Clive James – The Kid From Kogarah - Transcript w1m36

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Clive James – The Kid From Kogarah ABC TV Arts

Posted: Friday, 30 August 2013 at 10:19am Clive James is an intriguing character. He is high culture and pop culture bundled up together – able to write a new translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, provide hilarious commentary on Japanese television game shows and write respected literary reviews. Threaded throughout all that he does is James’ trademark wit and intelligence. Clive James – The Kid From Kogarah screend Tuesday 3 September at 8:30pm on ABC1 [TRANSCRIPT] Kerry O'Brien It’s a long way from the streets of Kogarah in suburban Sydney to the ancient sandstone spires of Cambridge for a boy brought up by a single mother on the widow’s pension but that’s the road that Clive James has travelled. Nearly fifty years later and an honorary fellow at his old college of Pembroke Clive James is battling not one but two terminal illnesses. They’ve taken a toll on his body but the mind of the man who is a writer, a poet, a lyricist, a linguist, a tv critic cum tv star, cultural commentator and internet pioneer remains as strong as ever. Having just completed the work of a decade a very different translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy Clive James is now racing against the clock to write the last reflections of a life lived to the full, his sixth and final memoir. “Ah now it’s a long time since I’ve been in here” New Republic observed that when England loses Clive James it will be as if a plane crashed with five or six of its best writers on board. The New Yorker called him a brilliant bunch of guys. “My special subject was Swift” Q Clive James, it’s good of you to give us the time.

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C Kerry, it’s very, very good of you to be here. It’s a long way to come. Q With pleasure. How are you? C The simple version of the answer is that I’m alive, ah and quite well, and I didn’t expect to be because so much went wrong with me. But ah the truth is that I’ve got almost everything wrong. My lungs are in bad shape and ah you might hear me do quite a lot of coughing soon, in which case you can lean forward and comionately pat me on the back. Q That might make it worse! C And [ahem] I have to have my immune system replaced every three weeks at the great hospital, Addenbrooke's, which is nearby. So effectively that means I can’t travel further than three weeks from Addenbrooke's for the rest of my life. And ah I’ve got leukaemia, which is in remission at the moment, but might decide to come back. So when you add it all together I’m in terrible shape! [laughter] Q But we’re laughing! How[laughter] [coughing] C There’s a cough. Q How restricted are you physically? C Pretty much. I’m I’m I’m a bit of a shuffler and I can’t walk very far or get- even make any kind of agitated movement without um without getting a coughing fit or feeling tired. Yes, restricted physically. I liked- I love dancing, love dancing the tango. I won’t be doing that anymore. There’s a lot of things I won’t be doing anymore. I won’t be flying anywhere, because you need a lot of oxygen. Q And that means no flying back to Australia? C Ah alas. Q You don’t see Australia again for the rest of your life . . . C . . . I don’t see Australia again, and it’s- It weighs on me. I’m very sad about that. Q You um you copped a double whammy all in one go, didn’t you? You actually I think went to the hospital ah to be checked out on one condition . . . C . . . Yes . . . Q . . . and by the time that was over they’d actually presented you with two terminal ones . . . C That’s the message – don’t get cured! Q Leukaemia- Leukaemia and emphysema. C I turned up because ah like many men, foolish men, and most men are foolish, I’d postponed my prostate operation too long. And the night came, it was New Year’s Eve of 2009 and th-the first day of 2010 when you know I really couldn’t pee at all. So it was a case of going into the emergency unit and ah and I thought I’d be there for a while, but I was there for a long time because I almost had kidney failure. And ah they took a couple of weeks to stabilise me and then they operated on that. Ah but I almost croaked then. Q Yeah. C And then later on I had a couple of bad things. Q So in fact ah your daughter Claerwen has said that you had two very close brushes with death . . . C . . . Yes, yeah, yeah . . . Q . . . in that, in that early period? C Yeah. It was while I went in there with the, w-with the kidney failure that they did spot the leukaemia, and the emphysema they already knew about, but they realised how bad it was. [coughing] It sounds particularly bad now because I’m getting- I’m enjoying myself!

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Q H-how hard has the fight back been? C Well, when you consider what people go through and if you’ve spent a lot of time around a hospital you see it all the time. You’ve got to count yourself lucky. For example, this is the right time to be alive if you’re sick, because you might stay alive. And ah I wouldn’t have had . . . Q . . . And if you can stay alive a little longer, it might be even better. C Yeah, exactly! And you start- I’ll tell you, just before I got sick I was having illusions, fantasies that I was well weary and I’d had enough of life and it wouldn’t really m-matter very much if I disappeared. Now I’d done it all, all that self-indulgent stuff. Those feelings vanished overnight as soon as I got sick! And I just wanted to live. and I’ve found this period when I’ve been ill, as I am now, as I sit here and talk to you I’m I’m not a well man, I find that brings a clarity of mind and an ability to concentrate on the essential that I never had when I was well. When I was well I was so energetic I never noticed anything . . . Q . . . Right. C I was sort of like, I was like a banzai bumble bee; I was everywhere! Q You’re saying . . . C . . . but I never concentrated. Q You’re saying a need to prioritise . . . C . . . Yes . . . Q . . . is much, much clearer? C Yes. And bad health makes you, makes you think. Q There’s a powerful poignancy I think about an essay that you wrote and delivered for radio in 2007, that you called Smoking the Memory, ah which I, which I think measured the depths of your dependence on nicotine . . . C . . . How foolish . . . Q . . . Because after you gave it up you were still smoking by memory for a year . . . C . . . Yes . . . Q . . . until of course you went back to it. C And I went- But the way I went back to it is particularly [ahem] shameful, is that I had a plan that I’ll, yes, I’ll smoke again, but I’ll smoke the occasional cigarillo, like Clint Eastwood, you know? Th-the dangerous cigarillo dripping from the laconic lip? Q Mm hm. C Three or four a day. Within a week I was chain smoking the things. Q Yeah. C So it was worse than ever. Q I-in March this year you wrote a poem called Holding Court, and ah if you’ll indulge me, I’ll read a little bit of it. “My body, sensitive in every way save one, can still proceed from chair to chair... C ....chair to chair. But in my mind the fire- the fires are dying fast. Breathe through a scarf. Steer clear of the cold air. Think less of love and all that you have lost. You have no future so forget the past. Let this be no occasion for despair. Cherish the prison of your waning day. liberty, and what it cost.” Q Is that what you feel? The fires in your mind dying fast? C I wasn’t writing anything like that before I got ill. This is, this is quite a recent event. And it’s got lines in it that I’m very proud of. And cherish, cherish the prison of your waning day, is that what I wrote there? Q Yes, yes. C I I do feel that’s what I’m doing. It’s you are restricted, but on the other hand your restriction gives you a vision, so

