The Revolt of the Pendulum (22 page)

THE VELVET SHACKLES OF A REPUTATION

In Dr Johnson’s little novel
Rasselas
, the Poet tells the Prince about the psychological requirements of a poetic career. The poet, says the Poet, must
‘content himself with the slow progress of his name’. On the other hand he should learn to ‘contemn the applause of his own time.’ We would have liked to hear more, but the
Prince has more boring things to do and cuts the Poet short.

My own view is that the second requirement sounds a bit hard: I would like to have a lot more of the applause of my own time before I contemn it. I don’t think that the whole idea of a
‘reputation’ for poets has done much for poetry in modern times, but while reputations are thought to matter it would be nice to have one. Leaving that second requirement aside,
however, the first requirement is one I recognize by necessity. Speaking as one whose name, for a long time, was all too recognizable from every activity except the one that mattered to me most, I
can only wonder, looking back, if my name as a poet might not have made quicker progress had I been less notorious for the other things.

Even today, when I have been absent from the screen for more than five years, interviewers take it as self-evident that I have a question to answer: didn’t television fame rule out any
possible reputation as a serious writer? A variation on this, if the interviewer is ready to concede that I might be some kind of serious writer after all, goes thus: didn’t my reputation as
a prose writer rule out any possible reputation as a poet? These questions are really based on two different levels of the same assumption: that poetry should be pursued as a single, dedicated
vocation. Proper poets really don’t do anything else. If any of them ever do, it can only be as a way of making the poetry possible.

Well, of course there’s a lot to that argument. If poetry is a dedicated activity like brain surgery, we don’t want the poet dreaming of being a TV presenter any more than we want
the brain surgeon dreaming of being Eric Clapton. Just as the brain surgeon might start playing air guitar at the critical moment, the poet might imagine himself jumping into the hot tub at Playboy
Mansion West with three gatefold girls, thus inevitably coarsening the texture of his latest tender love lyric. (Yes, that’s what I did. There were reasons, which I don’t have time to
explain now.) But the argument is based on a conception of poetry that I don’t happen to share. I have always admired the priesthood of the profession, but was cut out by nature for the
limelight, not the pulpit, and what really screwed my reputation was when I took my poetry into show business in the 1970s. Some of the details of how I did it are in my latest volume of memoirs,
North Face of Soho
, and I won’t repeat them here. But I can summarize them by saying that after my first mock epic
Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage
made its scurrilous mark,
I became typecast in the literary world as a kind of performance poet, like all those American visitors who turned up at the Albert Hall in their overalls. I was an Australian visitor (cue artwork
of man in bush hat with corks around the brim) making the same sort of flagrant assault on local reticence.

From then on, my fate was sealed, and anything I wrote in verse form was regarded as a would-be entertainment. The literary gossip column coverage that accrued to such poems as ‘The Book
of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered’ and ‘Bring Me the Sweat of Gabriela Sabatini’ confirmed that view. It became a given. What made it hard for me to fight this invisible but all
too palpable straitjacket was that I actually did believe a poem ought to be something that could be recited and performed: something entertaining in the first instance. I wrote lyric poems that
were meant to be as deep and intricate as anybody else’s, but I still wanted them to be able to pass that first test in front of a live audience. For all poets, critics and literary
journalists wedded to the belief that poetry was a private matter meant only to be overheard, this attitude was anathema.

I was ready to live with that assessment, but it undoubtedly had some uncomfortable consequences, and continues to do so. A few years ago one of my poems about my dead parents – a
particularly serious theme in my recent work, I would have thought – was up for consideration by a British literary tribunal known as the Forward Prize committee. I heard privately that one
of the judges threatened to resign from the panel if my poem was even mentioned. If I had ever depended on prizes I would have been dead by then, but the news was still disturbing.

