“Somewhere about this time I was in the Cubs.  When the time came for graduation to the Scouts, I was not accepted, and thus became, for the brief time before I tossed the whole thing in, the oldest Cub in the First Kogarah Wolf Cub Pack and probably the world.  Lacking the precious gift of taciturnity, I could never achieve the grim face essential to success in paramilitary organisations.  Considering this fatal flaw, it is remarkable how many of them I tried to get into.  The Cubs were merely the first in a long line.  My mother made my scarf.  It had to be in First Kogarah colours – maroon with yellow piping.  She made me a woggle out of leather.  Every Cub had to have a woggle.  It held your scarf on.  As well as the woggle, there were special sock-tops – called something like fuggles – which always fell down.  After you passed your Tenderfoot you got a wolf’s head, or diggle, to wear on your cap.  Also on the cap went a scraggle for each year of service.  In addition to woggles, fuggles, diggles and scraggles, successful Cubs had the right, indeed obligation, to wear a whole collection of insignia and badges.  The second in command of a sub-pack of six Cubs was called a Seconder and wore a yellow stripe on his sleeve.  The commander of a sub-pack was called a Sixer and wore two stripes.  A sixer in his final year would be so covered in in decorations that promotion to the Scouts became a physical necessity, lest he expire under the weight.

Ruling over the whole pack was Akela.  Her name was taken from The Jungle Book.  She wore a brown uniform with a Scout hat.  Otherwise she, too, was burdened down with woggles and fuggles.  At the beginning of our weekly meetings, we Cubs would squat in a circle and worship her.  While squatting, we made wolf head signs with our fingers and pointed them at the floor.  Then we chanted, “Akela, we’ll do our best.  We’ll dib dib dib dib.  We’ll dob dob dob dob …”  This routine was climaxed by a mass throwing back of heads and emitting of supposedly vulpine howls.  I used to get through the dibbing and dobbing all right but during the howling I usually rolled over backwards.”

What accounts for Unreliable Memoirs being the best memoir in the world? And by that I mean no backhand compliment. The memoir genre has suffered an over-grown pullulating decadence of bloom in the 35 years since Clive’s work was published. One need only be bitten by a shark or fondled by a stepdad to unload one’s history upon the reading public. Nowadays to say “best memoir in the world” is almost to say “best fart in an elevator”.
But do not blame Clive. His book trails none of the stink of the up-to-date memoir. Especially it has no funk of message — no fetor of ” setting goals”, no reek of “courageous persistence”, no effluvium of “self-acceptance”, and none of the fetid compost-heap putrescence of “finding my inner me”.Nor does Clive ever fall back upon that most pathetic trope of storytellers, “And it really happened.” On the contrary Clive starts his preface to Unreliable Memoirs by saying, “Most first novels are disguised autobiographies. This autobiography is a disguised novel.” Thus Clive becomes, so far as I know, the first honest memoirist. And, so far as I see, the last.

Unreliable Memoirs is written with a mastery of the honest and a down-the-hole understanding of its pitfalls. Honesty comes in various types and the best is exaggeration.

Clive exaggerates to wonderfully honest effect. He sets to work with singular material, a combination of an exceptional young mind, an upbringing in the exotically named town of Kogarah, a pained childhood with his father, a Japanese prisoner of war, surviving only to die in a repatriation plane crash and his mother worn by worry and toil and, finally, tragedy. Then Clive, by a wild act of exaggeration, makes all this universal. He takes the yeast of his memory and plants it in the bread dough of ours.

The motto of other memoirs is “Know Me.” The motto of Unreliable Memoirs is the better version, inscribed on the temple of the Delphic Oracle. Or, I should say, the motto is “Getting to Know Thyself, Slowly” – the inscription at Delphos as written by a man too modest to use the imperative mood.

But not so modest that he’s dull and unrevealing about the nature of “The Kid from Kogarah” both inside: “Having a character that consists mainly of defects …” And out: “Similarly uncontrollable was my virile organ, which chose the most inconvenient moments to expand. For some reason riding on the top deck of the trolley bus led to a spontaneous show of strength.”

