Philip Harvey
Pembroke College Library, University of Cambridge
Photograph thank you Jordan Gordon
He is the writer of scripts from the psychedelic age
to the selfie age. He is the author of unreliable memoirs more accurate than
most of his contemporaries, and he promises to be even more unreliable in
future. He would open night time interview shows with lines like those,
introducing everyone short of royalty to the comfy chairs of a BBC studio. How
comfy is comfy? None of his subjects went into throes of terror, “No, not the
comfy chair!” They couldn’t wait to be seated in the comfy chair. They were
princes for a day. His audience was nearly always live.
He is the writer of more Audenesque and Audenish
poetry than anyone of his generation. He is the author of so many literary
reviews that Google can’t keep up. His magnum opus is a hotchpotch of
brilliance and point-scoring that reveals an underlying interest in what Germany
did to the culture of the 20th century. Not Britain, or America, or
France, or Russia, or Australia, but the country they divided up at the end of
the 1940s. He is the translator, late in time, of a foursquare version of
Dante’s triangular Comedy of the then, the now, and the to come. Ladies and
gentleman …
He sits in the brown shade of an English university
old library, answering questions himself this time of an interviewer. He has
put to him first “So this is where it all began, in here.” “Yeah, a long time
ago now, more years than I care to count.” The brainy books with luminous spine
labels line up behind him like the actors of some distant performance at The
Globe. TV men have arranged lights to pick up effects of shadow across the
books. As aisles of works recede behind his receded hairline, we see in the
distance the faint light of outside, the perfect point of perspective. Not a
starlet in sight. His own perspective is somewhat different, reminiscing in
craggy Sydney accents on undergraduate days when he grappled with Italian
medieval vocabulary, whose effect was not unlike a grappa first thing in the
morning.
Is this really where it all began though? And not
the wild surf beaches of the Pacific Ocean where he read the existentialists to
his heart’s content and imagined Paris as it never was. Or cast a glance at the
rowdy beery debates in Newtown where liberation was round every corner and the
rest of the world was just a ludicrous but tantalising plaything of the mind,
when it wasn’t the name of a combined international cricket team the
Australians beat anyway. Or people and places we are yet to meet in his own
Comedy of life: its pitfalls, purgations and surpassing glories.
This library of centuries of excited ideas, its
books ready to knock us awake with their lived experience, is apparently where
it all began. But not altogether where it began, if it is always beginning as a
new page turns, or someone comes into the frame who makes you see things like
you’ve never seen them before, or you suddenly get it … what someone you love
is saying for real to you right now. Not that he would do without the library
were he doing his time again, like someone he meets by surprise in his own
private hell, his own lesson in reform, his own way into complete acceptance of
how everything else is, without aid of psychedelics or selfie-reference.
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