So Brightly at the Last

Ian Shircore

Description

Jimi Hendrix, Princess Diana and the Syrian dictator's wife, Asma al-Assad, rub shoulders with Auden, Eliot and Shelley - and with the Trouser Thief Clive met while spending weeks locked up in a closed psychiatric ward - in this unconventional and affectionate biography.In 2010, Clive was told he only had months to love. Since then he has shuttled between the hospital and the writing desk, pouring out a stream of books, articles and poems in a sustained burst of dazzling productivity.The poems he's written in these last years show an impressive range and depth - sometimes light, witty and paradoxical, sometimes sad, heartfelt and regretful. All are packed with the unexpected ideas, inventive imagery and uniquely thrilling way with words that have helped him achieve his avowed ambition of becoming 'a fairly major minor poet.'

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique

Informations

• Publié par: Distributed by eBookpartnership
• Date de parution: 13 février 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781839785962
• Langue: English

Extrait

Praise for So Brightly at the Last
A terrific book. I read it with astonishment and learnt a huge amount. It’s informal, enthusiastic, chatty and leaves the reader in no doubt about Clive’s formidable scope and range.
PROFESSOR JOHN CAREY
A lively, unpredictable guide to Clive James’s late work. Anyone interested in his astonishing career will want to read this book.
CHRISTIAN WIMAN
Clive James is possibly the greatest prose stylist of his generation; erudite, elegant, funny and penetrating. All that, though, applies equally to his poetry, less well known but just as dazzling. Shircore’s book is a long overdue, very readable but insightful celebration of James’s wonderful and humane lyric verse.
STUART MACONIE
A fascinating study of Clive James’s lifelong dedication to poetry—a compelling portrait of the man through the work. Not to be missed.
STEPHEN EDGAR
Ian Shircore has given Clive’s poetry the care and attention it richly deserves. This is a sensitive treatment of a body of poetry that has flourished so beautifully near the end.
PHILIP COLLINS
Clive James’s verse is alive with energy, wit. craft, beauty, fire and a uniquely thrilling poetic intelligence.
STEPHEN FRY
Praise for Loose Canon: the Extraordinary Songs of Clive James and Pete Atkin
‘I loved this book, right from Stephen Fry’s gorgeous introduction... I especially recommend this to folks who don’t know the songs... I envy anyone hearing them for the first time’
‘Written beautifully’
‘A brilliant book about one of the greatest, but least well known, songwriting partnerships of the last 100 years’
‘I read this book in one sitting, it’s that readable and engaging’
‘An essential read’
‘Thoroughly enjoyable both for dipping in and for longer sessions…even for those who don’t really know them yet, it’s definitely worth a punt’
‘It is rare you find a book where the written narrative is as lyrical as the songs themselves, but Loose Canon is one of those books’
‘A beautifully written exploration of the songs of Clive James and Pete Atkin…there’s no better way of understanding them more clearly, and appreciating them more deeply’
‘This book should be of interest to anyone interested in the craft of songwriting’
‘If you’re a fan it’s a must and if you’re not…well, you’re missing a treat!!’
‘A fabulously well researched and entertaining read’
‘Cracking read. I knew next to nothing about James/Atkin and their work but was drawn into the story from the first chapter’
‘I loved this book. It’s well written, illuminating, full of humour and a real joy to read. Ian Shircore is an excellent writer and this is his best book yet’
‘What an enjoyable, interesting read, filled with some beautiful and touching moments’
CLIVE JAMES
AND THE PASSION FOR POETRY
SO BRIGHTLY AT THE LAST
IAN SHIRCORE
Published by RedDoor
www.reddoorpress.co.uk
© 2019 Ian Shircore
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions. If you believe you are the copyright owner of material used in this book and we have not requested your permission, please contact us so that we can correct any oversight
The right of Ian Shircore to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the author
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Typesetting: Tutis Innovative E-Solutions Pte. Ltd
This book is for Zoë and Nick, the great-great-grandchildren of Eleanor Parkman, whose grandma heard the news of Waterloo as it happened, and for Clive, whose words have been precious to me for half a century
Contents
You Can’t Expect to be Remembered
The Price of Fame
Japanese Maple
In the Heroic Mould
Poetry’s Hendrix
Game Over
The Locked Ward and the Trouser Thief
A Chip of Ice in the Heart
1815 and All That
At Ian Hamilton’s Funeral
Dream Me Some Happiness
It Depends What You Mean by Nonsense
That Old Black Magic
Asma Unpacks Her Pretty Clothes
The Editor’s Blue Pencil
Diana
Under Fire
The People’s Poetry
The River in the Sky
Signing Off
‘I’m Not Going to Go Out and Ride My Bike’
Acknowledgements
Index
1
You Can’t Expect to Be Remembered