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cherish it. Q Think less of love and all that you’ve lost. C Ah, we don’t want to go into too many details here, Kerry! But ah [coughing] let’s say that my days, my days as aWhat’s the word I’m looking for? I’d better be very, very careful of my vocabulary here. My days of being . . . Q . . . Somebody who appreciates beauty. C Dr-drunk with the spectacle of female beauty, a little bit behind me now, and ought to be. Q What are you working on at present? C Oh if only there were time to do it all! Ah there was sixth volume of memoirs. My younger daughter approves of my provisional title. The provisional title is Prelude to the Aftermath. Q Ha! C And ah I said I probably won’t call it that, and she said, no, you must call it that! [laughter] [coughing] Q You said in volume five ah on the TV years, on your television years, that in the next and final one you’d try to sum up a lifetime of reflections on your own existence. Is that still the plan? C Yeah, that’s what I’m doing. I’m about some almost 10,000 words into it. I’m having far too much fun! And it was meant to- And I I must get, I must get serious! also m-my memory keeps going back to my early disasters, which has always been the the basic- the bedrock of my writings, i-is not my my later years in the limelight or in prominence, but my early catastrophes. Ah they’re funnier! Q Is it true to say that the writing has provided you with the central thread of your life? C Oh sure, there’s no question. A writer is what I am, and I probably wouldn’t have been very good at anything else. Q when you have such a ion for what essentially is at the core of your life, does that make you a selfish person? C Necessarily and awkwardly and hard to live with. And ah I mean this is delicate territory, but it’s not the ideal ah- It’s not the ideal psychological const- It’s not the ideal motivational force for someone who also wants to be a husband and father. Q But these things are very hard I think at times to separate, aren’t they, when . . . C . . . Yeah . . . Q . . . when we reflect on our lives, work and family? C Yeah. Q Particularly if you’re ionate about both. C Yeah, well I’ve actually made a lot of time, especially in recent years, ah I’ve taken time to reflect on how the actual life, the real life actually connects up with imaginative life. And the truth is th-the imaginative life would not be so rich unless the real life was there. The ideal of going away, living alone in a garret and ah just being an artist is is a teenage fantasy really, mm. Q Don’t know whether you’ve thought about this, but it’s nearly 50 years since you first came to Cambridge University . . . C . . . Yeah . . . Q . . . This library must have some very powerful memories for you? . . . C I was, I was here, I lived on the other side of this courtyard, so I spent time here, especially at night. A lot of things started here. And downstairs, in what used to be called the old library, it was a sort of underground dungeon, I think it’s gone now, I think they demolished it, it used to be the venue for the Pembroke Smoker. It was a concert once a year and everybody used to come to that concert. Peter Cook started it, Eric Idle directed it for years and then handed it over to me. And he showed me how to build the stage. We built it out of beer crates in the corner of the room, and all these undergrads and graduate students and dons came and all the fashionable women of the university were all there.

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And ah it was there that, with one show I produced, Germaine Greer did her celebrated routine of Land of Hope and Glory with her lips out of synchronisation with the words . . . Q . . . Right, right . . . C . . . which some people think was the single funniest thing they ever saw! They were, they were grown men with knighthoods rolling on the floor. The dons went crazy about her. And it was, it was, it seemed like fun even at the time, and these things always look good in the memory . . . Q . . . And this . . . C . . . And better in memory. Q Th-the Smokers all fit into, um I mean the best of, I suppose, ended up in Footlights. C Oh sure. Q Which you also ran. C Well, you could ah- I was President of Footlights as well, which sounds rather grand, but in fact it just meant you’ve hang around long enough to get the job. I would do [ahem] two smoking concerts for Footlights every term, and then I’d do the Pembroke Smoker, and then you can sort of be guest star at the smoking concert of every other college, and there are a lot of colleges! So really you could be on stage practically continuously throughout your undergrad career, and that’s what I did. What I did was extracurricular activities. I really wasn’t much of a student. Q Well, in fact I was going to say, there was a pattern, both at Sydney University and here, ah where you were, you were hoovering up all kinds of literature, music, ah any kind of serious culture that that you could get your hands on. Q Ah what you weren’t doing much of anything of was the actual course. C Yeah. There was a terrible expression, ‘set books’, and I never could read the set books! And there was another expression, ‘off the course’, and I was off the course! I did everything that was off the course. It’s a temperamental fault. It would’ve been easier, I believe [coughing] if I’d just done what was set down for me. But ah it wasn’t in my nature. Q What was the Australia you left behind in 1961? C Oh well, I would like to think that it was a primitive, undeveloped place that I was well out of in my, in my search for richer adventure. But the truth was, of course, that it was a startling country. It had everything. And one of the things that it had was it offered the opportunity to see the world, you know. Y-you were rich enough to do that. I earned enough at the Sydney Morning Herald, my first newspaper, to save up and buy a ticket to England. So I did what everybody else did and I just got on a ship and went to see the world. Q Were you ever really clear what you wanted from England? Did you have any kind of a plan? C I think lemmings have a better plan than I had! I had no idea. And I got off the ship, I had ten quid in my pocket. I lost that at my first party I went to. No, I had no, no plan, and I just followed my noise. And I I bless it now, because I ended up doing strange things just to stay alive, like working in a factory for example, ah experience I still draw on. And um but no, th-th-there was no plan. I knew I wanted to be a writer and I was- I’d brought some poems with me and I wrote some more, and I had what I thought was a collection of poems. Luckily nobody published it! That was a blessing, because I managed to get it to a few publishers, and one or two of them kindly said it was promising. But luckily nobody published it, because if they had I’d be going around now trying to buy up every copy! [laughter] C Because they were just not ready. Very few poets are ready early; one or two. Q You wrote that um that Cambridge was the one place where you could be everything that you- You could be everything that you wanted to be . . . C . . . Yes . . . Q . . . all at once. Now what did everything encom?

