These I have loved

In the preface to his great collection of essays The Dyer’s Hand, W.H. Auden claimed: ‘I prefer a critic’s notebooks to his treatises.’ Auden’s criticism is like that: a passage of insights instead of a single sustained argument, and the same is true of Samuel Johnson, whose works are a pleasure to read for the feeling of the pressure of a great mind at play. Clive James belongs in this company.

His new book Latest Readings is a kind of reading diary: a collection of short essays, each prompted by one book or a handful he happens to be reading. They are not in any logical order or sequence, but are given unity by two things: one biographical, the other stylistic. James is — as has been widely publicised over the past two years — now dying, of leukaemia and emphysema, and while he only briefly mentions it here, this whole book is marked by a sense of medical struggle and imminent extinction. Olivia Manning’s cycle of novels, he writes, ‘makes now more bearable’. So the title contains a very Jamesian pun: it means both most recent and, implicitly, last. He will not be reading these books again.

He looks again at Hemingway, and Conrad, and writers he has clearly spent his lifetime with, and because this is mostly re-reading, the timeframe is a little blurred. He writes in a constant present tense (‘I have just started to read…’ and ‘I am currently under the spell of…’), and this is perhaps because of another buried pun: ‘I read’ is both the present and the past of the same verb, pronounced differently but spelled the same, as if the act had only its ever-present moment.

What kind of reader is he? A charming one: inquisitive, insightful, wry.