The Complete Unreliable Memoirs

by Clive James

One parent is enough to spoil you but discipline takes two. I got too much of what I wanted and not enough of what I needed.

Wisdom from Clive.

I suppose it is just another sign of weakness to blame everything on that one moment, but it would be equally dishonest if I failed to record its piercing vividness.

I have disliked luck ever since – an aversion only increased by the fact that I have always been inordinately lucky.

I had stumbled on one of the secrets of leadership – start something, then let people know you are doing them a favour by bringing them in on it.

In those days you matched a block of balsa against a rudimentary diagram and got going with a razor blade, which sliced your thumb as readily as it carved the balsa. If the result was recognizable as an aeroplane, you were an expert. If your thumb was recognizable as a thumb, you were a genius.

Clive Vivian James.

Brock fireworks and the every-second-Christmas box of W. Britains lead soldiers. I remembered my set of Household Cavalry with the right arms that swivelled and the swords held upright, except for the troop leader whose sabre stuck out in line with his extended arm while his horse pranced. When his arm worked loose and fell off I wodged it back on with a gasket of cigarette paper.

Then I lifted my arms to adjust the mirror, and discovered that I couldn’t see. The shoulders of the jacket had immediately risen to engulf my head. When I put my arms back down, vision returned. Perhaps I had just moved too suddenly. Tentatively I lifted my right arm. The right shoulder of the jacket went up past my ear. Ditto for the left side. Even more slowly I lifted both arms. Blackout. There was no spare cloth in the armpits: the gussets, or whatever they were called, were missing.

Clive's suit arrives from Singapore.

I still get so impatient with the whole time-consuming business of covering up exposed skin that I will buy the first thing that catches my eye, and that when it comes to shoes the first thing that catches your eye is the last thing you should ever put on your feet.

Dining out meant shepherd’s pie and bitter at the Anchor, Bankside. The Anchor was a little sooty brick Georgian pub on the Embankment.

Love the Anchor!

sat transfixed by the rhythm of that voice – the strong view lightly stated. It wasn’t words plus pictures. It was words times pictures.

George Russell had responded to yet another request for a reference, sending, by return air-letter, an encomium which would have sat extravagantly on the shoulders of Pico della Mirandola.

in those days I construed absence of explicit opposition as a whole-hearted endorsement.

He knew where to drop the needle – an especially important qualification in the matter of Wagner, with whom it is an invariable rule that the most immediately accessible bits are never at the edge of the disc.

Some people are different from the rest of us, and so are the rest of us.

Dalziel, for as long as I cared to remember, had drawn women like mosquitoes to a sleeping man. It wasn’t because he was good-looking, although he was. It wasn’t because he cleaned his nails and dressed in spruce clothes, although he did. It was because he was obsessed. Dave Dalziel was movie mad.

I would have hated him for it if he had been less good company, but if you allowed for his occasional patch of near insanity he was too funny to pass up. Like all truly entertaining talkers he rarely told jokes.

‘I hear you’ve been living with a horse’s hoof’ he drawled. It emerged that he and Reg had just taken a flat in Warwick Road, on the other side of Kensington High Street, and were looking for a third man to share the rent. ‘Here’s your chance to play Harry Lime. Also we need someone to keep the landlady quiet, who is a MONSTER. How would you like to slip her the pork sword?’

‘Asking you to play someone you’re not is like asking King Kong to play the Moonlight Sonata.’

In sharp distinction to the rest of us, he didn’t behave like an artist at all. He behaved like a truck-driver who has to get a load of perishable goods to a certain destination by a certain time.

We made our first private-life contact not at Harmondsworth or in the Kombibus but at the London Library in St James’s Square.

@thelondonlib

I read many volumes of the proceedings of the Nuremberg Tribunal, thereby saddening myself deeply but gaining a valuable inoculation of disillusionment – the precondition for a realistic happiness.

Writers much more exalted than I am have the same weakness. Think twice before you get mixed up with a writer, and ten times before you marry one. Writers want things to be over, so that they can write the elegy. Gray toured that churchyard on the run.

