Medusa Touch Falling Towards England

By Christopher Porterfield

Sexual intercourse began, as we know from Philip Larkin's famous lament, "In nineteen sixty-three/ (Which was rather late for me) -- / Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ And the Beatles' first LP." It was just in time, however, for Clive James, who arrived in London from Australia in 1962 seeking literary fame, the socialist millennium, bohemian good times and the love of beautiful women, not necessarily in that order. Eventually James would become a successful Fleet Street journalist-critic and a popular panelist on British TV. But for now his ambition was "to take a lowpaying menial job during the day and compose poetic masterpieces at night," and in between to begin swinging with the '60s.

"Atomised libido was misty in the air," James recalls. The combination of miniskirts and minibicycles nearly unhinged him: "When a girl's tights came towards you on a Moulton, they were making scissor movements at eye level, especially if you were on your knees sobbing with lust." He stumbled into a few affairs and even found a couple of devoted girlfriends, but he also soon discovered that "virginity is a recurring condition."

So was unemployment. James' interview with a pub manager revealed that he knew "bugger all" about the wine trade, and he flunked the psychological test for guards in the London subway. But he worked briefly and erratically as a librarian, factory hand, statistician and publisher's assistant. His digs were more makeshift than his jobs and included, besides a succession of repressive rooming houses, a converted coal barge with a toilet that tended to fill up with the bilges and a paper mattress wrapper on the floor of somebody else's room. One of his roosts was so tiny that the chief problem was "to lie down without getting hurt. I started by kneeling and then did the difficult next bit by twisting myself sideways so that my mouth hit the pillow at an angle which allowed breathing. You can tell when it works because you wake up again next morning."

All this may sound too comically exaggerated to be true, and it is. James gave readers fair warning in 1980 when he titled the first volume of this continuing autobiography Unreliable Memoirs. He cheerfully admits to rearranging details and changing names (an American writer becomes Alexander Lobrau, a construction company is called Piranesi Brothers). And no character sketch is more heightened in its absurdity than his portrait of his younger self, about whom everything apparently was hopeless: his head for alcohol, his "Medusa touch" in everyday affairs, even his clothes. One of the best running jokes concerns a Singapore-made suit whose shoulders engulfed his head whenever he gestured with his arms, causing mystifying blackouts.

In taking most of the pratfalls himself, James seems to play along with the Aussie baiting that "for the English chattering classes . . . had begun to serve as a mild form of licensed antiSemitism." But like many a clever provincial before him, he knows that writing well is the best revenge. In his pages, it is the English who emerge as outlandish, not least in their accents. One office colleague offered James a cake that proved to be a soft drink. "No, not cake," she explained. "Cake. Cake-Akela."

Falling Towards England scants one major theme of all first-rate autobiographies: the growth of a distinctive mind. Presumably James is saving that for the next installment. He reports that after two years of rampant appetites and guilt, his health was beginning to suffer; his revolutionary fervor ebbed; friends began settling into real jobs, marrying, going back to Australia. James, though already a graduate of Sydney University, prepared to go to Cambridge: "For the lost soul, the university is the modern monastery." As his parting gesture, he left a derelict car parked in front of the most detested of his former rooming houses -- a monument summing up his early London career as "having had nuisance value and nothing more." This may be too harsh, but fortunately James is not a man to let a little harshness, or anything else, get in the way of a laugh.