Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

Product Details

• ISBN13: 9780393333541
• Adapt: New
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Description

"I can't remember when I've learned as much from something I've read—or laughed as much while doing it."—Jacob Weisberg, Slate Finally in paperback after six hardcover printings, this international bestseller is an encyclopedic A-Z masterpiece—the perfect introduction to the very core of Western humanism. Clive James rescues, or occasionally destroys, the careers of many of the greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists, and philosophers of the twentieth century. Soaring to Montaigne-like heights, Cultural Amnesia is precisely the book to burnish these memories of a Western civilization that James fears is nearly lost.

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Customer Reviews

Indispensable
One of my life's treasures is a single Word file: Various Quotes.doc

A collection, begun about a decade ago, of quotes that have caught my eye, it's become a record of my intellectual life: my reading, my thinking, my enthusiasms, my obsessions, my laments, my solitude, my delight. I've assembled the quotes as I've encountered them, so it's order is chronological, and I've recorded their origin, including the page number, so I that I can easily locate them again, should I need to. What riches.

Fundamentally, Cultural Amnesia is Clive James's Various Quotes.doc, consolidated into a book, with commentary. The book is filled with astonishing quotes, taken from a life of reading--my goodness, what reading--and film-going, listening, traveling. James uses his various quotes to contemplate people whom in his view we should not forget, mostly for their grandeur, occasionally for their depravity. The quotes get him rolling, and his essays often turn in unexpected--and consistently marvelous--directions: a mediation on the anti-Nazi heroine and martyr Sophie Scholl, for example, turns into a celebration of Natalie Portman. James imagines Portman playing Scholl in a movie of Scholl's life--which takes him to a fascinating claim about the limitations of cinema:

"If Natalie Portman plays the role, the girl won't die. Natalie will go on after the end of the movie with her career enhanced as a great actress, whereas Sophie Scholl's career as an obscure yet remarkable human being really did come to an end. The Fallbeil (even the name sounds remorseless--the falling axe) hit her in the neck, and that was the end of her. Her lovely parable of a life went as far as that cold moment and no further. It's a fault inherent in the movies that they can't show such a thing. The performer takes over from the real person, and walks away. For just that reason, popular, star-led movies, no matter how good they are, are a bad way of teaching history."

The essays in Cultural Amnesia wander like this, as essays should--orbiting elegantly, satellites crossing the firmament, around their brilliant quotes, the shining little planets upon which they gaze and which give them the axis all orbits require.

The primary pleasures of this text, which as a whole constitutes the most compelling defense of Western liberal democracy that I've ever read, number three: 1) reading the quotes James has gathered; 2) becoming acquainted, or re-acquainted, with some of the essential figures of (mostly) 20th century cultural and political history; and 3) following the movement of the author's mind, which, in the end, is any essay's fundamental purpose.

The good news here is that Clive James has a exceptional mind and he has given us an indispensable book.

2010-08-26 (Half Moon Bay, California, USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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A Civilized Man's Look at an Uncivilized Time
CULTURAL AMNESIA is a book of over 100 essays that Clive James wrote over a 40 year period. The majority of the essays are about 20th century German, Austrian, and French cultural figures, but there are a few Russians, Asians, and Latin Americans in there as well.

My favorite essays are the ones about the German & Austrian Jews that populated the Viennese cafes between the wars. Many Jewish intellectuals were denied university positions because they were Jews, so they turned the cafes into a university of their own. One especially good essay is about Egon Friedell who was not only a cabaret star but who also found time to write a cultural history of Europe in his spare time. When the Nazis came a knockin' he leapt out his apt window but (ever the conscientious humanist) yelled out a warning to those on the street below as he approached.

Each essay is a kind of character sketch but also each essay contains invaluable cultural insights, some from the figures that he is sketching, and some from his own highly civilized brain (this guy has read everything and I would love a chance to peruse his library). In fact this book made me re-think what civilization is--I decided it is certain basic human decency (humane action under extreme historical conditions)and basic human qualities like understanding which of course isn't very basic at all. Anyway, you won't be sorry if you buy this book.

Its one of those books that makes you feel more civilized just looking at it.

