asma Unpacks Her Pretty Clothes
Wherever her main residence is now,
Asma unpacks her pretty clothes.
It takes forever: so much silk and cashmere
To be unpeeled from clinging leaves of tissue
By her ladies. With her perfect hands, she helps.
Out there in Syria, the torturers
Arrive by bus at every change of shift
While victims dangle from their cracking wrists.
Beaten with iron bars, young people pray
To die soon. This is the Middle Ages
Brought back to living death. Her husband’s doing,
The screams will never reach her where she is.
Asma’s uncovered hair had promised progress
For all her nation’s women. They believed her.
We who looked on believed the promise too,
But now, as she unpacks her pretty clothes,
The dream at home dissolves in agony.
Bashar, her husband, does as he sees fit
To cripple every enemy with pain.
We sort of knew, but he had seemed so modern
With Asma alongside him. His big talk
About destroying Israel: standard stuff.
A culture-changing wife offset all that.
She did, she did. I doted as Vogue did
On her sheer style. Dear God, it fooled me too,
So now my blood is curdled by the shrieks
Of people mad with grief. My own wrists hurt
As Asma, with her lustrous fingertips –
She must have thought such things could never happen –
Unpacks her pretty clothes.
Nina Kogan’s Geometrical Heaven
Two of her little pictures grace my walls:
Suprematism in a special sense,
With all the usual bits and pieces flying
Through space, but carrying a pastel-tinged
Delicacy to lighten the strict forms
Of that hard school and blow them all sky-high,
Splinters and stoppers from the bombing of
An angel’s boudoir. When Malevich told
His pupils that their personalities
Should be suppressed, the maestro little knew
The state would soon require exactly that.
But Nina, trying as she might, could not
Rein in her individuality,
And so she made these things that I own now
And gaze at, wondering at her sad fate.
She could have got away, but wished instead
Her gift devoted to Utopia.
She painted trams, designed official posters:
Alive until the siege of Leningrad
And then gone. Given any luck, she starved:
But the purges were still rolling, and I fear
The NKVD had her on a list,
And what she faced, there at the very end,
Was the white cold. Were there an afterlife,
We might meet up, and I could tell her then
Her sumptuous fragments still went flying on
In my last hours, when I, in a warm house,
Lay on my couch to watch them coming close,
Her proofs that any vision of eternity
Is with us in the world, and beautiful
Because a mind has found the way things fit
Purely by touch. That being said, however,
I should record that out of any five
Pictures by Kogan, at least six are fakes.
Star System
The stars in their magnificent array
Look down upon the Earth, their cynosure,
Or so it seems. They are too far away,
In fact, to see a thing; hence they look pure
To us. They lack the textures of our globe,
So only we, from cameras carried high,
Enjoy the beauty of the swirling robe
That wraps us up, the interplay of sky
And cloud, as if a Wedgwood plate of blue
And white should melt, and then, its surface stirred
With spoons, a treasure too good to be true,
Be placed, and hover like a hummingbird,
Drawing all eyes, though ours alone, to feast
On splendour as it turns west from the East.
There was a time when some of our young men
Walked plumply on the moon and saw Earth rise,
As stunning as the sun. The years since then
Have aged them. Now and then somebody dies.
It’s like a clock, for those of us who saw
The Saturn rockets going up as if
Mankind had energy to burn. The law
Is different for one man. Time is a cliff
You come to in the dark. Though you might fall
As easily as on a feather bed,
It is a sad farewell. You loved it all.
You dream that you might keep it in your head.
But memories, where can you take them to?
Take one last look at them. They end with you.
And still the Earth revolves, and still the blaze
Of stars maintains a show of vigilance.
It should, for long ago, in olden days,
We came from there. By luck, by fate, by chance,
All of the elements that form the world
Were sent by cataclysms deep in space,
And from their combination life unfurled
And stood up straight, and wore a human face.
I still can’t pass a mirror. Like a boy,
I check my looks, and now I see the shell
Of what I was. So why, then, this strange joy?
Perhaps an old man dying would do well
To smile as he rejoins the cosmic dust
Life comes from, for resign himself he must.
Change of Domicile
Installed in my last house, I face the thought
That fairly soon there will be one house more,
Lacking the pictures and the books that here
Surround me with abundant evidence
I spent a lifetime pampering my mind.
The new place will be of a different sort,
Dark and austere, and I will have to find
My way along its unforthcoming walls.
Help is at hand here should I fall, but there
There will be no one to turn on the lights
For me, and I will know I am not blind
Only by glimpses when the empty halls
Lead me to empty rooms, in which the nights
Succeed each other with no day between.
I may not see my tattered Chinese screen
Again, but I shall have time to reflect
That what I miss was just the bric-a-brac
I kept with me to blunt my solitude,
Part of my brave face when my life was wrecked
By my gift for deceit. Truth clears away
So many souvenirs. The shelves come clean.
In the last, the truly last house ther
e will be
No treasured smithereens to take me back
To when things hung together. I’ll conclude
The way that I began so long ago:
With nothingness, but know it fit for me
This time around, now I am brought so low,
Yet ready to move soon. When, I can’t say.
Rounded with a Sleep
The sun seems in control, the tide is out:
Out to the sandbar shimmers the lagoon.
The little children sprint, squat, squeal and shout.
These shallows will be here until the moon
Contrives to reassert its influence,
And anyway, by then it will be dark.
Old now and sick, I ponder the immense
Ocean upon which I will soon embark:
As if held in abeyance by dry land
It waits for me beyond that strip of sand.
It won’t wait long. Just for the moment, though,
There’s time to question if my present state
Of bathing in this flawless afterglow
Is something I deserve. I left it late
To come back to my family. Here they are,
Camped on their towels and putting down their books
To watch my granddaughter, a natural star,
Cartwheel and belly-flop. The whole scene looks
As if I thought it up to soothe my soul.
But in Arcadia, Death plays a role:
A leading role, and suddenly I wake
To realise that I’ve been sound asleep
Here at my desk. I just wish the mistake
Were rare, and not so frequent I could weep.
The setting alters, but the show’s the same:
One long finale, soaked through with regret,
Somehow designed to expiate self-blame.
But still there is no end, at least not yet:
No cure, that is, for these last years of grief
As I repent and yet find no relief.
My legs are sore, and it has gone midnight.
I’ve had my last of lounging on the beach
To see the sweet oncoming sunset light
Touching the water with a blush of peach,
Smoothing the surface like a ballroom floor
As all my loved ones pack up from their day
