Clive James
The prolific Australian proves he is more than just a TV personality
| 20 Aug 2007
The so-called super-don John Carey once described Clive James's grand statements about George Bernard Shaw (that in his later works, "garrulity displaced eloquence and brainwaves insight") as "at best meaningless," and implicitly accused the Australian upstart of speaking above his station. I risk being open to the same charge when I call James the most influential journalist writing in English, but the evidence is everywhere. The current bad boys of American letters, Vanity Fair's James Wolcott and The New Yorker's Anthony Lane, both emulate the Jamesian style of honed vernacular impudence – albeit with a waspish pomposity and coltish over-exertion of which James has never been guilty.
I say this to suggest how much adulation James inspires, as the enormous turnout may have reminded him. Of the hundreds of readers at this presentation, more may have been drawn by James's skirmishes with television – his writing about it and his performing on it – than his revolutionary critcism and sapid, playful poetry. But a heartening amount of people were also there to hear him talk up a storm about Cultural Amnesia, a mind-expanding collection of linked essays on the subject of artists' moral accountability, which he called "this very, very strange book which has fulfilled all my dreams."
As one has come to expect, James's range of reference was both large and wide, and always animated by his weakness for wordplay. Having drawn the large crowd, he played it. Frequently standing up with an air of mock pride, and constantly tripping himself up with another brainwave, he was always rewarded with laughter, admiration, and gratitude. He repeatedly joked about grand future projects, but this author of more than thirty books will probably go through with them. James' prolific writing makes the merely very productive look slovenly.
Clive James talks as well as he writes. Everything that he says is not only worth hearing: it is worth memorising. He is a writer for whom every conscientious reader should be grateful – like Shaw in his prime.
I say this to suggest how much adulation James inspires, as the enormous turnout may have reminded him. Of the hundreds of readers at this presentation, more may have been drawn by James's skirmishes with television – his writing about it and his performing on it – than his revolutionary critcism and sapid, playful poetry. But a heartening amount of people were also there to hear him talk up a storm about Cultural Amnesia, a mind-expanding collection of linked essays on the subject of artists' moral accountability, which he called "this very, very strange book which has fulfilled all my dreams."
As one has come to expect, James's range of reference was both large and wide, and always animated by his weakness for wordplay. Having drawn the large crowd, he played it. Frequently standing up with an air of mock pride, and constantly tripping himself up with another brainwave, he was always rewarded with laughter, admiration, and gratitude. He repeatedly joked about grand future projects, but this author of more than thirty books will probably go through with them. James' prolific writing makes the merely very productive look slovenly.
Clive James talks as well as he writes. Everything that he says is not only worth hearing: it is worth memorising. He is a writer for whom every conscientious reader should be grateful – like Shaw in his prime.