Another kebab?

Clive James
NORTH FACE OF SOHO
Unreliable Memoirs, Volume Four
300pp. Picador. £17.99.
0 330 48128 2
 
The great Peter De Vries, when asked about the nature of his ambition, replied that he yearned for a mass audience that would be large enough for his elite audience to despise. In this latest volume of his tragicomic autobiography, Clive James admits twice to a similar aspiration. Meeting the dazzling Nicholas Tomalin and accidentally making a good impression on him with a piece of gaucherie about wine, he finds (or fancies) that Tomalin is describing him round town as “the boy from the bush who could quote Wittgenstein”. Looking back at the close of North Face of Soho, he rues his own tendency to fall for projects “that would duplicate the effects of the Italian Renaissance while helping to save the baby seals in the rain forest”. The first of these moments comes just as James has left the Footlights in Cambridge to launch himself in the metropolis, and the second occurs when he is back home in Cambridge trying to recuperate from the flopperoo that was the West End launch of his mock-epic poem about the grooming of Prince Charles. This, in other words, is about that weird transitional interlude “the 1970s”; a decade of “becoming” for many boomers. He faithfully notes that many people tried to warn him about the “Charles Charming” fiasco – Mark Boxer discreetly, James Fenton firmly, your humble servant rudely and coarsely – so here might be the place to state that the 70s in London would have been infinitely less amusing without the willingness of Clive James to take chances including – which is that most vertiginous of all risks – the danger of making himself look ridiculous.

No real fear of anyone else doing that, when the author himself accomplishes it with such brio. There are two set pieces included here: one about the night of the giant marijuana cigarette and one about the day he became a legend in his own lunchtime by swearing off the booze with one gargantuan farewell debauch. Both are rendered by Barry Mackenzie out of Withnail and I, and both give wholly new workouts to old routines about chundering. (I was myself an ear-witness of the celebrated giving up / throwing up episode, and am now glad that I wasn’t any closer, since James also includes a memory of his friend Jonathan James-Moore being sick in a washbasin: “Many years later he was a power in the land, in charge of comedy at BBC radio, but I bet he didn’t forget how his own lunch looked when it was staring back at him”.)Previous memoirs contained the running gag of his late mama calling the police when the boy Clive had done it again; this time the man-child is forever blacking out on the train home to Cambridge and avoiding the reproachful gaze of his incomparable wife.

James’s strenuous test of the De Vriesian proposition was to try to demonstrate that one could be simultaneously cerebral and on television. This did not just mean writing long literary essays for Ian Hamilton’s New Review and then, after a testing session in Soho’s dire saloon The Pillars of Hercules, catching a hasty and costly cab to White City, as if to prove that the thing could be done. It meant both writing “on television” and being on television, with the implied wager that no diminution of standards would be required. The wager was not unlike that placed by those literati who hoped they could exploit Hollywood without being corrupted themselves – and who among us would be without the resulting screenplays from William Faulkner? I can only say, as someone who doesn’t watch much television, that when Clive James invited me on to one of his shows (it had the unpromising, not to say forbidding, name Saturday Night People) I did actually feel that I wasn’t under orders to be stupider than I really am. But then, I might say that, mightn’t I?

Asked to be assistant director on an ill-starred Shakespeare-plus-revue tour, our hero reflected that “the fee was more than I could earn by reviewing ten different hopeless books so I said yes, reflecting that if I reviewed the books anyway, I would double my money”. At this, I pencilled “Orwell, ‘Confessions of a Book Reviewer’” in the margin. And a few pages later, James is in another period of post-disaster recovery, flat out in bed and devouring Orwell’s collected journalism. To have let the thoughts occur to this reviewer in that order is much better than the other way around. In fact, through all the hyperbole and collapsing scenery, mingled with sobering last-chance interviews with such severe editors as Terence Kilmartin and Karl Miller, this book is an excellent guide to the vagaries of Grub Street, which was always a concept rather than a place, and could be read with genuine profit by any anxious tyro. Those who resent the clubbiness and chummery of the old guard, and wish to become a new guard, must learn that “the only road to the top [is] the one on which the goods are delivered”. Of a certain Friday lunchtime group, which now threatens to become a pseudo-legend on an almost Bloomsbury-like scale (it actually did end up convening in a distinctly unassuming Turkish-Cypriot kebab joint in Bloomsbury), James makes the correct observation that it started out as a self-consciously counter-Leavisite snack, where little if any career-smoothing or back-scratching could even have been attempted.

One of the “stars” of that snack, Martin Amis, once rebuked someone for being in want of a sense of humour, and added that by saying this he meant very deliberately to impugn the man’s seriousness. Clive James knows perfectly well that a man with a talent to amuse will always have some difficulty persuading the public that he can, so to speak, quote Wittgenstein. And, once they know that he is also from “the bush”, they will expect some coarse material, too. Thus it’s brave of him to stand by the original version of his much-misquoted image of Arnold Schwarzenegger (it was “a brown condom stuffed with walnuts”) against subsequent plagiarism and dilution. He coins a new term for authorial humiliation, when he speaks of a publisher’s “advance” that is really a retreat. And then, within the self-satirizing constraints of a recounted media trip to China and Hong Kong, where the obligation is to stress the showbiz elements of a voyage with Mrs Thatcher, he abruptly detours us to the Australian Military Cemetery, where lie the mortal remains of the father he barely knew. Here, where he troubles deaf heaven with his bootless cries, we can see what Nicholas Tomalin, all those years ago, was so deft as to notice.

------------------------------------------------------------

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair, and a visiting Professor at the New School in New York. His most recent books is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, published last year.