The Meaning of Recognition

by Clive James

  Sitting in front of our Stromberg Carlson radio set, which was bigger than the Kosi stove, I was introduced by Jack Davey to the concept of word play, which is essentially the interplay of the expected and the unexpected, and therefore a matter of construction far more complex than a mere pun. Almost anyone can make a pun, which is why we flee those who do. Hardly anyone can do word play. Jack Davey’s writers could, and he knew exactly how to deliver it. In the show’s tightly written script, it was established that the woman who lived next door was seeking Jack Davey’s affections. It was further established that she was large and powerfully built. In one programme, she said to him, ‘I’m going to chuck you under the chin.’ This announcement was followed by a sound effect of a body whistling through the air and landing heavily at some distance, with a clattering of tin cans. ‘Struth,’ said Davey, ‘she chucked me under the house.’ It might not sound like a great joke now, but my mother and I laughed for a week. I had no idea how he did it. I presumed that he had written the line himself. Actually he hadn’t, but he easily could have. Jack Davey could think like lightning on his feet. Later on, in another programme, he introduced me to the concept of the educated joke – the joke that depends on a certain cultural sophistication in the audience. This time it was a quiz show, and Davey was improvising, picking up on unexpected things, a knack that can’t be scripted. You can script the link material, but to interact verbally with the contestant you have to look up from the page and snatch the opportunity out of the air. In the final, hard round of the quiz, Davey asked a contestant the name of the supporting actress in a certain film, and the contestant gave the wrong answer, i.e a name that could not have been on Davey’s script of questions and right answers. The contestant said ‘Mercedes McCambridge.’ There was the briefest pause before Davey said: ‘Mercedes McCambridge? Sounds like a well educated Scotsman in a sports car.’ My mother and I laughed for another week, and when I look back on it, I realize that it was then that I discovered my stock in trade. Actually I hadn’t really understood the joke at the time. It had gone over my head like a frisbee. But I had been delighted by its flight. That was the thing I would do, if I could.

  I would like to think that it was the thing I did on television, some of the time anyway. But most of the credit I got was just for having my face there. It was never much of a face in the first place, and as you can see, it has by now achieved the same condition as Pompeii. To pay myself what compliments for realism I can muster, I never tried to spruce it up. I never had my eyes enlarged or my teeth replaced, and above all, to use precisely the right phrase, I never tried to conceal the ravages of my excess testosterone. One of my producers had a wig designed for me but I never wore it. Later on it was given its own talk-show, which is still running. But my face got famous anyway, just for being there, and I finally realized that there was something wrong with that. By that measure, anyone can be famous, and that’s madness. We have to get back to sanity. It will be a battle, but Australia is probably the best place to fight it.

  Australia, partly by geographical luck and partly because of the much-underestimated collective wisdom of its political class, has so far managed to avoid both the worst excesses of Britain’s uniformly squalid tabloid press and America’s demented obeisance before anyone who claims to be unique. Australia, considered as a culture, is held together more by radio than TV, and radio has much less of this madness about glamour. Whatever you might think of John Howard’s policies, the population that elected him proved by their votes that they had not yet succumbed to the delusion that a politician should look like a film star. Among Australia’s flourishing community of left-wing commentators, there is even a rumour that the young John Howard looked like Ben Affleck, but the Liberal party’s cosmetic surgeons went to work on him to make him more electable. If that proves to be a fact, we should rejoice in it. We should rejoice that ordinary Australian people can still pay heartfelt respect to those who have done something, and grant them a further existence beyond the necessarily brief period of their initial glory. In Adelaide earlier this year I was invited to tea by the Governor of South Australia, Marjorie Jackson. It pleased me that the Lithgow Flash had been granted lasting recognition for her achievements. To respect achievement is the only antidote for being poisoned by glamour. But the antidote must be taken before the poison. People should do something before they are allowed to be somebody. Getting back to that reality will be a struggle, but we should make a start now, while we are still sane enough to see that our world is going mad. The prize is a life that our children will find worth living. For that we must fight, and for once an adverb by George Bush applies exactly. We must fight vociferously.

