by Clive James
My own considered critical opinion is that each of Eliot’s Four Quartets is better than the others, but that ‘Little Gidding’ takes the prize. The nightfall king is flagged near the beginning but makes his full impact near the end, after the fabulous intermediate section which echoes the sequence in Inferno where Dante walks with the ghost of his old teacher Brunetto Latini. Scholarly comment largely agrees that Eliot, in his version, walks with the ghost of Yeats, but I always saw myself as the third man, listening in.
Apparition in Las Vegas
In his second last phase, before he was finally enslaved by the deadly combination of cocaine, hamburgers and bad caped costumes, Elvis Presley made marvellous music. Much of it he made in Las Vegas. None of it was quite as good as the 1968 concert, in which he sat there relatively immobile in black leather while a bunch of veteran guitarists rocked up a storm. (Preserved on video, the concert still hasn’t reached YouTube at the time of this writing: you have to buy it, in one of those strange cash transactions peculiar to early capitalism.) But he would still give the Las Vegas audiences the best he could do, even when miles overweight and clad in an outfit that made him look like Abba rolled into one. Both Pete and I thought the world of him, with reservations; which, when you come to think of it, is what anyone sensible thinks of the world itself. It will be seen from the lyric that I thought I had the old people well summed up. Pete was too sensible to think the same, and in his music he was careful to give some of the heroic dignity to the pink-rinsed audience.
Touch Has a Memory
The title line is from Keats, in a mysterious, distraught and song-like love poem to an unnamed addressee. ‘Touch has a memory. Oh say, love, say/ What can I do to kill it and be free/ In my old liberty?’ In that mood he was practically Leonard Cohen: all he needed was a trilby hat.
The Rider to the World’s End
The title line is a tip of the hat to the late Lex Banning, a palsied poet of Sydney’s Downtown Push whom I met briefly and still admire. (The very pretty Edwards & Shaw edition of his only collection Apocalypse in Springtime is in the bookcase before me as I compose this note.) He once wrote that a row of men fishing with rods looked like illustrations from Euclid. I spent a lot of time wondering how he thought of that. Luckily, in those days, I still had time to burn. The narrator of the lyric is cursing himself for his own unreliability. Feckless men when young often believe that a confession absolves them.
No Dice
The lyric with a multiple narrator in a multiple setting was a way for its author to be anyone and everywhere. Pete’s task was to unite the multiplicity with the music, and thus suggest that there can be a coherence in chaos. The test lay in the performance. Would the audience realize, as the song unfolded, that the puzzle had a point? The evidence suggested that they enjoyed the tease, and over the years we wrote several songs with a similar approach, although always, I hope, with a different array of themes. The LVT (Landing Vehicle Tracked) was used by the American forces in the Pacific, most famously by the Marines at Tarawa. The Incas really did hide their gold in a lake.
Driving through Mythical America
This was the title track of Pete’s second commercial album. The multiple narrative hinges on the traumatic event at Kent State University, where the National Guard fired on protesting students, killing four of them. Eddie Prue is the psychotic killer in Raymond Chandler’s novel The Little Sister. Moose Malloy is the star hoodlum from another Chandler novel, Farewell My Lovely. Herman Kahn was a guru who pioneered the art of earning large fees from predicting what the world would be like far enough ahead so that nobody of mature years would be able to check up on what he had predicted. Lavishly supported with pie-charts and elastic statistics, his expert-sounding spiel helped to generate the thousands of futurologists who pull the same stunt now. Bogart said ‘Even the dead can talk’ in the film Murder Incorporated.
Thief in the Night
A lament half-disguised as a catalogue song, this lyric brings in the deep grief of a blues singer (Big Bill Broonzy) and also the glittering melancholy added by Charlie Christian to the Benny Goodman small groups that I so adored. I would have put Django Reinhardt into the same frame except that he gave me too much joy, and at the time I preferred to register despair. Another of my favourites was Ry Cooder, but he was too recent: there needed to be a touch of nostalgia, of looking back in hunger. Luckily Pete made the melody a rabble-rouser, and the song has always been a hit in the clubs. Backstage in the theatre, the ‘beginners’ call’ is the intercom signal from the stage-manager that tells the actors in the first scene it’s time to get to work. As Footlights performers we were both familiar with it.
