The Meaning of Recognition (58 page)

Postscript

My audience on the Gold Coast consisted entirely of people working in Australian commercial radio. Most of them were still in shock from John Howard’s recent election
victory. If they had been working for the ABC, the country’s public service broadcasting network, it wouldn’t have been a matter of ‘most’. It would have been all of them.
Australian media personnel, like the intelligentsia as a whole, tended to believe that Howard could have won only by fooling the electorate, and that the electorate, therefore, had become
increasingly easy to fool. These were not opinions I shared, but I was there to entertain, rather than argue, so I thought it best to steer clear of the subject. I also tried to keep an even hand
on the question of the forthcoming Presidential election in America. Once again, it was believed that a consensus of the publicly concerned would determine the outcome, and that George W. Bush was
therefore doomed to defeat. I didn’t share that opinion either, but I could lampoon the incumbent with a whole heart, because I thought that, unlike Howard, Bush deserved to be consigned to
oblivion if only it could be arranged. Howard, though the Australian progressive consensus would rather be hanged than grant him any mental quality beyond a certain low cunning, is more than clever
enough to be a fit Prime Minister. Bush is not a fit President, and as the leader of the Free World he is a liability, not least because he is so ignorant that he can inadvertently insult even his
allies. A man who believes that World War II began with Pearl Harbor should not be delivering a State of the Union address. He should be delivering pizza. Going on what I had seen of the
Presidential debates, however, I saw no reason to believe that Senator Kerry would easily defeat him.

Luckily I wasn’t called upon to make a political prediction. My nominated subject was the so-called Celebrity Culture, and I felt justified in sticking to that. The subject is quite
political enough, and would go on being so whoever occupied the highest office in Australia, Britain or the United States. Fast food doesn’t necessarily drive out slow food – for every
new branch of McDonald’s, a good ethnic restaurant opens somewhere – but it certainly increases the weight of people who eat nothing else, and sooner or later, if you do a lot of
travelling, you will find yourself sitting between a couple of them on an aircraft. Similarly, there are alternatives to reality television, but anyone who believes that it doesn’t increase
the total stupidity in a given culture is simply dreaming. President Bush can’t see that the privatization of the benefits system will turn life insurance into a lottery, but that is because
he is too obtuse to know the difference. Intelligent people, and intellectuals above all, should realize that the Celebrity Culture is the free market run rampant, and if they can’t see how
it can be curbed without infringing liberty, should at least think how it can be offset by argument, so as to provide their fellow consumers with a less debilitating ideal. Satire is one way, but
the satirists become celebrities too. I don’t pretend to know the answer, but I can honestly report that when I delivered this address I got a thoughtful response for having asked the
question. The jokes, when successful, might even have helped in this: people are often ready for a new thought after they laugh, just as they are ready for a fresh breath after they sneeze. The
joke about the retiring Governor of Tasmania depended on the knowledge being fresh in everyone’s memory that he had been a diplomatic catastrophe. William Shatner’s hairpiece, however,
was a hit even with those who had never seen it. The image has been passed down through the generations. It’s no bad thing: the iconography of show business is a frame of reference, and there
is virtue in being able to name all the actors who played the Magnificent Seven. I even know which one of them saved Frank Sinatra from drowning. (It was Brad Dexter.) But when the ice-skater Tonya
Harding started showing up on television to explain her motivation for taking out a contract on her rival’s kneecap, it was time to wonder, and if Lynndie England gets a book deal it will be
time to panic.

The word ‘book’, however, reminds me to be honest, even if it hurts. When it comes to the less popular arts, a high media profile pays off. Unless you can wangle a subsidy, you need
publicity. My books of essays would be less likely to earn out their advances if I were not a recognizable name on television and radio. In the US I am not that, and they don’t. In the US a
writer can be a recluse, but he has to be a famous recluse – Thomas Pynchon, J. D. Salinger – if his books are to stay in print. In Britain and Australia, a writer, no matter how
talented, can’t be a recluse for long, or he will lose his publisher. Now that I have enough free time to attend the festivals when invited, I attend them all, and do my best to put on a
show, as well as hit all the associated radio and television shows that my publisher can arrange. Except in rare cases, I find it excruciating to sit for newspaper profiles, but my publisher would
suffer worse pain if I turned them all down. In addition, when there is a new book to push, I accept guest spots on any talk shows that don’t require me to wear a funny hat or discuss the
uses of a motorized pink dildo with a man who streaks his hair. I would like to think that my book of collected poems,
The Book of My Enemy
, would have paid its way unassisted. But it
didn’t hurt to recite a poem on air to Richard and Judy, and another poem to Posh Spice and David Bowie on
Parkinson
. So it could be said that I am against the Celebrity Culture for
everyone except myself. But I still prefer to think that if I had only myself to promote, and not a body of work, I would have no excuse for being in the limelight. There was a day, admittedly,
when I sought the limelight for its own sake. But I was young at the time, and there were far fewer crazy people doing the same thing. A brief way of putting it, and perhaps a fitting conclusion to
this book, is that I care enough about writing poems and essays to want other people to read them. They aren’t private forms, although any writer who believes they are will have no trouble
demonstrating his conviction.

