by Clive James
The Light Well
The epigraph is from Fidel Castro’s pamphlet History Will Absolve Me. ‘We were born in a free country given to us by our fathers, and this island will sink into the sea before we consent to be the slaves of anyone.’ At the time I first visited Cuba, almost twenty years after the battle at Playa Girón (the Bay of Pigs), you could still meet the winners in Havana, and the losers in Miami.
The Artificial Horizon
The epigraph, an anonymous Latin motto, translates as ‘God navigates the ship.’ Even today, with all kinds of electronic instrumentation to locate the aircraft’s attitude in space, pilots are grateful to have a simple mechanical instrument to tell them, in dense cloud, whether they are still the right way up.
What Happened to Auden
‘Chester’ was Chester Kallman, Auden’s lifetime companion. At the time I wrote the poem, everyone knew who Chester was, and that he could be hard on the nerves. After Auden’s death Kallman could often be found lunching late in Soho, and complaining loudly that nobody would publish his poetry. But it was unwarrantedly brusque of me to first-name him. Salonfähig: ready for the salon, i.e. sortable. There is no real equivalent in English, except perhaps ‘presentable’.
Lament for French Deal
The epigraph is from Virgil, Georgics IV, the sublime episode in which Eurydice berates Orpheus for looking back after he has been told not to. ‘For I am carried folded in gigantic night/ Holding towards you the useless hands alas no longer yours.’ On Sydney Harbour the little white-and-yellow-painted ferries that ran from Circular Quay over to Luna Park and McMahon’s Point were eventually withdrawn in favour of the catamarans, just as the splendid double-ended ferries that ran to Manly gave way to the less imposing but much faster hydrofoils, which in turn were replaced by the JetCats. In the course of seven decades, romance has been usurped by efficiency, but whatever kind of ferry it is, it’s still more fun than the bus, and the glitter on the water is always there.
The Eternity Man
For generations, everyone in Sydney knew about the lonely madman who wrote ‘Eternity’. At the turn of the millennium, the word was written in huge copperplate fire on Sydney Harbour Bridge, to the puzzlement of the entire world.
In Praise of Marjorie Jackson
Scholars of Australian slang will notice that I use the correct term, Bondi Special, in my oblique reference to the hallowed motto ‘He (or she, they or it) shot through like the Bondi Special’. The popular but corrupt version is ‘shot through like a Bondi tram’: more immediately appreciable, perhaps, but incorrect, because an ordinary Bondi tram would have stopped at every stop, whereas it was the Special, which usually ran late at night, that went non-stop all the way from the city to the beach. In her later life Marjorie Jackson was Governor of South Australia, and when I was filming in Adelaide she kindly invited me for a tour of her official residence. Among the trophies on display, along with her collection of Olympic and Commonwealth Games gold medals, was her famous first pair of running shoes, aptly made of kangaroo skin.
Lucretius the Diver
Though I wrote the poem in Europe, the reef I had in mind was far away, where Lucretius could never have suspected that it existed. But the Great Barrier Reef is always in the mind of any Australian who has ever seen it. In recent years, when the notion of man-made Climate Change took hold, along with all its gaggle of subsidiary predictions, the supposed threat to the Barrier Reef attained world-wide currency, but not so much within Australia, where the proprietorial pride of those specialists who had given their lives to studying and caring for the Reef tended to set aside the dire warnings from distant pundits. My own response to the Reef can be read in my poem ‘The Great Wrasse’, nominally a tribute to my distinguished compatriot Les Murray but also a salute to the South Pacific: the geographical extravaganza into which we both were born, not long before the whole area became a battlefield.
Edwin Estlin Cummings Dead
I wrote this all-purpose E. E. Cummings pastiche when I was still a student in Sydney, and still deeply in his debt, although no longer in his thrall. Since it was designed to spoof some of the sub-Apollinaire tricks that Cummings worked on the page, it couldn’t really work in performance, though I sometimes had fun trying. And I hope even this squib conveys a hint of what I really got from him: with his acute ear for phonetic balance, he could make a line go like a Bunk Johnson trumpet solo. In the decades to come I got a lot of my ideas about the forward drive of a syncopated rhythm from jazz and rock and roll. Even today, when my feet are almost too tired to tap, my work in verse is less likely to be haunted by the Elizabethan sonneteers than by the Count Basie rhythm section or the Funk Brothers, the engine room of Tamla Motown.
