by Clive James
Nimrod
I was impressed that when the city-state’s Governor Chris Patten presided over the ceremony at which Hong Kong was handed back to China, he chose Elgar’s Nimrod as the play-out music. The Tower of Babel is in the last line because Nimrod built it.
Culture Clash
In Japanese, gaijin (outside person) is the word, not always used politely, for a foreign stranger. The Floating World, Ukiyo, was the disreputable but vivid Yoshiwara district – kabuki, geishas, etc. – of Edo, once the capital of Japan, and later, under its new name Tokyo, the capital again. From the Floating World came the woodcuts (Ukiyo-e) whose attention to the space between objects influenced the post-Impressionists, and hence the whole of modern art in all its forms. The Lady Murasaki (Murasaki Shikibu) wrote The Tale of Genji, and thus, like Jane Austen, put the feminist credentials of her nation’s literature beyond dispute.
Fashion Statement
In the blessed days when the trams still ran in Sydney, the toast-rack was the ideal tram, open to the breeze and with a running board on each side, so that the conductor could swing casually along and impress the girls while he collected the fares. It made me very much want to be a tram conductor, but alas I was too late, and I only got to conduct a bus, with the disastrous outcome related in my early book Unreliable Memoirs.
On Reading Hakluyt at High Altitude
In the excellent first-year English course at Sydney University we were meant to read Hakluyt’s Voyages and I made a big mistake in not doing so, because I would have been equipped to face a lot earlier the possibility that some of the best literature is composed with no literary ambitions in mind. Concrete engagement trumps abstract pretension every time, and everything in Hakluyt is strictly reportage, with specific detail the common currency. It makes an unbeatable resource for poetry. In my first manuscript of this poem I followed Hakluyt in calling the Portuguese ‘Portugals’ but my editor thought it looked like a misprint. The last line shows my fascination with the slingshot effect that the unmanned space vehicles get as they thread the orbits from one planet to the next.
Dreams Before Sleeping
‘Time, time, it is the strangest thing’ is an allusion to the Feldmarschallin’s sad line in Act One of Der Rosenkavalier when she faces the disaster of having turned thirty: Die Zeit, die ist ein sonderbar Ding. ‘The bird sings with its wings’ is one of the mystery messages from the underworld in Cocteau’s film Orphée, which my group of Sydney University literati all quoted from until we became unbearable even to each other.
The Falcon Growing Old
At the end of the poem, the orange-blossom trellis in the oasis is a nod to Fauré’s setting of the lyric by Leconte de Lisle Les roses d’Ispahan. The song was exhaustively imposed on me by my voice trainer, the late and cherished Ian Adam, who had been assigned the task of teaching me to breathe from the diaphragm so that I would stop running out of puff in the TV studio at the end of a two-day rehearsal period, just when the tape was ready to roll. Thus, as so often happens, the hard laws of business led to the materials of art.
Vertical Envelopment
Some of the American critics understandably failed to realize that the real setting of this poem was not a D-day airfield in East Anglia but Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, where I had my life saved for the first time in the year 2010, but at the price of being led to believe that my combination of ailments added up to several different kinds of curtains. The drama of the poem’s storyline thus consists of waiting for the signal to jump. ‘Peter’ was my friend Peter Porter, who died before I started the poem, and ‘the Hitch’ was another friend, Christopher Hitchens, who died not long after I finished it. SS Das Reich: the name of one of the Panzer divisions that, against all the confident predictions of British military intelligence, just happened to be parked ready and waiting in the drop zone at Arnhem. Edgar Orriss, our barman in the Cambridge Footlights clubroom during the 1960s, had been one of the glider troops on the operation and he told me that they might just as well have landed in a POW camp. The poem’s narrator is not quite right to say that after Crete the German paratroopers never jumped again. A small Kampfgruppe jumped into the Battle of the Bulge, but its mission was a complete failure. The bulk of the German paratroopers who fought at Bastogne arrived at the battle after travelling over land. The same applied to the US 101st and 82nd Airborne, arriving from the opposite direction, some of their veteran soldiers no doubt wondering why they were not travelling by aircraft. The short answer to the puzzle is that the airborne tactic, for all its glamour and apparent might, had proved itself too vulnerable. ‘Come, let us kiss and part’ is from the first line of Michael Drayton’s sonnet, which begins ‘Since there’s no help’.