Practical Man
Although it is true that we ended up taking out an injunction against our first agent, we would both have liked to meet a Practical Man who really was practical. The music business in those days was too much of a jungle to navigate unguided. It will be noticed that the Practical Man in the song is cultivated as well as rich. But from my angle he was all too practical; although it was the merest posturing on my part to write a line like ‘There are just some songs that are not for sale’. We would have dearly liked to sell some songs, if only to keep eating: but the music business in those days was all against it, because we had started writing songs to be sung by other people at the exact moment in history when the singers had started writing their own songs so that they could be paid twice. Nowadays the music business has collapsed completely and the Practical Man is doing something else, such as delivering lectures on sustainability, or calling you up to say that the bank owes you money.
Beware of the Beautiful Stranger
The revelatory female face has been a theme for poetry since Homer raved about Helen in the Iliad, and not even the Divine Comedy would be the miracle it is if Dante had not had an eye for the girls. But in real life no woman wants to hear from a writer that he worships women, or even that he worships an abstract woman called the Muse. She wants to hear that he worships her. Nevertheless the theme, or dream, drives on. This lyric was one of my earliest statements of it. At first I thought Pete would never be able to set a stanza so four-square and regular. He did so by repeatedly, but not predictably, altering the spaces. The song was, of course, far too long to record as a single; but we were still taking pride in asking the impossible. It will be noticed that the Beautiful Stranger is not described; but then, Helen’s beauty is not described by Homer, he just evokes it by describing how thousands of men react when they see her.
Have You Got a Biro I Can Borrow?
This song would have been on the all-important BBC playlist but they told us that ‘Biro’ was a brand name and we would have to alter it. I’m afraid I must take responsibility for an expensive digging in of the heels. Faced with a similar demand, the Rolling Stones didn’t hesitate. Listen to what Pete’s melody does to my line ‘So when the sun comes up tomorrow’ and you see what music can do to apparently simple words. Jean Renoir in his autobiography tells us that his father, crippled with arthritis, said ‘Tie the brush into my hands’.
Laughing Boy
This lyric was so clearly a personal cri de coeur that when we were on stage together Pete asked me to join in the singing. On tour in Britain, Australia and Hong Kong we would close the show with it, always carefully telling the audience beforehand that it was one of the first things we ever wrote together. Many years later, at the other end of my life, the landlady with the pressed flowers showed up again in my poem ‘Grief Has Its Time’.
Thirty-year Man
The title I got from the novel by James Jones, From Here to Eternity, which I read at school before the movie came out. The book’s hero Robert E. Lee Prewitt wasn’t a short-time soldier, he was signed up for thirty years. When young writers ask for advice, I always try to tell them that they shouldn’t dabble with this stuff, but get into it for life. Deaf ears, usually. But so had I, in the beginning. Determination emerges: it can’t be instilled.
Carnations
on the Roof
I got the idea for this lyric when I was working in London at a Holloway sheet-metal factory before I went up to Cambridge, but at first I thought it might be a poem, and didn’t realize until later that it had to be a song lyric. At the base of the theme is the conviction that the labourer is worthy of his hire. After the war from which my father failed to return I would play with the gauges and spirit levels in his metal toolkit and imagine that my future lay in the machine shop, which is more or less how things turned out, although the things I make fold into books. My earliest Fleet Street editor and dear lost friend Nicholas Tomalin was kind enough to say, on the basis of this one song, that what we were doing was something strange, new and worth pursuing. If he had not been killed when covering the Yom Kippur War I would be still trying to impress him now.
