posted on 07 Oct 2015

Sentenced to Life by Clive James

I’ve always struggled with Clive James. To be honest I always found myself irritated by his bluff smugness and his too-clever-by-three-quarters persona. He was, I suspected, in love not only with celebrity but with himself. All of this was only exaggerated by his physical appearance – looking as if he was being slowly crushed by the pressure of the atmosphere and always slightly over-heated. And yet, despite this, I couldn’t help but admire his capacity for easy, witty prose and his television criticism was, at times, laugh-out loud funny. Having said that his prose was often a crystalline masterpiece, his poetry was, in my view execrable – his attempts to pastiche eighteenth century Augustan satire was painfully embarrassing.

Sadly James is terminally ill and having to come to terms with his imminent death. I have seen him interviewed several times and I have been struck by the dignity, fortitude and intelligence with which he has dealt with a death that will inevitably be a public one simply because of his minor celebrity. He has chosen to address his dying months by turning to poetry – a decision which, given his past record, was not one that filled me with an overwhelming desire to go out and buy it. Well, at least not until I heard him reading from his collection Sentenced to Life.

This is a beautiful, elegiac work. Unsurprisingly it’s a collection concerned with death, regret and guilt but it’s certainly not maudlin. The mischievous spirit is still evident and it’s alloyed with a sort of brutal honesty that the proximity of death allows him to play with. There’s an opening section of quite introverted poems that are certainly beautiful and the voice of James cuts through in the use of language and the structure of his lines. Just when you start to worry that this might all get a bit too claustrophobic he breaks out and gives us poems that engage with his other worlds –  movies, Africa, Russian art.

I love the way that the limited life he is now living has made him focus on the details. Frequently he doesn’t try to give us the big picture but to conjure atmosphere from the fragments, understanding that we are all, ultimately, the sum total of those tiny moments of awareness.

In the end we have to come back to his end. Somehow he can be bleak and up-beat in a single phrase:

But memories, where can you take them to?
Take one last look at them. They end with you.

This is, of course, true and untrue. Memory may mean nothing to the dead but memory is what the dead leave behind as a gift to the living. James has given me something here to remember him by and I’m glad it will be something more substantial than what I had before I read this collection.

Terry Potter

October 2015