Several years ago one of my college professors asked me if I was reading Clive James. (The implication was that I should be.) I told him I had never heard of him. He was shocked: James was a regular contributor to those learned periodicals that a certain class of people consider obligatory reading for intelligent people, like The New York Times Book Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and The New Yorker, none of which I ever read except in cases of dire boredom and crushing world-despair (a regular condition for a substantial enough segment of the population, which I suspect is the reason those magazines have so many readers). Besides writing for the periodicals, James had written a billion books and was on television all the time. Still I had never heard of him. The world is large. I checked out his website and it seemed to be a token effort: a few things that apparently had no value in the world of publishing was all he offered. I was not impressed, and I moved on.
But another person, an unusually intelligent friend of mine, suggested James to me once more, and this time she backed it up by producing a copy of one of his books, which is always the best way to get a person to read a book, especially when he is too poor to buy it, and too disorganized to get to the library on time. She gave me Cultural Amnesia, which she said she had been dipping into for months with real pleasure. She cautioned that it was a bit dense and did not demand to be read through at a sitting. She did not need to caution me off: the books other people call dense I find to be my proper element: water is denser than air, but for a dolphin it’s easier going nonetheless.
So I read James’ very enjoyable set of essays over the course of about a week, with a break in the middle when I took a trip to New York and forgot to bring the book with me (which resulted in this recent Freud essay).
Cultural Amnesia is an unusual book. Eight hundred fifty pages long, it consists of brief meditations on a hundred-some odd quotations from a hundred different literary figures or otherwise famous people. These are obviously the gleanings of James’ lifetime of attentive reading and note-taking. Many of them are priceless in themselves. We have Kafka on a woman’s body: “How short life must be, if something so fragile can last a lifetime.” (God, how beautiful that is – if a woman ever wonders what men think of as they watch them sleeping next to them, there it is, put into words that simply cannot be compressed any further – the wonder, the feeling of loss in the face of mortality, the tenderness, the awareness of something precious beside one, something needing infinite protection but ultimately destined to be the prey of something against which there is no protection – again, an amazing, beautiful line.) Flaubert on the collapse of religion during the Roman Empire: “No cries, no convulsions, nothing more than a face fixed in thought. The gods no longer existed, Christ didn’t exist yet, and there was, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, a unique moment in which man was alone.” Cocteau on mercuriality: “Too many milieux injure an adaptable sensibility. There was once a chameleon whose owner, to keep it warm, put it on a gaudy Scottish plaid. The chameleon died of fatigue.”
What follows each quotation is an essay, generally on the subject of the quotation itself – hence for the Flaubert quotation the essay is about whether the world is better with or without religion – but sometimes about the artist generally (the Cocteau essay, for instance). Sometimes the essays wander a great deal, however, wherever James feels he has a chance to say something he wants to say. Jazz comes up several times in the book – there are essays gathered around Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Miles Davis – and the general structure of the book is jazzy. Given a theme – the starting quotation – James improvises, “blowing wherever he listeth.” Thank goodness there is an index, because finding these digressions afterward can be quite a task (who would know to look for the paean to Singin’ in the Rain in the Michael Mann essay based off the line “let’s violate his ass right now”?).
The book’s packaging by the publisher is terrible as usual, because the title and subtitle (“Necessary memories from history and the arts”) suggest that the book will be a liberal education in a can, which it is not, and a screed against modern mindlessness, which it is not. Aging businessmen who want to banish the slightly hollow ache of a lifetime of making money and voting Republican by knowing the intellectual importance of Thomas Mann, in three bullet points or less, will be disappointed. In fact I don’t know how much you can get out of the book unless you love ideas in general and spend your time with them already, and enjoy a breezy, aphoristic engagement with them. Because when his essay on Georg Christoph Lichtenberg veers into a discussion of the vapidity (or profundity?) of beauty (via Tolstoy), James is all-too-sparing of the details:
We can’t begin to be reasonable on the subject until we concede that our response to beauty is unreasonable in the first place. Tolstoy dramatized the truth incomparably – incomparably even for him – when he made Pierre fall in love with the pulchritude of his future wife even while she was busy proving that her head was full of air. Pushing the theme to its outermost artistic limit, Tolstoy shows Pierre obsessed with the shapeliness of her breasts at the same moment when she is obsessed with the shapeliness of her own arm. (397)
“Who the hell is Pierre?” says the aging businessman. “What book is this from?” James gives you no more details than his discussion requires. Some people I am sure will accuse him of name-dropping – the people for whom the world of books evokes only personal insecurity. For me I will simply note that the above example does precisely what James wants it to do – dramatize, incomparably, the problem he is talking about.
