North Face of Soho: Unreliable Memoirs Volume IV: vol. 4 [Hardcover]

Some commentators seem to tend to the view that Clive James has an over-high opinion of his own qualities. My own view is that these same commentators ought to belt up until they have written an article with anything like the clout of the introduction to From the Land of Shadows, to pick just one from a wide range of alternatives. North Face of Soho is the fourth volume in the Unreliable Memoirs series and it has been a long time since the third, May Week was in June, published back in 1990. Since then we have seen a lot less of James on the television and it is unlikely viewers under thirty will appreciate how much of a peak-time feature he was not so long ago.

There is no evidence in this book that James misses those times, and overall he appears to think that he is well out of it. Readers will find that North Face is generally darker in tone than the earlier volumes in the series, which had an embarrassing tendency to leave one spluttering with laughter whilst travelling on public transport, but there are still plenty of eye widening episodes included. Some of these relate to the author's copious consumption of booze and cannabis, both of which he gave up completely during the period covered, and the extent of his addictive tendencies is surprising, given the discipline that seems to have powered his creative output over the years.

A theme of slowly acquiring a greater sense of responsibility runs through this book. It begins shortly after James's marriage, with children on the way, and the future wellbeing of the family depending on his contribution to household income. The earlier sections tell of an endless round of poorly paid freelance pieces and deadlines that James could only meet by working through the night. The stress of these early days was eventually mitigated through regular slots on television and the TV review column for the Observer that started in 1972. An interesting sub-plot to this memoir relates to James's work as a lyricist. Given his standing as a critic and TV presenter, relatively few of James's fans may be aware that during the early 1970s he was expecting fortune, if not necessarily fame, to come from the music industry. The songs that he wrote with his old Cambridge colleague, the guitarist, singer and composer Pete Atkin, have become cult classics and deserve a much wider audience (you can widen it yourself now on Amazon), but at the time did not attract enough attention, despite the efforts of Kenny Everett.

Covering a period when media and literary giants were moving into the ascendancy, Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, James Fenton and Julian Barnes and many others pass through the book as part of the crowd at the famous London Literary lunches, but one of the most touching portraits is of Ian Hamilton, who James recalls: "... really did remove the lighted cigarette from his mouth only to replace it with the rim of a glass of Scotch...". Hamilton appears to have played an important part in James's life at this time, providing guidance at critical points along the way.

In his own Introduction James states that he has increasingly taken to wishing he had done things differently. This book does not make it entirely clear why this is the case, although poetry has always been the author's first passion, and perhaps he hoped to either achieve more or gain greater recognition for his work in that area. If this is the problem, then to some extent it belies James's own belief in the importance of the popular media. But perhaps the sense of disappointment is a result of the decline in the quality of television and newspaper offerings, both failing to live up to the promise they once had. If this is the reason then James has every right to feel proud that his contributions remain among the very best that the popular arts had to offer when that promise seemed real.

It's been a long time since the last installment of Clive James' Unreliable Memoirs appeared in 1990; the previous one came out five years before then, and the original volume (from which the series takes its title) five years before that. So there's been a change of pace, and there's a change of style as well. Much of the appeal of the first three books came from the stories of how a well-respected, intelligent, prolific media figure started out in life; the contrast between his tough public persona and - say - the defecating, masturbating, over-consuming child depicted in the first volume was particularly striking. The air of self-deprecation (if not brutal honesty) hung over the second and third installments, as he sought to make his way to England, and established himself at Cambridge.

Although this installment follows on immediately from the end of the last one (where he was just about to leave Cambridge following his marriage), everything changes here. Being more an account of how he found his way into London's media scene (where he became preeminent), he's left out the self-deprecation, preferring to tell the story straight. Part of this appears to be a sharing of his experiences in an attempt to instruct any reader who has ideas about following in his footsteps. This is doubtless a worthy cause, but it has the effect of limiting the range of appeal for the book - certainly when compared to the original volume, which (as he acknowledges here) has become the most popular of all his books.

So lovers of his wit and humour won't find much to admire here. They also won't find many examples of his brilliantly coruscating style - indeed, parts of the writing appear to be somewhat rushed, as he makes promises to return to subjects in a way that's almost chatty, and certainly not up to his usual standards of construction. The hubris that he's sometimes accused of breaks through here and there as well, as when he attempts to excuse his poor listening skills by noting that "they used to accuse Scott Fitzgerald of the same thing". However, there are still memorable examples of his characteristic knack for finding exactly the right image, as on p150: "If all the accomplished but not especially interesting would-be writers became schoolteachers and taught grammar, the country would be on the road to recovery. The sky has more stars than it knows what to do with, but it can't do without gravity."

"Falling Towards England" was always the funniest book I've ever read. In this latest installment of his memoirs Clive James takes the humour of the previous volume and hones it to a sophisticated perfection - the descriptions of his colleagues and various editors and mentors at The Pillar of Hercules had me bellowing with laughter - but tempers it with an older wisdom, a poignant sense of time passing all too quickly and not in the right direction.
Here too are some wonderful apercus about the process of writing, and a passionate sense of how much it matters. The result is a celebration of the fun of bohemia and of the deep seriousness which must underpin it if the work is to get done.