Book Review
The eminent philologist Gianfranco Contini was the star professor at the University of Florence in the 1960s. He was the main reason why Prue Shaw, my future wife, was there, along with her studious friends, all of them sedulously copying down what Contini whispered as if it were a state secret. I myself was never equipped to follow his work at the level of scholarship, but he was also a critic and curator of modern writing. He acted as a mentor to Pasolini and was a close friend of Eugenio Montale, one of my heroes among the modern poets. (Contini’s little book of essays on Montale, Una lunga fedeltà – A Long Faithfulness – is a model of the form.) In his more scholarly work Contini’s prose style was notoriously over-condensed; and my wife was careful to absorb from him every influence except that. At the time of the poem she had not yet begun to write her pellucid handbook Reading Dante, but it was already clear that the analytical force of her writings was a tribute to her old professor. It was a long faithfulness.
The Later Yeats
The form of this poem depends on the idea that to use whole sonnets for stanzas might be a way of paying tribute to the majesty of Yeats’s final masterpieces. ‘Our books are drowned’ is a reference to Prospero’s farewell scene in The Tempest.
Castle in the Air
The last stanza was meant to be a would-be heroic fantasy, with the choice of diction indicating that the boast was a pose. Nevertheless there were one or two tone-deaf critics who preferred to think that I was claiming a kind of death-bed droit du seigneur. In their dreams. The poem’s narrator is past all that.
Bubbler
For the conferring of an honorary doctorate from Sydney University, I was asked to give an address, and while speaking with apparent fluency I was still recovering from the impact of having found that almost every graduating student sitting there politely in the Great Hall was of Asian origin. Pam Yao Ming, the maths whizz in my poem, was probably one of them.
The Shadow Knows
The line ‘I am the shadow and the widower’ is taken from Gérard de Nerval’s desolate poem ‘El Desdichado’, written not long before his suicide. (Years before, I had borrowed the same desperate idea for a song lyric, to be found in the final section of this book.) As a corrective, the title is a catchline from the radio show The Shadow, which I listened to regularly early in my hidden career as a leader of secret night-time gangs.
Grief Has Its Time
The title expression can be found in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, as can the story about the King emerging from a hidden door in the library. The other quotations from Johnson are my inventions. The old lady in the signing queue is not an invention, but she is a compilation. My first landlady in London, whose basement bedsit I rented during the hard winter of 1963, lost her fiancé in World War I: she had a book of Rupert Brooke poems in which she had pressed some flowers that she and her young man had picked together.
Epigraph for Sentenced to Life
The epigraph is yet another borrowing from Rilke, whose lost tomb is so often plundered that there ought to be a five-star hotel on the site. He had a tone of sex-soaked spirituality that nobody wants to own but anybody might need to rent, like morning dress. The translation is my own.
Driftwood Houses
The ‘s
keleton riders’ lie prone on minimal toboggans that carry them at high velocity down the frozen chute with their noses an inch from the ice. Luge riders lie supine and see the sky, but they look ridiculous. Either way, it comes under the heading of the kind of sports I never dreamed of doing but which showed up in my nightmares when I was ill. Another one was weightlifting: female weightlifting.
My Home
In Kogarah I went to the local Presbyterian church and was therefore subjected to quite a lot of pipe-band music, a massed caterwaul marching and counter-marching seemingly without end. The only bearable number was the lament ‘My Home’, perhaps because there was only one set of pipes playing it. As I recall, it was played at the funerals of both King George VI and Winston Churchill, and on each occasion I grew wet-eyed watching.
Tempe Dump
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.
Managing Anger
An outstanding piece of angry male thespian shelf-clearing is accomplished by Val Kilmer in the movie Heat, with Ashley Judd betraying no sign of anger that she will have to clean up the ruins. She is angry, but for other reasons, one of which might be Val’s fixed pout, which stays in place even when he is redistributing the crockery. The propensity of male actors to wreck the room was pioneered by Marlon Brando in the Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Actors who wanted to be Brando were from then on encouraged to smash up the set by directors who wanted to be Elia Kazan. No union of stage-hands ever protested: putting the set back together got them into overtime. As usual, only the public suffered.
Too Much Light
The title was not meant as a contradiction of Goethe’s supposed dying demand for more light: ‘Mehr Licht! Mehr Licht!’ It’s a translation of a remark in Eugenio Montale’s criticism, where he contends that a work of art can suffer from too much study. Since Montale himself was a supreme student of poetry in several languages, it was a generous statement. Montale was the poet who defined the poem as ‘a dream in the presence of reason’, still the best definition I have ever heard.
