CLIVE JAMES 1939-2019 An appreciation by Gillian Southgate

Clive James was a man of many parts, but I hadn’t thought of him as being especially brave till I saw the interview he gave to Mary Beard (BBC2 January 4^th) towards the close of his life. This is partly because the persona he adopted was of the self-deprecatory kind that is easy for readers and viewers to feel comfortable with. He spoke often about how he’d achieved success simply by doing what he was good at, and he never quite believed how successful the journey had been. The kid from Kogarah, an unremarkable township in Sydney’s southern suburbs, was going to be revealed one day as some kind of fraud, he informed Michael Parkinson on his talk-show. But this was ingenuous; as soon as he picked up a pen or sat in front of a TV camera and turned a conspiratorial grin on the audience, we knew we had the real deal.

After Cambridge, and some publishing successes, he was hired to write the TV critic’s column for the Observer. Before he took it on, most of the offerings had been humourless. I was at the time in my young twenties and knew nothing much about TV criticism or Clive James, but the first time I read his column, I burst out laughing. So did much of the nation. He sent up everything from BBC documentaries to blockbuster American serials, and went on to do it again on television. But at the same time he was writing literary criticism, journalism and poetry of such quality and integrity that we started to understand he was remarkable, and worth sticking with for what we could learn from his considerable gifts.

The Beard interview took place in his study at home. Before he spoke a word to her, his appearance came as a shock. He’d had years of chemotherapy, and many spells in Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge receiving oxygen for his lungs. The results were revealed in a face splotched with the effects of radiation, medication and the sheer physical effort of coping with a terminal condition.  The interview was conducted in a spirit of cheerfulness and positivity neither of them were probably feeling. But it worked; Beard explored the writing, the poetry, the TV appearances. Two of the ‘Postcard’ series had been shown immediately before the programme; it was good to see that the trademark reflectiveness of style and paradoxical observations had not dated in any way. Those of us who had seen the series first time round, hugged the re-runs to ourselves as we might a friend who comes unexpectedly to the door. Younger viewers may have wondered why a sick old man in a baggy T-shirt and a straggly-haired old woman, merited a slot on primetime weekend TV. I hope they hung around and listened long enough to find out.

We who admired him could have told them why we did, and how much. How the poetry, rigorously crafted, said everything about what it is to be human, in such elegant metres. How the journalism was compulsive reading, coming from an incisive mind he took pains to deprecate. He was only, perhaps, for our generation, but he examined it as few others of his time have. When she closed the interview, I had the strongest feeling that Mary went back to her car and wept into her handkerchief. Clive James was that kind of man. If you need to re-acquaint yourself with even a soundbite of his best writing, look at the last page of ‘Unreliable Memoirs’ where he reflects on what it was for him to have grown up in Australia. It will grip you with such nostalgia, you may have to remind yourself that you haven’t even lived there, may not even have visited the place. That’s his secret; anything he did made you feel a part of him. I hope Clive James knew the respect in which oldies like me held him. As he might laconically have put it himself, I’m missing him already.