CLIVE JAMES, Sentenced to Life, London, Picador 2015, pp. 60 + xii, £ 10.49


in: Semicerchio LII (2015/1) Poesia alimentare. Food poetry pp. 121 - 122


«Clive» (christened Vivian Leopold) James was one of the postwar influx of talented literary Australians to London which included Germaine Greer, Barry Humphries, the siblings Richard and Jill Neville and most notably Peter Porter (1929-2010), one of the leading «English» poets of the last quarter of the 20th century. Some took their acquired fame back with them «down under», others in effect commuted, but Porter and James – who became good friends – stayed, resisting anglicisation (in contrast, say, to the Missouri- born T.S. Eliot) to remain resolutely «Australians-in-England». While Porter, a decade older, and a decade earlier off the boat, made, after a spell in advertising, a hard-won career as a non-academic littérateur, James, having built a fearsome reputation as a television critic, became in due course himself a star of the small screen as funny-man, cultural commentator, travel journalist and chat-show host, conducting a string of successful series under his own name.
He has always thought of himself, though, primarily as a poet, if, like others successful «on the box», he has found a degree of difficulty in being taken seriously in the austere halls of literature. His earliest successes in this sphere were hardly a help, book-length freewheeling verse satires of which easily the best, Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage through the London Literary World, was famously performed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1974 by Martin Amis, Russell Davies and the author «under the auspices of the Poetry International Festival». No doubt some of its palpably hit targets took their pillorying better than others.
But James is not easily discouraged: Sentenced to Life is his thirty-eighth book, a list that includes five volumes of autobiography, four less-than-successful novels, eighteen books of essays, literary, televisual, cultural… and various collections of poetry. It would be fair to say that his verse has been respectfully rather than enthusiastically received, although one piece – The Book of My Enemy has been Remaindered – is much anthologised, has become popular even, no easy thing for a poem.
In the last couple of years, James, now 75, has become quite seriously ill, but an apparent death sentence has given him a new lease of poetical life, a fact ruefully celebrated in the title of his new book. Barely surviving – «living and partly living» as Eliot had it – has become his final theme, and brought out the best in him.
It would be unrealistic to expect all his faults to have disappeared overnight. Most comfortable in rhyme, he fails on occasions to conceal formulations dragged in for that sole purpose: in the opening, and title, poem, for example, consecutive strophes end «Now, not just old, but ill, with much amiss, / I see things with a whole new emphasis.» and (re goldfish) «their rule / of never touching, never going wrong: / Trajectories as perfect as plain song.» neither of which convince as observations independent of their need to chime. On the other hand, Event Horizon, a sort of brave and beautiful unbeliever’s creed, each of its six verses ending with a reiterated, unflinching «nowhere», doesn’t put a foot wrong:


Into the singularity we fly 
After a stretch in which we leave 
Our lives behind yet know that we will die 
At any moment now. A pause to grieve, 
Burned by the starlight of our lives laid bare, 
And then no sound, no sight, no thought. Nowhere. 

What is it worth, then, this insane last phase 
When everything about you goes downhill? 
This much: you get to see the cosmos blaze 
And feel its grandeur, even against your will, 
As it reminds you, just by being there,
That it is here we live or else nowhere. 


As could be expected of a genuinely humorous humorist (a more restricted category than one might think), the comic pieces also work well: Living Doll for example – An «Aufstehpuppe is a stand-up guy. / You knock him over, he gets up again…» – and the witty Compendium Catullianum – «Remember when I asked for a thousand kisses? / Let’s make it ten. Why not just kiss me once?…». They are also a welcome leavening for a book whose general tenor is in the nature of things less than cheerful. Not that James seems overly cast-down by his impending exit, any more than he appears overly contrite for the confessed bedhopping that has led to him facing it on his own. Or rather he regrets where his behaviour has led him – «His body that betrayed you has gone on / to do the same for him…» – rather than giving any strong impression that with his time over again he would have played it differently, sinning and forgiveness seeming the preferred option to continence:


    Your proper anger and my shamed regret – But once we gladly spoke and still might yet . . . (Balcony Scene)


He is fine too at combining the humour with a degree of pathos, staying the right side of sentimentality:

Too deaf to keep pace
with conversation, I don’t try to guess
At meanings, or unpack a stroke of wit,
But just send silent signals with my face
That claim I’ve not succumbed to loneliness
And might be ready to come in on cue.
People still turn towards me where I sit. (Holding Court)


Sentenced to Life has already been widely lauded and applauded. It is as if the disbelieved angels had said «You can write better than you ever have, but it will be for the last time». One gets the impression that the poet – he has earned the title – is happy enough with the deal.


Are you to welcome this? It welcomes you.
The only blessing of the void to come
Is that you can relax. Nothing to do,
No cruel dreams of subtracting from your sum
Of follies. About those, at last, you care:
But soon you need not, as you go nowhere.

(Philip Morre)