What happened next is another story. This story I had better break off while I still have your patience, if I do. The longer I have stayed in England, the more numerous and powerful my memories of Sydney have grown. There is nothing like staying away for bringing it with you. I have done my best to tell the truth about what it was like, yet I am well aware that in the matter of my own feelings I have not come near meeting my aim. My ideal of autobiography has been set by Alfieri, whose description of a duel he once fought in Hyde Park is mainly concerned with how he ran backwards to safety. Perhaps because I am not even yet sufficiently at peace with myself, I have not been able to meet those standards of honesty. Nothing I have said is factual except the bits that sound like fiction.
By the time this book is published I will be forty years old. When I left Sydney I boasted that I would be gone for five years. I was to be gone three times that and more. During that time most of those who came away have gone back. Before Gough Whitlam came to power, having to return felt like defeat. Afterwards it felt like the natural thing to do. Suddenly Australia began offering its artists all the recognition they had previously been denied. It took a kind of perversity to refuse the lure. Perhaps I did the wrong thing. Eventually fear plays a part: when you are too long gone, to return even for a month feels like time travel. So you try to forget. But the memories keep on coming. I have tried to keep them under control. I hope I have not overdone it, and killed the flavour. Because Sydney is so real in my recollection that I can taste it.
It tastes like happiness. I have never ceased to feel orphaned, but nor have I ever felt less than lucky – a lucky member of a lucky generation. In this century of all centuries we have been allowed to grow up and grow old in peace. There is a Buster Keaton film in which he is standing around innocently when the facade of a house falls on him. An open window in the facade passes over his body, so that he is left untouched.
I can see the Fun Doctor juggling for us at Kogarah Infants’ School. One of the balls hits the floor with a thud. Then what looks like the same ball lands on his head. I can hear the squeak that the mica window panels of the Kosi stove made when I scorched them with the red-hot poker. When Jeanette Elphick came back on a visit from Hollywood they drove her around town in a blue Customline with her new name painted in huge yellow letters along the side: VICTORIA SHAW. On Empire Night when we threw pieces of fibro into the bonfire they cracked like rifle shots. Every evening for weeks before Empire Night I used to lay my fireworks out on the lounge-room carpet, which became impregnated with the smell of gunpowder. Peter Moulton kept his fireworks in a Weetabix carton. On the night, a spark from the fire drifted into the carton and the whole lot went up. A rocket chased Gail Thorpe, who was only just back from therapy. She must have thought it was all part of the treatment.
At the Legacy Party in Clifton Gardens I got a No. 4 Meccano set. On hot nights before the nor’easter came you changed into your cossie and ran under the sprinkler. At Sans Souci baths I dive-bombed a jelly blubber for a dare. If you rubbed sand into the sting it hurt less. Bindies in the front lawn made you limp to the steps of the porch and bend over to pick them out. Sandfly bites needed Calamine lotion that dried to a milky crust. From Rose Bay at night you could hear the lions making love in Taronga Park. If the shark bell rang and you missed the wave, you were left out there alone beyond the third line of breakers. Every shadow had teeth. Treading water in frantic silence, you felt afraid enough to run Christ-like for the shore.
At the Harvest Festivals in church the area behind the pulpit was piled high with tins of IXL fruit for the old-age pensioners. We had collected the tinned fruit from door to door. Most of it came from old-age pensioners. Some of them must have got their own stuff back. Others were less lucky. Hunting for cicadas in the peppercorns and the willows, you were always in search of the legendary black prince, but invariably he turned out to be a redeye. The ordinary cicada was called a pisser because he squirted mud at you. The most beautiful cicada was the yellow Monday. He was as yellow as a canary and transparent as crystal. When he lifted his wings in the sunlight the membranes were like the deltas of little rivers. The sun shone straight through him. It shone straight through all of us.
It shone straight through everything, and I suppose it still does. As I begin this last paragraph, outside my window a misty afternoon drizzle gently but inexorably soaks the City of London. Down there in the street I can see umbrellas commiserating with each other. In Sydney Harbour, twelve thousand miles away and ten hours from now, the yachts will be racing on the crushed diamond water under a sky the texture of powdered sapphires. It would be churlish not to concede that the same abundance of natural blessings which gave us the energy to leave has every right to call us back. All in, the whippy’s taken. Pulsing like a beacon through the days and nights, the birthplace of the fortunate sends out its invisible waves of recollection. It always has and it always will, until even the last of us come home.
Clive James
FALLING TOWARDS
ENGLAND
Unreliable Memoirs II
PICADOR
in association with Jonathan Cape
To Chester and John Cummings
I had already noticed with various people that the affectation of praiseworthy sentiments is not the only way of covering up reprehensible ones, but that a more up-to-date method is to put these latter on exhibition, so that one has the air of at least being forthright.
Proust, Le Temps retrouvé
All censure of a man’s self is oblique praise. It is in order to show how much he can spare.