The Hypertension Kid
In my experience, writers bent on self-destruction rarely write about self-destruction: they write about rose gardens. But there can be no doubt that I have always had within me a desire to take my place just one more time at the bar of the Early Quitter. Pete always liked this lyric more than I did: I prefer not to recognize the two speakers, but perhaps he knows them well.
Perfect Moments
Purist scholars of Charlie Parker might say that his solo on ‘My Old Flame’, recorded when he was near death, is a bit of a wreck: but in Cambridge I would play it over and over, close to weeping. It’s a great song anyway: even Mae West can touch your heart with it.
Secret Drinker
Hart Crane used to call it ‘wine talons’: the grip of the grape. After I gave up drinking, by public demand, I found it easier to describe why the hooch was so glamorous for those susceptible to its embrace. But even when I was still regularly smashed I was lyrical on the subject. From the angle of civic responsibility, it surely makes more sense to evoke the attractions of a vice than to deplore its results. The obvious love poured into this lyric should be a clear warning to stay clear of the stuff. Or anyway, that’s my rationale for having had such a luxurious time putting the images together. Pete, whose idea of a binge was to drink a whole half-pint in a single evening, was nevertheless inspired to a sympathetic melodic line, as if he, too, had dipped his head into liquid hell and drawn back just before the shark struck.
Tenderfoot
Before the spaghetti westerns stripped the genre of its last plausibility, the Western movies were a vast reserve of poetic angst, and in the cinemas of Sydney, London and Cambridge I spent a lot of time imagining myself tall in the saddle, the lone rider in search of absolution. Even today, with the last round-up entering its final phase, I still see myself riding towards the distant mountains while young Brandon deWilde cries ‘Come back, Shane!’. So when I planned this lyric I had a lot of resonance to go on. Hence the operatic layout: to make room. As in all episodic lyrics, however, it’s the music that supplies the shape. Ian Bostridge explains a lot about the structure of a song in his marvellous book Schubert’s Winter Journey. Writing songs like the ones in Winterreise, Schubert didn’t really need to write an opera. It was all happening within earshot.
Care-charmer Sleep
When the English Renaissance poet Samuel Daniel used the lovely phrase ‘care-charmer sleep’ to open a sonnet, it was an instant hit. Michael Drayton used the same phrase within the line instead of at the start. Dial the phrase into the Web and you can soon find a thesis devoted to Daniel by one George Keyports Brady, submitted for a PhD at the University of Illinois in 1923. Punctiliously written, the ideal introduction to the whole area of Petrarchan poetry in Europe, Brady’s thesis is full of hard learning in several languages and would serve all on its own to make you wonder about those thousands of PhD theses in the humanities today, almost invariably devoted to shuffling theories about a subject that can’t be theorized about, but only studied, and not even studied if it is not loved.
Canoe
When very young I was impressed by a sequence of photographs in the National Geographic that showed young male Polynesian canoeists studying star maps made of stones and sticks. The maps allowed them to navigate by the constellations. In performance, the song holds the audience by the way the two stories are woven together by the melody: listeners soon realize that the apparent discrepancy between the two voyages is a single tribute to human endeavour.
I Feel Like Midnight
John Garfield says the title line in the movie Force of Evil, which Abraham Polonsky both wrote and directed. After refusing to testify before HUAC, Polonsky was blacklisted and didn’t return to directing until Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here. A Marxist until the end, Polonsky, when Elia Kazan was given a lifetime achievement Academy Award, said that somebody ought to shoot him on the night, so as to liven the proceedings up. Kazan had sung to the committee and Polonsky never did, so it was hard not to admire one of them more than the other. Polonsky had, on the other hand, proselytized all his life on behalf of one of the most horrible regimes in history. But he could write, and there is seldom any real substitute for that.