For half a lifetime, Clive James has lived with fear. It’s not the fear of death. That’s a done deal, so there’s no point fretting about it. ‘Stop worrying. No-one gets out of here alive,’ he says. What does worry him is the dread suspicion that the obituaries, when they eventually come, will fail to give him credit for any of his achievements in the fields of literature, music and cultural criticism, including forty books, two hundred song lyrics and fifty years of dedicated devotion to the poetic muse.
Instead, they will focus, he fears, on the other side of his public role. He has seen the headlines in his dreams: ‘Japanese game show man dies.’
That would be a harsh reward for a long and dazzling career that has seen Clive hailed as the most versatile writer of his generation. No-one who’s relished his exuberant, provocative TV and literary criticism should ever forget that he invented a new way of writing about such things – a way that’s so firmly established it’s become today’s orthodoxy. No-one who has enjoyed his million-selling Unreliable Memoirs can question his ability to create moments of comic genius. No-one who has read Cultural Amnesia , his vast survey of the words, wars, music, people and politics that shaped the twentieth century, could doubt his erudition, his wit or his serious engagement with the greatest issues of our time. And no-one who has read recent works like ‘Japanese Maple’ or his book-length poem, The River in the Sky , could fail to recognise the late flowering that has finally confirmed his status as a genuinely talented poet.
But who wants someone who’s a poet, essayist, comedian and critic – and, of course, television presenter – all rolled into one?
It confuses people. It makes it hard to know what to expect. When a critic from The New Yorker , back in the last century, declared ‘Clive James is a brilliant bunch of guys’, he deftly summed up both the strengths and weaknesses of Clive’s unique and ambiguous position in our culture. He is today’s Renaissance Man. But, as he pointed out years ago, in an essay on Pier Paolo Pasolini, that’s a tag that has been devalued by overuse.
‘Renaissance Man is a description tossed around too lightly in modern times,’ he observed, striking his best Noël Coward pose. ‘Actors get it if they can play the guitar.’
The ‘Japanese game show man’ label is part of the picture. For millions, Clive will always be the amiable Aussie with the hooded, piercing eyes and the wry Cheshire Cat grin who entertained them for twenty years with shows like Saturday Night Clive , the Postcard From… travel documentaries and Clive James on Television . When this last series unearthed the spectacularly brutal Japanese ‘torture TV’ game show Za Gaman – otherwise known as Endurance – British television crossed a watershed.
We had never seen reality TV before, except for the rather more sedate Candid Camera . We gasped at the humiliating trials contestants were put through and told ourselves it could never happen here. It never has, quite, but it didn’t take us long to get used to seeing our own minor celebrities tucking into a meal of roast spider or grilled crocodile penis and being showered with glistening cockroaches.
Alongside this television stardom, Clive was still producing thoughtful, incisive essays and literary criticism, still adding volumes to his Unreliable Memoirs and still writing poetry. Occasionally, a poem of his would cut through the hubbub and make its mark in the outside world. His splendidly spiteful ‘The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered’ dates from the early eighties, but it is still being shared with glee across today’s social media. It may, even now, prove to be his most long-lasting poem, if only because it has three decades’ start on the remarkable surge of work he has produced since he became seriously ill, nine years ago.
People come to Clive James by a variety of different routes. I first knew him as a songwriter, the lyricist who worked with singer Pete Atkin in the early seventies. I didn’t know he wrote poetry then, but I was well aware of a sneaky poetic tendency in the words he wrote for their largely humorous songs.
One of the first I heard was called ‘You Can’t Expect to Be Remembered’, a little ditty that warned modern lovers that they couldn’t hope to be immortalised in ‘balanced lapidary phrases’ like those so casually knocked out, in days of yore, by the likes of Petrarch, Shakespeare and Ronsard. These bards of old, the song explained, couldn’t put pen to paper without creating works of enduring genius. You could scarcely fail to notice Clive’s nonchalant hijacking of one of the great lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (‘They never said “Farewell”, they said “So long” / “So long lives this and this gives life to thee” ’), introduced by the splendidly anachronistic and slangy ‘So long’. I loved this stuff. It was funny. It was smart. It certainly wasn’t the sort of thing you stumbled across every day in the folk clubs and student bars of 1970s Britain.
This song and other gems on Pete’s first album, Beware of the Beautiful Stranger – including ‘Touch Has a Memory’, which was based on a line from Keats, and ‘Have You Got a Biro I Can Borrow?’, which wasn’t – opened my eyes to Clive’s playful, quirky way of looking at the world and my ears to his unique way with words. I moved on to enjoy his TV criticism in the Observer and,