James is a left of center kind of guy, but he is also a guy who has no patience for any kind of reductive catch-all theory of any kind. He's been everywhere and believes in the value of learning from experience. He's spent his life as a journalist and he always prefers the clarifying value of a fact over the seductive power of a theory--which in his view just seduces people away from sense. This is one reason he loves the worldly sophistication of the Viennese Jews who never lived in the safe confines of university communities (they couldn't), but remained in touch with everyday reality and everyday concerns and spoke in a way that everyone could understand. Hes none to fond of the Walter Benjamins & Jean Paul Sartres of the world. He also has no kind words for artists like Picasso & Borges who never seemed to be too terribly bothered by the political atrocities happening outside their studios/libraries.

Each essay in this book is like a reckoning. Some good guys get saved from oblivion and some bad guys get kicked toward it, which is what you want from a highly civilized compendium of 20th century cultural knowledge/thriller, right?

Highest recommendation.

2010-06-15 (Miami Beach, Florida United States) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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No license for talking through a high hat
This is a book for list addicts. More than hundred essays about artists and writers, organized by alphabet. A seemingly erratic selection: not all essays are in praise of their subject. In fact, many are very much not in praise. All essays are excuses to talk about anything that the author feels like talking about. He claims that there is a pattern, and that may be so. The pattern could be called anti-irrationalist and anti-ideological. I would write `anti-b...s...' if amazon would let me. We meet victims of totalitarianism and of racism. We meet key people of epochs or moods or fads. We meet people who wrote or spoke against the grain. We meet people whose fame needs to be hung lower.

Just look at the entries for A:
Akhmatova, a victim of Stalinist suppression of art (though she survived as a person, contrary to many others of her world).
Altenberg, as a `key figure' of the fascinating world of Vienna before WW1: an influential writer of nothing much, who provides an excuse for talking about all kinds of things (including a reference to the magnificent Egon Friedell, whose Cultural History of Modern Times (= Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit) is an absolute must). Vienna was the `cradle' of so many schools: critical rationalism, psychoanalysis, Zionism, plus some worse things. Without WW1 and the following totalitarian revolutions in Russia and Germany, St.Petersburg, Berlin and Vienna would have had a great race with Paris for cultural leadership on the continent.
Armstrong, for anti-racism, including the `inverted' racism which would not agree to see white jazz musicians like Goodman or Beiderbecke in their greatness.
Aron, for writing against the opium of intellectuals and resisting the popedom of Sartre.

B: Benjamin, Borges, Browne, plus two Frenchmen that I never heard of (Marc Bloch, Brasillach)
C: Camus, Cavett, Celan, Chamfort, Chanel, Chaudhuri, Chesterton, Cocteau, Contini, Croce, Curtis, Curtius...
That should suffice for a picture of delightful eclecticism.

James manages to discuss Stalin, Hitler,Pinochet, Jim Crow, sex, jazz, occupation/resistance, fellow travelers/Cold War, emigration/cosmopolitism, and whatever else he feels like. A great concept. Great fun. Opinionated writers are most of the time more interesting than the sleek ones. I wish he liked Coltrane and Melville better.

He is good at telling the `truth': like about good old Walter Benjamin, whose fate was so tragic that one hardly dares to question his theories, as far as one could find them in his opaque language. Benjamin became a star posthumously, an intellectual icon of the 60s. (Coincidentally, I tried to read his most famous book, the unfinished Passagenwerk (=The Arcades Project), recently. Very hard to say anything about it, as not even the intention, the vision is clear from the huge heap of fragments that he left behind.)
Another debunking subject: Borges, whose literary genius remains undoubted, but whose political blindness irritates.

If you don't want to add to your `must read' list, stay away from this book! It will provide you with tons of ideas what you need to read next. So annoying.
I am posting my review before finishing the book. By its nature it does not require reading it in one sitting. Of course that implies the risk that I will be annoyed by later entries. In that case I will come back and take revenge!
What I regret: I was careless in ordering and now I am stuck with the hardcover version, which weighs about 10 kg.

2010-06-01 | Hermit (window seat) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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Endlessly quotable.
A centrepiece of ideas radiant into cultural history and a study in prose style. Endlessly quotable and a perfect example of genuine erudition and scholarship effortlessly integrated with a real humanity and humility.

