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July 01, 1990

Salad Days

Filed under: Archive,Books

1990

May Week Was in June
Clive James

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

There is something prodigal about Clive James’s writing. An expense of spirit, you might say, in a waste of shame. Prolific almost to a fault, he has not only produced twenty books, including two overcooked novels and half a dozen volumes of comic verse less Augustan than Dysgustan, he has also become a television monolith producing the kind of glib, pleased-with-itself instant editorialising that, as critic for The Observer, he earned an honourable reputation denouncing.

A man of many parts is Clive -and none of them seem to quite fit together. At his best he can write with a critical pungency and an aphoristic elegance that even Wilde would be pleased to own. At worst his prose takes on the predictable cadence of platitude and the obvious quip. You start to wonder whether he has any real idea what makes his writing tick. Watching him hyperventilate reading himself from the teleprompt on The Late Clive James or Saturday Night Clive, unctuously over-enjoying his own cleverness, it is hard to believe that even his mother could love him. Rattling through a fatuous commentary on candid newsphotos of the rich and politically significant, or interviewing some sitting duck by satellite, James seems unnervingly content with the asinine and the whimsical.

Yet from other writings we know better. His three volumes of TV criticism are models of their kind, the best of his book reviewing has a readable acuity often lacking in literary commentary. His enthusiasms become infectious, his use of the apt phrase, scrumptious and invigorating. Like the equally ebullient Robert Hughes, James, free of academic mannerism, but no slouch as a thinker, can be a great pleasure to read.

But, despite all his opinionated commentary, James himself is not easy to find in the writing. He is the master of the no-one-will-find-me-here persona, of the ironic deflection. Everything is laughed off, buffooned out to arms’ length. So when he began his joke autobiography, Unreliable Memoirs, he worked from his own vanishing point. Names and places were factual -except when they weren’t, any resemblance to the living or dead was coincidental and elliptical. It remains one of his funniest books, of course, an evocation of the artist as a young Ginger Meggs, a portrait of New South Wales in the ’40s and ’50s preserved, if not in aspic, then at least in Aeroplane jelly.
The second volume, Falling Towards England ,again captured a generic experience- the acquisition of OE. The young James, innocently abroad like Barry McKenzie, Going Home on a cultural pilgrimage as reflexive as species migration.

May Week Was in June, the third and final Unreliable, is a rather different enterprise. Our narrator is still capering in a variety of guises but this time the experience is more specific. Plenty of young Australians in their early twenties head for England but many fewer go to Cambridge and fewer still become President of Footlights.

“The story in this volume -while being, as before, no more faithful to the facts than the ego finds convenient- is as true as I can make it to the pattern which emerged when my half-formed personality was put back in the scrambler. I won’t dignify the process with the name of self-discovery. The self scarcely altered. ” Ingenuous and evasive, James is both tabula rasa and idee fixe. Now you see me, now you definitely don’t.

Some things, on the other hand, are made patently clear. “Cambridge was my personal playground. It would be useless to pretend otherwise. I would be surprised if nostalgia for those easy years did not drip from the following pages like sweat.” And despite the unprepossessing simile, they do.

James’s ambivalence towards the manners and affectations of the academic cloister is a distinctly colonial blend of admiration and scorn. With the exception of F.R.Leavis who is scathingly depicted as vicious and erratic- “Leavis’s views were almost impossible not to misrepresent, because they were designed so that only he could hold them”- the Cambridge dons are indulgently depicted. Cambridge, its culture and values, are shrewdly evaluated but it is still the only club that James would care to join:

“Continuity was the keynote. Any amount of eccentricity was tolerable as long as not publicised. If my friend Boxer, rather than publishing a mildly secular poem in Granta, had practised voodoo in his rooms, he would have gone on to get his Gentleman’s Third, instead of being carried symbolically out of Cambridge in an open coffin. But merely to state the case is to show the truth. To be thrown out was to be kept in. Oxbridge had you even when it let you go. Oxford threw Shelley out but kept his name. It drives some alumni bananas, so that they write whole cycles of plays and novels about how they don’t really care about not having become dons.”

James arrived at Cambridge in 1964 and left in 1969, giving up his Ph.D study to take up full-time writing in London. In his time there he was, by his own account, feverishly active in the extra-curriculars- Granta, Cambridge Review, Footlights- and torpidly inactive in his degree study. A semi-likely story. Nevertheless, abrasive by temperament and slightly older than his peers he cut a swathe through student life.

Friend of the famous he gives flattering accounts of some of his fellows- Eric Idle, Julie Covington, Russell Davies and Peter Atkin- and coyly renders others pseudonymously. No guesses for Romaine Rand, later to become a feminist of planetary significance (in the Epilogue James describes a meeting with Germs in Sydney that reads like a meeting between Hepburn and Tracy). For the wealthy satirist, Bruce Jennings, read B. Humphries and the alliterative film-maker, Dave Dalziell one deduces to be Clive’s old mate Beresford.

James gives a fragmented but vivid account of his work with Footlights including prescient descriptions of his own performances as a comic monologist. “It wasn’t acting. I didn’t even memorise the stuff. I just read it out. Timing was for real performers; it usually struck me as artificial even when they did it, and when I did it it was ludicrous. Establishing a tacit understanding with the audience that I wasn’t going to perform, however, generated an air of complicity which I dimly saw might be a way ahead.”

“May Week, one need hardly point out, took place in June. Only if it had been called April Week would it have taken place in May… Everyone is outdoors. Everyone except those concerned with the Footlights May Week Revue. They are inside the Arts Theatre, facing the horrendous prospect of not being loved.”

Curiously, James gives very little evocation of late Sixties counter-culture. It was everywhere around him but he spends his time reconstructing Canute-like rebuttals of its logical contradictions rather than acknowledging the cultural transformation it represented. “Romaine” would have a very different account of events.

The book is full of humorous incident though. The account of his temporary job with a circus is vintage James -“My job was to clean out the tiger’s cage. In later years, when telling this story, I didn’t always remember to mention that the tiger was removed from the cage before I got in there with my bucket and short shovel. Actually there wouldn’t have been much danger if the tiger had stayed put. He had probably thrown the occasional scare into Clive of India, but to Clive James he posed no threat. So old that only his stripes were holding him together, he had teeth that couldn’t dent the tennis ball with which he had been provided.”

At every point the tone is anti-heroic. Clive the less than brave, Clive the tinpot screamer, Clive the borrower of funds, Clive the untidy. And Clive the polymath.

May Week was in June makes misjudged gestures towards intellectual autobiography so that James’s account of his first visit to Florence is, oddly, both gauche and complacent in its conscious display of erudition. Perfectly pitched when he is being Lucky Jim, when James shifts to a more revelatory, confessional mode he becomes belligerent and defensive, even a bit whiney, but in so doing he also allows the memoir to become his own. The important book he may yet write, he confides, “will be the book into which I finally disappear, having overcome an inordinate need for attention the only way I could, by reducing it to absurdity.” Clive the puritan is too severe. It might be a book much like this one, flawed but also redeemed by genuine disclosure, and showing a more than occasional willingness to strangle a witticism for the sake of the ordinary, interesting truth.

“Salad Days” The Adelaide Review, No.78, July, 1990, p.29. Reprinted The Sydney Review, September pp.24-5.

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