Clive James Meet the Author

to the writer and broadcaster Clive James.

We've come out of the studio to meet this week's author.

I'm in Cambridge with Clive James, writer, critic, wit and poet, that's

And alongside his Collected Poems, he's publishing Gate of Lilacs,

which he calls a verse commentary on Proust's great novel Remembrance

He says it's a novel about gratitude, for life,

love, and art - an attitude he shares with the author as he

It still amazes me I ever got interested in him,

I like to think I'm quite butch and Proust wasn't that.

He is exquisite and I'm not, and there's nothing

I think in many ways the novel, Remembrance of Things Past

is an essay, trying to bring in his appreciation

Of course, he's talking at the moment where the fin

de siecle was ending, and the great artistic explosion

was beginning, so you're talking about a moment

that's affected us all, in terms of our culture,

He was that strangest of cultural figures.

He was a cultural revolutionary, in fact.

Nothing mattered more to him than the richness of the past,

but he was preparing the future, as he wrote about it.

Now when you look back on him, he's practically a hippie.

As everyone knows, you've not been well, you're ill.

You know you're ill, you've talked about it a great deal,

you are approaching the end of your life.

You talk about Proust writing in the full bloom

of the hothouse of his dying.

Clearly that something you feel very strongly?

The big difference between the author -me -

and Proust himself is that Proust was always sick.

And I found out a lot about life when I got sick,

because I never knew what it was like not to be healthy.

He was an asthmatic, which is like death happening

There wasn't any medical treatment that was going to save him,

so his life was lived in the shadow of death, it was a form of death.

He knew a lot about the approaching extinction.

His book is also about that, about how the prospect of vanishing

concentrates your attention on the world.

I, of course, have got more interested in that lately.

You read the book, all its volumes over quite a long period.

RU Sirius when you say you are using it as a way

But my message in the poem is, don't bother about that,

because what you're hearing off his page is the language

I wanted to know what it sounded like in the beginning,

and I thought, well, I'll learn French while I'm doing this.

It took me 15 years to get through him in French,

but I was also reading the English translation as well.

And I would recommend to anyone watching this,

to start with the English translation, because it's great.

Of course, you use this form, as you meditate about the book

and talk about it and explore your own reactions, you talk

For example, your background with your mother, the death

of your father, so you're using it as a kind of grand receptacle

Because that relationship with your mother is one that,

I suppose it does with all of us, shaped to your life?

That was probably one of the connections I really had

The book starts with the young Marcel fretting in his bedroom

because his mother hasn't climbed the stairs to kiss him.

And instead of throwing the book at the wall and never reading it

Caring too much about your mother, yes, was my experience.

Proust was quite capable of beginning this thing

without knowing how he was going to bring it to amend.

It all ends in a big party, and everyone in the book

sort of gathers there, even when, if you do the maths,

People I used to know are dropping off the twig

Do you think it all ends with a big party?

I think the whole thing was a big party, and you finally realise it,

but that's if you're lucky, you've got to be lucky.

Your vitality in verse, in this style of verse,

seems as great as it was when you arrived here in the early

60s and began to write in the way that you did?

It's all that is left, and blessedly, since I can

It helps me concentrate on the one thing I can do,

The day might come when I can't write any more.

But the big question is, will I know?

How do you know when you are writing badly?

You talk at the end of the poem about a safe harbour,

a warm harbour, a beautiful harbour...

Which is where you come to in the end.

I was going to say, it's clearly Sydney

I've already said in my will, that's where my ashes

should go, they should be scattered on the harbour.

I said this blithely, without realising that first

of all the ashes would have to get on the plane.

Second, the Australian Customs will almost certainly not let them in.

Thirdly, there is almost certainly an ordinance against putting

You don't look or sound, to me, as a man who's about to die.

Because I feel exactly like someone...

One of the drawbacks of my condition is I feel quite tired, quite easily.

So one always thinks one might not make it to the morning.

2010 was my critical year, I almost died that year,

But luckily when my leukaemia went into remission it went

into remission for long enough for the scientists to

Now I have something to stave off the leukaemia.

When you wake up each morning, and the light is still coming in...

It comes streaming in through those doors.

That light, a harsh eastern light, maybe in Cambridge,

Yes I do, and then I write something to celebrate.

Well I haven't got a schedule or a plan, but there's nothing else

I won't be going for a jog tomorrow morning.

But you will have a piece of paper or a laptop?

I know when a poem is really arriving when it gets me up

The problem with the poem, as a former, when it gets

into your head, you have to pay attention to it,

even today, tomorrow, even if it takes years.

And that's the evidence, in the end, that's the essence?

You should write only what you must write,

That is my only advice to young poets.

To the end you remain, fundamentally, a poet?

A lot of people claim it who really don't deserve it.

I'd like to think I have earned it by now.

But I understand those people who think I'm really an entertainer.

It's not such a bad thing to be, an entertainer, is it?

You can make a long list of people who aren't entertaining.

Clive James there. Let's have a look at the weather now with