Clive James' fire extinguished with a final, critical offering

POETRY
The Fire of Joy: Roughly 80 Poems to Get by Heart and Say Aloud
Clive James, Picador, $34.99

"Dr Johnson said that when a man knows he is about to die, it concentrates the mind wonderfully. I am bound to say," muses Clive James near the beginning of his poetry anthology, The Fire of Joy, "that I have found the opposite."

It’s a tribute to the grit of the man that, while losing his eyesight due to cancer treatment last year, he marshalled his powers of concentration long enough to produce one last book, turning to reflect on poems he could remember by heart and which had been "the milestones marking the journey of my life".

Each selection in The Fire of Joy seems more moving in light of Clive James’ impending demise.Credit: Ben Rushton

The personal slant might suggest some idiosyncratic choices, but James has chosen a largely traditional selection of English-language verse across the centuries. From the 16th-century lyric poet Sir Thomas Wyatt to the contemporary Australian voice of Stephen Edgar, these poems are accompanied by brief commentaries brimming with James’ characteristic insight and drollery – but also showing, sometimes, his more flippant side.

"If Andrew Marvell had been called Andrew Dullfellow," he writes at one point (it must be said, a little immaturely), "his achievement might have seemed less wonderful to posterity." Still, James reckons Marvell is one of the English language’s finest poets, and highlights a superlative stanza from The Definition of Love to prove it: "Magnanimous Despair alone/ Could show me so divine a thing/ Where feeble Hope could ne’er have flown,/ But vainly flapp’d its tinsel wing."

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This book is neither quite memoir, nor quite criticism, but the context of its composition is inescapable and each choice seems more moving in light of James’ impending demise. His commentaries slide occasionally into poignant reflections: "Clear sight is no longer my great thing," he writes in response to George Herbert’s The Flower, "but as I look out into the blur of my back garden, I can see [the flowers] glowing."

Understandably, the theme of mortality recurs frequently, and few poems address it better than a 1586 elegy by the English conspirator Chidiock Tichborne, written just before his execution in his 20s: "My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,/ My feast of joy is but a dish of paine,/ My crop of corne is but a field of tares,/ And al my good is but vaine hope of gaine./ The day is past, and yet I saw no sunne,/ And now I live, and now my life is done."

This intimate reckoning with death, anguished in its clarity, sings across 400 years to comfort and humble anybody who, like James, is confronting their own end.

Elsewhere in the book we find the usual suspects: Whitman, Dickinson, Hopkins and the Romantics (excepting, oddly enough, Blake). James is also an astute critic of English Victorian poetry: while describing The Kraken, he identifies Tennyson’s "natural scientific insight" – which may help to explain why that very Victorian poet can strike us as prescient today.

In an extended appreciation of My Last Duchess, James describes Robert Browning as "a psychoanalyst before the fact". That seems true enough, and a page or so later, the inclusion of Matthew Arnold’s exquisite Dover Beach from 1851 will be a revelation for anyone who still writes off that most unfashionable poet as some clunky Victorian versifier.

The late Clive James pictured in 1980 on one of his trips back from Britain. Credit:

James also deserves a medal for championing the "faultless sense of rhythm" of modernist Charlotte Mew, one of the 20 century’s most neglected poets. A further hidden gem comes from Vita Sackville-West, whose little-known forays into poetry produced Craftsmen in 1926. "A poem as good as this can never die," James declares, as its first stanza shows: "All craftsmen share a knowledge. They have held/ Reality down fluttering to a bench;/ Cut wood to their own purposes; compelled/ The growth of pattern with the patient shuttle,/ Drained acres to a trench."

Read the poem aloud and you’ll probably never forget it. The book’s emphasis on the formal characteristics of poetry leads James to rhythmic, memorable verse from all eras; he dismisses the "pseudo-modernist idea that there might be something sufficiently fascinating about the way that words are arranged on the page".

He also confines the selection to one poem per poet, but that parity does allow strange parallels to emerge. You can’t help noticing the similarity, for instance, between the metaphysical John Donne and modernist Marianne Moore, with their compressed density and painted ideas, the intellect expressed through the image.

While full of the kind of squibs and indulgences that anyone might expect from a dying writer, The Fire of Joy is a generous and genial valediction from one of Australia’s most famous wits. Finally, the book concludes with a postscript about "growing up in a poetical Australia", which feels like the voyage home James always longed to make, but could not.