Johnson
Contents
Preface
1 Soft Landing
2 Beyond the Valley of the Kangaroos
3 Soul for Sale
4 Into the Hinterland
5 Cracking the Secret Code
6 Statistical Catastrophe
7 The Birmingham Decision
8 The Man in the Brown Paper Bag
9 Solvitur acris James
10 Fairy Mild Green Liquid Godmother
11 The Warping of the Ninth
12 Fiorenza, Fiorenza
13 Like a Burnished Throne
14 Back to Square One
15 The Green Gladiolus
16 Autumn of the Expatriates
17 The Deep Tan Fades
18 Prelude to the Aftermath
Preface
This is the second volume of my unreliable memoirs. For a palpable fantasy, the first volume was well enough received. It purported to be the true story of how the author grew from infancy through adolescence to early manhood, this sequence of amazing biological developments largely taking place in Kogarah, a suburb of Sydney, NSW, Australia. And indeed it was a true story, in the sense that I wasn’t brought up in a Tibetan monastery or a castle on the Danube. The central character was something like my real self. If the characters around him were composites, they were obviously so, and with some justification. The friend who helps you dig tunnels in your back yard is rarely the same friend who ruins your summer by flying a model aeroplane into your mother’s prize trifle, but a book with everybody in it would last as long as life, and never live at all.
As for the adults, they were shadows, but that was true to how children see, and my mother, in particular, was too much of an influence on my life for me to appreciate at that age – or at any subsequent age, for that matter. Her quiet but strenuous objections to Unreliable Memoirs arose from my depiction, not of her, but of myself. Apparently I was not the near-delinquent portrayed, but a little angel: to suggest otherwise reflected badly on her. The insult was not meant. Perhaps I should have pointed out more often that without her guidance and example I might have gone straight from short pants to Long Bay Gaol, which in those days was still in use and heavily populated by larcenous young men who had chosen their parents less wisely.
Unlike my mother and my father, who were robbed by history of a rounding to their youth, I had come peacefully to my middle years a
nd wanted to celebrate my good luck, or at any rate atone for it, by evoking a childhood blessed enough to be typical. But the typical, for even the most high-minded male child, does not exclude the revolting. I tried to leave some of that in. One might argue that I should have made a more thorough job of it. A Scots lady ninety-three years old sent me a charming letter saying that when young in Ayrshire she had done all the things I did. The book must have been read aloud to her, by someone who knew which pages to pass over in silence.
To tell my story in the belief that I was remarkable would have been sufficiently conceited. To tell it in the hope of being universal was possibly even more conceited, not to say pretentious. He who abandons his claim to be unique is even less bearable when he claims to be representative. But at least he has tried to climb down. There is a story by Schnitzler, called ‘History of a Genius’, about a butterfly so impressed by how far it has come in one day that it resolves to dictate its autobiography. Yet Schnitzler, so greatly generous about human beings, sells the butterfly short. The butterfly’s only mistake is to imagine itself unusual. The story of its day would be well worth having, and all the more so if it realised that millions of its fellows shared the same career. Usual does not mean ordinary. A butterfly’s compound eyes, which can see in the infra-red, are no less extraordinary because every other butterfly has them. The same applies to human memory. When I hold my hands as if in prayer and roll a pencil between them, I can smell the plasticine snakes I made in Class 1B at Kogarah Infants’ School. There is nothing ordinary about that.
Far from being all done in a day, my own story is of a late developer: one who, deficient in natural wisdom, has had to learn everything by trial and error. In this book my errors continue, but in a different context. In Sydney I had come of age but still had a lot to learn. In Europe I forgot what little I knew. London in the Sixties, it was generally believed, had sprung to life. Lost somewhere in the hubbub, I either marked time or went backwards. Readers who grew up faster, wherever they did so, might still recognise in these pages something of what they went through in order to become what they now are. Those whose personalities were handed to them in one piece might shake their heads. There are such people, and often they are among the saints, but they are denied the salutary privilege of remembering what they once were, before they knew better. It is possible that they are also denied knowledge of where the human comedy begins, in the individual soul. But I wouldn’t want to be caught suggesting that the past dissolves in mirth. Things happen that can’t be laughed off. Our hero is a bit older in this book, and the same ways are not necessarily so winning.
Not that I have registered here the full squalor of my past derelictions, some of which I can’t begin to recall without an involuntary yell to quash the memory. But to confess would be an indulgence, and there are bigger sinners growing old in Paraguay. Young Australian men living in London drank a great deal but broke nothing except the hearts of young Australian women. Feminism as a mass movement was imminent but had not yet arrived; women were still exploitable; and men duly exploited them. For the sons of the Anzacs this wasn’t a very noble chapter, and the girls who suffered, should they read this book twenty years later, might justly complain that I have glossed it over. For them to know that the crassness of their young men was waiting for them at home was bad enough, without encountering more of the same when they arrived abroad. Some of them might find their faintest outlines here, sharing a false name, catching someone else’s bus to work in Lambeth or Fulham. No disrespect is intended: quite the opposite. The full complexity of the human personality is something I no longer presume to sum up, or even to suggest.