The whole book is filled with such excellent dramatizations and brilliant observations – a book of telling details. It is excellent for writers, because writers are basically collectors of telling details: you need to tell the inside story, and the only way you can do it is from the outside.
The book is also good for writers because James is an excellent writer, who has obviously spent a lifetime writing for effect, with a wonderful stock of metaphors and a knack for canny summaries. In keeping with his career as a critic, most of his best effort is critical and summary: “Ezra Pound, typically, was hammering away at a nail whose head was already flush with the wood.” “With War and Peace as a knapsack book, he [Alan Moorehead] was able to complement Tolstoy’s key insight – everything depends on morale – with an insight of his own: morale depends on everything.” “Spenser is only the third most gifted exponent of the stanza named after him.”
These opinions are not backed up with anything, and you have to supply the details. You need to know that there is such a thing as a Spenserian stanza (and a Spenser, for that matter). And of course you may or may not share James’s opinion about Spenser. James is at the end of a long career, and his prose drops opinions the way forest-trees drop leaves in the fall. They are everywhere, and you cannot read a paragraph without three or four of them – even ones theoretically irrelevant to his set theme – bumping up against your mind. I don’t find myself agreeing with them all – who could? – but they are often, to borrow a phrase of his, “unbeatably well put,” and they almost always contain an important insight (for example, he thinks that jazz went astray when it lost “that swing,” its danceability – you may disagree, but this is still a useful way of discussing what happened in jazz after World War II). I am certain that a certain sort of person will find James’s opinionated prose insufferable – the type who believes that only professionals can have opinions. In fact, it would be interesting to hear James analyze at further length the great split in the world of books, between literature and academic analysis. He clearly disdains academics and “professional opinion,” and though he is a critic himself he never feels like one to me, in large part because he can actually write – what he is doing is similar in method (and perhaps even purpose) to other works of art. He contrasts this with academic writing, and he even notes the cultural benefits of the institutional anti-semitism of the universities in early-twentieth-century Germany and Austria:
Whole generations of Jewish literati were denied the opportunity of wasting their energies on compiling abstruse doctoral theses. They were driven instead to journalism, plain speech, direct observation and the necessity to entertain. The necessity to entertain could sometimes be the enemy of learning, but not as often as the deadly freedom to write as if nobody would ever read the results except a faculty supervisor who owed his post to the same exemption. (2)
A similar – but contrasting – point can be made (and James does make it) that America benefitted immensely from the culture of those (mostly Jewish) intellectual eminences driven into exile by Hitler. But I will point out that many of them had in fact compiled doctoral theses, and found their homes in American universities, and yet they made tremendous contributions to American culture. Does this count as evidence against James’s contention that compiling those abstruse doctoral theses was a “waste of energy”?
It may not, but this is the kind of problem James never thinks through, and if you take his statements too seriously you may be bound to get annoyed at him. He applauds the cultural contributions of people driven from the universities, and to some extent claims that their achievements were dependent on that exile, while also noting the equal achievements of people who spent their entire lives in universities at home or abroad. No data is given, and it is merely James’s opinion. He can be caught doing similar things in other essays. To some extent James almost makes it part of his method: his work is not systematic. When he praises liberal democracy – a constant theme of his – he praises it for its capacity to hold contradiction. He allows himself the same freedom.
In a similar vein James discounts there being any real plan or coherence to his book: after all, a hundred discrete essays about a hundred quotations from a hundred different authors, organized seemingly in the most lazy manner possible – alphabetically by author’s last name – seems to be the very definition of a hodgepodge. And the choice of people is bizarre – where else will you find Dick Cavett sandwiched between Albert Camus and Paul Celan? Or Edward Gibbon beside Charles de Gaulle and Terry Gilliam? James had something to say about them, that is all. This is a legitimate consideration for a writer, though again, not useful for the businessman who wants to stick with the 100 most important people to know. The people were chosen not because they were crucial in themselves, but because either their words or their careers were in themselves a “telling detail.” And James pulls it all off, because in fact almost all the essays are interesting.