  Postscript

  My audience on the Gold Coast consisted entirely of people working in Australian commercial radio. Most of them were still in shock from John Howard’s recent election victory. If they had been working for the ABC, the country’s public service broadcasting network, it wouldn’t have been a matter of ‘most’. It would have been all of them. Australian media personnel, like the intelligentsia as a whole, tended to believe that Howard could have won only by fooling the electorate, and that the electorate, therefore, had become increasingly easy to fool. These were not opinions I shared, but I was there to entertain, rather than argue, so I thought it best to steer clear of the subject. I also tried to keep an even hand on the question of the forthcoming Presidential election in America. Once again, it was believed that a consensus of the publicly concerned would determine the outcome, and that George W. Bush was therefore doomed to defeat. I didn’t share that opinion either, but I could lampoon the incumbent with a whole heart, because I thought that, unlike Howard, Bush deserved to be consigned to oblivion if only it could be arranged. Howard, though the Australian progressive consensus would rather be hanged than grant him any mental quality beyond a certain low cunning, is more than clever enough to be a fit Prime Minister. Bush is not a fit President, and as the leader of the Free World he is a liability, not least because he is so ignorant that he can inadvertently insult even his allies. A man who believes that World War II began with Pearl Harbor should not be delivering a State of the Union address. He should be delivering pizza. Going on what I had seen of the Presidential debates, however, I saw no reason to believe that Senator Kerry would easily defeat him.

  Luckily I wasn’t called upon to make a political prediction. My nominated subject was the so-called Celebrity Culture, and I felt justified in sticking to that. The subject is quite political enough, and would go on being so whoever occupied the highest office in Australia, Britain or the United States. Fast food doesn’t necessarily drive out slow food – for every new branch of McDonald’s, a good ethnic restaurant opens somewhere – but it certainly increases the weight of people who eat nothing else, and sooner or later, if you do a lot of travelling, you will find yourself sitting between a couple of them on an aircraft. Similarly, there are alternatives to reality television, but anyone who believes that it doesn’t increase the total stupidity in a given culture is simply dreaming. President Bush can’t see that the privatization of the benefits system will turn life insurance into a lottery, but that is because he is too obtuse to know the difference. Intelligent people, and intellectuals above all, should realize that the Celebrity Culture is the free market run rampant, and if they can’t see how it can be curbed without infringing liberty, should at least think how it can be offset by argument, so as to provide their fellow consumers with a less debilitating ideal. Satire is one way, but the satirists become celebrities too. I don’t pretend to know the answer, but I can honestly report that when I delivered this address I got a thoughtful response for having asked the question. The jokes, when successful, might even have helped in this: people are often ready for a new thought after they laugh, just as they are ready for a fresh breath after they sneeze. The joke about the retiring Governor of Tasmania depended on the knowledge being fresh in everyone’s memory that he had been a diplomatic catastrophe. William S
hatner’s hairpiece, however, was a hit even with those who had never seen it. The image has been passed down through the generations. It’s no bad thing: the iconography of show business is a frame of reference, and there is virtue in being able to name all the actors who played the Magnificent Seven. I even know which one of them saved Frank Sinatra from drowning. (It was Brad Dexter.) But when the ice-skater Tonya Harding started showing up on television to explain her motivation for taking out a contract on her rival’s kneecap, it was time to wonder, and if Lynndie England gets a book deal it will be time to panic.

  The word ‘book’, however, reminds me to be honest, even if it hurts. When it comes to the less popular arts, a high media profile pays off. Unless you can wangle a subsidy, you need publicity. My books of essays would be less likely to earn out their advances if I were not a recognizable name on television and radio. In the US I am not that, and they don’t. In the US a writer can be a recluse, but he has to be a famous recluse – Thomas Pynchon, J. D. Salinger – if his books are to stay in print. In Britain and Australia, a writer, no matter how talented, can’t be a recluse for long, or he will lose his publisher. Now that I have enough free time to attend the festivals when invited, I attend them all, and do my best to put on a show, as well as hit all the associated radio and television shows that my publisher can arrange. Except in rare cases, I find it excruciating to sit for newspaper profiles, but my publisher would suffer worse pain if I turned them all down. In addition, when there is a new book to push, I accept guest spots on any talk shows that don’t require me to wear a funny hat or discuss the uses of a motorized pink dildo with a man who streaks his hair. I would like to think that my book of collected poems, The Book of My Enemy, would have paid its way unassisted. But it didn’t hurt to recite a poem on air to Richard and Judy, and another poem to Posh Spice and David Bowie on Parkinson. So it could be said that I am against the Celebrity Culture for everyone except myself. But I still prefer to think that if I had only myself to promote, and not a body of work, I would have no excuse for being in the limelight. There was a day, admittedly, when I sought the limelight for its own sake. But I was young at the time, and there were far fewer crazy people doing the same thing. A brief way of putting it, and perhaps a fitting conclusion to this book, is that I care enough about writing poems and essays to want other people to read them. They aren’t private forms, although any writer who believes they are will have no trouble demonstrating his conviction.

