Clive James grants Trent Dalton five hours of poetry and spirited debate in Cambridge

Australia’s finest novelist, essayist and television pioneer grants a five-hour interview - and reads us his poetry.

TWAM-20150328 EMBARGO FOR TWAM 28 March 2015 NO REUSE WITHOUT PERMISSION Clive James pic : Phil Fisk

Clive James, sitting in his Cambridge home, reads Japanese Maple, the poem about death that went viral when he published it online in September.

The resignation is palpable. James, 75, is losing his fight against emphysema and leukaemia, and it shows.

But there is still much he wants to say. Having seen a recent profile of poet Les Murray by The Weekend Australian Magazine’s Trent Dalton, James wondered if Dalton might like to interview him too.

Dalton was soon on a flight to England. What was meant to be a 30-minute interview expanded into a five-hour encounter, during which James talked with characteristic fatalism. “I’ve been technically dead now for several years,” he says.

But not really. James might be short of breath, but his spirit remains strong. The domestic setting looks plain, but the poetry, of everyday beauty seen by a man with increasingly limited time, transcends.

Dalton understood the significance of his task. “I felt the weight of it,” he says. “I felt like he was saying things that he wanted me to take back to Australia.” Australia, the country that James will never see again, but still sees vividly in his mind.

“He can see his beloved Sydney with such clarity he wonders sometimes if he’s hallucinating,” wrote Dalton in the story that appears in the Weekend Australian Magazine tomorrow.

The encounter is punctuated by moments when James, exhausted, retires to his bedroom, leaving Dalton alone in the writing room, free to peruse anything or just gaze out the window at the Japanese maple that inspired the recent, famous poem.

Dalton splits his observations between two stories — a portrait of the dying James in the Magazine, and a discussion of his work in Review, in which James is his usual ironic self:

“It wouldn’t matter if I stopped now,” he says. “I feel I’ve done enough to establish what I’m here for. On the other hand, I would like another hundred years if you could arrange it.”

Read both stories in The Weekend Australian tomorrow.