North face of Soho

A photo on the back of the jacket reveals the author sporting lavish sideburns, a tonsorial arrangement which artfully combines baldness with long hair, and a hideous cravat, so you know immediately that it was taken in the 1970s. James says he had an entire rack of cravats ‘of a chemically derived material printed with a paisley pattern’. He describes the period as ‘an era of dandies without taste’. This ability to sum up a subject or person in one witty sentence is evident throughout the book.

The fourth instalment in the Unreliable Memoirs series, North Face of Soho covers about fifteen years from the late ‘60s to the early ‘80s. It starts with James having a nervous breakdown after being fired as director of an Oxbridge show more revue and ends with another theatrical disaster. In between he is building his career, or perhaps that should be careers, and nowhere near as famous as he would become later in the ‘80s when millions came to know him simply as a television performer rather than the brilliant critical essayist he also was. Consequently it’s much more interesting than the final volume, which dealt with the years of TV fame, the ascent always being more fascinating to read about than the Olympian view from the summit.

Although the quantity of his output during these years is impressive, it’s the variety that is really striking. When he wasn’t establishing a reputation as a heavyweight literary critic in the pages of the TLS, The New Review and the The New York Review of Books, he was doing impressions of Henry Kissinger on late night satirical TV shows. Or furnishing singer-songwriter Pete Atkin with literate lyrics. Or helping future Factory Records boss Tony Wilson present an off-beat rock show called So It Goes. Or writing a groundbreaking TV review column for the Observer newspaper. Or writing poetry. I could go on, but you get the picture. This is a book full of anecdotes involving people who don’t belong in the same book: Peter Sellers & Robert Lowell, Barry Humphries and Martin Amis, Ian Hamilton and Johnny Rotten. The common factor is the Zelig-like kid from Kogarah.

James was a postmodernist before postmodernism was a thing, and long before the thing became a cliche. I’m not sure if he was consciously breaking down barriers between art and entertainment or if he just couldn’t help finding everything interesting. Perhaps he wasn’t sure either. Most intelligent people are interested in lots of different stuff. Unlike many, certainly fifty years ago, James wasn’t afraid to say so. He made the world of ‘serious literature’ seem accessible to the general reader and gave you the courage to enjoy alleged trash without feeling stupid. If someone as obviously clever as Clive James thought Star Trek was good fun, then it was okay for you to do so. Culturally omnivorous rather than populist he was the personification of the idea of a genuinely democratic culture, neither highbrow or lowbrow: ‘everything created should be composed on the assumption that it can be enjoyed by anybody, even if not by everybody’.

All of this was exemplified by his TV reviews written between 1972 and 1982. My paperback collections of the columns fell apart long ago through excessive reading. These mesmerising pieces were so funny that some concluded they weren’t criticism at all. James, however, proved that being funny and being serious were the same thing. When he made fun of the indefatigable patriotism of the BBC sports commentators at the 1972 Olympic Games (‘And Wilkins quite content with his fifth place. He can build on that’) he was telling you about Britain’s reluctance to accept that it was no longer an imperial power. Usually mainly remembered for hilarious put-downs of the famous his TV columns were really a celebration of the bewildering variety of 1970s British television, even if the compliments had a tendency to be distinctly backhanded. He wrote with an admirable lack of snobbery, taking popular fare like sit-coms as seriously as the supposedly prestigious productions, and frequently finding them more rewarding. Never intimidated by reputation he was always willing to point out that the Famous Playwright wasn’t wearing any clothes. And he didn’t just review the programmes: he also reviewed the adverts, the continuity announcers unable to get through a single link without fluffing, and the weather forecaster resplendent in a wildly strobing jacket while prattling about something called ‘a freezing fog situation.’ For Clive James television was a riotous carnival of eccentric characters and bizarre juxtapositions erupting into your living room. His reviews were often more enjoyable than the programmes and remain worth reading even though many of the programmes have been forgotten.

This is a wonderfully entertaining memoir, it zips along with tremendous energy and is full of wit and wisdom. It’s also full of the kind of finely honed and assiduously polished prose that dullards dismiss as slick. The kind of prose that is easy to read and almost impossible to achieve. James was a poet whose best poetry was written right across the page. He is honest about the ambition that drove him (‘I seemed less ambitious for anything in particular than for everything at once’) and avoids false modesty while taking delight in detailing his many failings. His failings are on such a grand scale they sound like achievements in themselves. For instance, he didn’t just smoke he ‘smoked so much that I needed the hubcap of a Bedford van as an ashtray’. Classic comic exaggeration, I thought. I then came across an article by Russell Davies in which he recalls both being in the street with James when he found the hubcap and how alarmingly quickly it filled up with cigarette butts.

