A MOMENT WITH CLIVE JAMES
Clive James, Melbourne - August 4, 2003.
When Clive James first set eyes on me I could tell he was pissed off I wasn’t a beautiful female journalist. But he got over it when I started quoting large chunks of his own work back to him. One of the most revealing moments from our chat was him talking about his mother ,who had died two weeks before.
“She was 93 years-old. She was tired. I’ve worried all my life and probably will go on worrying that it was terrible for me to leave her. I could have – should have – stayed home and just looked after her. Sometimes ruthlessness comes in handy and I felt my destiny lay elsewhere. She didn’t take it well. She said one ship took my father away and another ship took me away.”
Clive’s father never returned. After being released from a WWII concentration camp, the plane he was on crashed on the way home. That’s why Clive has a dim view of luck.
“Luck killed my father and deprived my mother of a real life,” he says. “I don’t like the man upstairs. He’s not just a gambler. He’s a careless gambler. I’ve had a lot of luck in my life but it doesn’t make me like it any better. I’ve been able to make a living from my lip, which is a stroke of luck.
“I don’t see how you could walk up a street and see what the arbitrary hand of fate has done and still like luck. You see someone in a wheelchair and he’s going to be in a wheelchair all his life. What’s he thinking? He’s thinking, ‘Why me?’ Which makes me think, ‘Well, why me?’”