Clive James to publish new essay collection this summer
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Version 0 of 1. Just weeks after his most recent poetry collection hit the shops, Clive James’s publishers have announced that he will publish a second book this year, a collection of literary reflections, Latest Readings, due out this summer. James, who was diagnosed with terminal leukemia in 2010, will use the book to tackle subjects ranging from American Power to Women and Hollywood and “Naipaul’s Nastiness”. The collection of short essays, dedicated to “my doctors and nurses at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, UK”, will mark a return from the melancholy of his late poems to the witty erudition of his earlier years as critic and commentator. A spell in hospital suffering from pneumonia sent him back to Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim which he had detested at university, he reveals. “I suppose I had a plan to stave off one kind of boredom with another, as a kind of inoculation. On the strength of this long-delayed second reading, the book struck me as no more exciting than it had once seemed, but a lot more interesting.” Related: Clive James: ‘I’ve got a lot done since my death’ Conrad crops up in several essays, but James has room for lighter authors too, writing of how he was raised off his deathbed by his daughter’s introduction to Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey novels. “She was like a drug dealer handing out a free sample. Within a few days I was back for the next one … and in the course of remarkably little time – the excitement of reading stopped me reminding myself that it was time I didn’t really have – I had read all 20 volumes.” He concedes that O’Brian “doesn’t really know what to do with an interesting female character”. “The only woman on a par with the leading men gets killed off in a coach accident. No, these are boys’ books, and the lesser for it. I try to remember that most of the fans of O’Brian that I have met are women, but I suspect that they want a holiday from feminism, just as his male fans want a holiday from inertia.” Two of the essays are about Hemingway, “I have spent a good part of my adult life reading books about Ernest Hemingway,” he writes, arguing that “he’s too much of a problem to leave unsolved”. After tackling the writer’s troubled masculinity, his shaky relationship with the truth, his addictions to alcohol and dangerous sports, James concludes of the author of A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea: “The height of his tragedy was that he could not write about his own finale, which, lasting so long, could have been his great theme.” Latest Readings will be published by Yale on 25 August. |