Death of Clive James: Great literary figure who was simultaneously clever and funny

The Western world has lost one of its greatest literary talents. The poet, writer and broadcaster Clive James has died at 80. James was renowned for being simultaneously clever and funny. Don’t quit this report early because one of the most hilarious pieces you will ever read is at the end of it.

James was born in Australia but made his name after moving to the UK in 1961. Diagnosed with leukaemia 10 years ago and later emphysema and kidney failure, James predicted his own death many times, so often PJ O’Rourke told him to put a plug in it because the public would get impatient. “Cultural Amnesia”, a series of mini-biographies of famous figures, and “Always Unreliable”, three volumes of memoirs in one, are two of James’ works that will be appreciated by book-lovers.

After his daughter gave him a maple tree, James wrote a poem that went viral. Here are the last two verses re-published in his memory:

My daughter’s choice the maple tree is new
Come autumn its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that. That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same.
Fiddling the double doors to bathe my eyes
A final flood of colours will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by a vision of a world that shone
So brightly, and then was gone.

Don’t read “Always Unreliable” in public because cackling will get you strange looks. Here is one of the funniest episodes in it:

James tells the story of a fellow student at Cambridge who was adept at pulling girls. The Dean was a noted geologist who had his office stuffed with rocks.

“Abramovitz toured the school in Station Road where foreign girls came to learn English, picked himself a strapping German with paradigmatically Aryan features, brought her back to his room and gave her English lessons. The fee was not in cash but in kind. Through Abramovitz’s frequently sported oak, the squeals of his guest penetrated with ease. What was he doing to her in there? When I met him in the gyp room, he would explain trembling with repletion that he was doing his bit for historic justice.

“‘I’ve enslaved her, dear boy. It’s the guilt. She’s putty in my hands.’

“I think he taunted her in the throes of need. Anyway, there was a big scandal when the ancient bedder (lady who made the beds) — the same Mrs Blade who was my bedder, too — tottered into his bedroom one morning and found half a dozen loosely knotted, awesomely heavy used condoms festooned all over the decor. The one draped over the lampshade had started to fry. Presumably Mrs Blade had seen one or two of those things before, back around the time of the Battle of Jutland, because when she eyeballed six of them at once, the shock of recognition drove her backwards all the way down the stairs and across the Dean’s office where she had hysterics among the haematite. Convulsions amid the chrysopase. She passed out into the porphyry.”