James also claims that the book’s eight hundred fifty-page heft took “forty years to write.” This is transparently false as a literal statement. The book reads like it was written in a week: the voice modulates for effect but never really changes. The essays are all breezy and digressive and never ponderous: in fact, their digressions into blatant contradiction are of the sort that a long time with a subject generally resolves into some kind of synthesis eventually. Even its contradictions, hence, have a coherence to them – it feels all of a piece. James himself writes an “overture” for the book, which is a description of Vienna before the Nazi takeover, which he takes as somehow an ideal and also somehow not an ideal: a subject of fascination, let us say. Vienna was beautiful, brilliant, witty, learned, humanist: it was stuffed with people who knew history and literature and the passions. And yet it was helpless before the Nazi onslaught: in fact, it was in great part cooperative. Many of the luminous intellectuals seemed to have no idea what was coming. Many more were part of what was coming in some way. Many were collaborators. Many claimed for the intellect a place above such concerns as Hitler and National Socialism – a claim belied by the fact that once National Socialism arrived, the city’s intellectual culture never really returned. Its streets had kept their pretty facades, but their soul had been gutted: it had become just another pretty place for American tourists to make a two-day stop on their way to the next European capital.
Almost all of James’s essays gather around the general phenomenon of which Vienna is but one example: the helplessness, the blindness, and the culpability of those who lead a life of the mind when confronted with anything serious. Sometimes it is just typical human blindness when it comes to love, but most of the essays have as their backdrop the titanic twentieth century struggles with totalitarianism in its various forms. The essay about Sartre is in many respects the best, because it is utterly unflinching. It begins with a long quotation from Sartre whose awfulness should indeed arouse suspicion (and there are entire shelves of this kind of stuff in our university libraries):
The Cogito never delivers anything except what we ask it to deliver. Descartes never interrogated it concerning its functional aspect: “I doubt, I think,” and by having wanted to proceed without a guiding thread from this functional aspect to its existential dialectic, he fell into the substantialist error. Husserl, instructed by this error, remained fearfully on the place of functional description. By that fact, he never superseded the pure description of appearance as such; he remained on the Cogito; he merits being called, despite his denials, a phenomenist rather than a phenomenologue; and his phenomenism borders at all times on Kantian idealism. Heidegger, wanting to avoid the phenomenism of description that leads to the megatic and antidialectic isolation of essence, directly tackles the existential analytic without passing through the Cogito….
James replies, “But enough, and more than enough.” After acknowledging that sometimes expressing complex things is hard, giving the example of Hegel, James goes on the attack:
Hegel was trying to get something awkward out into the open. Heidegger was straining every nerve of the German language to do exactly the opposite. More than half a century later, the paradox has still not finished unraveling: it was Heidegger’s high-flown philosophical flapdoodle that lent credibility to Sartre’s. It was a paradox because Heidegger [rector of the University of Berlin from 1933 through the end of World War II] was an even more blatant case than Sartre of a speculative mind that could not grant itself freedom to speculate in the one area where it was fully qualified to deal with the concrete facts – its own compromises with reality. But merely to call Heidegger a “more blatant case” shows what we are up against. The case is still not clear, and in the years when Sartre and Heidegger were in a supposedly fruitful intellectual symbiosis, it was still not even a case: Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazis was thought of as a flirtation. The means scarcely existed for anyone – philosopher, philologist, literary critic, journalist or clinical psychologist – to point out the truth which has since become steadily more obvious, even if it does not appear axiomatic yet: that these two men, Heidegger and Sartre, were only pretending to deal with existence, because each of them was in outright denial of his own experience, and therefore had a vested interest in separating existence from the facts. (676-7)
To me this does, in fact, appear axiomatic. The makeup known as intellectual culture is opaque because it is being called upon to hide blemishes. You can’t spend much time with artists without knowing this. And the twentieth century might indeed be called the age where this was proven most clearly, when the most cultured, aesthetic nations proved the sickliest and ugliest of all. Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Spain, Russia, and Japan all signally disgraced themselves. Argentina produced the prettiest city together with probably the worst political history in South America, and it also produced the best writer, Borges. That Borges is escapist I think should be obvious enough. Whether you want to call this escapism our noblest or ignoblest faculty is a matter of perspective. You might call our ability to at least mentally remove ourselves from the idiotic primate bloodbath all around us one of our better qualities. Borges’ fellow-writer and Argentinian Ernesto Sabato – whom James quotes with approbation in his essay on Borges – merely thought it was fear, however: “From Borges’s fear of the bitter reality of existence spring two simultaneous and complementary attitudes: to play games in an invented world, and to adhere to a Platonic theory, an intellectual theory par excellence.”
James could turn the conversation from here into a discussion of spirituality – which in this context I will define as the attempt not to hide the blemishes but to address them directly – and an examination of what happens to art which does not believe in the gods, and philosophy which does not believe in wisdom. But James instead tends to chalk the rot up to personal culpability. In a few instances this seems fine, but when you see James pull the same trick in essay after essay – very few thinkers turn out very honorable except the ones who got immediately murdered – his standard of honor seems a bit too exalted for human beings. Can you really hold it against these men – especially the Frenchmen, who had to choose death or silence and generally could not go into exile – that they chose to live? But even in writing about the topic James does us a favor: it reminds us that totalitarianism is all the more to be dreaded, because the moral stature of the individual human being stands almost no chance against it.
