I dislike the growing trend for immortalising celebrities while they are still alive, most especially those who announce they are suffering a terminal illness.
Am I the only one who considers the fashion morbid; reminiscent of a parodical deathbed scene in which a family gathers around a dying person anxious to learn how they’ll be remembered in the will?
I first complained about this last year following news that the Scots writer, Ian Banks had been diagnosed with cancer. When he died barely two months later, the fulsome obituaries were almost redundant.
I return to the theme following the publication of a valedictory poem by the multi-talented writer and broadcaster, Clive James whose work I’ve enjoyed since he became The Observer newspaper’s excoriatingly witty television critic in the 1970s.
I understand that Japanese Maple first appeared in The New Yorker magazine but has since been republished many times elsewhere.
It is a lovely piece and makes one reflect what a great loss James’s eventual passing will be to all who cherish good writing.
Everyone can recall times of great physical or emotional pain that have been relieved, even for just a moment, by a glimpse of great natural beauty.
James evokes that feeling with the same quiet force as former Poet Laureate, Cecil Day Lewis whose final work, At Lemmons, was published after he died. I first discovered the poem in Slipstream, the autobiography of novelist, Elizabeth Jane Howard. She included it because Day Lewis wrote it at the house she then owned with Kinglsey Amis.
“At Lemmons - C Day Lewis
“Above my table three magnolia flowers
Utter their silent requiems.
Through the window I see your elms
In labour with the racking storm
Giving it shape in April’s shifty airs.
“Up there sky boils from a brew of cloud
To blue gleam, sunblast, then darkens again.
No respite is allowed
The watching eye, the natural agony.
“Below is the calm a loved house breeds
Where four have come together to dwell
- Two write, one paints, the fourth invents -
Each pursuing a natural bent
But less through nature’s formative travail
Than each in his own humour finding the self he needs.
“Round me all is amenity, a bloom of
Magnolia uttering its requiems,
A climate of acceptance. Very well
I accept my weakness with my friends’
Good natures sweetening each day my sick room”.
“Japanese Maple – Clive James
“Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.
So slow a fading out brings no real pain.
Breath growing short
Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain
Of energy, but thought and sight remain:
Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree
And saturates your brick back garden walls,
So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?
Ever more lavish as the dusk descends
This glistening illuminates the air.
It never ends.
“Whenever the rain comes it will be there,
Beyond my time, but now I take my share.
My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that. That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same:
Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,
A final flood of colours will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone”.
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