Unreliable Memoirs
James, Clive
UNRELIABLE MEMOIRS Clive James / Alfred A. Knopf/ $10.00 Ronald B. Shwartz Clive James is the eminent British critic of whom it was once said: "He keeps words spinning like saucers on poles."...
...There is a notable, if fleeting, exception...
...For all his early dare-deviltry, James is something of an emotional cowardhis forte is fun, not feelings, but it misses the point to say that his narrative objective was limited to fun...
...then taut, then snapped...
...With the facts as shaky as saucers on poles, only a select few seem stable: He was born in 1939 in New South Wales and christened "Vivian"-a name he later changed to the less effeminate Clive (lifted from a Tyrone Power movie...
...Unreliable Memoirs is a far cry from true confession or guilt-orgy, and there is cause to wonder if James isn't still "play-acting" even now...
...And it's exactly this that serves as the measure of how far the baby has come...
...This autobiography is a disguised novel...
...What Vivian did to Jaffas, James does to his memories of Vivian: He fondles them with his tongue, toys with them, sucks them dry for laughs-but seldom strays from their most palpable qualities...
...Of course, in every self-deprecating memoir there lurks a thinly disguised narcissist, and all his cries of "What a bad boy I was" may be translated "I've come a long way, baby...
...He once dressed up in green mask and cape and became'' the Flash of Lightning,'' inciting his fellow imps to wreak havoc on local building sites...
...by his own last-page admission, he is "not even yet sufficiently at peace with myself," and it's no wonder: He never veers far from the very real angst of his youth-guilt at having tormented his mother tolls through the book like a faint, leaden bell-but he never gets too close to it, never confronts the soft underbelly of trauma without taking refuge in the clown-suit...
...Boys will be boys, all right, but Vivian was a boy to the fourth power...
...In fact it is neither one nor the other (though his compatriots, who made it a best-seller, apparently thought the disclaimer was itself a ruse of some kind...
...The point, rather, is that James sought nothing less than catharsis ("Sick of being prisoner of my childhood, I want to put it behind me") and failed at it...
...Here it is on no less trifling a subject than eating, as opposed to launching, hard candies: The star lolly, outstripping even the Violet Crumble Bar and Fantail in popularity, was undoubtedly the Jaffa...
...He was a member of what he calls "the lucky generation," by which he means the generation that missed the century's major wars...
...There is, in fact, a certain nervous bustle to the man's style...
...His, after all, is a frankly "unreliRonald B. Shwartz is a Boston attorney and freelance writer...
...continuedon page 41) SHWARTZ (continued from page 39) As James tells it, he was a hell-bent little swine who spent his time, among countless other ways, cavorting with the neighborhood girl Allowed to Run Wild, or "exploiting a highly marketable capacity to fart at will'' for classroom entertainment ("timing, not ripeness, is all''), or competing in masturbation games with his precocious friend Gary, who is "able to conjure a whole vichyssoise into being...
...The Jaffa had a dark chocolate core and a brittle orange candy coat: in cross section it looked rather like the planet earth...
...You could fondle the Jaffa on the tongue until your saliva ate its way through the casing, whereupon the taste of chocolate would invade your mouth with a sublime, majestic inevitability...
...So that what we get is a coy muddling of fact and factoid, and a breezily comic one at that...
...The son, an only child, is untamed by his widowed mother and gets too much of what he wanted and not enough of what he needed...
...Was it her husband or her son who stood at the other end of the swooping ribbon that grew straight, then taut, then snapped...
...But not quite: At the end of WW II, his father, a POW in Japan, is released from prison only to perish when his home-bound plane crashes in a typhoon...
...Catching my streamer as she stood with thousands of others at the rail of the dock, my mother was as brave as if she had never done this before...
...Eventually, in my middle thirties, I got a grip on myself...
...Which ship was it that she was seeing...
...But the image, as it turns out, has to do not just with style and not just (as style always does) with the man: In Unreliable Memoirs, the story of his coming of age in Sydney, Australia, the image points more emphatically to the boy that James allegedly was -a smart-alecky imp, a kind of vaudevillian of derring-do-who, like a spinner of saucers, moved nowhere fast and sustained a lot of accidents...
...It presented two alternative ways of being eaten, each with its allure...
...And what he wanted, to put it discreetly, was not what Tom Sawyer or the Hardy Boys wanted...
...Beware such solemn candor, however...
...able" account: "Most first novels are disguised autobiographies...
...it is lovely, resonant, and profound, and it ends the book and one can only hope it begins a more "reliable" sequel: At 22, he is standing on board a Greek ship, about to leave home to seek his fortune in London: Could my loved ones tell from my eyes how much less I felt than they did...
...I know," says James, "that until very recent years I was never quite all there-that I was play-acting instead of living and that nothing except my own unrelenting fever of self-consciousness seemed quite real...
...But there can be no doubt that I had a tiresomely protracted adolescence, wasting a lot of people's time, patience and love...
...He is more anecdotal than reflective, and hardly ever sociological or psychological like Orwell in the classic reminiscence "Such, Such Were the Joys...
...Or you could bite straight through and submit the interior of your head to a stunning explosion of flavor...
...It's as if candor, for a licensed bull-artist like James, were the virtue of last resort...
...What redeems some otherwise tasteless prepubescent pap in this book-what makes the sexual, scatological, and (thanks to Vivian's chronic sinus condition) mucal obsessions palatable and even funny to a civil reader-is the exaggerated, almost endemically British precision of the prose, its sheer verve and resourcefulness...
...Or turning to more cultural sport, he and the gang attended a matinee performance of "Giselle" and, arming themselves with hard candies, stopped the show by taking aim at the dancer Al-brecht's codpiece...
...A packet of Jaffas was loaded like a cluster bomb with about fifty globular lollies the size of ordinary marbles...
Vol. 14 • August 1981 • No. 8