CLIVE JAMES is the author of more than thirty books. As well as essays and novels, he has published collections of literary and television criticism, travel writing and verse,
plus four volumes of autobiography,
Unreliable Memoirs
,
Falling Towards England
,
May Week Was in June
and
North Face of Soho
. As a television performer he has
appeared regularly for both the BBC and ITV, most notably as writer and presenter of the ‘Postcard’ series of travel documentaries. He helped to found the independent television company
Watchmaker, and the Internet enterprise Welcome Stranger, one of whose offshoots is a multimedia personal website, www.clivejames.com. In 1992 he was
made a Member of the Order of Australia, and in 2003 he was awarded the Philip Hodgins memorial medal for literature.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Unreliable Memoirs

Falling Towards England

May Week Was in June

Always Unreliable

North Face of Soho

FICTION

Brilliant Creatures

The Remake

Brrm! Brrm!

The Silver Castle

VERSE

Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage through the London Literary World

Other Passports: Poems 1958–1985

The Book of My Enemy: Collected Verse 1958–2003

CRITICISM

The Metropolitan Critic (new edition, 1994)

Visions Before Midnight

The Crystal Bucket

First Reactions (US)

From the Land of Shadows

Glued to the Box

Snakecharmers in Texas

The Dreaming Swimmer

Fame in the Twentieth Century

On Television

Even As We Speak

Reliable Essays

As of This Writing (US)

TRAVEL

Flying Visits

Some of these essays first appeared as articles in the
TLS
, the
London Review of Books
, the
Spectator
, the
Independent
, the
Guardian
, the
Sunday Times
, the
Australian
, the
Australian Book Review
, the
Los Angeles Times
, the
New York Times
, the
Atlantic
Monthly
, the
New York Review of Books
and the
New Yorker
. The essay about Primo Levi’s biographers was included in
As of This Writing
, a selection of my essays
published in the US by W. W. Norton in 2003, but has not previously appeared in book form elsewhere. The
Independent
obituary for Sarah Raphael was reprinted along with contributions from
Frederic Raphael and William Boyd in a memorial pamphlet of her drawings published in 2004. Two of the pieces began as public lectures:
Our First Book
was an address given at the
invitation of the State Library of New South Wales in 2002, and
The Meaning of Recognition
was my acceptance address in Mildura when receiving the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal in 2003.
Both lectures were later printed by the
Australian Book Review
. Printed here as an essay,
Save Us from Celebrity
was a conference paper given to the Australian Commercial Radio
Association on the Gold Coast in 2004. In many cases, production cuts have been restored, and in most cases a postscript has been added: a device I have taken to in recent years so as to amplify or
correct a point in the light of later events, rather than, by rewriting the original piece, to confer on it a bogus prescience. If the critic can’t criticize himself, he shouldn’t be
criticizing anything. My thanks as always to the editors and commissioners concerned. Several of the pieces, minus their footnotes, have been available on www.clivejames.com while waiting to be incorporated into this book. For help with the website, which also features radio and television interviews, I owe a special
debt to my generous young cybernaut colleagues and their futuristic expertise. A multimedia website is a marvellous thing to see. The book, however, not much changed since Gutenberg, is still the
breakthrough in communications technology that leaves me wondering how anybody ever thought of it.

C.J.

First published 2005 by Picador

First published in paperback 2006 by Picador

This electronic edition published 2012 by Picador
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR
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ISBN 978-0-330-52717-0 EPUB

Copyright © Clive James 2005

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