I can’t remember having been consciously insensitive. I can hardly remember being consciously anything, except cold. It was all a bit like being on the Moon: you moved forward because you were falling forward. The clear path is revealed later, looking back. Which doesn’t mean that one disclaims responsibility for one’s actions. We are what we have done; and besides, we can’t deny it without giving up our pride. ‘For my part, since I have always admitted that I was the chief cause of all the misfortunes which have befallen me,’ wrote Casanova in his old age, ‘I have rejoiced in my ability to be my own pupil, and in my duty to love my teacher.’ Did knowing himself to be vain make him less vain? Leaving the metaphysics to others, he died writing his life story – which, considering the other things he might have died doing, was not the least dignified way he could have gone. What a swathe he would have cut through Kogarah! A thought to keep the reader’s expectations in proportion as I begin this account of my impact on England, drawn there by gravity like a snowflake to the ground.
London, 1985
C.J.
I
Soft Landing
When we got off the ship in Southampton in that allegedly mild January of 1962 I had nothing to declare at customs except goose-pimples under my white nylon drip-dry shirt. This was not because I had been prudent in my spending but because I had spent the last of my money in Singapore, plus twenty pounds I had borrowed from one of my cabin mates – and which I still owe him, come to think of it. The money had gone on a new suit which I didn’t actually have with me in my luggage. The tailors in Singapore’s Change Alley had taken my measurements and promised to send the finished suit after me to London. This had seemed like a sensible arrangement, so I had handed over the cash, thereby depriving myself of any leeway for a spending spree later on in Aden. I thus missed out on the chance, seized by most of the other Australians of my own age on the ship, to be guided by the expertise of Arab salesmen in the purchase of German tape-recorders and Japanese cameras at a fraction of the price – something like five-fourths – prevailing in their countries of origin.
In the crater of Aden, while my compatriots knowingly examined the Arabic guarantee forms for machines whose batteries were mysteriously unavailable, I hovered in the heat-hazed background, sullenly attempting not to catch the remaining eye of a beggar whose face had otherwise been entirely chewed off by a camel. It had been very hot in Aden. In England it was very cold: colder than I had ever known. The customs men did a great deal of heavy-handed chaffing about how you cobbers couldn’t really call this a winter, ho ho, and what we would look like if there really was a winter, har har, and so on. Their accents were far funnier than their sense of humour. They all seemed to have stepped out of the feature list of an Ealing comedy for the specific purpose of unpacking our luggage and charging us extra for everything in it. My own luggage consisted mainly of one very large suitcase made of mock leather – i.e., real cardboard. This compendium was forced into rotundity by a valuable collection of tennis shorts, running shorts, Hawaiian shirts, T-shirts, Hong Kong thong rubber sandals, short socks, sandshoes and other apparel equally appropriate for an English winter. The customs officer sifted through the heap twice, the second time looking at me instead of at it, as if my face would betray the secret of the illicit fortunes to be made by smuggling unsuitable clothing across half the world.
As the people all around me were presented with huge bills, I gave silent thanks for being in possession of nothing assessable for duty. The ship’s fool – a pimply, bespectacled British emigrant called Tanner who was now emigrating back the other way – was near tears. In Aden and Port Said he had bought, among other things, two tape recorders, a Japanese camera called something like a Naka-mac with a silver box full of lenses, a portable television set slightly larger than an ordinary domestic model but otherwise no different except that it had a handle, a stuffable leather television pouffe for watching it from, a hi-fi outfit with separate components, and a pair of binoculars so powerful that it frightened you to look through them, especially if you saw Tanner. Most of this gear he had about his person, although some of it was packed in large cardboard boxes, because all this was happening in the days before miniaturisation, when an amplifier still had valves. The customs officer calculated the duty owing and confronted him with the total, at which he sat down on his boxed tel
escope and briefly wept. It was more money than he had in the world, so he just signed away the whole mountain of gear and walked on through a long door in the far side of the shed.
A few minutes afterwards I walked through the same door and emerged in England, where it was gently snowing on to a bus full of Australians. There was a small cloud in front of my face which I quickly deduced to be my breath. The bus was provided by the Overseas Visitors’ Club, known for short as the OVC. The journey by ship, the bus ride to London and a week of bed and breakfast in Earls Court were all part of the deal, which a few years later would have been called a Package, but at that time was still known as a Scheme. The general thrust of the Scheme was to absorb some of the culture shock, thus rendering it merely benumbing instead of fatal. As the bus, which strangely insisted on calling itself a coach, headed north – or west or east or wherever it was going, except, presumably, south – I looked out into the English landscape and felt glad that I had not been obliged to find my way through it unassisted.