My volume of collected poems,
The Book of My Enemy
(Picador, 2003), received a Poetry Book Society special commendation, ran through five printings in its first year, and was widely, and
often favourably, reviewed. Some of the most generously thoughtful notices, I’m glad to say, were in Australian publications: I think particularly of Peter Craven in the
Adelaide
Advertiser
, and Peter Goldsworthy in the
Australian Book Review
. But the two serious British literary papers in which most of the book’s constituent poems first appeared still
haven’t reviewed it, three years later. Neither periodical is known for being quick off the mark, and one of them is famous for delaying a review until the author can be proved to have
entered the nursing home, but you would have thought that having been actually published so often in their pages would have been a qualification for the acknowledgment of one’s existence.

It could be said, even by me, that my existence as a poet gets acknowledged quite enough. I suppose that being blessed, or cursed, with a showbiz name did something to save me from the usual
crepuscular stretch in the specialist magazines. But it gave me no automatic entry to such outlets as the
Spectator
, the
Guardian
, the
TLS
, the
LRB
, the
Australian
, the
Australian Book Review
,
Meanjin
, the
New Yorker
and
Poetry
(Chicago). Almost all of those publications, in my case, continue, as they should, to
do at least as much rejecting as accepting. I have no reason to believe that the interior editorial voice saying, ‘He’s a well-known media name, let’s print his poem,’ does
much to quell the other interior editorial voice saying, ‘He’s playing at poetry, let’s leave his poem out.’ All too often, indeed, I am the victim of the strange medical
condition which its victims call Death by Acceptance, whereby a poem is accepted and then not printed for months that stretch into years. The only way I can explain this is that the editor, having
temporarily convinced himself that my reputation for frivolity can be ignored for once, starts realizing that he might run the risk of acquiring the same reputation for himself. So he just parks
the thing. Or she does. One of my London editors proved incapable of responding in any way during the two full years that I intermittently quizzed her on the fate of one of my poems that she had
accepted. She smiled at me very nicely at parties, but the smile got broader after I finally let somebody else print it.

Luckily I don’t have to hold my breath. I get enough attention to be going on with, and most of it is the best kind. I wrote a poem called ‘When We Were Kids’ about my memories
of childhood in Australia. Now I can’t sit down to read and write at Rossini’s on Circular Quay without people coming up to me and telling me what I left out of it. My website
www.clivejames.com is a vanity press the size of a space station. So far, on the Web, I have published only those poems which have already found a first home in print, but if the site got famous
enough I could easily contemplate forgetting about print publication altogether, and just send the stuff in through the Earth’s atmosphere from cyberspace, like cosmic rays. If I went on the
road with a show based on reading out nothing except my verse – with, of course, a suitably subversive commentary damning all editors to hell – I would probably even make a living, in
the way that Robert Frost pioneered. He got paid thousands of dollars a pop, not just because he was correctly perceived to be a great man but because he could put on a show.

Most poets can’t do that, because they are steeped in the private ways of being merely overheard. Good luck to them, but I prefer to take stage centre. I’m used to it, and nobody has
asked for their money back yet. Also it’s the sort of applause I care about most. But there’s no denying that I could use a bit more of the other kind of applause as well. Still
hankering for that, I would be hypocritical to contemn it, not to say unwise. A good reason for being at least sceptical about the approval of the poetic establishment of the day is that is has
never been very good at separating the poet from his publicity. Unfortunately any poet who complains about his publicity is likely to be reminded, by fellow poets who don’t get enough of it,
that he sounds like Jennifer Lopez complaining about the size of her trailer.

The Monthly
, August 2007

Postscript

This piece was a clear case of blowing my own trumpet, but I still felt, at the time, that I had nobody else to blow it; and poetry needs pushing, because the poet is
facing something far more unyielding than sales resistance. Poetry has a restricted market even for Seamus Heaney, so he has to go on the road. In the popular music industry they call it Touring
the Album. With poetry you have to tour the book or it’s as good as dead. Later on, in 2008, my book of selected poems
Opal Sunset
came out in America, and it was followed in Britain
by
Angels over Elsinore
, a collection of poems written since 2003. Though there was quite a lot of press coverage for both books, in Britain I still had to work the festivals. A festival
appearance really means going on stage without a fee, but it’s worth it if you can sign the crucial few extra copies that will make your publisher feel he hasn’t just set fire to a wad
of his own money.

