Authors: Clive James
The poem was completed but the goal was not. The German goalkeeper, Festschrift, had got a hand to the ball but of course he couldn’t hold it. Hamilton’s shot, moving at only just
below the speed of sound, had been too powerful. Hamilton knew what must happen next. He had planned it all along. The only chance with Festschrift was to get him with the second bite of the
cherry, not the first. The ball rebounded in a high arc. From behind, the fullbacks Enzensburger and Grass had recovered fast and were moving in. Hamilton was upside down in mid-air when he glanced
into the stands and saw Julia, Jennifer, Kate, Courteney and Gwyneth all clutching their distorted faces in horror at the prospect of his missing this most vital of all goals. But he was not going
to miss. He never missed with the upside-down overhead backward somersault bicycle kick with the special spin. ‘
Ach, du Schweinhund Hamilton mit deine magische Talent!
screamed
Festschrift as the ball streaked past him into the net.
Slack-jawed with awe, the referee finally remembered himself and blew the whistle. A hundred thousand people were shouting too loudly to hear it. Nor could the object of their adulation. But he
didn’t need to. He knew the job was done. On his hands and knees, suddenly weary, Hamilton glanced towards the grandstand and realized at last why Julia had arrived late. He had forgotten but
the girls had not. Julia had brought the cake. They were all lighting the candles.
Damned pity it took such a long time, but there was a lot more football in him yet.
From
Another Round at the Pillars
, a
Festschrift
for Ian Hamilton, edited by David Harsent, Congo Press, 1999
It was the only year I ever thought of at the time as being a special year by itself, so it’s the only one I can look back on with any sure recollection as to its events.
Other years interchange their events in memory. When I was writing the first draft of the television series
Fame in the Twentieth Century
, I worked from memory, and found out only while
checking for the next draft that I had continually got things out of order. Memory rearranges even the biggest, worldscale happenings into a more manageable sequence. Memory edits. Memory would
have edited 1982 if, before the year began, I hadn’t persuaded Karl Miller of the
London Review of Books
to serialize an
ottava rima
verse chronicle which would treat the
year’s news as it came, with no benefit of hindsight. It was typically generous of Miller to be attracted by this prospect, because there was no guarantee that much of interest would actually
happen.
And at first, indeed, everything seemed drearily normal. General Jaruzelski, ruling Poland, rounded up all the Solidarity activists and penned them in the open air while the snow fell. As things
went in the East, nothing could be more humdrum than that. Roy Jenkins stood for the Glasgow seat of Hillhead with every chance of losing it for the SDP, whereat, it was predicted, the new party
would disintegrate. Here again, the predictions couldn’t have been more predictable, especially from Tony Benn, who had branded the SDP a media party, with no policies. My own view was that
for the SDP not to have the Labour Party’s policies was policy enough, but a win for Jenkins still looked like a lot to hope for. Mark Thatcher got lost in Africa, which had to happen. The
railway union ASLEF went on strike, which also had to happen. Freddie Laker’s airline went broke, which seemed as if it had to happen too, since few people realized at the time that an
independent entrepreneur who complained about being sabotaged by BA might just have a case. In Northern Ireland, John de Lorean’s factory for building gull-winged sports cars had proved to be
the most efficient way of combusting the British tax payer’s money since the ground-nut scheme.
Mrs Thatcher gained fewer points for denying funds to these crashed buccaneers than she lost for having presided over the new spirit of free enterprise in which they had somehow contrived to
fail. Her principles were working against her. Michel Foot hailed the Peace of Bishop’s Stortford, a new deal by which the Labour Party would somehow bind up the differences within itself,
thus rendering the SDP superfluous. Abetting this process with unsurprisingly miraculous timing, a plot was uncovered: Labour’s Militant Tendency had not only been conspiring to remove all
non-Marxist MPs after the next election victory, they had written their plan down. Happening to meet Neil Kinnock and his charming family taking a half-term tour of St Paul’s, I found him
delighted by this development and was thus able to get some personal colour into my poem, but things were looking pretty staid. At just this point my chosen year started behaving as if the power
had been switched on.
