Unforgetting with Clive James

Clive James

CULTURAL AMNESIA

Notes in the margin of my time
896pp. Picador. £25.97


In 1576, having sought refuge from public life and taken up residence in the library of his family estate near Bordeaux, Michel de Montaigne gave instructions for an engraved medal to be placed on a wall above his writing desk: Que sais-je? This admonishment to be sceptical in the face of received knowledge was to be Montaigne’s motto during the composition of the Essais, the great record of his mind over the last two decades of his life. “Ainsi, lecteur, je suis moi-même la matière de mon livre”, cautions Montaigne; “ce n’est pas raison que tu employes ton loisir en un subject si frivole et si vain.” A finer example of what the rhetoricians call praeteritio could hardly be found, as Montaigne’s winking warning invites the reader to accompany him on a kind of holiday journey as he embarks on the thrilling endeavour of sketching the intellectual terrain of Renaissance humanism.
Four and a quarter centuries later, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the margin of my time arrives as the record of a properly Montaignean project – the adventures of Clive James’s agile mind as it confronts the culture and history of the century just ended. The mind, as Montaigne and James know well, contains multitudes; indeed, it is “the one collectivity that the free individual can thrive in”. If nothing else, James revels in the workings of his mind, as must any writer worth his salt, and because he has chosen to engage with so many compelling interlocutors, the volume is always stimulating. Begun as annotations in the margins of the books James has devoured over the past half-century, the 106 essays collected here address a staggering variety of topics without settling on a single overarching theme or claim. “Far from a single argument, there would be scores of arguments. about philosophy, history, politics, and the arts all at once, and about what had happened to those things during the course of the multiple catastrophes into whose second principal outburst” James was born in 1939.
While James professes to resist the siren song of ideology, which petrifies by way of a “premature synthesis”, Cultural Amnesia espouses a humanist ethic, which provides the banner under which his one-man army rides. For James, humanism stands in opposition to totalitarianism; in its fealty to the irreducible particularities of the individual, humanism is the very ideology of enlightened democracy – “a particularized but unconfined concern with all the high-quality products of the creative impulse, which could be distinguished from the destructive one by its propensity to increase the variety of the created world rather than reduce it”. Whereas the totalitarian “insists that, apart from a few hand-picked satraps, there will be no individuals except himself”, the humanist accepts and encourages individuality and variety, and seeks to expand the purview of human sensibility.
Variety is the name of the game here, as James expatiates alphabetically on figures as diverse as Louis Armstrong, Robert Brasillach, Dick Cavett, Witold Gombrowicz, John Keats, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Mao Zedong, Alfred Polgar, Sophie Scholl, Evelyn Waugh and Stefan Zweig. James tucks into this feast with remarkable gusto; his appetite for culture is lusty and his tastes are admirably catholic. At times the reader is hard-pressed to keep up with him. James is well aware that such an endeavour is threatened by a kind of centrifugal dissolution, as the book throws out names and addresses in dizzying fashion. At first glance it is hard to know for whom this book was written, as scholars will most likely find its courses too brief and too allusive, while laymen may well experience a certain bewilderment in the face of so much information.
Given the torrent of arguments and the cataract of topics under consideration, James relies on style to provide the glue for his project, professing his “faith that the unity would come from the style”. Now style, as Roland Barthes once argued, amounts to the distillation of the writer’s body, the scripted trace of his likes and dislikes as they move from impression to expression. Style is the very index of the writer’s sensibility in the old sense of the term. James is indeed a wonderful stylist, and Cultural Amnesia is filled with marvellous turns of phrase, many of which parry forcefully with those James deems antagonists of the humanist enterprise. On Jean-Paul Sartre, the book’s intellectual bête noire: “In Sartre’s style of argument, German metaphysics met French sophistry in a kind of European Coal and Steel Community producing nothing but rhetorical gas”. On Walter Benjamin’s crypto-messianism: “Whenever Benjamin transcends his sense of the relevant detail, one’s own sense of the relevant detail tends to punch holes in his abstractions”. Against the persistent cult of Leon Trotsky: “[he] lived on for decades as the unassailable hero of aesthetically minded progressives who wished to persuade themselves that there could be a vegetarian version of communism”. To José Saramago, who defended his adherence to the Communist Party in spite of all, by claiming, “I am a Eurosceptic who learned his scepticism from a professor called Europe”, James acidly retorts that such a pose is one “about which we are entitled to be sceptical, having learned our scepticism from a professor called history”.
