Twenty years ago Clive James’s poetry represented all that I most disliked about contemporary Englit. For a start it was practically ubiquitous. Barely had one laid down the Christmas number of the London Review of Books containing a lengthy Jamesian summary of the bygone year, it seemed, than one walked into a bookshop to find a remaindered copy of Charles Charming’s Challenges winking at one from the bargain bin. Then again, an air of metropolitan cliquishness rose off its shiny surface like sweat. It appeared to consist mostly of tinkling tributes to well-placed chums (‘Among the foremost ranks of your adherents/I’m vocal to the point of incoherence,’ our man addressed his fast friend Martin Amis) of the kind who clustered around the editorial desk of the late Ian Hamilton’s New Review. It was in addition both self-advertisingly brainy (lots of foreign quotations) and tremendously pleased with itself.
All that, I hasten to add, was two decades back and time has softened many, if not all, of these asperities.
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