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C I think it was probably the right time, you know. It was my middle 20s. I’m very glad I wasn’t here earlier, at the time the other- I was older than the other undergraduates by just that crucial few years. And um so I could, so I could see what the requirements were and find a way of getting around them, and I realised the extracurricular stuff was it. I realised that straight away. I knew that th-the thing to go for was Footlights, drama and student journalism, and I started really to be a cultural journalist here. I would do- I wr-wrote for the Cambridge Review, I wrote film criticism, I wrote all kinds of essays. And they started to get noticed in London, because in those days London, it probably still does, the editors would keep their eye on the universities, and ah you’d get an invitation, would you like to review a book for us? Would I! Yes, I would! Q But the interesting thing was that um that with those reviews, y-you- the film reviews you were writing for Cambridge Review, um ah you broke a mould, didn’t you, because ah because you were writing about Hollywood as much as you were writing about. C . . . Oh sure, yeah . . . Q . . . as much as you were writing about continental films. C Yeah, or more. I’d go for the popular end every time. Q Yes. C Suspecting that the real creativity might be there. And later when I became a TV critic I did a lot of that. Q When you first seriously hit the mainstream, it was by taking the exact, exact same approach with your television reviews . . . C . . . Yeah . . . Q . . . as you had with your film reviews for the Cambridge Review . . . C . . . Th-that’s true. Q This was with The Observer. Ah you took popular art seriously, but also sent it up brilliantly. D-did the success surprise you? C yes, i-it got very popular very fast. But in those days, which are different from today, print journalism, print journalism were very strong, especially in London, and um about a million of the brightest people in the country took The Observer every Sunday. So you were really hitting an audience, and I became part of the landscape. Q I wonder if you can your column on ah Charles and Di’s wedding, the wedding of the century, because . . . C . . . Oh I had fun writing those . . . Q . . . because people who read it at the time or read it in The Book of Columns would certainly it. C Oh I had a lot of fun composing those things. I composed them like a mosaic, because so much was happening. And what I did is I covered the coverage. Ah the great Australian journalist who’s dead now, Murray Sayle, used to say what matters is it’s the story, it’s the story of the story. And I would cover the coverage, and I would write down what the TV commentators were saying and/or what the celebrities were saying. And I- Barbara Cartland was asked her opinion, and there she was on screen, and I was able to say that that her eye makeup looked like the corpses of two crows that had flown into a chalk cliff! And that was a case of a phrase becoming well-known. It still is; people quote it to me! Flatteringly, people quote it back to me! It was like later on I said that Arnold Schwarzenegger looked like a brown condom full of walnuts . . . Q . . . That one’s come back, that one’s . . . C . . . People, people will, people- That’ll be on my tombstone, people come . . . Q . . . No, it’ll be on his! [laughter] C Actually he did get To hear of it Q When the opportunity came for you to leave Fleet Street and perform for television, what was the lure that hooked you?

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C It appealed to me to do television, and it did for a long time. And I didn’t quit until the year 2000 and that was because I wanted to get back to have all my concentration available for writing again. Also it was getting a bit hard. I wasn’t, I wasn’t young anymore. Q But I think also didn’t you find values changing? Didn’t you findC Yes. It got very, very hard . . . Q . . . To focus? . . . C . . . t-to interview the people I wanted to interview. I wanted to interview a ballerina, they wanted me to interview a Spice Girl. They were right, because if you interview the Spice Girl the figures go up by a million. Actually it’s a million people who eat crisps, but it’s another million people. So I could see it from their viewpoint, it was just that it wasn’t, it wasn’t my interest. Q So how do you look back now on those television years that catapulted you into stardom? C With gratitude, because it would be churlish not to. Ah it made me well-known here and in Australia, not in America, only a few of my shows went to America. Um [cough] but I was grateful for the attention, and which I still get because people don’t forget that you’ve been on television. C But no, I’m grateful. Ah a lot of awkward stuff comes with it, ah and that I’m not grateful for. I’m not really, although I love the limelight, I’m not made for media attention. Q Well in fact ah your daughter, Claerwen, must be very wise, Clive, must be very observant. She’s perceptive. She’s talked of your conflicting sides that don’t sit comfortably together. C Yes. Q Quote, ‘He’s a showman and a recluse at the same time, and has conflicting impulses of gregariousness and the need to be alone to work’. C She’s clever, isn’t she? Q Mm. C That’s exactly true. Q Well, she had a box seat. C Yeah, but on the other hand I’m not so sure I’m the only person who’s had conflicting impulses, and that again is a subject, the way being ill and approaching death is a subject. And writers love subject. I’m writing things now I never would’ve written before, and ah I can write about in memoirs, volume six, this very division in my nature. Ah so it’s ah it’s not nothing to weep about . . . Q Claerwen the wise again, quote, ‘Fame is distorting, uncomfortable and toxic. I was in my late teens when he was suddenly on TV a lot. His TV persona didn’t seem to be him. To me he’s someone who reads, thinks and writes poetry.’ C Isn’t sheQ Perceptive. C She’s so clever, in fact quite damming when she says that. You know that terrible thing that John Updike said, that ‘fame is a mask that eats the face’. Well, Claerwen saw that, but ah I think I did a probably better job than my family thinks. First of all, of protecting them from the onrush of interest, and also I didn’t go quite entirely crazy. It’s very easy to go crazy. Q Of course you’ll always be ed as the man who discovered Japanese television in all its ah glorious eccentricity for the rest of the world . . . C . . . I’m afraid it’s it’s going to go- that’s going to go on my gravestone too. Q Japanese game show man dies! C Yes! Japanese game show man dies! Yes. There’s no way out of that one. Um it seemed like an original idea at the time. Ah we had a stringer in Tokyo who sent us this footage. In those days you had to ship everything by air in a parcel; there was no electronic transferring, and there was miles of this stuff. And I took one look at it and thought this,