Not everything Clive James did was good. There was quite a lot of dross among the gold. He mentions, without a flicker of embarrassment, a sequence of putatively comic epic poems with awful alliterative titles like Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage through the London Literary World. Some of his programmes were more entertaining than envious fellow journalists allowed but there is no doubt that he was much better writing about television than appearing on it. His finest work is on the page: the reviews, essays, and memoirs like this one. A fashionable view is that he was a split personality fatally divided between his desire to be a famous jester and taken seriously: fashionable and false. This book, like all his best work, demonstrates the truth of something he once said: ‘A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing. Those who lack humour are without judgement and should be trusted with nothing.’ show less

More years ago than I care to think about, I read and enjoyed the first three volumes of Clive James' Unreliable Memoirs. His humour oozed from the page; I could relate to his stories; and I spent much of the time in helpless laughter. My mind's ear related so much of the text in James' inimitable voice. So I was looking forward to this volume.

I'm afraid to say that I was disappointed, though I don't think the reasons were anything to do with Clive James. The first three volumes dealt with his childhood, his adolescence, his decision to move to the UK and his student years. Well, I've done all those (well, I was in the UK already, but like James I moved out into the world, as we have all done). But this book tells the story of how Clive show more James established his career as a writer and media personality within the milieu of the London literary establishment - and interesting as that is, that's a world I only know at third hand (at best). Interesting, but it doesn't have the same immediacy. And as James has to spend time building the background to the situations he found himself in, and the personalities he was dealing with, the opportunities for wall-to-wall humour are fewer. (They re still there, of course - the opening of chapter 15 had me in stitches - but the fact that I can pinpoint exactly the best bit says a lot.)

That doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with the book; indeed, it's a necessary stage in Clive James telling his own story. And there are valuable lessons in here, about how to handle setbacks, and how to promote cultural events, and how to sell books to publishers. There are many pen portraits of personalities both well-known (Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, Peter Sellars, Spike Milligan, Kenneth Tynan) and not so well-known (for example, many of the literary editors that Clive James encountered to get his writing into print). These are interesting, sometimes amusing and always valuable. There is also a fair amount about James' song writing career with Pete Atkin, and he also talks a lot about his poetry.

There are two other things about this book which contributed to my feeling a bit let down by it. Firstly, I'm rather older than when I read the first three volumes, so perhaps my "Gosh! Wow!" reaction has been blunted by time and my own experiences. And we have been deprived of the man's distinctive voice, so that it is no longer so fresh in the memory - hence, less readily recalled to read out his words in my head. Some of his phrases did come to me in his own voice, but it took a greater and more conscious effort.

Do not let this stop you from reading this book. Clive James remains one of the wittiest and most intelligent cultural commentators ever to grace our pages and our screens, and we are the poorer for his passing. I suspect that most of the issues I had with this book came out of my reading it in isolation from his other memoirs. The view James gives of the London literary establishment, of Fleet Street and of the first twenty years of British television are all important and it is good that we have them. show less

What to say about an institution like Clive James? Part four of his unreliable memoirs delivers exactly what it promises: a mixture of gossip, self-deprecating -- even self-excoriating -- humour, cheerful self-promotion, ever so slightly over-the-top similes, a rich seasoning of aphorisms, wise advice to young aspiring writers and consolation to those who aren't so young, vivid pen portraits of the famous (Peter Sellers, Burt Lancaster, Robert Lowell) and the should-be famous (a whole string of literary editors). The book is stuffed to the gills with quotability. This one-liner captures nicely the book's, and James's, cultured but not elitist stance: 'Everything created should be composed on the assumption that it can be enjoyed by show more anybody, even if not by everybody.'

http://homepage.mac.com/shawjonathan/iblog/C1020611578/E20070902165621/index.htm... show less

At the very end of May Week Was in June, we left our hero sitting beside the River Cam one beautiful 1968 spring day, jotting down his thoughts in a journal. Newly married and about to leave the cloistered world of Cambridge academia for the racier, glossier life promised by Literary London, he was, so he informed his journal, reasonably satisfied. With his criticism beginning to appear in magazines and newspapers such as the New Statesman, and his poetry published in Carcanet, as well as a play being performed to rave reviews at the Arts Theatre, James had good reason to be content. But what happened next?

Clive James is a brilliant writer who tells us how he ended up amongst the elite watering holes of what's known in the Literary Trade as 'Grub Street' He details his struggles to write as well as his smoking and drinking habit. For the middle class addicts who read the TLS and other Literary Monthlys who tend to originate from elite academic Institutions which is a pity.

His best yet - as a big Pete Atkin fan, I enjoyed hearing about their music making. The bits about Burt Lancaster were especially wonderful.