For James, style makes the man, but too much style threatens to unmake him, for when the writer attends too closely to his own sentences, he tends to turn away from the horizon of real events, and it is on this horizon that James believes the wary writer must unstintingly train his eye. Edmund Burke, he remarks, “was not just a stylist. But then again, nobody with a considerable style is”. While Burke wrote admirably sinuous, muscular prose, he never invested it with more energy than the ideas whose vehicle it was to be. The writer who too lovingly caresses his own phrases risks falling into the trap of narcissism, a kind of affective disorder of the text that inevitably saps the prose of its vigour. Thus the decline of Gore Vidal, once a paragon of style for James, now sadly fallen into decadence. For James, it is the Viennese writer Alfred Polgar, little known in the English-speaking world, but greatly esteemed in the Germanophone one, who is the model stylist, as Polgar manages to attend to his own text and the reality it would represent with equal acuity. James cites a few marvellous aphorisms that make one wish Polgar’s works were readily available to the English reader: “The striking aphorism requires a stricken aphorist”; “It is the destiny of the emigrant that the foreign land does not become his homeland: his homeland becomes foreign”. Indeed, throughout Cultural Amnesia, the polyglot James mourns the vanished culture of Vienna, which he takes to be the very heart and soul of pre-war Europe, and it is the Viennese café philosopher Egon Friedell, author of the obscure Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit (1927–32), who is one of the true heroes of James’s book.
James’s allergy to writing that he believes takes itself too much as an object of psychic investment leads him to offer some questionable aesthetic judgements. Of Moby-Dick, James writes: “It’s not so much that I find [Melville’s] language contortedly and even wilfully archaic: more than that I find it makes a meal of itself, as if foretelling a modern critical age in which it is fated more to be taught than enjoyed”. De gustibus non est disputandum notwithstanding, it must be said that James is dead wrong in his blanket condemnation of Melville, just as he is wrong about Nabokov: “There will always be equivocal admirers who think the beauty of what [Nabokov] could achieve with English was the real reason he could never tear himself away from the mirror”. It is curious that one as attuned to the possibilities of expressive language as James should so thoroughly miss the wicked humour and pathos, not to mention the sheer invention, that inform Moby-Dick and Lolita. Indeed, given his unflagging interest in the politics of prose, James would do well to reread Benito Cereno, Melville’s profound literary meditation on the problem of race.
It is hard, too, to take James seriously when he claims of Paradise Lost that “there has never been any liking for the poem’s story, because there isn’t one. It’s just an outline”. How remarkable that he should bypass not just the poem’s epic tale of rebellion and damnation, but also the characterization of Satan, one of the two most penetrating presentations of the man of Nietzschean ressentiment in the English canon (Shakespeare’s Iago is the other), the very type of the terrorist whose only solace, futile though it must be, is Schadenfreude. Satan is the avatar par excellence of the festering Bin Ladens of the world; it is odd that James should ignore this, in a volume so centrally concerned with the stakes and legacy of the politics of terror.
James’s comments about satire are similarly problematic. In a fascinating essay on the character and legacy of Karl Kraus, James writes,
“his supreme mastery of verbal satire proved that satire is not a view of life. It can be a useful and even necessary by-product of one, but it can have no independent existence, because the satirist hasn’t either. Any writer who finds the height of human absurdity outside himself must find the well-spring of human dignity inside, and so lose the world.”