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well this is great, we’ll have to edit it down, but this is just ideal. And um and it took off straight away. [Clip of Endurance] The contestants have to stand on their hands and lean their bare bodies against the blistering metal. A dangling bit of cactus stops them falling forwards and strips of cactus stuck to the hot steel make sure they don’t fall sideways. where the Japanese come from it’s just a game. C What I didn’t know was that the actual shows we were looking at were going to influence the whole of television all over the world. Clip of Endurance Strapped to a wooden framework from which they can’t escape they are dusted with powdered fish food. Hungry catfish wait in the river for the contestants to them for lunch. Those who drown are not allowed to go forward to the next stage. C It was the beginning of of reality TV, in the sense that th-the participants must suffer. I mean if you turn on TV now, there are people suffering all over the, all over the place. Q What special qualities did you endeavour to bring to your interviewing? C I’m not so sure how good an interviewer I was. I found it quite difficult to ask an awkward question, a question that the the other person didn’t want to answer. I never could do that. Q Well, you’re saying that and I’m immediately thinking of Roman Polanski. C Well, Polanski, see there was a deal on there. Polanski knew that if I was gonna help him plug his book, he would have to answer the question about the underage girl. The reason he answered it is that Polanski didn’t see anything wrong with it. You’ve gotta get that clear in your head. [Clip of Polanski interview.]

Clive James: When the newspapers and magazines and books talk about you and little girls right is there anything in it? Roman Polansky: Well I like young women let’s put it this way and I think most of men do actually. J But the question turns on how young doesn’t it P Well yes and here you come to a concrete case for which i have been behind bars and that’s what you want to talk about J Doesn’t the age of consent mean precisely that that under a certain age whatever age may be it doesn’t matter if the girl says yes or not or wants to or not you’re supposed not to because.. P Yes I know I know in that particular state again it’s a question of .. J Everywhere in the west has got some sort of age of consent P No but you see if you think of the united states there are states where the age of consent is twelve

C Polanski is a European refugee who’d seen the SS wiping out his family; he just didn’t think there was much wrong with what he’d done. The rest of us do, and I think we’re right, but he didn’t, so that’s why he answered the question. So I didn’t have to probe for that; it wasn’t wasn’t difficult. Q Katherine Hepburn, that would’ve been a slightly different . . . C . . . That was difficult because there were things she didn’t want to talk about. She didn’t want to talk about Howard Hughes, she didn’t want to talk about Spencer Tracy. I asked a clever question of her about Hughes. I congratulated myself! I mean when I finally got to it, the way I framed the question was, ‘Some people think that falling in love with you was the only sane thing Howard Hughes ever did’, and she was stuck – she had to answer it! And she did.

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[Clip of Hepburn interview]. Clive James: I can’t even mention Hughes Katherine Hepburn: Well you can mention Hughes, he was flying around the world... J Well it did just occur to me... H a very distinguished man J Well it did just occur to me that falling for you was the only sane thing he ever did H I think it was on a par with the rest of the things he did but poor Howard he was a brilliant man. You know he was deaf at 15 he was deaf seriously deaf. I think it was what made him seriously eccentric.

C What I didn’t do of course was uncover all the secrets of Katherine Hepburn; she didn’t want them uncovered. Q So while you were leading this double life in your television years, you were building your bank of poetry, writing memoirs and essays . . . C . . . Yes. Q The poetry was always your first love? C Always there, from the first, when I arrived in Sydney University on the first day I met my first poets, and I knew instantly that I wanted to be one of them. And I’ve written poetry all my life. I like to think that I’m getting better. Q You’ve said that ah that when you write prose you, quote, ‘try to write the phrase that will get past people’s defences and get right into the middle of their head before they get a chance to censure it on the way in’ . . . C . . . Yes. Q How does that differ from when you write poetry? C: You’ve got to get people’s attention straight away, and that’s where show business comes in. I actually write show business poetry in the sense th-the poem is actually working for attention from the first phrase. But all- [coughing] Every phrase in the poem has to be as good as those phrases in prose. I once said about- I once, listen to this! I once saidQ You’re quoting yourself! C I once said, modestly, modest that I am! I once said that all I do is ‘turn a phrase until it catches the light’. Well, the second part is the interesting part. Y-you’ve got to turn a phrase that people are startled by. Q Is it also in the process- Is it the purest distillation . . . C . . . Yes . . . Q . . . of thoughts? C I think so, but some some would say philosophy is, and I don’t know which is, which is true. I love writing what I would regard as philosophical prose where I, where I work on a a concept and try and tease it out and explain it and so on. But um no, I think poetry is distillation. Q You wrote in volume three of your memoirs in 1990 that if you had an important book in you, it would be what ah happened in the Pacific in the war. C Ah! Q But you said it would take a decade to prepare even before you began to write. You got at least as far as the title, River in the Sky, but what happened to the book? C You see what happens when you make predictions? I g-got sick and that’s- And The River in the Sky would be a big project. I don’t think there is time for it. The urge is still there Q Why did it not really get going? C I knew I’d have to do it at the end of my life when everything else was done. It was going to take time. It was going to be m-my swan song. Q But it all started because you lost your father to that Pacific War . . .