The Emperor’s Last Words
The sudden appearance of Napoleon (like his hero Julius Caesar, he was a master of quick movement) in the thoughts of a dying poet is not necessarily a mark of succumbing to a senescent mad interest in military dominance. It could equally be a sign of finally getting interested in literature. Certainly Napoleon was. He underestimated Shakespeare in the same way as he underestimated the English navy, but in all other respects he had a voracious and adventurous curiosity for history and the arts. Goethe in his old age said that the time he spent talking about tragedy with Napoleon was the high point of his life.
Bugsy Siegel’s Flying Eye
The mention of Ava Gardner might seem gratuitous, but 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. My mother cherished the copy of the Fitzgerald Rubaiyat from which she and my father had once read aloud together. She would read it to me with what I can now recall as a naturally sensitive attention to the stanza form. In the key line ‘Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it’ she would give the word ‘tears’ precisely the light but slightly lingering emphasis that it required.
Leçons de ténèbres
Though the title phrase is well known to all musicians and music lovers who have ever come across the name of Couperin, I myself encountered it in One Art, the treasure house of Elizabeth Bishop’s collected correspondence. She used the phrase untranslated in a letter to Marianne Moore. After I fell ill and the light sometimes seemed on the point of fading, I turned to Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry more and more often, and even now I still wonder how she got the effect of the sandpiper thinking bird thoughts as it walks along the beach.
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.
Mysterious Arrival of the Dew
In this poem 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 the later novels in Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey sequence. Goethe calls the dew Zitteperlen (shiver-pearls) in Faust.
Sunset Hails a Rising
The title 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 Cimetière marin, best translated by Derek Mahon: although the two translations here, like the two translations from Marlowe’s Latin, are both my own.
Notes for the Song Lyrics
Nothing Left to Say
This lyric is one of my earlier efforts and clear proof that the idea of facing the end appealed to me at the start: but only, I insist, as subject matter. Just as, in the history of song writing, there are more songs about losing love than finding it, so there are more songs about winding things up than pressing on. One of the several big changes that rock and roll made to Tin Pan Alley was that it increased the vocabulary of a life worth living.
National Steel
Pete’s acquisition of an authentic National Steel guitar gave me the chance to write the lyric for a catalogue song, as it is called in the trade. In this case the catalogue was of the names of the blues singers who had played a National Steel. Lonnie Johnson was the one we both cared most about.
I See the Joker
As I recall, I started writing this lyric before the first Godfather movie came out, but by the time the song got into performance the audience easily recognized the references. My own formative gangster movies dated back to the time of The Big Heat (Lee Marvin ruins Gloria Grahame’s face with hot coffee), Murder Incorporated with Humphrey Bogart, and the Rod Steiger version of Al Capone.
Sessionman’s Blues
Back in the day, the sessionmen were heroes of mine. They were the musicians who could be relied upon to come into the studio, read the music, and play it correctly first time. A lot of well-known musicians were denied a reliable source of income because they couldn’t do this.
Shadow and the Widower
As in my later poem ‘The Shadow Knows’, the shadowy widower came from Nerval’s El Desdichado: ‘Je suis le Ténébreux – le Veuf …’ The source of ‘The perfume and suppliance of a minute’ was Hamlet: Laertes warns his sister Ophelia that the wooing of the Prince can’t be relied on. In my earlier lyrics I often took pleasure in piecing lines and phrases from Renaissance plays and poems into the scheme, counting it as a form of theft legitimized by the way it declared itself. A three-sheet was a publicity poster that was pasted up in three sections, like a cheap triptych. The ‘lineaments of gratified desire’ were from Blake.
Screen-freak
This one is a catalogue song in extremis, with the drawback that a lot of the movie references have gone hopelessly out of date. As Peter Bogdanovich once told me, it isn’t only that young people don’t know who Moses was when you talk about Charlton Heston starring as Moses, they don’t know who Charlton Heston was. But I remain proud of my line ‘Atlantis down in
bubbles and Atlanta up in flames’. At least most people still know that Atlanta burns in Gone with the Wind. If the movie were remade today, the burning would be accomplished by CGI, but Selznick had to burn down the set. For Broken Lance, however, there is no eternal life. It was one of the first CinemaScope movies, and on a TV screen it looks like nothing. Only when you get to the Fred and Ginger level does immortality kick in. The caliph in the caftan was usually played by George Macready while Piper Laurie waited to be rescued by Gordon MacRae, all three of them unaware that one day even the film buffs would forget their names. Gone, gone: with the wind.
A King at Nightfall
