Sam Leith Sam Leith

Intimations of mortality

Pendulum, eh? Well, there’s certainly something swing- ing back and forth here.

Pendulum, eh? Well, there’s certainly something swing- ing back and forth here.

Pendulum, eh? Well, there’s certainly something swing- ing back and forth here. Two years ago, lest we forget, Cultural Amnesia came out — all 900-odd pages of it. Now here’s Clive with another fat wedge of ‘essays’, some of which are essays, and some of which are more recognisable as old book reviews and feature pieces for newspapers. In the section marked ‘Handbills’ he reproduces pieces he’s written to promote his stage shows; in ‘Absent Friends’, addenda to obituaries.

It seems rather a monumental way of presenting ephemera, but it emerges piecemeal in this book that James is starting to hear the guy with the scythe and the persistent cough. He’s thinking about how he’ll be remembered. He’s building monuments to himself.

He says of his website (‘the first personal fully fractal multi-media archival-critical instrument on the Web’):

I would never have started building the site in the first place if I hadn’t thought that the day had arrived for getting things together. How to keep running it after I conk out is the big question now.

I think he’ll be remembered as a pompous, brilliant old thing with a big, prickly ego. You can still see in the temperament of the man that gauche, ambitious child so laceratingly evoked in his first volume of memoirs. Throughout it there are sentences working that little bit too hard; learning worn that little bit too heavily. 

Why do you need to line up Baudelaire, Gaudi and Field Marshal von Manstein, for example, to see off a clumsy sentence written by a Sunday Telegraph sports reporter eight years ago? The essay — ‘The Perfectly Bad Sentence’ — is funny, because the sentence is funny: ‘Now, the onus is on Henman to come out firing at Ivanisevic, the wild card who has torn through this event on a wave of emotion.’

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