Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time

Product Information

The idea that humanism has no immediately ascertainable use at all, and is invaluable for precisely that reason, is a hard sell in an age when the word “invaluable,” simply by the way it looks, is begging to be construed as “valueless” even by the sophisticated. The totalitarian states, the great sponsors of mass atrocity against innocent human beings, had been propelled by ideologies, and what else was an ideology except a premature synthesis? From the force of cohesion would come the power of suggestion, and one of the things suggested should be the existence of other voices. A lifetime in the making, Cultural Amnesia is one of the crowning achievements in Clive James's illustrious career.

I find myself starting with those figures I feel I know best (which is never as well as James) and drifting onto the (for me) relatively obscure names. It is not a fancy dress party, but “come as you are” means that Tacitus has arrived in a toga, and the poet Juana Inés de la Cruz in a nun’s habit. As I was reading, I felt I was deepening my understanding and appreciation of Western culture, sometimes by taking a new look at a well-known figure, and other times by learning about a previously unknown person whose work I am know seeking out. Akhmatova’s friend and rival Nadezhda Mandelstam, on the other hand, seems delighted to have met Albert Camus: she distrusts the way he turns on the automatic charm even for an old lady, but she approves of his opinions.He says that, if he has done his work in assembling this volume properly, “themes will emerge from the apparent randomness and make this work intelligible. One of the most famous cabaret artists of his day, Friedell in the 1920s combined his career in show business with a monkish dedication to his library, in which he produced a book of his own that must count as one of the strangest and most wonderful of the twentieth century: Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit (The Cultural History of the Modern Age). It's this approach which has led to James's much commented-on demonization of Jean-Paul Sartre, who is ‘a devil's advocate to be despised more than the devil’, ‘the most conspicuous example in the twentieth century of a fully qualified intellectual aiding and abetting the opponents of civilization’.

A poorly formatted but serviceable web page includes the table of contents for Cultural Amnesia, in case any of you would like to review the vast array of people profiled by James: http://catdir. Indeed, every one of its many essays was written especially to fit with all the others in a vast verbal mosaic of the mental life of modern times, the area where politics and culture meet. This book alone has determined me to get to grips with all manner of novels, essays and verse, by the likes of Witold Gombrowicz, Egon Friedell, Montesquieu, Alfred Polgar, Karl Kraus, Heda Margolius Kovaly, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Jean-Francois Revel, Raymond Aron, and a holy host of others; and that's merely scratching the surface. To make matters worse, James dedicates the whole book to Scholl, and yet he spills five times more ink on Tony Curtis.By the time that terminus was in clear sight, however, I had begun to live with the possibility that there could be no scheme. Although it putatively focuses on the twentieth century, there are some notable names from rather earlier, including Keats and Montaigne. This inheritance is something which can be ignored from time to time, or only partially appreciated, but it cannot be lost as long as it is talked about. As for the stuff on Fuentes, I presume James deliberately changed Keat’s quote about poets being legislators from “unacknowledged” to “acknowledged” but the fact that Llosa ran unsuccessfully for President of Peru rather diminishes the effect here since he too, as a failed candidate, must remain in the ranks of the unacknowledged. The most amazing thing is that James appreciates them all, even when he criticizes their mistakes and excesses.