Jenkins won in Hillhead. Overnight, like Eurydice glanced at by Orpheus on their way out of Hades, the Labour Party went backwards into history. There would be a new party of opposition. Mrs
Thatcher would be hard pressed to defeat it. She was the most unpopular Prime Minister since, since . . . But just when we were absorbing the shock of these wonders, wonders were succeeded by
epiphanies. Argentina occupied the Falklands. Lord Carrington – observing the quaint, not yet quite extinct custom by which Ministers who presided over catastrophes resigned in contrition
– presented his embarrassed Prime Minister with his head, which for a while looked like the only thing she had to throw at General Galtieri. In the House of Commons nobody shouted louder for
war than Michael Foot, but by left-wing intellectuals it was taken for granted that for Britain to fight would be a preposterous exercise in post-Imperial nostalgia, jingoism after the fact. One of
my most brilliant friends published an article instructing the fleet to turn back.
The sinking of the
Belgrano
confirmed thinkers on the Labour Party’s left-wing in all their suspicions about Mrs Thatcher. Actually, we can now see, those same thinkers were
helping to sink the Labour Party, because nothing weakened the opposition to Mrs Thatcher like reluctance to admit that in the matter of the Falklands war she was a realist. The
Belgrano
had been a victim, not of her ruthlessness, but of the Royal Navy’s long memory for the day when they let the
Bismarck
out of their sight, thereby almost losing a whole convoy and
World War II along with it. The Falklands war, small-scale in historic terms, was still a momentous event, and Mrs Thatcher managed it well. The best way to counter her afterwards would have been
to say, truthfully, that while to show determination in war is admirable, it is not as taxing as to show creative imagination in peace, when there is no single object in view. But nobody – at
least nobody in the House of Commons – said so, and she came out of the war doubled in stature, with the Labour Party nowhere in sight, although as yet it would have taken a clairvoyant to
spot that no other party or group of parties would have a chance against her either. With a glittering future seemingly assured, the SDP’s choice of Dr Owen as its leader seemed merely
stage-struck, not disastrous.
At Buckingham Palace, the Queen played host to an undistinguished visitor, one Fagan, who appeared beside her bed at dead of night to bum a cigarette. Suspicions that the Palace might not be
quite so suavely in charge of its affairs as had been thought were soon quelled. The IRA bombed a military band in London: things were getting back to normal. In Cambridge an undergraduate poetess
called Sue had a devastating effect on previously imperturbable dons, allegedly because of her fluent gift for the sonnet form, and not because of her beauty: things were very normal. History had
left Britain and was happening out there in the world, as was only proper. Squeezed by Begin’s invading armies, Yasser Arafat and the PLO pulled out of Beirut, whose ruins filled the
world’s television screens, except for the sad hiatus in which Princess Grace died – by accident, scarcely history at all, just terribly regrettable, a containable tragedy. Then it was
the Lebanon again, where Begin and Sharon were responsible for an uncontainable tragedy – the massacre in the camps. All of us who believed in the state of Israel’s right to exist had
suddenly to face the fact that it was run by men too stupid to appreciate why getting stuck with a label like
massacre in the camps
was contra-indicated, PR-wise.
At the time, that was my pick for the incident that would have the most fatal resonance in the future. As things turned out, it just blended into a dreadful, see-sawing sequence of atrocities
which can probably never be ended; only, at best, brought to some kind of balance. A better choice for an event with a long shadow would have been the Royal decision to deny Koo Stark her manifest
destiny as the bride of Prince Andrew. Discreet, strong-willed, keen for the job, as bright as any woman willing to share her life with the future Duke of York was ever going to be, Koo, though she
had admittedly been photographed with her clothes off, at least looked good that way. Though we didn’t yet know it, to shut her out left the way open for Sarah Ferguson, whose impact on
Buckingham Palace would be roughly the same as that of alcohol on the Eskimos.
