On Clive James' The River in the Sky

On Clive James’ The River in the Sky



A famous and powerful man, a sort of emperor, senses that death is imminent.  In ancient Egypt, the ruler’s retainers would gather together treasures that the dying man required in the next world.  Rare foodstuffs would be packaged.  Unguents and perfumes would be squeezed into alabaster and jade vessels.  Weapons and thrones, favorite horses, chariots, luxury household items – all of these precious things would be assembled to be interred in the ruler’s tomb.  In some cultures, slaves, wives, and concubines would be slaughtered so as to accompany their lord on his celestial journey.  An Egyptian pharaoh, Clive James tells at the outset of his final book-length poem,  The River in the Sky, would be provisioned for “endless travel/Across the sea of stars...to immortality.” These regal preparations for death are the occasion and subject of James’ book.  As he feels death approaching, James searches his memory for the riches that he wishes to accompany him into the hereafter: “Boats in the windows, treasures on the terrace/As if I weren’t just Pharaoh’s tomb designer” but, instead, “the living god in the departure lounge/ Surrounded by his glistering aftermath.”  James begins by summoning favorite books from his library – characteristically this selection is a culling: he has “weeded his books” to a select few, the volumes that are central to his existence on this earthly plane and, later, in an afterlife in which the poet doesn’t believe.  But from these “few thousand/ Pages of print and plates”, James is led to the vision of “the boats” and the terrace “treasures”.  The boats are the celestial vessels that will carry him across “the river in the sky”, the heavenly path traced by the Milky Way, but also anchored by books (“books are the anchors left by ships that rot away”).  The anchors are embedded in mud – the mud is “one’s recollections/Of what life was, and never, late, or soon/ Will be again.”  Death is coming, although whether “late or soon” remains unknown.  The poem substitutes for a body of flesh and blood – it is an instrument for immortality.

James’ method is, at first, transitive: with his daughter, he has culled (‘weeded’) his books.  Books are what remains of human voyages (either in spirit or reality) – the anchors of the boats that have rotted away just as human beings die and decompose.  But there is a rich mud that embraces the book-anchors, a context, as it were, for those treasures – and this context of memories of a lifetime’s pleasures must also be amassed, scrutinized, and enjoyed before embarking on the “journey” that is “no journey” but only a “long aching pause” that is all the “voyage there will ever be”.  In the face of annihilation, the dying poet summons those precious things that enriched his life and praises them.  He imagines an interlocutor, Adrastus (the name means “Courage”) to whom he addresses the catalog of wonders that comprises the poem. This is the argument of The River in the Sky (2018).

Clive James is less well-known to American readers than many of his contemporaries and should be better appreciated.  His lack of fame on this side of the Atlantic is unfair.  James was a great poet and a marvelous polymath as well.  Born in Australia, he lived for most of his career in Cambridge, England, although he traveled extensively in the United States and, it seems, everywhere else as well.  In the early seventies James moved to London after a picaresque youth in Sydney, Australia – there, he knew Germaine Greer (whom he describes with transparent malice in his memoirs as “Romaine Rand”) and other luminaries of the Push Movement, a sort of Fluxus in the Downunder with notes of the American “Summer of Love” and Andy Warhol’s Factory.  For many years, James wrote weekly columns for British newspapers, composed essays and wrote poems.  He is a brilliant, aphoristic and wholly lucid prose stylist, modeling his work off the great Austrian writers of the period between the world wars – he has described his debt to these authors in his magisterial work Cultural Amnesia.  In the 1980s and, thereafter, James was a popular “presenter,” that is, TV host on the BBC.  He provided literate and avuncular commentary on the arts, films, and subjects as diverse as World War II airplanes and Formula One racing (he is an expert on both topics).  He could write gracefully on all subjects – for instance, he is a connoisseur of rugby and cricket, translated the entirety of Dante’s Divine Comedy into rhyming tercets in 2013, wrote lyrics for six albums of satiric songs, and mastered the tango to the extent that he had a dance-floor specially constructed for the practice of that art in his home at Cambridge.  So far as I can see, he knows everything about jazz and opera.  He was friends with the good and great – Princess Diana was a close and intimate acquaintance and he knew just about everyone worth knowing in the world.  Throughout much of his life, he drank heavily and smoked 80 cigarettes a day.  In 2014, as he was dying, he wrote a beautiful and now famous lyric called “Japanese Maples” published in The New Yorker and widely regarded as his swan-song.  But, in fact, experimental medical treatments kept him alive until November 24, 2019 when he died at age 80.  James said that he was embarrassed that his demise didn’t occur when it was anticipated in 2014, but, he made the best of it, writing a column entitled “Reports of My Death” for The Guardian  He survived long enough to write his epic poem, The River in the Sky published about a year before his belated demise.