Here James gives in to the allure of phrase making and gets carried away with himself: put some pressure on the planks of his aphorisms and they break into splinters. While the critique may well hold true for Kraus’s bitterly barbed version of satire, it ignores the more dialectically cunning Horatian variant of satire, in which the writer mocks himself as he mocks others. In times of social crisis, such mockery certainly does present a world-view, and often a tonic one at that.
Or maybe this is just a winking provocation, designed to exercise the reader and to draw him into dialogue. Indeed, Cultural Amnesia invites precisely this kind of engagement on the part of the reader, and this is one of the volume’s signal virtues. James’s literary and musical sensibility may be problematically conservative, but it must be said that he is never dull in his condemnation of the things he dislikes. Though I do not assent to his claim that in the tenor saxophone explorations of John Coltrane “there is not a phrase that asks to be remembered except as a lesion to the inner ear”, I cannot but enjoy the invention James brings to the dismissal. He is right when he claims that Duke Ellington’s short pieces of the early 1940s are in every way superior to the often ponderous suites of the later part of his career: “It was all too evident”, he writes, “that three minutes on shellac had been his ideal form from the start: he was a sonneteer, not an epic poet”.
When James turns his attention to politics, the results are bracing. Cultural Amnesia is invaluable in its unflagging defence of humanism, and its argument that Soviet communism and Nazi fascism are obverse sides of the same murderous coin. Against the gauchiste line of Sartre and his epigones, James defends the humane liberalism of Raymond Aron and his intellectual progeny, Jean-François Revel and François Furet. He cites Aron from The Opium of the Intellectuals at the start of his own book: “The liberal believes in the permanence of humanity’s imperfection; he resigns himself to a regime in which the good will be the result of numberless actions, and never the result of conscious choice”. If we are condemned to wander an imperfect world, James suggests we have the power to improve our exile incrementally.
In a lapidary aphorism from the essay on Furet, James puts his finger on why Left intellectuals in France were so loath to abandon their adherence to the Communist Party in spite of the Stalinist purges and horrors: “Their reluctance to accept that so much suffering could be wasted”. Throughout Cultural Amnesia James is painfully attuned to the tragic waste of life brought on by Communism and Fascism in the middle of the twentieth century, and he is especially good at dissecting the bizarre way in which monstrous apologists on the Right and Left justified the excesses of the Stalinist and Nazi regimes by invoking derisory notions of progress. In an essay on the awful career and legacy of Grigory Ordzhonokidzhe, James shows how this Stalinist henchman claimed it was the cadres liquidating the kulaks who experienced hardships greater than the farmers who perished. Heinrich Himmler, officer-in-charge of the Nazi death camps who fainted dead away at the sight of real blood, spoke of the “hard task” of liquidating European Jewry and empathized with the SS officers charged with gassing and incinerating the innocent 6 million. “The hard decision had to be taken”, wrote Himmler, “to have this people disappear from the face of the earth.”
If nothing else, Cultural Amnesia offers lessons in scepticism about such utopian political language, which James shows to be the screen for any number of brutal regimes. He endorses the notion that it was the English literary and cultural tradition above all that provided a safeguard against the totalizing dreams that turned European history into a nightmare for much of the twentieth century. “The great playwrights infused our language with a permanent awareness of the difference between desiccated eloquence and the voice of experience. This was how English-speaking nations, above all others, were armed in advance against the rolling barrage of ideological sophistry in the twentieth century.” On this account, it was English empiricism that provided the philosophical bulwark against Communism and Fascism.
In good Kantian form, James writes, “It has always been part of the definition of humanism that true learning has no end in view except its own furtherance”. James’s volume is an exercise in what the psychoanalysts call “anamnesia”, or unforgetting, his attempt to present and preserve what he has found most vital in the culture and history that he and the rest of us have, to a greater or lesser extent, lived through over the past decades. That Clive James remembers it all so well and rescues so much that has often been forgotten is a testament to what an excellent, passionate reader he continues to be.