Clive James: Cultural Amnesia 0 comments

By Santiago Ramos

Clive James’ collection of essays, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts came out in 2006, but I read it during a period of month-long unemployment this summer, and more than anything else, it reminded me why I love books. I recommend it for everyone, but especially for people my age signing up to go to graduate school in the humanities—people, in other words, who might soon forget why they like to read books.

If I say that the book celebrates humanism and defends the political philosophy which that author believes best protects humanism—liberalism—I am perhaps giving the impression that this book is a philosophical apology. It is actually more like what the French call a cahier, a collection of thoughts on different thinkers, each thought spurred by a significant quotation or passage from the thinker which James has lifted from his notebooks or memory.

Refreshingly, James doesn’t merely quote from people he admires: Sartre features as bête noire in the book and there are chapters on Hitler and Mao and a few early Soviet apparatchiks. Moreover, the book is intentionally unsystematic because one of the things that James has learned throughout his lifetime of reading is that totalizing narratives are more often than not a bad idea.

The result is a pleasurable hodge-podge, displaying the author’s virtuosic and conversational prose style at its best.

Apart from the humanism and liberalism, the third main tenet of this book is its faith in the “common reader,” which, I suppose, is derived from the first two tenets. So we get some impassioned analyses of proper prose in a chapter on Evelyn Waugh, on aphoristic compression in a chapter on Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, and against classicist snobbery in a chapter on G. K. Chesterton.

Even when he writes about jazz and tango—in brilliant chapters on Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Ernesto Sabato—James defends the composers who write music that can still be danced to, which still “swings,” because dance music is the most inter-personal, un-solipsistic expression of each genre, and requires a certain communitarian contract between musician and dancer—I will write music that you can dance to. One of James’ favorite lines quotes an Ellington tune: “It don’t mean a thing (if it ain’t got that swing).”

With regard to the “common reader,” one of the best essays in the book is the one on Walter Benjamin, which combines an appreciation for some of the philosopher’s ideas while being critical of his overcomplicated prose. James is also tough on Benjamin’s unwillingness—after being shunned from the university system (anti-Semitism)—to accept a career as a journalist.

That’s because journalism, for James, is far from superficial: it forces an intellectual to say what he means and to do so concisely and elegantly.

In short, the common reader plays an important role in preserving liberalism, and liberalism, in turn, creates an environment in which the common reader can flourish. But the reader is inspired by the value of humanism, which James defines as having to do with the wonderful complexity of human activities in the arts and sports and everything else.

Anything that tries to destroy this complexity and interconnectedness is to be resisted. Which is why James writes against the Soviets and the Nazis and all the other killers of the twentieth century. This is James at his best—particularly in his essay on the Nazi resister, Sophie Scholl. But this is where I express my criticism of the book.

James’ treatment of Scholl is excellent: he recognizes that the fire within her—the force that gave her no choice but to fight against the Nazis—was her Protestant Christian faith. But for the most part, James spends time only with authors who share his own faith in a humanistic liberalism. Even when he writes about French political theorists, he writes mostly about liberal political thinkers like Raymond Aron, François Furet, and Jean-François Revel.

When it comes to Albert Camus, a writer who fits less easily into a liberal-humanistic mould, James chooses instead to focus on the concept of style. Why not, instead, on Camus’ metaphysical examination of political institutions in The Rebel? But James doesn’t have patience for that sort of speculation. Admiringly, he writes that the (formerly socialist) Peruvian liberal Mario Vargas Llosa, even in his Marxist days, did not indulge in too much metaphysics.

Beyond the philosophical issues, there is a more fundamental criticism: Why not simply write about people more unlike yourself? I don’t mean Mao and Hitler and Sartre. I mean, for example, people who resisted their regimes, which James rightfully detests, but who had a faith that James does not share. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, say. Maximilian Kolbe. Edith Stein. Alfred Delp, SJ.

And since he likes the French so much, why not a chapter on the French Catholic existentialist Gabriel Marcel? Or novelists like François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos? And while we’re at it, speaking about faiths James does not share, why not some balanced appraisals of other Marxists beyond Benjamin—thinkers like Theodor Adorno or Herbert Marcuse?

I could go on, but the point is clear. I want Mr. James to publish Cultural Amnesia, Volume II.