Clive James: Cultural Amnesia

I have been reading Clive James' essay collection Cultural Amnesia on and off over the last week. At over 900 pages, it is a pretty hefty volume and the scope and the breadth of his subjects make it look very impressive and daunting indeed. Only when you start reading the essays that his writing and opinions start getting on your nerves. Now I have no problem with either dilettantism or being opinionated, even when someone is both at the same time, as James certainly is but rather the way he behaves as a petulant elementary school teacher giving off marks to these twentieth century luminaries on good behavior, or at least what he thinks constitues good behaviour, which to him is saying appropriate things about the totalitarian powers of twentieth century Europe - Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. He condemns those who he thinks gave aid and comfort to totalitarian powers and his list includes Sartre, Brecht ("creepiest major talent of modern times"), Neruda and many others. Even poor Wittgenstein gets a few marks cut off because he didn't say anything about what was happening in the Germanic part of Europe in his time. He concedes that it was his prerogative but still finds it a "strange omission." In the end James comes out as yet another in the same line of contemporary intellectuals like Hitchens, Martin Amis and others who pass off their essential conservatism under the guise of anti-totalitarianism and rational humanism. James actually has an adulatory piece on Margaret Thatcher in the book. Hitchens and Amis at least were critical of her or probably it was only when they were young.

It is not that he is oblivious to the essential unfairness of judgment from hindsight. In his essay on Golo Mann, who according to him was the finest German historian of last century, he calls hindsight, "a disposition of personality that likes to impose itself on the past and turn it into a self-serving cartoon." But that's exactly what he has done in the rest of the book. Sartre and Brecht have their reputations skewered elsewhere too, though James does heap on some new abuses (a most thoroughgoing conman, that's Brecht for him), but his essays on other more admirable figures like Walter Benjamin that baffle. He barely stops short of blaming him for his own death because he refused to see what was coming. He then criticises him for his belief in Marxism while in reality his Marxism was nothing like the institutional leftism. In one of his other essays he accuses Paul Celan of being deliberately hermetic and then impugns a political motive - that of a calculated disengagement from reality. I really don't understand why is he wasting his time reading poetry when his notion of reality is so shallow. There is an essay on Rilke too which I thought would contain similar gems but he goes into the same Nazi/Soviet crap allover again there too. This is yet another problem with his book. I generally like digressive writing because it feels much closer to how our minds really work but in this case it is as if his record were stuck in the same place. It is Nazis, communists, nazis, communists and on and on. Even when it is not so, his digressive imagination doesn't lead to interesting places. In his essay on Sophie Scholl for example, he is more interested in who is best suited to play the role in a hollywood adaptation. He thinks it should be Nathalie Portman. I mostly yawned through it, looking for some more information about Sophie Scholl which never came. (The recent German film about her life is excellent by the way with an amazing young actress (Julia Jentsch) playing the title role. Here is a trailer.) The book is also dedicated to her memory...

As I said in the beginning the breadth and the scope of his learning make it look very impressive and the book can serve as a useful starting and reference point since many of the names featured here are not well known. I hadn't (or barely) heard of more than one-third of his subjects and I look forward to reading and finding more about them. If not for anything else, the book does inspire with its project. In the context of Viennese intellectuals of the turn of century period he says that for them education was not something that was required to start off on a career. Education itself was a life-long career. That's a very valuable lesson, even when you realize how difficult it is to live by this principle under all the material and financial exigencies of modern life. Still it is an inspiration to keep reading, learning and thinking and making it a life-long project.

For more, The Millions blog has a very nice and critical review of the book. Really worth reading. Complete Review gathers some other reviews and offers its own too.