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Clive James: North Face of Soho - Unreliable Memoirs, Volume IV

I never used to think much of Clive James. Because my parents were Sunday Times readers in the 1980s (and they still are, in spite of all I’ve said) I was unaware of his TV column in the Observer; and when he was at the height of his fame I had no desire at all to watch his TV show about TV. I thought he was a smart-arse, and I’d got the impression that the show was a succession of bad jokes based on laughing at foreigners on the grounds that they’re different from us. So I had him down as a shallow smart-arse. That changed in Hay-on-Wye sometime early this millennium, on my only ever visit to that festival – I liked Hay, but not the festival, really. It seemed to have to little to do with books. I was there with a friend who’s a convinced James fanatic, whom I allowed to talk me into hearing him speak about the Holocaust. The Holocaust? Clive James on the Holocaust? It was the almost postmodern appeal of the concept that convinced me to go – the image I had of the man was so fundamentally unserious that I thought the combination of subject and speaker was absurd.

I changed my mind about five minutes after James had shuffled onto the stage, all in black and wearing a leather jacket that was strangely heavy for the weather – much the same outfit he’s wearing on the cover of North Face of Soho, in fact, or the hardback edition anyway. He was reading a review he’d written some time before of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, a book whose central argument was that the Nazi persecution and genocide of the Jews was an accident waiting to happen, brewed up into inevitability in the stew of hatred that in Goldhagen’s view was German culture. Nazism expressed something deep in German society that Hitler had only to tap into; it was set free by his leadership. Clive James’s review, in fact more an essay on Nazism, squared up to Goldhagen and knocked him out flat, arguing passionately and persuasively that the Holocaust was inevitably only from the moment Hitler gained power in Germany; and that it was then inevitable because of the nature of fascism, not the nature of Germany or of Germans. I can’t think of another occasion when my perception of a speaker has changed as much as this so quickly: I arrived at that talk thinking I was going to see a minor celebrity out of his depth with an important topic. I left pleased to have heard a serious, moral writer (a political writer, I might have thought at that moment; but a moral writer is the better description); amazed that I’d underestimated him so badly, and promising to discover more of his work. Which is what I’ve done, gradually, since. I now know that that review embodies an important principle behind James’s approach to criticism:

I thought he was wrong, and wrong on an important theme: one on which the young ought not to be misled.

James is here recalling his 1972 review of Al Alvarez’s The Savage God, but it could just as well be about the later Goldhagen piece. He thought Goldhagen was wrong, too – badly wrong, on an pre-eminently important theme – and must be countered, an urge born of the enlightenment ethic, of the commitment to democratic institutions and to common humanity that’s palpable throughout Clive James’s work, whether his wit serves as a sword, as I witnessed it at Hay, or whether he uses it just for fun. I’m reminded of A.V. Dicey’s explanation of the texture of freedom in England: A man has a right to hear an orator as he has a right to hear a band, or to eat a bun. For James, the fun is as important as the important stuff. It’s all about a love of ideas, and it’s all about a love of life.

This book, the fourth volume in his series of Unreliable Memoirs, tells the story of his early career as a freelance writer and broadcaster. Those who’ve read the lot (I’ve not) tell me it’s not as funny as the others; well, I reckon it’s got a decent laugh quotient, but I also reckon that’s not quite the point. It tells the story of a fundamentally serious writer, one who believes in the comic, who loves and values it and uses it to the full. A writer who now feels less intensely the need to please, and more so the need to tell the truth.

That truth is incomplete, you’re bound to feel, when James is talking about his own drinking in the sixties and early seventies: here, the humour is used to distance him and us from what must the painful memory of something that sounds akin to alcoholism, if not the thing itself. Throughout the book, James presents himself as a shambling, badly dressed figure of fun, a journeying fool among literary giants and stars. It’s a persona that transparently shields him from serious criticism and self-criticism, but I don’t blame James for that: he shows repeatedly that he’s perfectly willing to own up to his failings and recant errors, and the jokes are almost all on him, so much so that only a hard man or woman would have the heart to tell him why the late Tony Wilson reacted the way he did to what James said about Manchester. The joke would have worked if it’d been about the Arndale Centre. It’d be a bit much to expect a more gory, masochistic self-examination than this, and James no doubt rightly guesses his readers would prefer an honest and funny account of his life than a gloomily self-regarding one.

I enjoyed it very much, and read it at high speed, which I think would please the author. It’s got quite a few interesting stories about the people James met during this period – I’m thinking especially of Ian Hamilton, Burt Lancaster and Robert Mitchum – and James uses to the full an ability to portray characters in almost Dickensian comic vignettes. For the aspiring writer the book is full of good advice, about avoiding unnecessarily mean-minded reviewing, for example. The same type of reader will enjoy the story of how James came to write the astonishing critical pieces that made his name – dipping in to his first collection of critical essays The Metropolitan Critic while reading this memoir, I found the breadth and depth of his reading amazing, the range and confidence of his references staggering. The other thing to marvel at and learn from here is James’s writing style, of course – the characteristically witty tone, the cracking pace, the balance and cadence of the sentences, falling like lines recited by a pro, or gags perfectly timed. James offers plenty of advice about how to write well, and badly, and again those of us who are trying to do a little bit of what he did lots of will pay attention and do our best. If that leads to a temptation to imitate the James voice – well, there are worse ways to be derivative.

Of course I’m particularly interested in the way Clive James first conquered Grub Street, then the broader newspaper audience and finally television because today’s freelance intellectual is some kind of lightweight, less literate and altogether lower-brow relation of the young James’s metropolitan critic. I feel sure he’d have blogged in those days if the word and the technology had been there, and given his interest in the internet I like to think he’d approve of mad enterprises like this site, although the likes of me have it easy: he managed to turn out an impressive quality and quantity of words when there were only typewriters, and seemingly to have seen all films when there were no DVDs or even videos. I’ve already admitted I can’t begin to compete with him in terms of erudition (did he read everything when he was at Cambridge? He gives the impression of having been re-reading it all ever since), and only the exercise of posting here will bring my prose to anything approaching his level. But one area of life where James shows a reassuring, and for envious wannabes like me, mildly encouraging vulnerability is politics – something the metropolitan critic was clearly much less interested in than the freelance intellectual of today. How can he possibly, when recalling the Edinburgh Festival of 1968 or 1969, not know whether Ted Heath was about to become Prime Minister or had just stopped being it? Political junkies will be amazed by that; and cheered up slightly by the knowledge that James isn’t superior in absolutely every way.

I liked this book – and I’m looking forward to the next in the Clive James series of memoirs, which I hope won’t be too long coming. I really must borrow Cultural Amnesia soon, too.