  THE MEANING OF RECOGNITION

  CLIVE JAMES is the author of more than thirty books. As well as essays and novels, he has published collections of literary and television criticism, travel writing and verse, plus four volumes of autobiography, Unreliable Memoirs, Falling Towards England, May Week Was in June and North Face of Soho. As a television performer he has appeared regularly for both the BBC and ITV, most notably as writer and presenter of the ‘Postcard’ series of travel documentaries. He helped to found the independent television company Watchmaker, and the Internet enterprise Welcome Stranger, one of whose offshoots is a multimedia personal website, www.clivejames.com. In 1992 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia, and in 2003 he was awarded the Philip Hodgins memorial medal for literature.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  Unreliable Memoirs

  Falling Towards England

  May Week Was in June

  Always Unreliable

  North Face of Soho

  FICTION

  Brilliant Creatures

  The Remake

  Brrm! Brrm!

  The Silver Castle

  VERSE

  Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage through the London Literary World

  Other Passports: Poems 1958–1985

  The Book of My Enemy: Collected Verse 1958–2003

  CRITICISM

  The Metropolitan Critic (new edition, 1994)

  Visions Before Midnight

  The Crystal Bucket

  First Reactions (US)

  From the Land of Shadows

  Glued to the Box

  Snakecharmers in Texas

  The Dreaming Swimmer

  Fame in the Twentieth Century

  On Television

  Even As We Speak

  Reliable Essays

  As of This Writing (US)

  TRAVEL

  Flying Visits

  Acknowledgements

  Some of these essays first appeared as articles in the TLS, the London Review of Books, the Spectator, the Independent, the Guardian, the Sunday Times, the Australian, the Australian Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker. The essay about Primo Levi’s biographers was included in As of This Writing, a selection of my essays published in the US by W. W. Norton in 2003, but has not previously appeared in book form elsewhere. The Independent obituary for Sarah Raphael was reprinted along with contributions from Frederic Raphael and William Boyd in a memorial pamphlet of her drawings published in 2004. Two of the pieces began as public lectures: Our First Book was an address given at the invitation of the State Library of New South Wales in 2002, and The Meaning of Recognition was my acceptance address in Mildura when receiving the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal in 2003. Both lectures were later printed by the Australian Book Review. Printed here as an essay, Save Us from Celebrity was a conference paper given to the Australian Commercial Radio Association on the Gold Coast in 2004. In many cases, production cuts have been restored, and in most cases a postscript has been added: a device I have taken to in recent years so as to amplify or correct a point in the light of later events, rather than, by rewriting the original piece, to confer on it a bogus prescience. If the critic can’t criticize himself, he shouldn’t be criticizing anything. My thanks as always to the editors and commissioners concerned. Several of the pieces, minus their footnotes, have been available on www.clivejames.com while waiting to be incorporated into this book. For help with the website, which also features radio and television interviews, I owe a special debt to my generous young cybernaut colleagues and their futuristic expertise. A multimedia website is a marvellous thing to see. The book, however, not much changed since Gutenberg, is still the breakthrough in communications technology that leaves me wondering how anybody ever thought of it.

  C.J.

  First published 2005 by Picador

  First published in paperback 2006 by Picador

  This electronic edition published 2012 by Picador

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

  Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-0-330-52717-0 EPUB

  Copyright © Clive James 2005

  The right of Clive James to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  The Macmillan Group has no responsibility for the information provided by any author websites whose address you obtain from this e-book (‘author websites’). The inclusion of the author website addresses in this e-book does not constitute an endorsement by or association with us of such sites or the content, products, advertising or other materials presented on such sites.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any
author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.