by Clive James
They topped him, nearly all of them, but still
They stood around and got the story. ‘What
It cost? No bull?’ And when we thundered home
I sat the pillion, following his line
Through corners with the drag behind my back
Plucking and fluttering my shirt like sails,
Dreaming his dreams for him of AVUS Track,
Of Spa, the Ring, the Isle of Man TT,
The Monza Autodromo and the magic words, Grand Prix.
Two years later, on my spine at Ingleburn
Just after I came back from leave, I thought
Out piece by piece what must have happened.
He was older, and the bike was new: I’d seen
It briefly the year before and heard the things
He planned to do to it. Another BSA,
Still a push-rod job but OHV at least;
One-lung three-fifty. Home-made swinging arm
Both front and rear, a red-hot shaven head,
Light piston, special rings – the heavy stuff.
We lost contact. I kept hearing off and on
How broke he was from racing and improving her.
One Saturday while I practised the Present
With Bayonet Fixed, a thousand entities
In bullring splendour of precision blaze
To gladden hearts of all who’d guard our shores,
He banked through Dunlop Corner at Mount Druitt
Leading a pack of AJ7Rs –
All camshaft jobs, but not a patch on him.
A fork collapsed. The bike kicked up and paused,
Her throttle stuck wide open, as he sprawled
With helpless hours to watch her pitch and toss
Like some slow-motion diver on a screen
Before the chain came down across his throat.
I had leave the evening after. Halfway down
The street a neighbour told me at her gate,
And then another neighbour – they were all
Ready and willing, full of homilies
And clucking hindsight. And, I’ll give them this,
Of grief, too. He was noisy, but they’d liked him –
‘Phil killed himself at Druitt yesterday.’
It’s not that I felt nothing. I felt nothingness
Pluck at the armpits of my loose KDs
And balsa models jiggled on their shelves
While soaring roadways hurtled, shoulder high.
I had one thought before I turned away:
The trouble is, with us, we overreach ourselves.
A Line and a Theme from Noam Chomsky*
Furiously sleep; ideas green; colourless
Sweet dreams just lately ain’t been had.
Sweat smells like the colour of the jungle.
Things looked bad then. They go on looking bad.
No question Charlie asked for what he got
Below from us, from up there by the jets;
Else their I D-ola G’d’ve prevailed,
They’d’ve swum here and stole our TV sets.
We lined ’em up, we knocked ’em down; we smoked.
We finished off what we’d been told to do.
Back stateside I expected to forget
How heads look when an M16 gets through.
Green nightmares; pillow strangled; sheets mussed up
By day a ‘Go’ light stops me in my tracks.
Shades don’t help: they make the whole works green.
A night’s sleep is a string of heart attacks.
Furiously sleep; ideas green, colourless
Sweet dreams just lately ain’t been had.
That time our gunships hit us by mistake,
I was mad then, I mean angry. But this is mad.
The Outgoing Administration
The gods have eyes the colour of the sky.
They drink from crystal goblets full of cloud.
They laugh and sing a lot, but not aloud,
Since their appeal is mainly to the eye.
Their games become less hectic with the years,
Their wanton cries too feeble to deceive.
The very sight of them seems keen to leave:
It turns to powder like the salt of tears.
The vivid images are growing soft,
The purple robes are ceasing to wear well.
You see the azure through the muscatel
In all those grapes they’ve held so long aloft.
To think our children now will never know
How beautiful those creatures used to be,
How much more confident than you and me!
The reason why we had to let them go.
Neither One Thing Nor the Other
Sometimes I think perhaps I’m just obtuse.
Noon yesterday I took a turn through King’s.
The crippled physicist came whirring by,
No doubt preoccupied with cosmic things.
I stepped aside. Above us in the sky
A burping biplane shook a glider loose
Whose pilot, swerving sunward, must have felt
As overwhelmingly at liberty
As this man felt pinned down. Was that right, though?
To lie still yet see all might feel more free
Than not to know quite why you’re free to go.
The chair hummed off. The glider made no sound.
If I can’t fly, why am I not profound?
Le Cirque Imaginaire at Riverside Studios
In ‘The Phantom of the Clouds’ Apollinaire
Pretended to have gone downstairs to see
The acrobats, and found that when he tried
To drink in what he saw them do, it all
Turned bitter on the tongue. Pink pantaloons
Looked like decaying lungs. The fun was spoiled,
The family act more destitute than when
Picasso painted it. The War was on.
Apollinaire was in it, hence the dudgeon.
Without belittling him, you still might say
He needed horror to dilute delight,
Since childish joy to grown men feels like loss,
If only of childhood. There was a time,
Quite early in Le Cirque Imaginaire,
When Vicky Chaplin walked on the tight wire
Inverted underneath it, that I thought
I’d just turned five. Her father in his film
The Circus did a stunt like that, but had
To fake it, though with good results. He died
The death in later life, became a bore
About his immortality, which was
No longer under his control. It lives again
When his thin daughter, blessed with Oona’s looks,
Draped in sheet silver enters on all fours
High up on four tall stilts that look like six,
A basketballing insect from the depths
Of a benign nightmare.
Her husband makes
Surprises happen, just as, long ago,
With something of the same humility,
Her father could. A suitcase full of tricks
Yields up its secrets. Wherein lies the joke:
I mean the joke is that you see the way
It works. Except when the huge rabbit,
Which really couldn’t be in that red box,
Emerges to remind you that this coy
Parade of diffidence is based on full
Mastery of white magic.
Now the stage
Is full of birds and bouncing animals,
Of which only a few do not excrete.