On first reading, The River in the Sky seems largely decorative, a rococo catalog of the poet’s enthusiasms and pleasures.  But, in fact, on closer study, the poem turns out to be ingeniously constructed, hinged and jointed in complicated ways with recurring systems in its imagery.  A good example of the poem’s intricate network of associations occurs in a passage alluding to James’ visit to the Boboli Gardens in Florence.  (James long-suffering spouse, Prue, was a reader in Italian literature at Cambridge and a renowned Dante scholar in her own right – presumably they were Florence in 1968 while she was studying there.)  James notes that in the decaying Boboli Gardens “the orpiment degrades” – “orpiment” is an odd word, one that I had to look-up on the internet.  As it happens, “orpiment” describes an orange-yellow pigment extracted from volcanic sulphur.  This kind of pigment was used on facades in the Boboli Gardens and the color was a luxury item in antiquity, exactly the sort of thing that a drowsy Byzantine emperor with a mechanical singing bird would prize.  Furthermore, several of the artifacts in King Tutankhamun’s tomb were lacquered in orpiment.  (The pigment occurs in another tomb as well, the Taj Mahal.)  The reference to orpiment, accordingly, has a voluptuous funereal tint – a cast that is consistent with the themes in the poem. 

James’ organizes the verse around certain events or nodes of intense meaning to which he returns periodically.  One thematic melody, as it were, involves the death of his father.  James’ father was captured by the Japanese in World War II, tortured and almost starved to death, but miraculously survived the prison camp where he was interned.  At the end of the war, too weak to walk James’ father was nursed to sufficient health that he could return to Jannali in Australia, where his wife and son, Vivien (James’ given first name) were awaiting him.  But, on the flight home, the plane crashed and James’ father, with all his comrades, died.  (He is buried at Sai Wan Bay, Hong Kong as mentioned on the first page of the poem.)  James views the death of his father, whom he never really knew, as the event that nudged him into literature and the arts – after all, his father died in the most “ironic” and literary manner imaginable, the sort of evil coincidence upon which many novels and short stories depend.  Throughout the poem, James alludes to his father’s strange death repeatedly – often he will use a metonym for this motif, the “Pratt and Whitney” engine that powered the lost plane.  (And this is in keeping with James’ fascination with motorized vehicles of all sorts, motorcycles, fighter planes, and fast cars – for instance, the wrecked Facel Vegas that Camus was driving when he crashed and died, or the Hispano-Suiza in which the great travel writer (and one of James’ acquaintances) Patrick Leigh Fermor’s “exotic mistress...park(ed) her shapely bottom on the bumper.)   Other organizing links involve the city of Petropolis, the Imperial capitol of Brazil, a place James’ describes as a kind of earthly paradise, and Rio de Janeiro (“the river of January”) another Eden that the poet equates to the Milky Way --  the titular “river in the sky” that is the starry path to the Next Life as well as a constellation of glowing computer diodes that James imagines as also a simulacrum for the celestial river.  (The glowing lights must be near his sick-bed.)  Divers also fascinate James: the motion of leaping and falling, another representation for death, is a central metaphor – we see the Chinese Olympic diver Ren Quian tumbling through the air, Primo Levi committing suicide by throwing himself from his balcony, and American GI’s at Luna Park at Sydney slipsliding down an amusement ride in “Coney Island Hall” in the grandiose amusement park.  (Luna Park was built four years before James’ birth in 1935.) James writes: “Soldiers dive down the hill-high slippery dips... gripping their thin slick mats, harbingers of the boogie board.”