DON’T HOLD YOUR BREATH, ARGENTINA

To have a selection of my essays published in Buenos Aires is more than flattering. It seems fitting, because the city has not only touched my heart, through the tango, but has
helped to form my mind. Though I love to dance the tango, I will never be much good at it beyond a certain point. I found that out in Buenos Aires, when my teachers, the great tango couple Jorge
and Aurora Firpo, would demonstrate what I had to do next. Even when I learned to do it, I knew that I would never look as graceful as they did. But I can live with that knowledge because there is
something else I do better: the essay. Even with the essay, however, it helps to have a supply of role models if you want to find out how good you can get. I found many of my role models in Latin
America.

When I started learning to read Spanish, about twenty years ago, the essayists were my way in. I would recommend that priority to any student who is making a beginning with a foreign literature:
start with the essays. Especially if they are about politics or the arts, they are likely to have an international vocabulary that will help you keep the main thread while you are reaching for the
dictionary to clarify a subsidiary point. My first great exemplar was Octavio Paz. I accumulated a row of his essay collections and read everything in them. I never did learn enough about Mexico,
but his opinions on international subjects all got into my head, to reinforce my own opinions when they were similar, and make them more subtle when they were different. The same could be said for
Mario Vargas Llosa, who emanated from the other end of the continent but talked about a world you recognized even if you had never been that far south. In fact he talked incomparably about Europe:
nobody has ever described better the process of evolution by which the young intellectual gets out from underneath the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre, and starts to recognize the lasting humanist
significance of Albert Camus. I had already been through that process myself when I read Vargas Llosa on the subject and realized, to my discomfort, that he could express it better. I resolved to
try for the same clarity, and the same flexibility. (Young readers who doubt that latter quality in Vargas Llosa, and think he has moved irretrievably to the right, should read one of his recent
essays on illegal immigration, and take in the implications of his being for it, not against it.) With both those essayists, I was always taking notes, always arguing.

The arguing grew heated when it came to the essayists from Argentina. Borges I already admired as a poet and a writer of short fiction. There was no alternative to admiration: trying not to
admire him would have been a protest against the weather. But his essays and dialogues brought politics in, especially when he tried to leave politics out. Some of his Argentinian critics taught me
a lesson there. They pointed out what I would not have seen: that Borges’s early silence on the subject of the Junta has been eloquent. His critics admired him too, but he had disappointed
them. I tried not to get into a position where he could disappoint me, but there can be no question that my view of Borges was made much more nuanced by what he wrote, or failed to write, in his
essays, and what his critics, in their essays, wrote about him.

The essay was the revealing form: even more so than the dialogue, which I soon found was practically a speciality of Argentina, if only because it was so often practised by Borges and
Sábato, both separately and together. Borges has a way of retreating into the dialogue in order to avoid saying what he would have had to advance in an essay. Sábato, in both forms,
was, it seemed to me, more likely to say what was really on his mind. I enjoyed the transcripts of his dialogues but his essays I more than enjoyed. I know that this opinion might seem strange to
many literary people in Argentina who remember that Sábato, too, just like Borges, sat down to break bread with demons. Those people, brought up in the Spanish language as I am not, are apt
to regard his style as a back-number. But eventually he saw the point about the men who wore dark glasses at night – to the extent of editing a book about their crimes – and the clarity
of his prose is a gift to the foreign student. At this point I hasten to admit that what I hear as the simplicity of his style might be exactly what’s wrong with it: we characteristically
over-praise, when reading in a second language, those writers that we can wolf down.