Silk-slippered on the bare boards pipped with mire,
The happy couple take their curtain calls
And we go back into the world, which has,
No doubt, produced, while we’ve been gone,
Plenty of stuff to cut this down to size –
Car bombs in day-care centres, coups d’état
Less than Evita in a so-so week,
A torture farm in California
That takes all major credit cards.
Back in
Reality it needs Apollinaire
(Who went on being right about a war
That cost him half his head) to help retrieve
My reason from the most misleading evening
We spent at the imaginary circus –
Which children shouldn’t see without a warning
Things might start looking different in the morning.
______________
* Noam Chomsky gave colourless green ideas sleep furiously as an example of a random sequence of words which could have no meaning. It seemed possible that they could, if the context were wide enough, and that their meaning might relate to the Vietnam War, at that time Chomsky’s main political concern.
from The Book of My Enemy
POEMS
The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered.
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy’s much-praised effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life’s vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one’s enemy’s book –
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys,
The sinkers, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of movable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.
Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the glare of the brightly jacketed Hitler’s War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyard with a forlorn skyscraper
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed in by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretence,
Is there with Pertwee’s Promenades and Pierrots –
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor’s Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
‘My boobs will give everyone hours of fun.’
Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error –
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an event should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.
Sack Artist
Reeling between the redhead and the blonde
Don Juan caught the eye of the brunette.
He had no special mission like James Bond.
He didn’t play the lute or read Le Monde.
Why was it he on whom their sights were set?
For let’s make no mistake, the women pick
Which men go down in history as avid
Tail-chasers with the enviable trick
Of barely needing to chat up the chick –
From Warren Beatty back to ruddy David.
But why the broads latch on to the one bloke
Remains what it has always been, a riddle.
Byron though famous was both fat and broke
While Casanova was a standing joke,
His wig awry, forever on the fiddle.
Mozart made Juan warble but so what?
In Don Giovanni everybody sings.
The show would fall flat if the star did not
And clearly he’s not meant to sound so hot:
His women praise him, but for other things.
They trill of his indifference and disdain
But might have liked his loyalty still more.
We can’t, from how they lyrically complain,
Conclude that when he left they liked the pain
As much as they enjoyed the bliss before.
Bad treatment doesn’t do it: not from him,
Still less from us, who find out when we try it
That far from looking tickled they turn grim,
Leaving us at a loss out on a limb,
Instructed to obtain a kite and fly it.
Which doesn’t make the chap of whom we speak
Some gigolo devoted to their pleasure.
The fancy man turns no strong woman weak
But merely pumps out what was up the creek.
Plundering hulks he lays up little treasure.
Good looks don’t hurt but rate low on their own.
The teenage girls who fall for Richard Gere
Admit his face is random flesh and bone
Beside Mel Gibson’s, that his skin lacks tone
And when he smiles his pin eyes disappear.
They go bananas when he bares his chest
But torsos that outstrip his leave them cold.
One bit of you might well be the world’s best
But women won’t take that and leave the rest:
The man entire is what they would enfold.
The phallus fallacy thus shows its roots
Afloat in the pornographer’s wet dream
By which a synecdochic puss in boots
Strides forward frantic to be in cahoots
With his shy mote grown into a great beam.
A shame to be without the wherewithal
But all the wherewith you might have down there
Won’t get the ladies queuing in the hall –
Not if you let it loose at a masked ball,
Not if you advertise it on the air.
None of which means that lust takes a back seat.
Contrariwise, it is the main event.
The grandest grandes dames cease to be discreet.
Their souls shine through their bodies with the heat.
They dream of more to come as they lie spent.
The sort of women who don’t do such things
Do them for him, wherein might lie the clue.
The smell of transcendental sanction clings
Like injured ozone to angelic wings –
An envoy, and he’s only passing through.
In triumph’s moment he must hit the trail.
However warm the welcome, he can’t stay.
Lest those fine fingers read his back like braille
He has to pull out early without fail –
Preserve his mystery with a getaway.
He is the perfect stranger. Humbler grades
Of female don’t get even a brief taste –
With Errol Flynn fenced in by flashing blades
And Steve McQueen in aviator shades
It always was a dream that they embraced.
Sheer fantasy makes drama from the drab,
Sweet reverie a slow blues from the bleak:
How Cary Grant would not pick up the tab,
Omar Sharif sent roses in a cab,
Those little lumps in Robert Redford’s cheek.
Where Don’s concerned the first glance is enough:
For certain he takes soon what we might late.
The rest of us may talk seductive guff
Unendingly and not come up to snuff,
Whereat we most obscenely fulminate.
We say of her that she can’t pass a prick.
We call him cunt-struck, stick-man, power tool,
Muff-diver, stud, sack artist, motor dick,
Getting his end away, dipping his wick,
A stoat, a goat, a freak, a fucking fool.
So we stand mesmerized by our own fuss,
Aware that any woman, heaped with grief,
Will give herself to him instead of us
Because there is so little to discuss –
And cry perfido mostro! in relief.
Her true desires at long last understood,
She ponders, as she holds him locked above her,
The living definition of the good –
Her blind faith in mankind and womanhood
Restored by the dumb smile of the great lover.
The Supreme Farewell of Handkerchiefs
With acknowledgements to Arthur Gold and
Robert Fizdale, authors of Misia
‘I’ve left that great page blank,’ said Mallarmé
When asked why he’d not written of his boat.
There are such things as mean too much to say.
You have to let it drift, to let it float.
The man who did the asking was Manet,
Whose niece’s journal treasures the reply.
There are such things as mean too much to say,