The first half of the book culminates in two extended sequences that illustrate James’ mise-en-scene.  The first involves the tango.  The second reverts to Luna Park and its “River Caves” ride.  The tango scene is set in sultry Buenos Aires.  James practices his art with a brilliantly adroit woman who happens to be “stone blind” – the poet tells her that he looks like Errol Flynn.  James can be supremely self-aggrandizing, even boastful: he claims that he danced magnificently with her and that he has never forgotten her, and, indeed, in a venerable poetic cliche says that she “is with you” now, “my young male readers, poets of the future” – that is, he has immortalized her, but, most particularly, her eerie blindness.  James cites the lyrics to a famous tango “La Comparista” (“The Little March”) Spanish words that mean: “Who knows if you knew I had never forgotten you.”  The detail is precise: traditionally “La Comparista” is the last dance of the night.

There follows an extended fantasia on the “River Caves” beginning with the words “At the far end of the river in the sky/ Would be the river caves” – an image for James’ dream “(o)f how my life might end.”  The “River Caves” was an attraction at Luna Park, a tunnel of love or “dark ride” of the kind called an “Old Mill” in the United States.  Couples ride through a pitch-black grotto on shallow keel boars pulled through a couple of feet of water by a conveyor mechanism.  The River Cave provides a place for courting couples to kiss and pet – these kinds of attractions have been largely supplanted by amusement park “thrill rides” since, nowadays, boys and girls can do pretty much anything they want in public.  (A prominent local example of such a ride is Ye Old Mill” at the Minnesota State Fair, a sedate concrete tube built next to plashing water-wheel, far from the Midway.  When I was a little boy, I always took the boat ride in the darkness – I was scared of the wild, neon-outlined rides on the Midway – but never exactly understood the point of the excursion through the dark, cool tunnels.)

In James’ fantasy, Luna Park is now called “Dream Land” and the ticket-taker is the poet’s elementary school teacher who calls him by his first name “Vivien.”  Later, the ticket-taker transforms into (improbably) Mies van der Rohe, the architect – an opportunity for the contrarian James to praise the Farnsworth House (Mies’ work) as greater than Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Falling Water.”  James has to pay for the ride with Weimer-currency, vastly inflated, a whole naugahyde bag of bills in exchange for access to the River Caves boat-ride.  The dead have now gathered – every epic must contain a visit to the Underworld.  We see Fellini’s father suavely slipping into his grave as shown in 8 ½ and, then, other lovers appear as depicted in movies, all of them dead now, and described as a “catalogue” of famous couples, similar to those depicted in the mad whirlwind in Dante’s Inferno.  Here the whirlwind is domesticated to the big churning waterwheel.  In the River Caves, James recalls a girl whom he groped, unnamed in the poem because “she/ Might yet breathe”.  The tunnel of love becomes vaginal with a reference to Courbet’s “The Origin of the World” and, then, the spinning water wheel becomes “a blur/ The propeller of a Pratt & Whitney Twin/Wasp radial engine...”,that is, the engine of the plane on which James’ father was flying home from World War Two when the fatal crash occurred.  As dreams often end in a vision so horrific that it wakes the sleeper, James sees his father’s starved body “wasted almost to nothing”.  The shock knocks him awake although he knows that he will return once more to the River Caves when death finally takes him.  And, now aroused, James describes his Sydney, inhabited by other specters, the elegant old Jewish ladies who escaped the Holocaust to open tea-shops in Australia. 

