Dear Editor (You’ve not paid me for my last work)

First class New Yorker piece on Clive James. I might never have read it had it not been for your kindness in brining it to my attention. Very well done and thank you.

London in the seventies was awash with newspapers and the Sunday papers were vastly popular. I read the Observer, leftish, less gung-ho and a bit more cerebral than the rest. The Times and the Spectator amongst others were propagandist arms of the right and the working man’s newspaper, the Daily Mirror, having been slowly converted from a 60’s slob journal into a more ‘thinking’ newspaper, was gobbled up by Murdoch and returned to its slob condition.

Clive James was the once a week TV critic at the Observer. It is almost impossible to imagine now with what delight I looked forward to his weekly column. In the middle of an hilarious review of an episode of ‘Coronation Street’ he’d waft off on a literary dalliance on perhaps the Wife of Bath’s tale in Chaucer’s ‘The Canterbury Tales’ without batting an eyelid and assume you knew precisely the reference in question. He was so unlike the average English TV critic who tended to be almost censorious, husbanding their knowledge, their power, their ‘we know best’ pedantry, whereas James allowed his literary learning to explode out of him with a level of exuberance and joy that left the Poms gasping and struggling to catch up. James would have no truck with London’s literary propriety which quickly gave the jackass members of his profession ammunition aplenty to bombard the man and accuse him of the most disgraceful literary hooliganism. Of course, by their standards James was precisely that,  but a splendid firecracker hooligan, an exploding Catherine Wheel hooligan and already in the process of teaching Old Mother Fleet Street to suck eggs.

Wonderful, wonderful stuff and I can’t praise him enough.

Pushkin in Russia was as famous and well regarded a poet as Shakespeare or Heaney. Pushkin’s work did not translate well so Clive James learned to read and write Russian simply for the pleasure of reading Pushkin in the original. Extraordinary.

This has been a bit breathless but I don’t care. Being born in an age of Pavorotti,  Du Pre, Seamus Heaney, Chomsky, Kurosawa and so many others is a rare privilege. Easily I add Clive James to this list.