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C . . . Yeah, I think that’s . . . Q . . . even though the war itself was over? C That’s quite obviously the motivating point of my life, although how it motivated me is a big question. I think seeing my mother’s helplessness, and she was a- She wasn’t a helpless woman, and like many women of her generation she was terrific at the whole business of of running the house and having a job, and sh-she used to smock babies’ clothes, ah very intricate, f-finicky work. And on top of her widow’s pension pension that kept us alive. Ah no, she was a very capable woman, my mother. Q But ah but there was such a cruelty about the way he died . . . C . . . Yeah . . . Q . . . that that he’d survived the war as a prisoner, ending up as a prisoner in Japan. C Yeah. Q He’s released. You and your mother, but particularly your mother I would imagine, because you had not really known him . . . C . . . Yeah, I was tiny . . . Q . . . had this expectation that he was coming back. He’d survived the war and he was coming home. C And the telegram came instead. I was there when she got the telegram. Yes, it was, it was cruel, but it was, it was only bad luck. Um bad . . . Q . . . But but a huge impact on two lives. C Ah I got the sense that nothing was nailed down after that, and I also got the sense that I had to have the life that they might have had, a productive life. I think it probably motivated everything, but that was the main conclusion I drew at the, at the mature and wise age of six! It wasQ You think! C Was that ah the universe, creation, providence, they’re not on your side. It’s just chance. Q After the first of two visits to your father’s grave in Hong Kong you revealed in a poem called Son of a Soldier that at the age of 55 you cried authentically . . . C . . . Yes . . . Q . . . for the first time, an opening of the floodgates. What do you mean by crying authentically . . . C . . . Well, I don’t . . . Q . . . for the first time at 55? C It was my impression that that, that that was true, that I felt that I, until then I’d been locked up and I was at last facing a truth about not just my life, but life itself. Q ‘First for the hurt I had done to those I loved, then for myself for what had been done to me in the beginning to make my heart so cold’. C Yeah. Q Do we take that literally? C Yes, I I think I did . . . Q . . . A cold heart? C I think I did have a cold heart, and to a certain extent still do. That doesn’t make me a monster. There are people with lot colder hearts than I have, but I have got- I think I got scarred and injured when I was very young by that incident . . . Q . . . But but does that mean not trusting your emotions, not wanting to invest emotional in others? I meanC Not realising at the time what the emotion is, yeah. Yes. Yes, protective mechanism. I don’t want to go into too many

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details because it gets it into- gets into personal territory. But um yes, that’s ah, I’d say that was a characteristic, is sort of cold detachment. Q ‘Had you come home, I would not be what I am, I cried’. C Yes. Q ‘I could’ve loved my mother less and not searched for more like her among others, parched for a ion, undimmed by distress, while you lay deep behind that looming dam’. What were you saying? C What I was saying is I don’t think my personality would’ve been as it turned out. I think my father, my father would’ve told me things, but he wasn’t there to do so. And IQ What might he have told you? C [12:05:09] He would’ve told you to find someone, love her and don’t be stupid. Q Your wife, Prue, was there with you and you wrote, ‘I turned to meet her eyes. Let me explain, I said to her, my tears were trapped because he left me to be tender, strong and brave’. C Yeah. Q ‘Who was none of these things, inflamed by fright, the love that he did not return to make it to the first woman I knew. And could not became in me a thirst I could never slake for one more face, transfigured by delight’. C Yeah. Ah O’Brien, how sly you are to dig away and find all these revelations, which in factQ There are many of them. C In fact I published them! Q You did, you did! You did. C Nobody ever made himself more clear or more vulnerable. Yes. Q So honesty there, honesty there, not lies . . . C . . . Yes, beginning of honesty. Honesty about emotions is quite a hardQ Do you think that’s true for all, or more for you? C True for me, yeah. Whether what’s true for me is true for everybody is a question I’m still addressing. Ah I think the idea that everyone else in the world is like yourself is called solipsism, and I hope I’m not guilty of it. Q Those years growing up in Kogarah w-were the most powerful . . . C . . . Yes . . . Q . . . powerfully formative ah years of your life. How much of the kid from Kogarah is still in you? C Oh it’s still me. I mean there’s no question of it. The kid from Kogarah is sitting before you. Ah I think ah, I don’t know, can’t whether it was Auden or Stravinsky or maybe it was both of them, but let’s say it was Auden who said that he always felt as if he was the youngest person in the room. Q Right. C Yeah. I still feel that. Q The galloping sense of in security? C Yeah, well just ah I feel a lot of other people are wiser and more mature than I am. I wouldn’t say it was insecurity so much as inadequacy. Mm. Q And that goes all the way back? C Oh sure. [coughing] C In fact, the very thought of it brings on a coughing fit! [laughter]

