by Clive James
Velazquez (vide supra) for example.
You’re visiting the Prado, I presume?
Well, when you do, you’ll find a healthy sample
Abstracted from his oeuvre from womb to tomb.
The key works line one giant, stunning room:
Group portraits done in and around the Court
Whose brilliance cleans your brains out like a broom.
Bravura, yes. But products, too, of thought:
An inner world in which the Kings ruled as they ought,
Not as they did. His purpose wasn’t flattery
Or cravenly to kiss the royal rod.
He just depicted the assault and battery
Of Habsburg policies as acts of God,
Whose earthly incarnation was the clod
That currently inhabited the throne.
He deified the whole lot on his tod,
Each royal no-no, nincompoop and crone.
Great Titian was long gone. Velazquez was alone.
Alone, and hemmed about by mediocrities
(Except for once when Rubens came to town),
He must have felt as singular as Socrates
But didn’t let the pressure get him down.
He slyly banked his credit with the Crown
Until he was allowed a year abroad
(In Rome, of course. In Venice he might drown.)
To raise his sights by study. An award
The King well knew would be a hundredfold restored.
Conquistadores in their armadura
The drivers now are standing by their cars.
Unholy soldiers (but in purpose purer),
They look as if they’re shipping out for Mars.
It’s hard to tell the rookies from the stars:
When suited-up and masked, they seem the same.
White skin grafts are the veteran’s battle scars.
For A. J. Foyt the searing price of fame
Was branded round his mouth the day he ate the flame.
A year back young Swede Savage swallowed fire.
He took six months to die. It goes to show
How hot it is inside a funeral pyre
And just how hard a row the drivers hoe.
I can’t believe they’re in this for the dough.
The secret’s not beyond, but in, the fear:
A focal point of grief they get to know
Some other place a million miles from here –
The dream Hart Crane once had, to travel in a tear.
Eleven on the dot. The zoo gets hit
By lightning. Lions whelp and panthers panic.
The fastest qualifiers quit the pit
No more than hipbone-high to a mechanic
And take the track. The uproar is Satanic.
By now the less exalted have departed,
But still the sound is monumental, manic.
Librarians would hear it broken-hearted.
And this lap’s just for lining up. They haven’t started.
Around the speedway cruising on the ton
(Which means for Indy cars, they’re nearly stalling)
They blaze away like spaceships round the Sun –
A shout of thunder like Valhalla falling.
(I’m running out of epithets: it’s galling.
I’ve never heard a noise like this before.)
They’re coming round again. And it’s appalling –
The moment when you can’t stand any more,
The green light goes! Geronimo! Excelsior!
It’s gangway for the new apocalypse!
They’re racing at two hundred miles an hour!
The likelier contenders get to grips
Like heavy cavalry berserk with power
And three-time-winner Foyt already rips
Away to lead the field by half a mile
As up the ante goes. Down go the chips.
No one but Rutherford can match that style,
And he starts too far back. I’ll tell you in a while
The way it all comes out, but now I’ve got
To set this screed aside and keep a check
From lap to lap on who, while driving what,
Gets hits by whom or ends up in a wreck.
A half a thousand miles is quite a trek –
Though even as I’m jotting down this line
A. J.’s got someone breathing down his neck …
Yes, Rutherford’s McLaren, from row nine,
Has moved up more than twenty places. Heady wine!
Since Johnny Rutherford is from Fort Worth
And Foyt from Houston, they are Texans twain:
The both of them behind the wheel since birth,
The both of them straight-arrow as John Wayne.
This thing they’re doing’s technically insane
And yet there’s no denying it’s a thrill:
For something fundamental in the brain
Rejoices in the daring and the skill.
The heart is lifted, even though the blood may chill.
It’s SOME TIME LATER. On the victory dais
Glad Rutherford gets kissed and plied with drink.
It looks a bit like supper at Emmaus.
Unceasing worship’s damaging, I think:
One’s standards of self-knowledge tend to sink.
I’d like to try it, though, I must confess.
Perhaps a little bit. Not to the brink.
Nor would that heap of lolly cause distress:
Three hundred thousand dollars – not a penny less.
Until halfway, the prize belonged to Foyt.
His pretty GILMORE RACING ketchup-red
Coyote skated flatter than a quoit,
The maestro lying down as if in bed.
He only led by inches, but he led –
Until his turbo-charger coughed white smoke.