James’ exploration of the River Caves, a symbol that condenses the poem’s meaning brilliantly, represents the long poem’s apex, its climax both formally and emotionally.  Regrettably, the poem loiters, like its doomed but indefatigable poet, for another 75 pages or so – the River Caves sequence concludes on 47 of a book that will continue to 122 pages.  Although James is witty and never less than entertaining to read, the poem’s energy leaches out in the end, weakening in a way that seems congruent to the dying poet’s ultimately lethal fatigue. The River in the Sky continues to glory in astronomical imagery – the doomed man’s expedition into the sky is aimed toward Andromeda, a constellation to which the Milky Way is imagined to lead.  Egyptian references, particularly to Karnak and King Tutankhamun decorate the poem and the program for the text is made explicit: “Give credit to my gathered images/As if they might come with me/Just as if the afterlife/Were life itself.”  References to fighter planes and aviators abound – the air plane that carried James’ father to his death is mirrored in other craft that represent the chariot conveying the old man to his death, “sky-burial” he says at one point, referring both to the Tibetan mortuary practice by which cadavers are fed to vultures and condors, the airplane (and rockets) aiming his body toward Andromeda, and Khailash, the black ebony peak in the Himalayan mountains, worshiped by all major religions on the subcontinent and, forever preserved inviolate against the profane cleats and ice picks of mountain climbers.  As a peri-mortem ritual, James releases “every lyrical memory...towards where the sky turns into jewelry.”

As the poem advances toward its ending, James accelerates the pace of allusions, filling up the veins of the verse with jazz musicians, Tv shows that he once enjoyed (he likes The West Wing), opera singers that he admires, movie stars, books, and more memories of the River Caves.  He drops names like petals all over the pages.  A lot of this is a little obscure, although all the allusions are easily traced via Wikipedia, and, in fact, the gist of James’ references is generally clear even without recourse to the electronic encyclopedia and gazetteer.   James likes nature documentaries and seems to be friends with David Attenborough.  Pages 106 and 107 are representative: James begins by referencing a scene from Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers – he reverts here to imagery previously established about Camus, who was Algerian, and wishes to make a point that torture (prominently featured in the film) is, probably, the essence of war.  But, then, he leaps sideways into the animal kingdom, alleging that the death of the “foot-flagging frog” at the hands of an “Aussie spider with the headlights” is also “war.”   The image is a little unclear – either the spider is a sports car running over a frog hopping too slowly across a road or an actual Huntsman spider, a foot-wide monstrosity known to kill and eat frogs and small rodents.  (Go on the internet if you dare and watch the spider draining the juice out of a small possum.)  What cars (or spiders) do to kill frogs isn’t exactly war under any definition that I know and the writing is more than a little imprecise.  Next, James tells us that an ostrich runs with the stride of Czech Olympic long-distance racer, Emil Zatopek.  (These lines are purely associative – the frog is “foot-flagging” in contrast to the fleet-footed ostrich and the Olympic track star.)  Then, we’re told about hermit crabs “trad(ing) up” for “bigger shelters” – James speculates about how the hermit crab views its change of domicile, an image, probably, for the poet losing his corporeal body to go on the sky-voyage through the stars – although this isn’t clear and is a speculative interpretation that I have devised to try to make sense of the puzzling leaps and lunges in the latter half of the poem.  James brings Mark Knopfler and Dire Straits to the party – presumably because he enjoys that music and wants to add them to the list of things that gave him pleasure during his life.  The preening of the rock star becomes the sexual display of a fish that bloats himself into colorful balloon caricature only to be deflated by his mate who cavalierly says: “Do you think you could do that thing again?” referring to some exotic sexual bagatelle that the male is too exhausted to repeat.  If a fish is good, then, a small gaudy shark is better and James brings one in from the Great Barrier Reef.  Then, he makes a little (very little) wildlife joke – the next stanza reads in whole: “Behold the pygmy marmoset/Okay where is it?”  Tired of the animal kingdom, James, then, switches subjects, returning to theme of divers and diving – a symbol for flying up and, then, down into death.  At a pool called Sans Souci, young James climbs a tower to dive into the water.  (Sans Souci is a “tidal pool” in the Sydney suburbs built on the seaside in 1933 – tidal pools are swimming enclosures that are walled off from the actual ocean but full of sea-water.  They are very popular institutions in Australia.)  The poem now reverts to wild life – the pool is full of jelly fish and James has to aim his dive to avoid hitting them.  The jelly fish viewed from the diving tower look like the Hiroshima bomb bursting as seen from the bomber – a startling metaphor that conflates diving, falling, bombing, and violent death.  James’ next associative leap is looser and more difficult: he turns to the French artist, Yves Klein.  One of Klein’s most famous works is a photo-montage called “Into the Void.”  The black and white photograph seems to show the artist wearing a dark suit diving off the roof of a building.  The picture is astonishing and Klein’s body seems be really propelled into the air from the edge of the roof.  The picture shows diving, one of the signature motifs in The River in the Sky but here James doesn’t overtly refer to the photo-montage although I think its subconsciously behind the transition.  Instead the connection to the preceding text is more obscure – Klein invented a bluer-than-blue ultramarine, a pigment named after him as “Klein Blue”.  The poet imagines the pigment being “splashed” – “a splash of ultramarines”.  A diver “splashes”into the pool into which he plunges.  The lapis lazuli pigment used on King Tutankamun’s mask is similarly “ultramarine” like “the gouts” of pigment Klein (“the kid”) splashes on his canvases.  This vibrant blue summons to mind the color that the Japanese artist, Hokusai, used in his woodcut prints.  And, then, a few pages later, as James contemplates his imminent death, we’re reminded that Hokusai, on his death bed (he was 88), asked the gods for “just five more years” so that he “might become a true painter.”  (Although James doesn’t summon this image, I recall one of Goya’s last drawings, a crayon sketch showing an ancient man with a long white beard tottering forward on two canes.  The words Aun Aprendo are written on the drawing – that is, “I am still learning.”)

