Having mentioned an interview between the late Sir Jonathan Miller and Norman Lebrecht in a recent blog on Advent, I am now thinking of another cultural giant who has recently died: Clive James. A friend has drawn my attention to an interview first broadcast in 2001 between James and the novelist Piers Paul Read in the former’s TV series, “Talking in the Library”.
James makes an interesting contrast to Miller, for whom religious belief appears to have been a matter of utter indifference. James, a cultural and literary highbrow - and a serious poet - who spent much of his life and energies in a lowbrow milieu such as television, recognised the power of the Christian faith, even admitting to Read that “If I were capable of belief, I’d be a happier man.” For him, as with so many of those who reject faith, the “insoluble problem” is how to square evil and the God of love: where was God in Nazi Germany, he wanted to know, further stating “I am with Ivan Karamazov” – a reference to the passage in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov that always haunts those who read it, whether Christian or not. Describing himself as a Manichean, he believed “Evil has a mind” and that Hitler was “Satan’s representative”. Yet it seems James had not chosen, or been driven, to pursue the matter any further.