It is a book of embarrassment. Clive in his room lets the neighbourhood fat kid climb on top of the wardrobe to “bed bomb” in a flying belly flop onto Clive’s mattress. “He had … a behind like a large bag of soil …The frame of the bed snapped off its supports with the noise of a firing squad …” The author hides from his mother. “Once again it was very dark under the house.”

Clive at university falls in with bohemian aesthetes. “It was my first, cruel exposure to the awkward fact that the arts attract the insane.”
Anyone who is or has been “getting to know thyself, slowly” blushes with recall of suchlike. Yet, universal as Unreliable Memoirs may be, it is not an Everyman’s Memoir. Instead, this is an Every-Thinking-Person’s memoir. It’s a record of the chaos each individual releases into the world at birth. The need for that individual to think is evident in the well-thought-out descriptions of the protagonist’s thoughtless acts, ” … helping to restore the colour in a faded patch of the lounge-room carpet …by rubbing a whole tin of Nugget dark tan boot-polish into the deprived area.”
It is a book of embarrassment rather than humiliation. The root meaning of humiliation is to be humbled, ground into dust underfoot. That can’t be done to Clive James by any person; he’d stub his toe on Clive’s works.

And Unreliable Memoirs is full of lessons on how to overcome embarrassment, or impediments. Although I think these lessons leaked out by mistake. Clive means to entertain. But Clive is so profoundly entertaining that you can’t help but learn something by watching his act.
First, read deeply. I’m not sure exactly why. Maybe reading is a way of tying yourself to the mast so that you can hear the siren-song of ordinary life without smashing on the rocks of everyday existence and becoming a journeyman plumber in New South Wales.

More likely, reading thousands of books is a way of being intimate friends with thousands of people, an impracticality in life, particularly when the intimate friends died before you were born.

Everything in print is a personal and confidential confession to the reader and begins with a literal or implied “I.” Even the mild first sentence of Unreliable Memoirs – “I was born in 1939.” – is not something you’d tell a stranger on a trolley bus, especially not on the top deck.

I do know Clive has read Evelyn Waugh’s A Little Learning, but more learnedly than the way Waugh wrote it. He’s read H. L. Mencken’s Happy Days, wiping the satisfied smirk off its face. He’s read Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, which is autobiography as thinly disguised as Clive in his brief childhood career as “the Flash of Lightning”. (“You would not have known, when this sinister avatar caught and slipped your startled gaze, that his mask and cape had been made by his mother.”) However, Clive writes a Bildungsroman without any tedious Bildungs.

Clive is the best-read person I’ve ever known. He’s read it all, often in its original language, no matter if the language is as unwonted as Russian or Japanese. Once, before the dawn of Google, I asked Clive for the source of a bit of Ring Lardner dialogue that I wanted to use in a travel article. I couldn’t find the quotation in my, I thought, complete set of Lardner.

“The Young Immigrunts,” said Clive, “published in 1920, page 78.” I can’t absolutely swear that Clive said, “page 78.” But there it was.

Clive is a great talker but he’s no mere solo artist. He talks beautifully in duet and ensemble. He does it by listening. Here is Clive listening to his Sunday School teacher: ” … Mr. Purvis would launch into an attack on beer and Catholicism. He pronounced beer bee-ar. The legionaries who pee-arsed Christ’s side with a spee-ar had undoubtedly been enslaved to bee-ar. A sure sign of Catholicism’s fundamental evil was that it required the drinking of wine even in church, wine being mee-arly another form of bee-ar.”

Be self-conscious. Someone else may be looking at a clear path across the lounge-room carpet to the loo. Clive spies the ice-slick patch of Nugget dark tan boot-polish that’s only a step away.

And fail at most of the things you try. No, fail at all of them. The Victorian critic John Churton Collins said, “The secret of success in life is known only to those who have not succeeded.” And Collins would know. His entry in The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English ends, “Morbidly interested in murder, spiritualism and graveyards, and depressive in temperament, he drowned himself near Lowestoft.”
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Clive finds a cheerier message in Collins’ aphorism. Fail at everything anyone has ever done. Then you’ll have to come up with something new that no one has done before or will do again, such as write Unreliable Memoirs.