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Q I guess there are, there are at least apparent contradictions in us all, but you paint yourself as this kid who was outwardly gregarious, always in the action, playing Joe Cool or trying to play Joe Cool, but also lonely, ah an anxiety to belong. C [12:08:29] It’s a good subject. Don’t forget that. Q Yeah. C And that’s why you can never trust a writer. Q Right. C They dramatise themselves. Q I’ve just read Unreliable Memoires again. C God bless you! Q Ah and it still made me laugh out loud in the most embarrassing places! But your description of the billycart days has to be an absolute classic, Can you recall your pièce de résistance, which was the billycart supertrain[laughter] Q And Mrs.- And Mrs. Branthwaite’s poppies . . . C The supertrain, the supertrain, there's a big thing I’ve gotta say about this, when I finish the story. Mrs. Branthwaite had the house on the corner ah where one street turned into another. Let’s call it the corner, and the front strip? I think they’ve still got them in Australia, beyond the footpath there’s a strip of green between there and the kerb, and some people would plant flowers there. And Mrs. Branthwaite had the world’s- the gr- the district’s anyway, the greatest collection of poppies, the greatest display of poppies, carefully cultivated, and she was known to call the police if anyone even picked one of them. It was down- [laughter] [coughing] It was down the hill that I projected the billycart which I’d been inspired to build. The supercart was my billycart, followed by all the other billycarts had been bolted onto it. And there were about 20 kids in it, including little kids with their koalas and dummies, you know. And it came steaming down the hill! Q With all the people coming out of their houses to watch this phenomenon . . . C . . . Oh everyone was watching, yeah. And they even stopped hosing. People would hose you, because of the noise of the, the noise of the ball race, ball bearing wheels made. But they were looking in awe as this thing came [coughing] thundering down the hill and into the turn into the next street. And of course it was while I was making the turn I realised I’d miscalculated, and because the thing wouldn’t follow the first cart around, it would lash its enormous tail, which it did. And it wiped out [coughing] all Mrs. Branthwaite’s poppies. The air was full of them, and full of little kids and dummies and ah it was carnage. And and she came out of the house and saw this and had a stroke, and had to be helped away. She was taken away in a van, or she was in my memory! Now we get to the question of my memory! Let me tell you something about that hill. I went back to it years later – it’s very flat! [laughter] C You see the danger . . . Q . . . Everything’s relative . . . [laughter] C . . . The danger of writers, yeah, especially with their childhood memories, because they everything on the way childhood exaggerates them. Q B-but at the same time y-you said ah once that there’s as much hidden about you in the memoir as there is revealed. C Yes. Yes. Ah I’ve got a feeling they may have revealed more than they hid. Q But what did you want to hide? C I was discontented with ordinary life. I’d like to have been free to do everything, which you know you can’t be. I can’t go into detail, because it would be breaking faith with people, breaking f-faith with my own family. But although I realised that being a married man was the centre of my existence and the anchor and the secret of my existence, which it still is,

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I’m not built for it. I’m built to be Ulysses, not physically perhaps! But to be out there, to see everything, to be the universal adventurer, universal lover, all those things. Q Do you understand what that springs from? Do you understand what it is in you? C Hunger. Q Hunger? C Yes. And I don’t know what- where the hunger comes from. Q In the early memoirs you ah you paint your mother as a relatively simple, solitary, long-suffering figure who lived for her son and often despaired of him. But you eventually wrote about 30 years I think after you left for England, that you’d come to realise she was quite a sophisticated woman. C Yes. Q Ah ah a natural psychologist, you said, whose letters revealed a gifted writer. C Oh yeah. Q Tell me about that. C Yes, I underestimated her. Um th-there were several tragedies in the life of my mother, and indeed that generation of women. Higher education was unavailable to most of them, and because my- her father, my grandfather, was a wastrel, having ruined one family in England he came all the way to Australia to ruin another family. Gambler. And because of that, she had to leave school at 13 and ah she spent her teens on the production lines at General Motors Holden. Um never had the education she could’ve had. What difference w-we would’ve made, we don’t know. But later on it did strike me that I’d had all the privileges that she hadn’t – a thing which bothers me now. Q Um you must’ve poured a lot of effort ah in the post-television years ah into producing such a monumental work as Cultural Amnesia, a collection of more than a hundred essays on mostly 20th century figures, the great writers, philosophers, despots. C Yeah. Q Politicians, musicians, even comic actors, described by the Nobel Prize winning ah author J. M. Coetzee as ‘majestic and acutely provocative, a crash course in civilisation’. You’ve described it as a book designed to start arguments. C It’s attracted all kinds of favourable comments, as well as unfavourable ones, all over the world. It was ah my first big success in America, and it’s read in places like India, which pleases me greatly. Yes, and i-it’s meant to dis- it’s meant to start the subject in each ?? Sometimes I don’t even tackle the person that I nominally am writing the essay about; I just go off at a tangent. Q Yes -it’s really a book of what human beings were capable of, is it not? . . . C . . . Yes. Q A-a-and what they did in the 20th century, from the brilliant and inspirational, to the absolutely despicable. C Hitler is there. in one extreme, and then one of his victims, a little girl called Sophie Scholl, Sophie Scholl was one of the Munich conspirators that the Nazis executed in 1942. Ah and she was only, she was very young. And um that’s, I think, is my key essay in there. But ideally in a book like that, every essay is a key essay because every essay leads somewhere else. Q Yes. You were obviously impressed by the cafe society in Vienna . C . . . Yes . . . Q . . . and to a slightly lesser extent, Berlin, but dominated by Jewish intellectuals.Um before the rise of Nazism. Now, what was it about that cafe society . . . C . . . Well this . . . Q . . . that impressed you so much? C The cafe was the house of wit, of learning, and irresponsibility. Um and people weren’t model citizens; they were quite

