Clive James

A decade ago in Berlin, sunk in a plush seat in the Konzerthaus on the Gendarmenmarkt, I sneaked Clive James’s “Unreliable Memoirs” from my handbag to distract myself from a concert that was being conducted at Looney Tunes velocity. Sinking into the pages, I forgot about the music lovers around me, the chandeliers above and the strenuously laboring musicians below, and slipped into the world of James’s hardscrabble Australian boyhood. Absorbed in his account of a disastrous youth-group performance — he was supposed to crouch on the floor and wait for a large girl named Maureen to somersault over him — I read: “She came hurtling out of the back annex, along the corridor, through the connecting door, into the hall, up to the springboard and into space. She drove me into the floor like a tack.” I burst out laughing ... and was jolted back into awareness of my august setting by 80 enraged spinning heads and sputtered shushes from three rows of German aesthetes. I had failed to spot the warning printed on the cover of the book, plucked from the ticker tape parade of critical praise it had earned in Britain: “Do not read this book in public. You will risk severe internal injuries from trying to suppress your laughter.”
Reading James’s new book, “Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts” — a capacious and capricious encyclopedia of essays about everyone he considers worth knowing about in the 20th century (including people who lived long before: Tacitus, to name one) — I was surprised to learn, in his chapter on Dick Cavett, that “Unreliable Memoirs” had met with a cool reception in America. Critics slammed it, he explains, for “trying to be truthful and fanciful at the same time.” He writes, “Since I had clearly had no other aim in mind, I read these indictments with sad bewilderment.” Like the actor Tony Curtis, whom he apostrophizes in another chapter of this volume, and unlike Hitler (though Hitler, he notes, “told quite good jokes”), James is a natural master of the art form in which “serious delivery avails itself of comic timing.” It is a form that isn’t often brought to bear on journalism and letters in this country; but lucky for him, James is not from this country.