I had landed in the lap of the only kind of luxury I have ever cared about – a wealth of opportunity.

Yes!

The days of our youth are the days of our glory. He said it, and I believed it.

Cambridge will probably never get round to formally approving homosexuality, but the type of homosexual involved perhaps prefers a blind eye

row of damaged books which Davenport had failed to return to the London Library.

matched pair of Purdey shot-guns, one of which had not been fired,

She was one of those people whose whole bodies have a feeling for popular music, and that was the time when popular music had a feeling for bodies.

The Zeitgeist had given my Bacchic urge a blanket endorsement.

The return of Dave Dalziel helped to restore my capacity for dedication. Without him, London might merely have been where I went to do a cheap imitation of Christopher Marlowe in his cups.

I have gone only half way towards describing Dalziel’s principal and most troublesome protégé, Keith Visconti. Though Keith’s anabasis from the status of comprehensive school expellee to potential cinéaste should not be derided even in retrospect, there were several reasons to think that on top of being illiterate and odoriferous he was also clinically insane, with overtones of petty larceny.

She was quite pretty but in a way so lacking in animation that even I had trouble idealising her.

Even today, playing gin rummy with my small daughter, I am notoriously easy meat, and have been since she was seven years old. If I make a fool of myself at gin, it can be imagined what a figure I cut at bridge. I just couldn’t do it.

Bitterly reflecting that ‘Silent, upon a peak in Darien’ neatly summarised the condition and location to which everyone who knew Beaurepaire would like to see him translated, I was nevertheless pleased that we were cleaning up, and the last bonus question was a personal triumph for myself.

At the time of writing, television in Britain is still, by the skin of its teeth, a communal event - the best reason for being involved in it – but twenty years ago there was no question about it.

I am still told today by anyone I meet over the age of forty – that the tears which I thought were jetting from my eyes merely made them shine, and that if it had not been for my mouth, which went all square like a baby ready to howl, nobody would have known that my world had collapsed.

nostrils which would have made the Dalai Lama’s robe strobe, but which reminded me of a wild horse I had seen in Taronga Park zoo when very young

The pasta was always al dente, an expression which could be pressed into service as the name of a ferocious gangster.

In the Italian galleries even the guides regularly fingered the paint surface.

I forgave them, having surmised – correctly, as it turned out – that America was merely first in achieving a level of average income so high that even the mentally underprivileged were able to travel, and that shortly all the other industrialised countries would start exporting idiots too.

Raised in the hot sun, my idea of romance was to feel cold. North was a thrilling word to me. Balzac said that a novel should send the reader into another country. My dreams were like that. They still are.

When the cover was lifted to reveal nothing but a heaped plate of pineapple chunks, however, there were people in the audience who could take no more.

Funny Debates at both Cambridge and Oxford eventually helped to convince me that the only place to be amusing is in a serious context.

Some people develop, and sometimes they have to do that by throwing off the limiting estimation of those who know them.

Stability, for both of us, is a nostrum against caprice.

was a long time, by now stretching to a lifetime, in grasping how reality has a texture to which histrionics are an inadequate response.

The evidence rapidly mounted that there was a new contender in town for the post that every literary editor needs to fill: the trick pony who can work like a draught-horse.

Naive American scholars sometimes go looking for Grub Street but it has never existed as a geographical entity. Grub Street is a collection of periodicals that deal with literature and of newspapers that have literary pages: a collection of those, and of the people who edit and write for them. Grub Street is like a small Great Rift whose favoured watering holes continually change position. In the times of Swift and Dr Johnson, the gathering places were the coffee houses. In my time, they were the pubs.

My stance, however, was to contend that all thoughts of actual revolution were the kind of nonsense that could be excused only through ignorance.

In a previous volume of this memoir I gave Germaine the name Romaine Rand, on the principle that if I was going to attribute foul language to her it would be ungentlemanly to use her real name.