Richard Wilbur’s Fabergé Egg Factory
A parody is nearly always a tribute as well as a critique, and this imitation was a particularly obvious case of the double role. Michael Donaghy was right to call Wilbur the greatest modern phrase-maker: any mimic of his diction is obliged to dig deep, in the hard effort to bring to him what he brought to La Fontaine. Laforgue said ‘Comme ils sont beaux, les trains manqués’, so my transcription is almost right. Alekhine was the Russian chess master. All the other proper names are either self-explanatory or not crucial. Their prevalence is true to one of the chief pleasures offered by Wilbur’s poetry when he came back to America after the fighting in Europe: he was a walking encyclopaedia, with a knack for making erudition an enchantment.
To Martin Amis: A letter from Indianapolis
The chosen form is the Spenserian stanza, in which two masterpieces are always with us to serve as models: Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Shelley’s magnificent elegy for Keats, Adonais. For any modern exponent of the form, the chief trick is to make a virtue of its obstacle: the alexandrine at the end of each stanza. In every other respect the Spenserian stanza is a playground for variations of tempo, although Hazlitt was probably right to say that the requirement of its rhyme scheme for a fourth rhyme was a hobble even for Spenser himself. To square myself with the petrol-heads, I should say that I wrote this poem so as to sweeten a bitter assignment: I always thought that racing in the Brickyard at Indianapolis was a waste of time compared with the merest event in Formula One, which only in later years became tediously processional.
To Tom Stoppard: a letter from London
Because of the frequent use of it by Burns, the form is usually called Burnsian metre. It has often been used for light verse ever since, but perhaps most infectiously by Auden and Isherwood as an inspired choral interruption (variously called ‘The Two’ or ‘The Witnesses’) in their early verse play The Dog Beneath the Skin. I first encountered the poem in the late 1950s in Sydney and it had an immediate effect on the rhythmic ambitions of my own work: it was such fun to recite. You could snap your fingers.
To Craig Raine: a letter from Biarritz
Borrowed from Italy, the stanza form called ottava rima comes so naturally to the writer of poetry in English that other, slightly different forms are often incorporated under the same name. Thus Auden’s wonderful Letter to Lord Byron is often described as being in ottava rima when it is actually in rhyme royal. But no matter: as long as there is that temptingly punchy couplet at the end of the stanza.
The Great Wrasse: for Les Murray at sixty
People who live on or near the Great Barrier Reef usually pronounce ‘wrasse’ as two syllables, to rhyme with ‘sassy’. This verse letter is composed in blank verse paragraphs, the most demanding form of the lot for anybody who is trying to keep things tight. At the time when my family was holidaying on Lizard Island, the tourist industry’s light impact on the Reef had not yet been supplemented by the intense interest of countless television crews in the forthcoming climate catastrophe which would heat the water, raise the ocean, and reduce billions of tons of coral to a ruin any time soon. In the absence of such an event – nowadays still absent, but surely only minutes away – all was peace, and I lay down to begin reflecting upon my younge
r days. Necessarily there were a few references to Sydney University, which Les Murray and I both attended as beneficiaries of the Menzies Government’s plan to extend tertiary education even further among the less well-off. ‘Frensham girls’ would have been to private schools: not among the less well-off at all, but with a bewitching access to silk and cashmere. Andersonians were acolytes of the Professor of Philosophy, John Anderson: to some extent I was one of them, and still am. The quotation in italics is from Anderson’s key book Studies in Empirical Philosophy, which is still in the shelves before me as I write this. Toorak is a plush Melbourne enclave that ranks with Belgravia in London or the Sutton Place area in New York. In Australia, during the period of economic deregulation fostered by the Hawke and Keating governments, it was a regular event for some instant billionaire to become just as instantly broke again. Kerry Packer, however, always kept his money, perhaps because he carried a lot of it around in a paper bag. He and Rupert Murdoch were the big media tycoons, but whereas Rupert Murdoch went on to become world famous, Kerry Packer was, as the Australian saying goes, world famous in Australia. When the first atomic bomb was exploded at the ‘Trinity’ site in New Mexico, the desert at Ground Zero turned to green glass. Ginger Meggs was a young larrikin in a famous comic strip that we all read every Sunday: always in trouble but never unforgiven for very long.
