In the final year of his life, Clive James published a book-length poem, The River in the Sky (2018), a dying man’s last fling. The title refers to the Japanese phrase for the Milky Way. It’s mostly autobiography, a book of well-rehearsed memories, largely unstructured, much of it familiar to readers of James’ earlier work. In my experience and with growing frequency, memories often displace living in the present. The present is quite wonderful, thank you, but memory can be edited for happier consumption, with the boring and distasteful parts removed. It can lend forgiveness to old slights and grudges. When memory is not delusion, mythology or self-justification, it’s a well-earned consolation.
The poem is less aphoristic and tightly written than much of James’ earlier prose and verse. It’s for James completists. He writes that “little of the best wit comes from literature,” and that sounds like a sad confession. James recounts his visit to Finca La Vigia, the Hemingway House in Havana, which was locked but he peers through the windows into the living room:
“I scanned
the shelves for spines
Of novels by
Ronald Firbank
But couldn’t
find them. I knew, though,
That they
had to be there somewhere.
One of the
things that made him great
Was his
taste for stylists
Whose style
was not like his.”
This is followed by another
act of self-identification:
“I bathed in
the radiated neatness
Of thousands
of titles
But the
sight that moved me most
Was a pair
of moccasins
Out there on
the carpet like a couple of canoes
Set to take
someone bigger than the Yeti
Into the
mist that cloaks the waterfall
Of
unremitting, ever-extending time,
Which,
captured in its density and essence
Will outrun
even death.”
A few
stanzas later, James shares a brief, inarguable artistic credo:
“Today and
since it happened and far ahead,
Barber’s Adagio for Strings
Is the music
of 9/11
Nothing
aleatoric about it: no dice were thrown
Just beauty,
which at the end had better
Be anybody’s
fallback mode.”
The poem
concludes on a lugubrious decrescendo:
“I thought
that I was vanishing, but instead
I was only
coming true:
Turning to
what, in seeming to end here,
Must soon
continue
As the rain
does the moment that it falls.”
The final
book James published in his lifetime is Somewhere
Becoming Rain (2019), his collected writings on Phillip Larkin. The title
is drawn from the concluding line of one of Larkin’s masterpieces, “The Whitsun Weddings.” In it I hear an echo of the just-quoted lines from The River in the Sky:
“. . . as the tightened brakes took hold, there
swelled
A sense of
falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of
sight, somewhere becoming rain.”
1 comment:
A beautiful posting
Post a Comment