Falling Towards England, by Clive James
Crocker, H. W. III
C live James is to British television what Dick Cavett is to American television—an intellectual who wants to be an entertainer, a combination bound to disappoint. The jokes of the entertainer sound...
...I n addition, of course, he has trouble with women...
...Most of his time, however, is spent in being fired from menial jobs for general incompetence, in shamelessly borrowing money from his friends, especially his girlfriends, and in building a personal library he can't afford...
...FALLING TOWARDS ENGLAND (UNRELIABLE MEMOIRS CONTINUED) Clive James/W...
...Falling Towards England is the story of a young man from the provinces (in this case, Kogarah, Australia) come to make his fortune in the big city—or, in James's case, to survive in London for two years so that he can establish his residency in England and win a scholarship to Cambridge...
...It did, too: a steaming hot mug of Nescafe...
...Perhaps it was a tactical error to give her my standard lecture on the evils of capitalism...
...My own luggage consisted of one very large suitcase made of mock leather—i.e., real cardboard"—filled with "a valuable collection of tennis shorts, running shorts, Hawaiian shirts, H. W Crocker III is a writer and editor in Washington, D.C...
...The common ground between revolutionaries and parliamentarians is made of air...
...When not, despite his socialist principles, dazzled by the beauty of the upper classes'Sitting out there with those wonderful, handwoven, gentleman's-relish women under the same sun, I was made invisible by my appearance, like a satyr in an old engraving who blends with a gnarled tree-trunk and its attendant shrubbery"--he suffers the usual slings and arrows of a bachelor's outrageous misfortune: "Pandora invited me back to her flat for coffee...
...Its transparency can be rendered apparent by a very small fact...
...At the end of Falling Towards England, James prepares to abandon his shambolic existence for the sheltered cloisters of Cambridge, expresses remorse for some of his many misdeeds, and even manages to exhibit a new political maturity...
...Nothing else...
...It matters little whether the bulk of this unreliable memoir is fact or fiction...
...W. Norton/$15.95 H. W. Crocker III 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1987...
...Scholars wishing to enshrine Clive James's place in the history of English literature—if such there be—can always devote themselves to ferreting out the truth (it's the sort of thing that keeps them out of mischief...
...It was like being thrown against a windscreen...
...The jokes of the entertainer sound silly, shallow, and low-brow when one is seeking intellection, and the literary references, invocations, and commentaries of the intellectual sound like pseudery, cant, and show when one is expecting entertainment...
...He also has trouble with his landladies, including Mrs...
...I told myself to stay calm and it would all drop into my lap...
...I gave her the short version—less than three-quarters of an hour—but before it was half over she was saying 'Really?' in the middle of each sentence as well as "at the end...
...And as a twenty-two-year-old graduate of the University of Sydney, a radical socialist, a would-be poet, and a grand bohemian poseur, he sees fit to bore all his friends with his ideas on politics, art, the cinema, and literature...
...If the mind develops at all in such circumstances, it is likely to do so leaving certain gaps, one of which will be the failure to realise that to borrow money without the intention of paying it back is a form of theft...
...But for the rest of us, the steam roller wit of this very funny book is its own reward...
...I pursued the life of the mind as if the world owed me a living...
...But whatever doubts one might have about Clive James—and an American audience probably won't have any, not having been widely exposed to him—can be blissfully washed away by this tremendously funny second volume of his "unreliable memoirs" ("unreliable," because where fact is too arid James has sensibly employed fiction to keep things moving, and because many of the characters are composites—though hard-working, lady-killing Dave Dalziel is obviously Bruce Beresford, James's former roommate and the director of Breaker Morant...
...I, on the other hand, believed that property was theft—a more glamorous idea altogether, and one which encouraged the notion that if you could induce an acquaintance to give you some of his property in the form of money you were practically a policeman...
...T-shirts, Hong Kong thong rubber sandals, short socks, sandshoes and other apparel equally appropriate for an English winter...
...You can be in a demonstration, someone near you will pick up a stone and you will realise that you are in the wrong place...
...He wallows in the usual horrors of an impoverished bachelorhood—he lives in filth, drinks too much, eats revolting food, is flummoxed by washing machines, and keeps his ludicrous clothes in a terrible state of disrepair...
...His entry into the land of hope and glory is a humble one...
...Bennett, who "was eighty plus and walked with a stoop, which meant, since she was not very tall in the first place, that I often didn't see her before falling over her," and Hearty McHale, who "rather than see us enjoy ourselves would have called for an air strike to destroy her own house...
...When I tried to kiss her on the way out I rammed her spectacle frames...
...Being obliged to remember from that day forward that your fine ideas weighed less than a pebble will never be comforting, but always salutary...
Vol. 20 • March 1987 • No. 3