To Leonie Kramer… A Report on My Discipline
The sprightly decorum of ottava rima is meant, in this case, to be a match for my view of the subject’s achievement and personality. Leonie Kramer, both as a Professor of English and later in her role as Vice Chancellor of Sydney University, was a stickler for sound academic behaviour but found it within her heart to promote me for an honorary doctorate. In her youth she turned the heads of romantically minded men, and A. D. Hope’s long poem Letter from Rome can be thought of not only as a satirical masterpiece, but as a love song. Almost as much as Auden’s Letter to Lord Byron, it had a lasting influence on my own verse, for the way it helped me to realize how the play of tone could be wider the more strict the form. My admiration for Alfred Polgar I later expressed in greater detail in Cultural Amnesia: the phrase ‘an den Rand geschrieben’ (written in the margin) was his title for one of his collections of pieces. At the time I wrote the poem, Marcel Reich-Ranicki’s definitive six-volume Rowohlt edition of Polgar was still coming out. Regarded even by Thomas Mann as the greatest modern exponent of German prose, Polgar was the kind of writer that Leonie would have approved of: an untrammelled thematic scope based on perfect grammar. As her little book about the poet James McAuley attests, her cultural conservatism was adventurous: more so than his, in fact.
Under the Jacarandas
The jacarandas in question stand in the small park at the left-hand end of Sydney’s Circular Quay, as you approach the quondam Maritime Services Building, a sandstone-clad Art Deco heirloom rather more distinguished than most of the creations to which it nowadays plays host in its new role as the Museum of Contemporary Art. In my later years, until illness stopped me flying, I was always glad to be in Sydney in October so that I could sit writing at my favourite table outside Rossini’s and occasionally look up to watch the jacarandas raining purple. If the falling petals could have made a sound as they hit the grass, it would have been the slow scattering of individual piano notes in one of Debussy’s Images, or perhaps the linked glissandi in the haunting voice of Gurrumul. Last time I saw them, the office workers taking their lunch on the grass looked as if they were posing for a plane-load of French Impressionists.
The Victor Hugo Clematis
The rockets and the Gothas are from Proust: a rare acknowledgement in his novel that a war is going on not far out of town.
Statement from the Secretary of Defense
Saddam Hussein’s regime was so horrible that I was one of the many people who saw a good case for removing him from power, although a lot of them changed their minds retroactively when things went wrong. A strong suggestion that things would go wrong even in the event of a successful invasion was provided by the bizarre press conferences of the US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, whose choice of language might have been dictated by Gilbert and Sullivan, or George Orwell in a vicious satirical mood.
The Australian Suicide Bomber’s Heavenly Reward
Conceived as a satirical fantasy, this poem would have had some claim to prescience if it had not become evident that the kind of youngster volunteering as a suicide bomber is unlikely to be put off by the disinclination of those who assign him to his mission to share his fate. I neither foresaw, nor thought it possible, that Australia would ever become a hatchery for jihadis. But it continues to be a rule of modern politics that what the satirists think they have absurdly exaggerated today will come true tomorrow.
When We Were Kids
Most of the local references in this poem can be easily figured out, but a ‘connie-agate’ might prove a puzzle. It was a clear-glass marble with a polychrome spiral trapped inside it, like a Mandelbrot equation spun through three dimensions in a medium of liquid crystal. I found the first one I ever owned so fascinating to look into that I couldn’t look away, and was several times found sitting hypnotized.
Ramifications of Pure Beauty
The designer of the various Focke-Wulf WWII fighter aircraft, Kurt Tank, was one of the understandably unsung heroes of modern sculpture. There was never any rational reason for WWII military aircraft to be graceful, so it remains remarkable that so many of them were: aerodynamic efficiency seemed to have beauty as a consequence. The British Spitfire, however, for all its ballerina-like glamour, was left standing by the American P-47, which had the same poise and delicacy as a charging buffalo. The National Gallery in London had a Titian exhibition in 2003: as usual, too many people came to see too many paintings, so hardly anybody saw anything.
Fires Burning, Fires Burning
The title of the poem came from my memory of a round that I was obliged to join in singing at Sydney Technical High School. The last line of the chorus before the round started again was ‘Come sing and be merry’. For some reason I remembered this many years later when I first read about the killing fires of WWII. Perhaps one has an irony gene. If so, one needs to remember that no impulse is easier to overindulge. People with a gift for sarcasm can make you laugh, but only once.
