Remembering the genius of Clive James

‘Clive James Stirs.’ That was the standard subject line for the emails I used to get from the great Australian polymath. I liked it. It cast him, I thought, as a sort of barnacled kraken — still hanging in there, occasionally roused to action. He was usually submitting a new poem. For a while, after he first announced his illness and his poem ‘Japanese Maple’ had gone viral thanks to a tweet from Mia Farrow (Clive found this funny, and was pleased), there was a faintly ghoulish cachet in the thought that we might be the publishers of Clive’s last poem. But of course, he didn’t die — and the poems kept coming. ‘In the meantime I hope to have a couple more poems for you,’ he wrote in spring 2015, ‘if I am granted life. I’ve been granted it so far, and in delightful measure; but there is no knowing for certain. I suppose that’s part of the fun. Not even the Aussie critics can plausibly accuse me of rigging my exit, although some of them try, God bless them.’ He didn’t rig his exit — but he went. I’m sad I’ll never see that subject line pop up again.

In 2017 I went to Cambridge to talk to Clive for The Spectator’s books podcast. After our interview was over, Clive asked me to stay and keep him company. We sat for a couple of hours on a little terrace overlooking his box garden, talking about books and gossiping. He was good at gossip. He knew everyone and managed to be both slighting and affectionate — ‘Germaine? Germaine’s a child!’ — in a single thin breath. At one point my eye lighted on one of the plants in the garden and something occurred to me. ‘Is that a Japanese maple?’ I said.