The car kept running quickly while it bled,
But finally – black flag. For Foyt, no joke:
Unless he had his money on the other bloke.
The Coming Boy on his eleventh try
At winning the ‘500’ finished first.
A perfect journey. No one had to die.
On looking back, I think about the worst
Catastrophe was that an engine burst.
The empty Brickyard bakes in silent heat,
The quarter-million race-fans have dispersed,
And I have got a deadline I must meet:
I have to tell the story of the champion’s defeat.
Velazquez was ennobled in the end.
(Old Philip, fading fast, could not refuse
The final accolade to such a friend.)
His background was examined for loose screws
(Against the blood of craftsmen, Moors or Jews
Bureaucracy imposed a strict embargo)
And in a year or so came the good news,
Together with the robes and wealthy cargo
They used to hang around a Knight of Santiago.
Encumbered thus, he sank into the grave.
The man is dead. The artist is alive.
For lonely are the brilliant, like the brave –
Exactly like, except their deeds survive.
My point (it’s taken ages to arrive)
Is simply this: enjoy the adulation,
But meanwhile take a tip from Uncle Clive
And amplify your general education.
There’s more than literature involved in cultivation.
Tomorrow in the London afternoon
I’ll miss your stubby, Jaggerish appearance
And wish you back in Fleet Street very soon.
Among the foremost ranks of your adherents
I’m vocal to the point of incoherence
When totting up your qualities of mind.
You’ve even got the rarest: perseverance.
A wise adviser ought to be resigned,
Unless he keeps the pace hot, to being left behind.
/>
‘We’re given Art in order not to perish
Faced with the Truth.’ Or words to that effect.
An apophthegm of Nietzsche’s which I cherish:
He sees how these two areas connect
Without conceding that they intersect.
Enough for now. Go easy, I implore you.
It all abides your questing intellect.
The Heritage of Culture, I assure you,
Like everything, you lucky sod, is all before you.
To Tom Stoppard: a letter from London
To catch your eye in Paris, Tom,
I choose a show-off stanza from
Some Thirties play
Forgotten now like Rin Tin Tin.
Was it The Dog Beneath the Skin?
Well, anyway
Its tone survives. The metres move
Through time like paintings in the Louvre
(Say loov, not loover):
Coherent in their verbal jazz,
They’re confident of tenure as
J. Edgar Hoover.
Pink fairies of the sixth-form Left,
Those Ruined Boys at least were deft
At the actual writing.
Though history scorns all they thought,
The nifty artefacts they wrought
Still sound exciting.
Distinguishing the higher fliers
Remorselessly from plodding triers
Who haven’t got it,
Such phonic zip bespeaks a knack
Of which no labour hides the lack:
A child could spot it.
And boy, you’ve got the stuff in bales –
A Lubitsch-touch that never fails.
The other guys
Compared to you write lines that float
With all the grace of what gets wrote
By Ernest Wise.
The Stoppard dramaturgic moxie
Unnerves the priests of orthodoxy:
We still hear thicks
Who broadcast the opinion freely
Your plays are only sketches really –
Just bags of tricks.
If dramas do not hammer themes
Like pub bores telling you their dreams
The dense don’t twig.
They want the things they know already
Reiterated loud and steady –
Drilled through the wig.
From all frivolity aloof,
Those positivist killjoys goof
Two ways at once:
They sell skill short, and then ignore
The way your works are so much more
Than clever stunts.
So frictionless a jeu d’esprit,
Like Wittgenstein’s philosophy,
Appears to leave
Things as they are, but at the last
The future flowing to the past
Without reprieve
Endorses everything you’ve done.
As Einstein puts it, The Old One
Does not play dice,
And though your gift might smack of luck
Laws guide it, like the hockey puck
Across the ice.
Deterministic you are not,
However, even by a jot.
Your sense of form
Derives its casual power to thrill
From operating at the still
Heart of the storm.
For how could someone lack concern
Who cared that gentle Guildenstern
And Rosencrantz
(Or else the same names rearranged
Should those two men be interchanged)
Were sent by chance
To meet a death at Hamlet’s whim
Less grand than lay in store for him,
But still a death:
A more appalling death, in fact
Than any king’s in the Fifth Act –
Even Macbeth?
In south-east Asia as I type
The carbuncle is growing ripe
Around Saigon.
