Latest Readings by Clive James - review

Latest Readings by Clive James (Yale, £12.99)

In 2010, Clive James tells us, he could “hear the clock ticking”. He already had “wrecked lungs”, and now he had been diagnosed with leukemia. So the bookish James asked himself a desperate question: in his state, did he have enough time for long books? For anybody who reads, it’s a hellish question. Anyway, the answer was a Churchillian yes. James took on Boswell’s Life of Johnson and decided to keep on going. “If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights go out,” he tells us, “you might as well read until they do.”

You could see this as a book of essays about the reading habits of a man as he approaches the end. Or you could see it as a superbly compressed memoir. It made me think of the feeling you get when you’re cramming for an exam: you’re in control of the material and time is short, and you’re finally aware that if you had all the time in the world you’d enjoy this stuff so much more. But then again, if you had all the time in the world you’d never have come to this exact realisation.

With a watchmaker’s skill, James dramatises the inner workings of the act of sitting down and reading. “Being book crazy,” he writes, “is an aspect of love, and therefore scarcely rational at all.” For James, books are rapacious; they chase him down, they fill up his house. Soon, he knows, he won’t have any more space on his shelves. But he too is ruthless.

Of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels, he says, “Now that they have invaded my kitchen, they must be dealt with.” Other books he “deals with” are sequences by Patrick O’Brian, Anthony Powell and Olivia Manning, the poetry of Kipling and Larkin, the plays of Shakespeare, the works of V S Naipaul. “We read Naipaul for his fastidious scorn,” says James, hitting the bullseye, “not for his large heart.” But still the clock ticks. “Whether I shall read A House for Mr Biswas again remains to be seen.”

In the pulmonary ward, having contracted pneumonia, he finds Conrad’s Lord Jim on a hospital library cart “along with the usual epics about swords and dragons”. He’s superb on Conrad and also on what the writer means to him at his age and at this particular moment in history: “After a lifetime spent in the world that he presaged, I realise that I am at last ready for him.”

His compressed study of Kipling’s ability to compress ideas into words is itself a masterclass in nanotechnology. He shows us that, in a way, Kipling had too much talent — his propensity to multitask became self-defeating.

There are two piercing essays on Hemingway, which bookend his life and which almost bookend this book. James captures early Hemingway beautifully: “he habitually trod on the accelerator instead of the brake”. And he gets the end just right, too. “The height of his tragedy,” he tells us, “was that he could not write about his own finale which, lasting so long, could have been his great theme.”

With James, one hopes fervently that the finale is only just beginning.

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