Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time

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The pieces outweigh the whole, but that's also enough for considerable reading pleasure and thought-provoking. His frustration is perhaps best summed-up in his attempts to explain his issues with Brecht (who doesn't rate an entry of his own). Absolutely magnificent. It has been a privilege to spend time with Clive James while reading this book and I cannot recommend the experience too highly. Wow,. RIP Clive, one of our great devotees to the arts and culture. A tour guide to the intellectual pathways that lie behind us, this is his epic collection of essays on individual people that he deems worth remembering. A lifetime is exactly what it has taken Clive James to read them, and at times this book is presented as being something of a life's work for him. It's arranged alphabetically, from Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, and the first thing you find yourself examining is who's made the list. Although it putatively focuses on the twentieth century, there are some notable names from rather earlier, including Keats and Montaigne. There are a lot of people you won't have heard of, as well as several surprising absences. Hitler is there, but Stalin isn't. Albert Einstein is not there, but his cousin Alfred is. Michael Mann, bizarrely, is included although there's no mention of Scorsese or Lynch. There is a heavy bias towards writers, and specifically towards European writers: among other things the book is a celebration of the fertile intellectual ground that was the café culture in Vienna and Paris, before the literary scene in those cities was crushed by fascism.

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In January 2010, he was diagnosed with terminal leukaemia. One of the greatest annoyances his cancer and its treatment caused him was that he was not allowed to fly – thus stopping him visiting his beloved homeland. But he kept writing, including a weekly TV review for the Daily Telegraph for three years until 2014.

It is a continual concern of the book to demand what moral responsibilities an intellectual should have when faced with totalitarianism. It's this approach which has led to James's much commented-on demonization of Jean-Paul Sartre, who is ‘a devil's advocate to be despised more than the devil’, ‘the most conspicuous example in the twentieth century of a fully qualified intellectual aiding and abetting the opponents of civilization’. Watching him lay into someone like this is great fun, not least because it gives you a few ideas of what to say to the next Sartre-nut who corners you at a party. Sometimes he seems to hold these people up to some very demanding standards: he's convincing on Sartre's feeble response to Nazism, but surely it's a bit much to question why Wittgenstein never mention the Fascists in Philosophische Untersuchungen, a work of pure linguistic philosophy?

Cultural Amnesia – Necessary Memories from History and the

In the absence of an intelligible argument, or through line, in a volume that never quite dispels the suspicion that the author is frugally recycling some ancient intellectual compost, James and his editors have resorted to a helpful alphabetical arrangement, in which the essential link is its author's autodidactic fervour. The disproportion of gravy to beef makes Cultural Amnesia a wonderful book for a long afternoon in a left-bank cafe, or a transatlantic plane ride, but perverse and sometimes baffling to fans who might have been hoping for a Jamesian summation." - Robert McCrum, The Observer

One stupendous starburst of wild brilliance' – Simon Schama, historian and author of The Power of Art Gough argued: “James is an absolute master of surface, and the great critic of surfaces, not because he is superficial but because he believes that the distortions on the surface tell you what’s underneath. Style is character. His simplicity isn’t simple and his clarity has depth. With the essays and the poems – which I think you have to consider as one great project – he’s built an immense, protective barrier reef around western civilisation.” And this is odd, because the whole book is dedicated to Aung San Suu Kyi, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ingrid Betancourt, and the memory of Sophie Scholl, as much as to say that these women are exemplars of the humanism that the author holds so dear. Indeed, while discussing postwar American education, he writes, But beyond his skills as a linguist, James’ pride in his learning is tiresome elsewhere. Throughout the book we get autobiographical glimpses of an intellect in the making. Here he is reading Paul Valery’s Introduction a la poetique:

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The subject matter of many of the essays, dealing as they do with one or other form of totalitarianism, can be fairly bleak, and one thing a James fan might miss a little is the humour he usually brings to his writing. It's a pity that he seems to have felt it was inappropriate, because when it does emerge, in his lighter moments, the sentences can really come alive. How's this for a description of male porn stars: Ironically, Cultural Amnesia probably makes a better impression if the gallery of characters isn't that familiar, if the people he introduces are new (as way well be the case for many readers) -- i.e. part of that 'cultural amnesia' he's concerned with. It's frustrating, because there are threads running through all of this, several at a time -- but it's not tied together well enough to truly make for an argument (or several).Among the other slips: "The Germans have a word for it: Todgeschweigen" (330) -- no, they don't: the word they have (in this form) is totgeschwiegen. Several philosophers appear but their remit is so illogical as to the reference point that their ideologies disappear in a smog of erudite speciosity. Cultural Amnesia" is a series of short essays inspired by aphorisms, well-crafted sentences, or simply neat ideas from a wide array of writers, artists, thinkers, critics, celebrities, or otherwise historical figures. If there is any overarching theme, it is a championing of humanism and the defense of liberal democracy against totalitarian ideologies. James does an admirable job of explaining why such a defense, in this day and age, is still necessary. Quoting Joseph Goebbels,January 25, 1944: "Since Stalingrad, even the smallest military success has been denied us. On the other hand, our political chances have hugely increased, as you know."

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For those for whom the majority or all are more or less familiar it's harder to see quite as much to it, and while the individual pieces are almost all worthwhile the sum doesn't add up quite as convincingly. And that last sentence, in all its awkwardness and so-preachy exposition, its scornful lecturing to the students who cannot by themselves see the amazingly suave wit of Revel’s “wristy flourish”, is so typical of James. He aches for that “wristy flourish” himself, and simply produces a messy ejaculation. He has a gift for noticing and highlighting the telling phrase. Albert Camus’ observation, in The Rebel, that “tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes” allows James a useful meditation on the role of sheer tedium in the apparatus of totalitarianism. Indeed, several of the miniature portraits here are occasions for tangential reflections. Heinrich Heine provides an excuse for discussing the terrifying rise of celebrity culture. William Hazlitt spurs an excellent piece on the importance (and rarity) of generosity among literary rivals—where a paragraph on Auden and Yeats wouldn’t have come amiss. Reflections on Georg Christoph Lichtenberg detour into some notes on the disappointments of modern pornography. A treatment of Evelyn Waugh becomes a learned disquisition on the use of the dangling modifier by, among others, Anthony Powell. With fascinating essays on artists from Louis Armstrong to Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud to Franz Kafka and Beatrix Potter to Marcel Proust, Cultural Amnesia is one of the crowning achievements in Clive James's illustrious career as a critic.As he notes: Mao "started off as a benevolent intellectual: a fact which should concern us if we pretend to be one of those ourselves." Although a long book, Cultural Amnesia is not substantial. Don’t expect it to be instructive. (...) James sits on the judge’s bench assessing each author for their views. This is no mere collection of bits; it is a book with a theme, namely how the Kingdom of Letters did or did not stand up to the murderous philistinism of the dictators, especially Hitler and Stalin." - A.N.Wilson, Sunday Times James certainly endorses some very worthwhile books (and does so with quite convincing enthusiasm). A lifetime in the making, Cultural Amnesia is the book Clive James has always wanted to write. Organized from A through Z, and containing over 100 essays, it's the ultimate guide to the twentieth century, illuminating the careers of many of its thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists and philosophers. From Luis Armstrong to Ludwig Wittgenstein, via Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust, it's a book for our times - and, indeed, for all time. (inner flap)