Farewell to the unkempt koala who took on the cultural establishment and won

The poet and polymath came striding down the steps to the Piazza di Spagna as we were plodding up. We being my then wife and our two pre-teenage children out to see the sights of Rome. It was sometime in the late eighties.

We greeted each other effusively as Australians will when they meet among foreigners. I had interviewed Clive James a couple of times as his fame flowered, the most recently at a tiny bolthole flat he kept in The Barbican, a post-war concrete monstrosity in London’s East End that is certainly Britain’s and arguably Europe’s most hideous building. He had been generous with his time for a fellow toiler in the media vineyard, offering his thoughts on the coming marriage of Charles and Diana, for whom he had a severe case of the hots. As we all did.

Now here we were in Italy. “Roma!” he cried, with an expansive sweep of an arm. “You kids are so lucky to be seeing all this at your age.” The arm stopped when it reached a pale ochre building at the foot of the steps.

“Keats died there,” he said. “Poor tubercular Keats, carked at the age of 25.” We nodded sympathetically. There followed some advice on what to do with the kids when in Rome. “You must take them to see the Federico Fettucine frescoes at the Basilica di Santa Sadistica,” or some such, and then he was off, shambling down towards the Via Condotti like an unkempt koala.

Note the simile there. They were a Clive James speciality, studded through his writing like … you get what I mean. At his weakest they cluttered up the joint, crashing into each other for studied effect. As you read on you kept waiting for the next one to arrive overhead, like a doodlebug in the Blitz. Ba boom. But at his best they were so pungent, so utterly right that you could but stand and applaud.

The Sydney Opera House was “a typewriter full of oyster shells”, an indiscretion for which the Mosman culturati did not easily forgive him. Indelibly, Arnold Schwarzenegger became “a condom full of walnuts”. Best of all was his sketch of that raddled old literary dowager Dame Barbara Cartland: “Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.”

And look, to be honest here, I confess there was a time when I shamelessly aped his style. Back in the day, when I began writing a television column for the Herald, I had devoured every word of the scorching TV crit he had churned out over a decade for the British Sunday newspaper, The Observer. Guilty as all get out, I could feel him looking over my shoulder, snorting in derision at my Jamesian pastiche. Imitation, sincere flattery. It took me an age to find my own feet.

Those Observer columns launched him on his unstoppable ascent of Britain’s cultural heights. In 1962, in a sublime collision of place and opportunity he had stepped from the boat at Southampton just as the British were hoisting themselves out of the miseries of post-war austerity and hurtling into the dizzy excesses of Swinging London. Penniless, with only his talent to declare, he took on the cultural establishment of Oxbridge foxes and beat them at their own game. It cannot have been easy. The Cringe was then at its most virulent, when even the barman at the local Rose and Crown viewed Australians as a ragtag crew of convicts and colonial cricketers.

“Parked your kangaroo outside in the High Street, cobber?” they would chortle. Before they knew it – barman or Cambridge Don – the Kid from Kogarah was over the drawbridge, inside the castle keep and feasting at the top table, never to be dislodged.

The rest is, um, history. The oeuvre was awesome. Something like 40 books of essays, literary criticism, novels and poems; radio and television chat shows and docos; newspaper and magazine features cemented his reputation. Here was a man who taught himself Russian to read Tolstoy in the original and Italian to knock out a translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia. I think Japanese beat him but it was a close run thing.

Clive was not a modest man, although he habitually affected a faux self-deprecation. It takes a truckload of chutzpah to write in your own obituary that you were “the talk of literary London”. But in truth he had a lot to be immodest about.

In his later years, as death drew closer, he got a bit ratty. His dismissal of climate change was just plain silly, his strident opposition to an Australian republic was a puzzling disappointment, and he came to regret a bizarre extra-marital affair he ran for seven years with the first ex-wife of the disgraced Australian medical mug lair Geoffrey Edelsten. Those were blemishes which saved him from the burden of perfection.

But farewell, Clive James. Done good. You took it to ‘em. Like a koala among the foxes.

Mike Carlton is a commentator and author.