Poet, librettist, translator, essayist, journalist, poet, war correspondent, political columnist, foreign correspondent, poet, traveller, exile, theorist of Crepuscular Journalism (according to which sources become more trustworthy after dark), theatre critic, art critic, Oxford professor of poetry, historian of the Royal Academy, garden writer, poet, old friend of nearly 40 years – not, so far, thankfully, novelist – but poet, poet, poet …

I first met James Fenton when I joined the New Statesman in the 1970s under the indulgent editorship of Anthony Howard. The magazine’s three stars – all precociously talented, as well as alarmingly younger than me – were James Fenton, Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis. Martin had already published a novel, Christopher a political biography, James a collection of poetry as well as reportage from Indochina. They all seemed confident in their understanding of the world, and seriously intent on shaking things up. Not that they were interchangeable. Martin at one point explained the difference between Christopher and James to one of his girlfriends. The girlfriend – I forget which, one of the mille e tre – remembered the difference but not how it operated. And so, ingenuously, she asked one of them (again I forget which), “Are you the one who can write but can’t talk, or the one who can talk but can’t write?” Their friendship survived this moment of satire; and over time Hitchens learned to write and Fenton learned to speak, even unto professorship.

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I remember one of James’s New Statesman columns from that time in which he discussed the old Fleet Street tradition that journalists should not attack one another, or, as they liked to put it, “dog does not eat dog”. “But in that case,” James asked, “who gets to eat dog?” Beneath his benign appearance, James is a carnivore. He has chomped on haunch of journalist, gizzard of priest, pancreas of politician and neck of general, always finding time for a mid-course palate cleanser of Helen Vendler. The 1970s have a rather low reputation at the moment, but one thing to be said for them was that if you were setting up then as a writer, you did feel and believe that you could say anything you liked about anyone and anything, that offence could and indeed often should be given. Nowadays we are more cautious, and more self-censoring. Would any editor today print without a qualm an article such as the one James wrote in the Statesman under the heading “Mrs Thatcher’s Bum”? Probably not. Similarly, a poetry editor might anxiously consult multi-faith correctness before politely declining James and John Fuller’s joint anti-Catholic poem whose exultant refrain runs, “God we hate Catholics and their Catholic God.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Christopher Hitchens, James Fenton and Martin Amis in Paris in about 1977.

James’s work, both prose and poetry, is a deeply particular alloy of gravity and levity. We shouldn’t let the levity make us overlook the gravity; and, just as importantly, we shouldn’t let the gravity make us overlook the levity. Both are central. James’s levity is special. I remember visiting him with my wife [Pat Kavanagh], who was his agent, shortly after money had begun arriving into his bank account from a certain West End musical [Les Misérables]. This was in East Oxford. The kitchen had recently been renovated. There was a long worktop, and beneath it the biggest lineup of white goods that Pat and I had ever seen – with the full distortion of memory, I would say eight or 12 different machines. “James, what’s that?” Pat asked, pointing to one of them. James drew back a little, as if the question were not just impertinent, but actively preposterous. “Oh,” he replied, “I don’t know what they all do.” Similarly, I remember once ringing him up from my desk on the Sunday Times literary pages and inquiring, with a tinge of impatience, when we might expect a long-overdue book review. “When it’s finished,” he replied with serene impracticality. I love this silliness in James. Silliness in the Auden sense – “You were silly like us, your gift survived it all.”

James is a public writer – engagé, as he probably doesn’t like to say – and it is his poems about war, dictatorship and exile that have won him the PEN/Pinter award. He wrote most of them when wars took place on the other side of the planet; now they are closer to home, their consequences even closer, and his poems feel yet more powerful for it. Anyone taking a Syrian child into their home might well be given handbooks on adoption, but it would be quicker, and deeper, for them to read James’s “Children in Exile”. There is much anger in James’s writing. If I read him correctly, it began as a politically principled, righteous anger – the sort that can easily swerve into the self-righteous. Exposure to events in south-east Asia tempered it into a different kind, that of the appalled witness-bearer. At the same time, James is the most private public poet there is. He doesn’t speak at rallies, schmooze power, sign round-robin letters to the newspapers. There is something a little mysterious about him. In 1986 his photograph appeared in a national newspaper in the Philippines, where it was captioned “The Bishop of Legaspi”. I realise that I have never, ever seen him on television. Perhaps he wears a mask. Or a bishop’s frock.

James has done many perilous things. He has deliberately gone to “all the wrong places”; he has been tear-gassed and shot at. It is well known that, 40 years ago, as if hailing a No 7 bus, he hitched a ride on the first North Vietnamese tank into the Presidential Palace in Saigon. What is less well known is that, on reflection, he berated himself for the “opportunistic” nature of the deed, given that those palace gates were only a few yards’ walk away. Some of his friends reckon that the most dangerous thing he ever did was to disappear into the jungles of Borneo with Redmond O’Hanlon. When O’Hanlon asked him to join a follow-up expedition to the Amazon, James famously replied, “Redmond, I wouldn’t even go as far as High Wycombe with you.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest James Fenton reads his poem ‘For Andrew Wood’

James has been given the PEN/Pinter award for “speaking truth to power” in his public poems. But that phrase also covers his private poems. To write exactly and honestly about sex and love is to speak truth to different powers: those of social convention, of Hollywood, of romantic and pornographic delusion. Sex, in the jargon of the New Statesman, back in the 1970s, was “the thing that people do”. I first heard the phrase on James’s lips – I would guess he invented it – and it hit print a decade later in a long Fenton-Fuller ballad of which I alas have time to quote only four lines:



Oh the thing that people do,

The thing that people do;

It’s long-winded and it’s difficult,

Like changing trains at Crewe ...



As for love, James knows all about its fumbles and swift embarrassments, and the sharp bites inflicted by both hope and regret; in this, he reminds me much of that great understander of love, Turgenev. James has written some of the definitive love poems of our time – among them, “In Paris with You”, which has inspired a painting of the same title by Howard Hodgkin. In recent years, lovers visiting Paris have done one of two things: attach inscribed padlocks to the Pont des Arts, and read James’s poem to one another. I’m not sure how far these two constituencies overlap. Earlier this year, those padlocks were removed; the poem continues. And love, as we know, leads to grief. James’s “For Andrew Wood” is now much read at funerals, and will replace, at my guess, that poem of Auden’s made famous by that film. So his private poems, have, in a way, become as public as his public ones.

James, we honour you, we admire you, we thank you for your work, we remind you, quietly but firmly, that we want some more poems out of you – and we also publicly declare that we would happily go at least as far as High Wycombe with you.

This is an version of a speech given by Julian Barnes at the PEN/Pinter ceremony on 6 October 2015.