Naomi from Namibia
I never forgot that the patently worthy and intelligent Naomi had to go home to Africa. What she should have done, while still on Australian soil, was commit a crime. Later on there was a celebrated case of a defiantly unassimilable illegal immigrant who, after living for several years on welfare, beat his wife to death, went to prison, got himself released on the grounds that his human rights had been infringed, and was compensated to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars.
Status Quo Vadis
This immortal piece of bad Latin can be heard spoken in that enchanted movie Strictly Ballroom, and therefore counts as classic Australian poetry on all levels.
We Being Ghosts
The title is a quotation from Louis MacNeice: ‘For we being ghosts cannot catch hold of things’. Given his background in classics, MacNeice was more probably thinking of the vainly embracing ghosts in the Aeneid, rather than in the Divine Comedy. MacNeice, like his friend Auden, had the valuable gift of being able to make a classical reference sound like a natural flourish in conversation. It’s a quality that makes the poetry of the Thirties a tunnel to the ancient world.
A Perfect Market
In the epigraph, ‘plutost’ is left in the old spelling as a reminder that Ronsard, though he still sounds so modern, has been dead for several hundred years. His line ‘Ronsard me célébrait du temps quand j’estois belle’ was one of the first things in French that I ever learned. It was a vengeful clincher to a recriminatory poem, but he wasn’t really angry with the young lady: he was angry with time itself, and today I think of him often, toiling painfully up some spiral staircase in the Tuileries Palace to see the
young Hélène, and well-knowing that she would grant him nothing except grief. He gave us a language for the lyricism of the long goodbye.
Spectre of the Rose
Young Ulrike lived to be an old lady and was many times pestered by arts-page gossip-writers (the breed was already in existence) to reveal whether she and her grand old man had ever been lovers in the technical sense. She did him the honour of playing it vague, instead of issuing a downright denial. The ageing Goethe, by his proposal of marriage, had made a tremendous fool of himself over her, but he had also written one of the great lyric poems in the German language, the Marienbad Elegy: a tribute she was perfectly capable of appreciating.
The Same River Twice
The poem is an apostrophe to Heraclitus, rather impatient with him for making such a fuss about the obvious.
Continental Silentia
The title is the brand name of a silent typewriter. Sonderbehandlung (Special Treatment) was a Nazi euphemism for extermination. After the war, the survivor Victor Klemperer analysed Nazi language in a brilliant little book called LTI (Lingua Tertii Imperii – Language of the Third Reich). ‘List, oh list’ and ‘the rest is silence’ are both from Hamlet. Zum schweigen gebracht: put to silence.
Language Lessons
The learned muse was a love object from Elizabethan times all the way through to the Brownings, but she is less so nowadays, strangely enough, when a male poet has a much better chance of falling mutually in love with a scholarly female, and even of getting married to her. It remains notable that Napoleon, an erudite man with his choice among all the unmarried young females of Europe and most of the married ones as well, and who took at least twenty upmarket mistresses during his career, was happiest with Marie Walewska, who had scarcely read a book; although perhaps he thought he could get all that from Josephine. She would read him the latest novels aloud when they travelled by coach. ‘Ah, Orpheus,’ is Eurydice complaining to Orpheus in my previously cited favourite passage of Virgil in Georgics IV: ‘what is this madness?’ (Quis tantus furor?) ‘Like smoke mixed with thin air’ (ceu fumus in auras commixtus tenues). The last line of the stanza alludes to the ‘gigantic night’ in the same passage, and also to the Aeneid, Book VI, where Aeneas, in one of the scenes that had a formative effect on Dante, is guided by the Sybil of Cumae through the halls of Dis and the empty regions (perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna). Virgil’s gift for the music of lamentation still sets the mark for any poet wishing to register regret. In my poem, the lovers are doomed, but at least they are soothed by Virgil’s plangent melodies, though we should remember that Keats struck the same measure for his runaway couple without being able to read Latin much at all: ‘These lovers fled away into the storm’. Given time, Keats would undoubtedly have picked up all he needed of a classical education, simply because his perfect ear was hungry for past example.