But to spot that would have taken a crystal ball. There were bigger issues where all the trends were already running but you just couldn’t believe they would go on that way. My brilliant
friend who had instructed the fleet to turn back gave up writing about British politics. Another brilliant friend still wrote about British politics but now did it from America. With Reagan and
Thatcher triumphant, everything was blamed on their unscrupulous populism. No other reason than public gullibility could be adduced for their success. It had not yet become fully clear that the
real reason for the success of the Right was the collapse of the Left. Throughout the West, the dream of the socialist state was already well embarked on its long day’s dying, but you had to
be a cynic to believe it.
In the East you had to be a fanatic to believe anything else, and the really big news of the year was precisely that – they were running out of fanatics. The most tremendous event of the
year was the one that didn’t happen. Lech Walesa was allowed to live. Jaruzelski locked him up but didn’t kill him. Brezhnev checked out, Andropov checked in, and still the Russians let
the Poles get away with it. In December, Walesa walked free. The Soviet tanks didn’t come. The will to rule by terror was gone. With that gone, the whole thing was doomed. Looking back from
now, it is easy to see how everything followed from that one non-event. Looking forward from then, we didn’t dare even guess. Full of happenings, it would have been a big year anyway. But
what made it the biggest year of the late twentieth century was something that didn’t happen at all.
From Picador’s
21
st Birthday Anthology
, 1993
To introduce a special issue on the subject, the
New Yorker
asked me to sum up the history of Europe in a thousand words. For my next trick, I will run a mile in
four seconds.
Suppose the world were an animal curled up into a ball, like a threatened armadillo, and you wanted to blow its brains out: the best way to do so would be to put the barrel of
your gun against Europe and pull the trigger. The United States might be nettled by this dubious favouritism; in the century now waning, it has been called upon to save Europe from itself twice
– three times if you count Stalin’s opportunistic incursion. But even the United States would have to admit, if pressed, that it is itself a largely European creation, a giant offshoot
of the most productive piece of geography in the planet’s history. Behind that admission would be a tacit acknowledgment that, although America may have the power, the energy, and most of the
money, Europe has the pedigree. As David Copperfield (the Broadway illusionist, not the Dickens character) is reported to have said to Claudia Schiffer while they were touring the Louvre and
reading the dates on the paintings, ‘Talk about your
old
!’
As a word, Europe goes back a long way: Assyrian inscriptions speak of the difference between
asu
(where the sun rises; i.e. Asia) and
ereb
(where it sets). As a place, Europe
is old even by the standards of dynastic China and Pharaonic Egypt. As an idea, though, Europe is comparatively new: the word European didn’t turn up in the language of diplomacy until the
nineteenth century, and to
think
of Europe as one place had always taken some kind of supervening vision. Whatever unity existed within it came not through a unifying idea but through the
exercise of power, and did not last.
The Pax Romana prevailed for more than two centuries: it left us the Latin language and all its rich derivatives, and it left us the law – and slavery, and militarism. Dante spent the best
years of his life in exile: a member of a political faction, he was exiled from his beloved Florence not by another faction but by another faction of the
same
faction. The university
system pioneered the notion of intellectual unity, but intellectual was all that it was. Erasmus the wandering scholar was at home everywhere he went in Europe, but his wanderings were forced on
him, and his humanism would have died young if he had been caught napping where the knives were out. The Church united Europe in the one faith – Christendom is a peaceful-sounding word
– but finally the faith itself split. Nothing could stop the rise of the nation-states, or stop them from fighting once they had arisen. And those states whose destiny it was to fight one
another had been forged from fiefdoms and principalities that had warred upon one another, from walled cities that had laid siege to one another, and from fortified hill towns that had laid siege
to one another for the valleys in between. The colossal efforts of Charlemagne, Louis XIV and Napoleon – though they gave us, respectively, the restoration of learning, the apex of the
comfortable arts, and the crucial new reality of the career open to the talents – all depended on military might. Kaiser Wilhelm II’s similar dreams seem more explicitly violent only in
having left behind little that was constructive; and Hitler’s demented venture, though it united an unprecedentedly large proportion of Europe, left nothing in its wake – nothing except
destruction, and this: the idea of European unity stopped being an intoxicating vision and started being a mundane necessity.