Book: The Book of My Enemy

Overview

Clive James’s The Book of My Enemy: Collected Verse 1958, 2003 gathers nearly half a century of his poetry into a single, career-spanning volume. Better known to many as an essayist and broadcaster, James uses this collection to make the case for poetry as the central thread of his literary life. The book takes its title from his most famous lyric, "The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered", a mordant celebration of a rival’s commercial failure that doubles as a commentary on vanity, schadenfreude, and the book trade. Across the collection, the same blend of high-energy wit and moral pressure animates poems that range from quicksilver epigrams to long narrative satires.

Scope and Structure

The volume assembles poems written over decades, from early exercises in form to late, more reflective pieces, creating a continuous record of James’s development as a poet. It draws together his short lyrics, translations, and the extended satires that made his verse distinctive, including mock-epic excursions through the media and literary worlds. Read chronologically, the book shows him moving from youthful bravura to a steadier, chastened music without losing his appetite for rhyme, argument, and performance.

Themes

James’s governing subjects are fame, transience, and the comic spectacle of cultural life. He writes as an expatriate Australian long domiciled in England, alert to the ways memory reshapes distance: Sydney’s sunlit suburbs recur as a measure of hope and loss. The literary world, its prizes, factions, and self-importance, provides material for satire, yet satire is rarely an end in itself. Beneath the razzle of jokes sits a persistent reckoning with time: love persisting through disappointment, friendship tested by ambition, art measured against mortality. The poems also register the temptations of celebrity and the degradations of the media age, subjects James knew from the inside and could anatomize without rancor.

Style and Voice

James is a formalist with a showman’s instinct. He favors tight meter and full rhyme, often in quatrains or ottava rima, and he relishes the volta-like snap of a closing couplet. The diction ranges freely from demotic to mandarin, relishing puns, classical allusions, and vividly concrete images. The tone is companionable even when the argument bites. He is adept at parody and pastiche but rarely hides behind them: the technical dazzle frames, rather than replaces, feeling. Across the book the reader hears a distinctive voice, urbane, self-mocking, ethically engaged, that seeks clarity without surrendering complexity.

Notable Pieces

"The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered" is the signature poem, balancing comic relish with a confession of petty pleasure. Alongside it stand long narrative satires such as "Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage", whose Byronic verve skewers literary fashions while demonstrating how supple formal verse can be as social commentary. Elsewhere, shorter lyrics turn inward: love poems that resist gush in favor of precise affection, travel poems that hinge on a single, telling perception, and elegies that wear their grief lightly until a final line tightens the knot.

Significance

Taken as a whole, the collection argues for a poetry that entertains without frivolity and moralizes without pomp. It shows that wit can be a mode of attention, not evasion; that form can be liberating rather than confining; and that a public figure can write privately resonant poems without disavowing his public knowledge. For readers encountering James’s verse for the first time, the book offers an education in how style and stance evolve across a lifetime. For longtime admirers, it consolidates disparate publications into a coherent portrait of a poet who found, in rhyme and measure, a way to speak plainly about the vanity of worldly success and the stubborn, saving pleasures of love, memory, and art.