Clive James On Aphorisms

When reading 'The Revolt Of The Pendulum', the collected essays of Clive James from 2005-2008, and a book so enjoyable that I really don't want it to end, the high degree of the author's obvious civilisation and refinement could easily make one forget that he became a household name by showing clips of Japanese gameshow contestants enduring the indignity of having maggots stuffed into their underpants.

On the other hand, watching his show provided me with enough intellectual savvy to be able to see through 'Dragons' Den'. What Clive James might have to say about the importing into the UK, and the investing with credibility, of the type of Japanese humiliation gameshow that he used to be paid to make us laugh at could be worth hearing, if only because it might say more about us, and what we have become, than about the Japanese, and what they might always have been.

James was, of course, the deserved recipient of the most brutal put-down effected by one human being upon another that I have seen in all of the mostly fruitless years I've spent watching British television, and on one of his own shows as well, the early Channel 4's 'The Late Clive James'. If memory serves (I was only 12 or 13 at the time), it went something like this -

'Clive James - So where did you learn about sex?

Frederic Raphael - Well, I certainly didn't learn about it in the gutter.'

And bravo to you, Mr. Raphael, for the question was disgraceful.

I suppose that when you confess an attachment to 'Portnoy's Complaint', as James does, you could be said to be taking your life in your hands. However, James is clearly a civilised man. His reviews of John Bayley's criticism are a useful primer for those of us unlikely ever to encounter it, never mind even think of reading it. His raucously vicious deconstruction of Elias Canetti is a joy to read. There are times when his concern for the degradation of the English language seems so curmudgeonly, so more suited to bubblegum TV like 'Grumpy Old Men' than a collection of essays, that one almost thinks 'Which cares?' Yet these are minor quibbles. He is so civilised that he reads Karl Kraus! And Alfred Polgar!

His quotation of Polgar's aphorism that 'Striking aphorisms require a stricken aphorist' was a bit too close to the knuckle for comfort; conjoined to his assertion that '(o)ne of the basic things a young writer about any branch of history needs to learn is that if a quote sounds good, the person quoted is saying something that somebody else said first', it became a 'See You, Jimmy!' challenge.

And a fruitful one it was as well, for I have disproved James, and in the short distance between the sofa and the kettle as well; for if one were trying to describe a romantic interlude between a well-known actress and a well-known cricketer, one could say that she had won the toss.