CRITICS

In one of his essays, Robert Lowell speaks of the 1930s, the heyday of the New Critics, as a time "when criticism looked like winning." When you read Clive James, it still does. Mr. James is one of those rare writers who convinces you that criticism is not necessarily a handmaiden in the palace of the arts — that it can be transformed, Cinderella-style, from drudge to princess, given the energy and style of a first-rate fairy godmother (or godfather). In a time when criticism is dominated by the theory-sick monographs of academics, and when the future seems to belong to amateur and professional blurbists, it is more than entertaining to read Mr. James's lucid, passionate, erudite essays. It is heartening, and seems to promise that the critical role once played by a Samuel Johnson or an Edmund Wilson is still possible in the 21st century.
It is especially fitting, then, that Mr. James first won renown in 1972 as the author of a long essay on Wilson, titled "The Metropolitan Critic." The piece, which ran in the Times Literary Supplement in the days when contributors were anonymous, caused a sensation, and left people gossiping about the identity of the author. Soon Mr. James, who was born in Australia in 1939, had himself become a metropolitan critic, in the best sense. He positions himself at the intersection of cultures and languages, and makes possible the traffic between them that constitutes civilization.
He is universally curious, with an unflagging interest in fiction, poetry, history, politics, film, television, dance, painting, and just about any other expression of human creativity. And he is as unprovincial as any critic could be. An Australian living in Britain who frequently writes for American publications, he also reads French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese, and keeps abreast of developments in Asia, Europe, and Latin America.
All of those qualities and attainments go into the making of Mr. James's latest book, which might turn out to be his most lasting testament. The book is so rich that any title might have seemed inadequate to the contents. Still, "Cultural Amnesia" (Norton, 768 pages, $35) feels like the wrong way to introduce it to readers. From the title alone, one might expect the kind of screed against the dumbing-down of the younger generation than retired professors are fond of writing; or, at best, a Harold Bloom-type canon, designed as a vaccine against the loss of cultural memory. Such books usually leave an unpleasant taste: The ignorant don't read them, and the cultured who do read them — or at least buy them — do so primarily to congratulate themselves.
"Cultural Amnesia" is not that kind of book — it has too much charm and genuine, unscolding enthusiasm. Rather, it could be described as three books in one. First, and most obviously, it is a collection of essays, organized alphabetically by subject, about more than 100 writers, artists, and other cultural figures, mostly but not entirely from the 20th century.
The table of contents alone makes clear that Mr. James is no canonizing purist. In the "M" section, for instance, we find not just Thomas Mann, and not just his brother Heinrich, and his son, the historian Golo, but the movie director Michael, of "Miami Vice" fame. "G" brings Edward Gibbon, Terry Gilliam, and Josef Goebbels; "C," Tony Curtis and Ernst Robert Curtius.
Once you start reading the essays themselves, however, even this eccentric organizational scheme starts to break down. For the subject of each essay is not necessarily the name in the title. Mr. James always starts off with a quotation from that figure, but where he goes from there is brilliantly unpredictable. Sometimes he does stick to the subject, offering a brief assessment of, say, the Australian writer Alan Moorehead: "He was one of those colonials who, though being hard to place, can place themselves anywhere as long as they are given a few minutes to dust their shoes and straighten their ties."
Especially when Mr. James's subjects are, like Moorehead, not well known in America, such letters of recommendation are indispensable. I closed "Cultural Amnesia" with a new list of books I want to read: Moorehead's "African Trilogy," Golo Mann's history of modern Germany, and the journals of Witold Gombrowicz, to name just three. The fact that many of Mr. James's favorites have not been translated into English feels, for a moment anyway, like a minor obstacle. "Cultural Amnesia" is full of offhand remarks about how Mr. James taught himself Italian by reading Croce, or French by reading Saint-Beuve, with just a dictionary by his side.
That leads us to the second book inside "Cultural Amnesia": a piecemeal memoir of Mr. James's life as a reader and writer. The trails opened up by his favorite quotations frequently lead into his past. The essay on Tony Curtis, for instance, begins with the actor's infamous line, "Yonder lies the castle of my father," which in his Bronx accent sounded like "Yonder lies duh castle of my fuddah." It is a locus classicus of Hollywood silliness, but as Mr. James recalls, "Back there at the Rockdale Odeon in Sydney, I heard him say it, and I didn't laugh." The memory leads to an evocation of postwar Australia, hungry for American glamour, where Mr. Curtis's Jewishness read as quintessentially American: "Nothing mattered except the enchanting way that the tormented phonemes seemed to give an extra zing to the American demotic."
As Mr. James shows in this essay, a real intellectual is secure enough not to be worried about the height of his brow. Mr. James's principled eclecticism comes out in an essay on G.K. Chesterton, which, true to form, is really an essay about high and pop culture, provoked by Chesterton's definition of the critic's role: "To set a measure to praise and blame, and to support the classics against the fashions."
This sounds noble enough, but as Mr. James argues, such a defensive attitude toward the fashionable is dangerous. Puccini's contemporaries, he reminds us, scorned him as merely popular — a good example of how yesterday's fashions sometimes become tomorrow's classics. "Either in life or in the mind," Mr. James writes in what could serve as his motto, "there can be no such rigid division of the classical and the fashionable. A work of art has to be judged by its interior vitality, not by its agreed prestige."
That is why Mr. James feels no incongruity in moving directly from Tony Curtis to the German literary scholar E.R. Curtius: Both are part of his own inner life. The essay on Curtius, however, raises a more complicated set of issues, and leads us to the third and most important component of "Cultural Amnesia." Curtius, a great scholar of medieval humanism, lived in Germany through the Nazi period, and had to try to reconcile his intellectual calling with his responsibilities as a citizen. To Mr. James, Curtius's determination to stay quiet about contemporary politics points up one of the intellectual's most dangerous temptations — the forlorn hope "that there could be a cultural unity in conditions of political barbarism."
The problem of culture's responsibility in an age of barbarism, and the various ways it was met by writers and others in the 20th century, is the subject of the third book hidden inside "Cultural Amnesia." Many of the figures Mr. James includes were chosen as examples, for good and ill, of the way intellectuals responded to totalitarianism. Thus he writes about sainted figures like Anna Akhmatova — "a vamp by nature," forced by history to become a heroine — and Czeslaw Milosz. But he is perhaps even more interested in the century's villains — like Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, who edited the Nouvelle Revue Française during the German Occupation, and Alexandra Kollontai, whose feminist convictions led her to support a Bolshevik regime that starved and killed millions of women.
In these cases and many others, Mr. James is especially concerned with the temptations that ideology and power place before the intellectual. "Cultural Amnesia" can be read as an extended meditation on those temptations, driven by a genuine concern — which every thoughtful person must share — about how he would have behaved under similar circumstances. For every Marc Bloch, Mr. James reminds us, there was a Robert Brasillach, for every Nadezhda Mandelstam a Kollontai. The 20th century permanently cured us of the illusion that being well-read has any connection with being good.
That is why Mr. James, in his elegy and autopsy of the 20th century, always remembers that there is something more important than talent and erudition: that complex of beliefs and values that he calls humanism. Mr. James's definition of humanism is as good as any ever proposed: It is "a propensity to increase the variety of the created world rather than reduce it." In this book teeming with variety, he offers proof that such a humanism is still our best chance for a rich, happy, and decent life.