The Eye of the Universe
In Shelley’s poem ‘Hymn of Apollo’ it is the narrator who says ‘I am the eye with which the universe/ Beholds itself and knows it is divine.’ (A variant printing is ‘knows itself divine’ which is the one I borrowed.) Shelley might just as well have said it of himself. With varying degrees of tact, it is a belief all poets share: why else work so hard for so little reward? From personal knowledge of the narrator, however, I know him to have been lying when he said that he had found himself ‘redeemed’. High on the list of things I have never believed is the Wagnerian notion of redemption, but I still find it astonishing that Pete could give such integrated melodies to so much written evidence of inner fragmentation.
History and Geography
The lines about ‘the daughters of my father’s house and all the brothers too’ are spoken by Viola to Orsino in Twelfth Night, Act II Scene 4. When we were first writing songs in Footlights, Shakespeare productions were going on all the time all around us, and some of the Footlights comedians were doubling as serious actors, thus giving themselves an enhanced opportunity to neglect the set books and come away with a ruinous degree. There were very few actors who ever got a First, but they all knew more about Shakespeare than the proper scholars did, and the proper scholars, to give them their due credit, were aware of the fact, and incorporated the thrill of the performances into their learning.
Femme Fatale
The ‘weeping fields’ are Virgil’s lugentes campos. Perhaps the best translation of the phrase was by the old scholar J. W. Mackail: ‘the broken-hearted fields’. While at Cambridge I taught myself quite a lot of classical poetry. The circumstances were ideal: there were undergraduates all over the place who had been through the English public schools and could tell you where the best bits of poetry were in the acres of text. In the New Hall annexe where my wife and I had our first apartment, there was a young graduate student from New Zealand who would put her finger right on the indispensable passages in Homer and get me to recite until I could make a fair fist of the metre: sometimes, I learned, the way the rhythm worked was half the point of the line. Disciplinarians might have frowned at the shortcut but we rarely enjoy seeing someone acquire, just from love, the knowledge that was imparted to us at the point of a cane. Pete’s melody makes a subtle virtue of how the final lines of all three stanzas are a metrical match.
A Hill of Little Shoes
The subject matter is too sacred to permit any experimentation, but really this lyric is an exercise in the special form of the aria for the opera that cannot exist. Pete understood immediately what was required for the music: monumentality, but with a legato line. I should say, for a final note to these lyrics and a final note to the whole book, that I have always fully understood Adorno’s insistence that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz. I understood it, but I didn’t believe it. The question was already there when Thucydides described the first extermination camps, the quarries of Syra
cuse in which the Athenians were left to starve; and the answer was already there in the magisterial cadence of his prose. Poetry is a form of knowledge, not of therapy; and nothing that humans do can be beyond its reach.
Index of Titles
Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.
A Bracelet for Geoffrey Hill 377
A Gesture towards James Joyce 35
A Gyre from Brother Jack 214
A Hill of Little Shoes 520
A King at Nightfall 465
A Line and a Theme from Noam Chomsky 19
A Perfect Market 312
A Spray of Jasmine 373
A Valediction for Philip Larkin 68
After Such Knowledge 160
Against Gregariousness 317
And Then They Dream of Love 325
Angels Over Elsinore 208
Anniversary Serenade 285
Apparition in Las Vegas 467
As I See You 3
Asma Unpacks Her Pretty Clothes 419
At Ian Hamilton’s Funeral 254
At School with Reg Gasnier 252
Australia Felix 314
Balcony Scene 437
Be Careful When They Offer You the Moon 469
Beachmaster 326
Berowra Waters, New South Wales 5
Beware of the Beautiful Stranger 482
Bigger than a Man 248
Book Review 360
Bring Me the Sweat of Gabriela Sabatini 93
Bubbler 376
Budge up 92
Bugsy Siegel’s Flying Eye 414
Butterfly Needles 338
Cabin Baggage 433
Canoe 507
Care-charmer Sleep 506
Carnations on the Roof 493
Castle in the Air 371
Change of Domicile 425
Commercial Traveller 511
Continental Silentia 327
Cottonmouth 481
Culture Clash 341
