Hats Off for Clive James - Nick Garlick

The news of Clive James’ death made me dig out the book of notable quotes I’ve been compiling for the last twenty-eight years, a collection in which CJ features prominently. If this blog is about writers and writing, then I’d like to take my turn at the wheel this month to tip my hat to a writer I’ve been reading, and admiring, since the early 1980s.

At first I read him for the jokes that peppered his television columns in The Observer. In almost every one he could be relied upon to come up with an observation that would leave me laughing for minutes. Here are just two of my favourites

Hurricane Higgins smokes the way he plays – as if there were not only no tomorrow, but hardly anything left of today.

‘Like any winner’s dressing room after the big fight, the champagne flowed,’ said News at Ten, its grammar limp with admiration.

As the years passed, I continued to enjoy the humour, but I also started to admire and appreciate the elegance with which he wrote. I began to read what he wrote for the way he wrote it. Whether or not I agreed with what he said – although I almost always did – began to be beside the point. I was just carried away by his ability to express himself in carefully constructed sentences you only needed to read once to understand. You could go back and read them again for pleasure, but his message always came through the first time. As in:

The highest common factor uniting Ken Russell’s films about great artists is the way you can never get any idea of the artist sitting down to work. In Ken Russell’s view, a great artist’s art is always just his personality magnified.

A liberal society can be partly described as one that goes on finding the imaginative option without lapsing into the common delusion that cruelty is the only answer.

I could go on to talk about his more ‘serious’ works: his collections of essays, his literary criticism, and his magnum opus – and one of my favourite books – Cultural Amnesia. But doing that might steer this short piece into an analysis of his political views, views not everyone may share. And that’s not the point here.

I just wanted to mark the passing of one of my favourite writers, and to give a small indication of why I that is. And since it was his jokes that I first noticed, I’ll end with another one, written after an evening spent watching the WWII adventure, Where Eagles Dare.

Fighting their way back through several divisions of the German army, our two heroes had the advantage of being equipped with real ammunition, whereas the Germans, apparently, had made the mistake of issuing their men with blanks.