Free The Revolt of the Pendulum by Clive James Page B

obvious truth, but one which always shyly hides: humour is
not an overlay to seriousness. Humour is the actual thing, compressed and intensified into a civil code. The reason that Amis, when he failed, failed so catastrophically, was the same reason that a
jet pilot stunting close to the ground has no negligible version of getting things wrong. Comedy has to be astonishing or nothing, and Amis was astonishing often enough to make even the obtuse
momentarily realise that there are truths which only comedy can clarify.
    Unless we laugh at nothing, we laugh at truth to life: life in all its complexity, where people, even created people, are not just characters, but individuals. In the full flight of his comic
depiction of Margaret Peel in Lucky Jim , Amis still paused to remind us, at the moment of her true tears, that all the false tears were products of her neurosis, and that she was a figure of
sympathy even though she drove everybody nuts. She was alive, and people are alive one at a time. At which point it is time to revisit all those academic wives at Princeton who threw themselves
beneath the visiting Englishman in the splendour and promise of his energy and invention. They weren’t nine-pins. They were individual women, and they fell for him because they knew he knew
they were.
    TLS , February 2, 2007
    Postscript
    After the death of Philip Larkin I began asking myself just how valuable even the most thorough biography was, if it encouraged the dunces in their victory dance of small
radius with pointed toe. A suitably knowledgeable literary journalist could do something to head off the false impressions, but wouldn’t it usefully shorten the circuit if the biography were
not published at all? I knew it was an obscurantist position but couldn’t help flirting with it. Enlightenment came when I read Sara Wheeler’s biographies of Denys Finch Hatton ( Too
Close to the Sun ) and Apsley Cherry-Gerard ( Cherry ). Those two men weren’t literary figures, they were adventurers, but her biography of each was so well written, and so full of
pertinent social detail, that there could be nothing wrong with the genre, even though her avowed model was Michael Holroyd, the man who started the craze for the biography a block long. (Actually
it had started with the biographies of the composers, pioneered by Ernest Newman’s admittedly magnificent four volumes on Wagner, but Holroyd was the first to transfer the overkill to the
literary field.) Since then I have been catching up with a neglected cairn of literary biographies and have often felt grateful. Anthony Cronin’s Samuel Beckett , for example, is full
of things that I would never have figured out for myself. It can always be contended that a complete artist should need no explaining, but the answer is obvious: no artist is that complete. One can
hope, however, that the actual bulk of the biography might be kept within reasonable limits. My own rule of thumb is that a book is of a decent length if I can remember how it started when I get to
the end. Ideally, though, one can’t help wanting less than that. Lytton Strachey, unwitting subject of a Holroyd opus so excessively magnum , got himself on the front end of a
paradox when he wrote biographies not much bigger than articles. His Eminent Victorians was a meretricious book but it was in a meritorious tradition. One doesn’t say that
Aubrey’s Brief Lives set the desirable measure, but it always helps to remember how much got said by Johnson in his Lives of the Poets , any one of which is the first thing to
read on the poet in question. Not, of course, the only thing: but surely our aim, like Johnson’s, should be to get abreast of the essentials first.
     
    CANETTI, MAN OF MYSTERY
    As a literary type after World War Two, the German-speaking International Man of Mystery found Britain a more comfortable land of exile than America, where he was always under
pressure to explain himself in public, thereby