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the opposite, they were all characters. It was, it was the opposite of the totalitarian mentality, and of course it was very intelligent and very funny. And the things you like about Hollywood, the Hollywood moguls cracking their terrific jokes, that all comes from Viennese cafe society. It runs right through the century, a-and still does I think Q You observe with regard to the fate of the Jews ah and its accompanying achievements, you said that there could be no clearer proof ah that the mind is hard to kill, nor could there be a more frightening demonstration of the virulent power of the forces that can combine to kill it. C There is such a thing as evil. One of the philosophers, Stuart Hampshire, modern philosopher, was at Nuremburg and one of his jobs was to interrogate the Nazi prisoners. And he had been a philosopher ah who was very strong on the idea there was no such thing as evil, and he’d make a good case for the fact that there isn’t, for the idea there isn’t. And then he met Kaltenbrunner who’d been the head of the SS, and he came away and it changed- h-his whole philosophy had changed – there is such thing as evil. It can show up in little things. Sometimes it’s just, it’s just so petty. Ah that was something, in the Soviet Union that was standard – you make life impossible for the independent thinker. You take away their union hip, they can’t eat in the cafeteria, they can’t get work. You, you peck them to death. Ah that’s evil. Q And after all these reflections and all this accumulation of knowledge, are you a wiser perso- person yourself? Knowledge is supposed to bring wisdom. C I think I had to be. I think I was such a klutz! [laughter] C I think- Yes, I think I had to be wiser. Since I ah [coughing] my recent disasters, I’ve grown a lot wiser. But I I know I was unusually unwise when young. Q John Lennon said ‘count your age by friends, not years; count your life by smiles, not tears’. To the extent that you can define your life by the company that you’ve kept, what would it say about you? C Do you know, that line of his ‘count your life by friends’ strikes home to me, because I probably didn’t do a good enough- In fact, I know I didn’t do a good enough job of of cultivating and keeping my friendships. I took them as they came along. It was easy come, easy go. When I look back on it I wish I’d lived differently, but that means wishing to be a different person. It’s a sore point this, because I’m probably t-too good at solitude and ah I try to avoid obligations. And sometimes you shouldn’t. Q Do you think that means you took the friends for granted, that they’d always be there when you needed them or wanted them? . . . C . . . Yes, yeah, I tend- I tended to. And possibly I hope I don’t do that so much anymore. Now, I’ll tell you a big difference between now and then, because nowadays I go to funerals, because fairly soon one of those funerals might be mine! Q You’ve talked more than once about the importance of women in your life. C . . . Oh gosh! Q You’ve said ‘I’ve always been extremely susceptible to the beautiful women’ . . . C . . . Here comes trouble! Q I don’t know why you ever actually said that in public, but there you go! C Because I’m a fool! [laughter] C I should've shut the f up! Q You’re not alone in that, b-but does this go all the way back to your childhood too? . . C . . . Yes. I’ve always thought that the face of a beautiful and preferably intelligent woman was a revelation of God. And I suppose at some level I still, still do. Sometimes the beautiful woman isn’t quite as intelligent as I expected or thought she was. Um but that’s because men are romantic. One of the reasons I’ve found women so attractive is they’re less romantic; they’re more realistic. So when they say they like you, probably they’re telling the truth! [laughter] Q Right, right, right.

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[coughing] C It’s an infinite subject. And someday I’ll find a way of getting at it. I still don’t know, quite know how. Q So what sort of a routine have you been able to develop to cater for the illness? C I never in my life had a routine, ah in which I could get up in the morning, sit down at a certain time and write. So I don’t miss that, because I never had it. But ah necessarily now that I’m ill I spend most of the day asleep, which is very boring. Most of the night and quite a lot of the day. And um then there are visits to clinics over and- One clinic of another kind or another every few days. And when I do manage to write, it’s usually my my Daily Telegraph TV column, which I put together piece by piece over a couple of days. And then if there’s any time left over from that, I might do an article, or blessedly work on a poem. But you couldn’t call it a routine. Q In fact, um when you did write a poem at about the time that you were diagnosed, and you were clearly pissed off that um that it took you half a day to write one page . . . C . . . Yes . . . Q . . . double spaced. C Yes. Ah it was a cry of pain. That was- It was when I, just when I was getting sick, wasn’t it? Q Yes. C I’ve got to realise that I’m working on 50 percent power, and try and use that economically. But it takes some getting used to, because I was always accustomed to working as much as I like. That’s one of the reasons why writers generally, and me specifically, specifically, were so hard to live with, is I’d be up at three o’clock in the morning writing. The idea came, you get up and write it. Q And why at this point in your life, when time is of the very essence, ah would you use up so much of it translating someone else’s work? C There’s been at least a thousand translations of Dante, and most of them will bore you to tears, especially in the second books, Purgatory and Paradise, because they’re simply not poetic enough. And the Divine Comedy is a poem, it must be, it must be poetic. But you ahQ But you’re also translating 14th century Italian . . . C . . . Yeah . . . Q . . . as well as his own particularC That’s true, although 14th century Italian is practically Italian, because Dante invented the language. Dante brought all these dialects together into this great poem, and created the language we know as Italian today. I’d always wanted to do it, and j-just after 9/11 I was on holiday in Greece and I finally figured out how to do it, to turn Dante’s terza rima, that’s the triple rhyme, which is impossible in English, or very hard, to do it in quatrains, which I’d been practicing for all my life and I was quite good at, i-in my own opinion. So I knew how to do it, but it still took years. Q How how big an issue is it in the literary world to take someone else’s, particularly someone like Dante, and to actually change the structure of their poetry? C on the whole it’s been a pretty good critical reception. I’ll give you an example of what I did. Ah the inscription over the gate of hell, ah which in the Longfellow translation has the famous line ‘abandon hope all ye that enter here’. Q Right. C I didn’t want to reproduce Longfellow’s line, and I did fine there was room to introduce a line of my own, but the trick was to make that good enough for Dante. So this is the way that the- This is the inscription over the gate of hell, canto III, and the last stanza goes, this is gate of hell talking to people who are about to enter hell, big voice, right? ‘From now on, everyday feels like your last, forever. Let that be your greatest fear. Your future now is to regret the past. Forget your hopes; they were what brought you here.’ You see, I think that last line is not bad. And it’s not his! C I I made that one up and stuck it on! And when the a- When some of the reviewers see . . . Q . . . So how do the traditionalists deal with that? C Well, they don’t, they go nuts. If you’re lucky, they give you some praise for invention and originality.