The citadels are soon reduced.
The chickens have come home to roost.
The heat is on,
And we shall see a sickness cured
Which virulently has endured
These thirty years:
The torturers ran out of jails,
The coffin-makers out of nails,
Mothers of tears,
While all the Furies and the Fates
Unleashed by the United States
In Freedom’s name
Gave evidence that moral error
Returns in tumult and in terror
The way it came.
But now the conquerors bring peace.
When everyone is in the police
There’s no unrest.
Except for those who disappear
The People grin from ear to ear –
Not like the West.
Rejecting both kinds of belief
(Believing only in the grief
Their clash must bring)
We find to use the words we feel
Adhere most closely to the real
Means everything.
I like the kind of jokes you tell
And what’s more you like mine as well –
Clear proof of nous.
I like your stylish way of life.
I’ve thought of kidnapping your wife.
I like your house.
Success appeals to my sweet tooth:
But finally it’s to the truth
That you defer –
And that’s the thing I like the best.
My love to Miri. Get some rest.
A tout à l’heure.
To Craig Raine: a letter from Biarritz
Dear Craig, I’ve brought your books down to the sea
In order to catch up with what you’ve done
Since first I gasped at your facility
For writing Martian postcards home. The sun
Illuminates The Onion, Memory
Two pages at a time. The beach girls run
With naked bosoms on my low horizon
And yet yours are the lines I’ve got my eyes on.
Not all the time perhaps, but none the less
It’s fair to say I’m utterly drawn in.
When praising your alchemical prowess
One hardly knows the best place to begin.
Your similes are struck with such success
At least one bard has called your gift a sin.
You spot resemblances with a precision
Not normally conferred by human vision.
What I admire and envy most, however,
Is your unflinching hunger for the real.
Proportionate you are but pallid never.
With strength of knee unknown to the genteel
You push on with your passionate endeavour
To sweep aside the veil of the ideal
And view the actual world on a straight footing
In every aspect, even the off-putting.
‘Your stomach’s got no eyes,’ a man once said
Who’d guessed I didn’t like how oysters look.
For you I’d stand that saying on its head:
Your eyes have got no stomach. They can brook,
Nay revel in, sights that would strike me dead
And make me queasy even in a book.
I’d like to call it sorcery or knavery
But all too clearly it’s a kind of bravery.
You’d need it, too, if you were here today,
I think I might just mention at this point.
For every sweet young curved hip on display
There squeaks a fearsomely arthritic joint.
Those oiled old hands will never smooth away
The cellulite and wrinkles they anoint,
And many of the bare breasts on parade
Sensationally fail to make the grade.
Squeezed flat and creased like empty toothpaste tubes
Or else inflated to degrees grotesque –
To sum up this array of has-been boobs
The only adjective is Düreresque.
That woman sports a pair of Rubik’s cubes.
That woman there could use hers as a desk.
At these exhausted sources of lactation
Words can’t convey my lack of fascination.
But back again to literary matters.
One or two critics, I have lately noted,
Are showing signs of going mad as hatters
At hearing you so often praised and quoted.
The strictest of them taciturnly natters
Of how you could well find yourself demoted:
You are too popular and should tread warily.
Also, he says, your lines end arbitrarily.
I always thought his ended when the bell
Rang on his Olivetti. Never mind.
Your stanza forms still check out pretty well,
Even if arbitrarily inclined.
They break no rules as far as I can tell.
There are no wasted words that I can find.
In later works your rhythm grows less striking
But that might mean strong rhythm’s to my liking.
Speaking of form and rhythm, incidentally,
Two water nymphs so beautiful I bet
The sight of them would paralyse you mentally
Are playing tennis. It seems I’m the net.
They must be highly privileged parentally:
Such clear skins and fine bones you only get
When there’s a solid family tradition
Of no-expense-spared, well-thought-out nutrition.
Needless to say that with these two the breasts
From every viewpoint seem in A1 shape,
Though no doubt if it came to tactile tests
There’d be a yielding, as with a ripe grape.
Praise God that they’ve got those where we’ve got chests
I muse, while being careful not to gape –
A bald and overweight old coot from Sydney
Who cops a Frog tart’s let ball in the kidney.
Now they’ve pranced off and plunged into a wave
Which warmly fondles them as who would not.
Their gaiety of mood has left mine grave,
Preoccupied with man and his brief lot.