And I will say something further about the “outright denial of one’s own experience” which he accuses Heidegger and Sartre of. Any curious observer must note that this denial seems to be an aspect of the creative life in general, which seems, like blood, to flow into the world only from a wound. It is a struggle against helplessness, against limitation, against our smallness. Of course Sartre would write about freedom, the way Jane Austen would write about love and marriage: it was the thing they lacked. One might almost say it was the thing they knew nothing about – nothing perhaps except their dreams. It is wise to scrutinize their writings precisely here, where they were quite literally making it all up. Oftentimes they are delusions and only lead us further away from truth. But this is not to say that an artist cannot begin with such a wound and realistically describe both the helplessness and the thirst for the ideal which is engendered by it. I have never enjoyed Sartre’s work, which to me does indeed feel like a pose, but the work of his contemporary Camus (also compromised by his feeble cooperation with the Nazis) seems always to acknowledge his weakness in the face of the problem (the problem with a plague is that you are not immune to it: and it makes you want to run away from all your moral obligations in the hope of merely surviving it – this is honesty about our weakness, and yet it leaves room for heroism as well).
But even in Camus’s case, you get the feeling that the motivating factor is a kind of self-loathing, or at the very least an intense internal discomfort with life as it is. It is not clear that a more acute consciousness of this would make their work better; exposing roots to the light is not the best way to get flowers and fruit. (If Sartre had figured out he was merely writing out his guilty conscience at not resisting Nazism with his life, what could he have done? Could this awareness have led him to any destination but self-immolation? He would have had his moral integrity, but the liberation of France would still have had to wait for the Allied Army to arrive with the tanks).
I suspect that some of James’s blindness on this topic can be related to himself. His chosen field was the twentieth century – a large field. One might have thought that he would have focused on New York, or Washington D.C., or Los Angeles – major cultural centers which shaped the century – as opposed to Vienna. Or that he would have written about Franklin Roosevelt and Churchill instead of Mao Zedong and Hitler. In other words, his book is quite personal and idiosyncratic – hardly the only or even obvious way to treat such a subject. What does this tell us about James?
James, an Australian who moved to London, is obsessed with the middle-European writers – the Austrians in particular, but also the Poles, the Russians, the Germans, the Czechs. (In a word – Bohemians). What is so striking about them is how entirely un-Australian they are: they were boxed into a tiny, pressurized social space, the inheritors of a vast cultural tradition and a powerful economy, comfortable and hence cut off from nature. The dangers they faced were from human beings; the beauties around them were those of human beings. When they went to the “sea” it was the Lido at dead old Venice: not even at the ocean could they escape human history. It is clear that this world fascinates James. I see in him the same values that I see in the intellectual immigres who come to New York City: they want to be witty and cultured and brilliant and they want to be acknowledged for it. To get it they must be immersed in people, to smooth the rough edges off the pebble, to scrape off what is common and to imitate what is superb. What they want can only be given them by human beings. You can see that this has been James’s method for decades – to observe and imitate the most artful. He never even mentions anything natural in the course of the whole book.
James still seems a little bit surprised that this very social world is made up – necessarily – of people who will knuckle under pretty easily to social pressures. He is like the young ingenue who discovers that the Bohemians are all well-fed conformists after all – marching to a different drummer for sure, but in step all the same. Of course totalitarianism found good soil in these glittering, pressurized societies – totalitarianism itself is a social phenomenon. I find it a bit charming that James thinks that artistic culture should tend to produce insular, Stoic individuals capable of challenging any tyrant with the eternal truths of humanism. I’m an idealist myself and I do sometimes think about what kind of educational culture would actually produce people like this, but I harbor not the slightest illusion that the cafes of Vienna would be the place to look. I have my doubts even about the farm of Cato producing people like this. But for sure the cafe intellectuals are going to be the least likely to be practiced at thinking for themselves.
But it’s that cafe world which is – or was, at least – the beau ideal of James, and he has obviously spent a lifetime immersed in the literary productions of those men and women. And in James’s indignation at the failure of so many of his heroes to be heroic, you can feel the inner tension in the man – the question as to whether these figures should have been heroes at all, whether a lifetime spent, as James has, reading the works of Sartre and Borges and Proust amounts to much in the end. Nothing quite satisfies, but thank goodness the productions are voluminous enough. No matter how well put-together it is, no matter how many notes you take, you get through the book soon enough, and have nothing to do but reach for the next one.
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