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Q Now, it was your wife, Prue, who opened you up to Dante in the first place, wasn’t it? I meanC Yes. God bless her. Q Ah she’s a noted scholar on Dante . . . C . . . Yes. Q What did she bring to the table for you? C Oh everything. It was in Florence in the early ‘60s, you need some music here! Romantic music, because it’s a very romantic scene. We weren’t married yet. We were a couple of exiles living in sin in Florence, and ah she knew everything about Dante, and I wanted to know how it worked. And she opened up the first book, the Inferno, hell, to canto V, th-the episode of Paulo and sca, and she showed me how this worked. And immediately I was enthralled. It was a big thing for me, it was a big thing for me and her. In fact it was, it was a romance that’s still in a way going on 45 years later! I should say that. You know, we’re still married and still involved. But you don’t get more involved than when you’re reading something together. And strangely enough, the bit we were reading is about two lovers who are reading a book. And ah it was a big moment for me. But what I didn’t know then and didn’t find out for another 40 years, was how it could possibly work in English. Q You’ve written quite a bit about your wife in both memoires ah and poems, ah albeit under another name. Prue became Francoise. C Francoise! Q In ah 2005 you wrote an anniversary serenade to Prue. C Yes. Q You are my alcohol and nicotine, my silver flask and Cigarette machine, my share of heaven and my sheer delight, my soda fountain and my water sprite’, and it moves onC Do you notice the first two things are about booze and fags! Q That’s right! ‘The colours fade that we nail to the mast. We lose the future, but we own the past. We own the past from our first kiss, a lifetime to the last’. C Yeah. And when I wrote her a poem I always did my best. She’s like that. When I translated Dante, I did my best. Q You’ve obviously been hit hard by the troubles in your marriage, although ah Claerwen says the two of you are reconciled but still separated. C This is going to be good Q Regardless of what’s happened, Prue has obviously been incredibly important to you. C Yes. Q I know you are still married wh-what are the chances of you getting back together? C It’s a difficult question. It’s up to her. We’re not divorced. It’s been 45 years and we’re still involved. We’re in communication with each other. It really is up to her. But I have no other plans. Q You once told me that even after all the time away you still had the fantasy that you might return to Australia before the end . . . C . . . Yes . . . Q . . . to maybe live, yeah, in Sydney on the Harbour, and dangle ah a fishing line in the water. But that was, that was always going to be a fantasy, wasn’t it? C It probably won’t happen. But it happens in my imagination. And finally the imagination is everything, because the imagination is formed in the place you want to talk about. My imagination was formed in Sydney. I see in colours

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because Sydney was brightly coloured. I see through clear light, because Sydney had clear light. Q If I can read again from that poem you wrote on getting your deadly cocktail of diagnosis, ‘if I that is, If I, that is, should finally succumb to these infirmities C I’m slow to learn the names of, lest my brain be rendered numb with boredom even as I toss and turn, then send my ashes home, where they can fall in their own sweet time from the Harbour wall’. C Yes. I actually mean that. How they’ll get my ashes home, I don’t know. I think you have to buy a first class seat on Emirates! It’s a big deal. Nothing’s easy! But when the ashes arrive there I hope there’ll be a few people, perhaps yourself included, who will be there for the tipping . . . Q . . . But I like . . . C . . . of the ashes into the Harbour. Q I like thatC It’s beautiful there on- You know the spot across from McMahons Point, th-that point beside Circular Quay, from there? Q Yes, yeah. I I like like the the idea that that they’d fall in their own sweet time from the wall . . . C . . . Yes, that’s crucial. That’s that’s the culmination of the poem, because y-you’re gone, so it’s up to, it’s up to them what your ashes do. Your ability to control your life is is finished. Q If you could’ve written your own ending, what would it be? C I know what I won’t do. I won’t be buying a ticket to Switzerland so I can book into some clinic and pay people to put me into a long, deep sleep. I can get that from television here! [laughter] C So I I won’t be helping the process. Q You wrote a valedictory to the English poet, Philip Larkin . . . C . . . Yes . . . Q . . . who you greatly ired, ah which ended with the line, ‘your immortality complete at last’. C Ah, did I say that? That’sQ You did. C So I did. Q What do you most want to be ed for? C Well, it’s hard to say. I would like of course for someone to suddenly recite a whole poem at some romantic moment to a suitable listener. I’m not so sure that will happen. Ah I’m not so sure that people will even read a single book. But I think if they do it’s likely that it’ll be Unreliable Memoires, because it’s part of the Australian landscape and part of the British landscape. Unreliable Memoires, God bless it, it’s been 34 years now, 35 years that it’s been in print, it’s gone through about a hundred editions, is a dream of Australia which shows Australia as a dream. And it’s also Britain’s dream of Australia. Q Now I’m I’m going to read um the poem that you had published relatively recently, that you called in French, Lessons from the Darkness. ‘I should’ve been more kind. It is my fate .... C ..to find this out, but find it out too late. The mirror holds the ruins of my face roughly together, thus reminding me I should have played it straight in every case, not just when forced to. Far too casually I broke faith when it suited me, and here I am alone. And now the end is near.’ Q So I’d like to hear you just comment on that. C Well, I was pretty deep in the pit when I wrote that. That was more than a year ago. I was, I was sick, I was ah been

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really banished from home by my family, um and I meant it, on the other hand I also meant the way the poem is constructed. And it sounds quite neat and vigorous. This is the saving grace of this kind of poetry. To make it work you’ve got to give the reader a reason for going on with it, and it’s got its own strength and music, I like to think. But th-that’s one of the things I meant by it, that I’m still here, I’m still writing. But also I mean that I’ve I’ve faced the facts, and ah the ending- the end is getting close. Q ‘But now I have slowed down I breathe the air as if there is not much more of it there...... C ...and write these poems which are funeral songs that have been taught to me by vanished time, not only to enumerate my wrongs, but to pay homage to the late sublime that comes with seeing how the years have brought a fitting end, if not the one I sought’. C It gives thanks for the fact that I’m here at all, that I’m here to write it, that I have the power and the powers to reflect on experience. Most people don’t get that. A lot of people get subtracted from the world without a chance to comment. That’s why I often think of my father crashing in the plane, the plane going down in Taiwan. He must’ve had a few seconds to think, well, this is it. And I’ve had a better chance than that. And since I have certain powers of expression, I owe it to the world and to my country to to say it as well as I can. Q I think that could be fairly said. Clive James, I know this hasn’t been easy for you. But thank you very much. C Well, I appreciate it. I really do.

Credits: Produced and directed by Ges D’Souza. Related content Watch >> (http://www.abc.net.au/arts/blog/memorial-service-Robert-Hughes/default.htm) An excerpt from Enquiry Into The Beats. In 1959, Keith Smith interviewed young Sydney intellectuals Robert Hughes and Clive James about their impressions of Beat culture and the work of Jack Kerouac.

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