As should be evident, James’ web of associations becomes more diffuse as the poem hastens toward its end.  There’s a sense of palpable haste.  Time is running out and James wants to catalog as many of his life’s pleasures as he can before he’s swept away.  The impulse to list these experiences is noble, but aesthetically unsuccessful – the poem deflates, notwithstanding some extraordinary moments in its last half.  Indeed, conscious that the web of allusions has grown too broad, the poet tightens the final pages with thirty lines of rhymed verse, arranged in three taut ten-line stanzas, celebrating his “autumn’s autumn.”  The italicized rhymed verse is nicely done, but rueful and with a dying fall – James laments that he’s lost the former “ease” with which he “could command at will,/the music of the syllables.” 

Viewed as a whole, James’ poem The River in the Sky is problematic.  In the final analysis, it’s more a list than a poem, although, of course, epic verse often indulges in catalogs.  James’ collage technique is intrinsically modernist and compels comparison with Eliot’s The Waste Land, also a network of allusions and literary references.  Eliot’s poem fuses fragments together to represent the chaos of sensation and the crisis of representation after the First World War – “these fragments,” Eliot tells us, “I have shored against my ruins.”  The Waste Land depicts the desolation exposed after the Great War shattered all of the foundations of civilization.  James’ The River in the Sky is thematically opposed to Eliot’s vision of a world darkened by the retreat of those cultural verities that once, albeit only tentatively, held things apart.  (Eliot’s famously reactionary nostalgia for the Catholic middle ages is evidence of the deep malaise that he perceived in the modern world).  James’ assumes that the culture doesn’t cohere.  He makes this apparent in a scene in which Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, and Terry Southern (the author of Red-dirt Marijuana, a book that the poet praises) attend a screening of L’Avventura in Paris in 1960.  Antonioni’s film is about the failure of meaning – a young woman mysteriously vanishes during a holiday trip to the Aeolian Islands; the characters spend the next two hours of the film listlessly searching for her, until, at last, they more or less forget the meaning of their quest; the girl’s disappearance no longer signifies anything.  Southern is bored by the film and falls asleep.  Mingus and Davis devise a bebop melody to accompany the images, singing at the screen.  James’ is diverted from Antonioni’s dour high Modernist masterpiece by the leading lady Monica Vitti’s beauty – he lists the actresses on-screen in the film and reminds us of the time that “Vitti became every grown man’s dream”.  A fable about the failure for things to add up, about the enigma and alienation of modern life, becomes an appreciation of an actress’ beauty.  James doesn’t expect things to make sense – he just wants to remember images, phrases of jazz, art works and women that gave him pleasure.  He catalogs these things in his treasure-house of a poem as the “touchstones” or the measure of his life.  Things cohere only in his sensibility, that’s the only unity that he can give the poem.

Clive James is indomitable, courageous, a wise comrade.  He offers us the best that he can – that is, himself.  And despite my reservations about the slack parts of the poem, this gift is, I think, enough to recommend The River in the Sky to most readers.