2009-12-28 | gingaTao (Australia) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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A unique testimonial to humanism and liberal democracy
CULTURAL AMNESIA is a compendium of intellectual criticism, very broadly construed. The subjects include history, politics, and the arts, but one of the lessons of the book is how artificial the boundaries of those disciplines are, that in truth they are intermixed. So I guess it is best to describe CULTURAL AMNESIA as a book of intellectual criticism of human life - for the most part, 20th-Century human life

The bulk of the book consists of 106 chapters, each of which is devoted, at least nominally, to a different figure from history, politics, and the arts. Some of them are famous (e.g., Albert Camus, Duke Ellington, Adolf Hitler, Marcel Proust, and Margaret Thatcher); some are obscure, at least in this country (e.g., Ernst Robert Curtius, Ricarda Huch, and Pedro Henriquez Ureña). Although most are from the 20th Century, a few predate it (e.g., Sir Thomas Browne, Montesquieu, and Tacitus). Each of the chapters, in turn, has two parts. The second and the raison d'être for the book consists of one or more brief quotations from the figure in question with extended commentary from James that relates to the quotation(s), in one way or another and eventually if not immediately. (For example, the quotation that anchors the chapter on Franz Kafka is "How short life must be, if something so fragile can last a lifetime."). The first part of each chapter is a brief (one-or-two-page) profile of the person, which serves to set a context or frame for the more extended discussion that follows.

Clive James is very well-read, in five or more languages. Now 70, he must have been collecting quotations and working on this book for the better part of his life. It is extraordinarily wide-ranging and eclectic. But it does have certain themes or preoccupations. The principal object of the book is to champion humanism and liberal democracy. Thus, James's primary preoccupation is with those who sponsored fascism and communism in their various manifestations, those who turned a blind eye or were taken in or were hypocritical, and those who resisted, criticized, or heroically endured totalitarianism during the 20th Century. A second theme deals with intellectual and artistic integrity. A third preoccupation has to do with whether, in evaluating an intellectual or an artist, we can dismiss or ignore his/her personal weaknesses, inordinate egotism or selfishness, and hypocrisies. (In this regard, interestingly, James is much more inclined to give a pass to artists than to intellectuals.)

Next to its phenomenal intellectual breadth, what most distinguishes the book is the writing, which in the main is of the first order, often brilliant, marked by cleverness and wit, and studded with memorable aphorisms (both James's own and others he quotes or borrows). Here are a few examples:

* "No ideology can tolerate a full historical consciousness."

* "When academic language gets beyond shouting distance of ordinary speech, voodoo is all it is."

* "A crippled schizophrenic, Goebbels was easy to make fun of at the time by those safely out of his reach."

* "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."

* "Many attempt without success to make up for their lack of talent with defects of character."

* "Revisionist historians and commentators who deplore the use of nuclear weapons against the two Japanese cities have a humanitarian case, but they weaken it by supposing that they have a military case to back it up."

CULTURAL AMNESIA is not uniformly superb. Some of the essays are odd (e.g., Michael Mann). At times James is too abstruse or didactic. A few of his discussions are out-of-place (too vulgar) or simply silly (e.g., the extended piece on the movie "Where Eagles Dare" and Richard Burton's hairstyle). James is much better as a critic than as an original thinker (witness the claptrap at the top of p. 702). While the writing itself often sparkles, there are occasions when it is too aphoristic, instances when it is overly artful or contrived, and at times simply baroque.

But I am very glad I stuck with the book and read it cover to cover (although it took me two years of off-and-on reading to traverse its 850 pages). CULTURAL AMNESIA introduced me to numerous figures of consequence of whom I otherwise probably would die in ignorance; it alerted me to twenty or so books that I want to read (or re-read) before I kick the bucket; and, overall, it broadened, and deepened, my own critical faculties. Trite to say, but it has made me a better human being. CULTURAL AMNESIA is a splendid book that I recommend highly.

2009-12-20 (Santa Fe, NM) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 5

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Unreliable Memoirs

Description

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Customer Reviews

A hoot!
Loved this book although it is not an easy read. The Aussie slang and the vocabulary made me run to the dictionary more than once. But I like that sort of thing. Clive James talks about his youth in Australia, mostly after his father died at the end of World War II. He ran rings around his mother and pretty much ran wild. Not an easy read vocabulary-wise, but worth the effort.

2010-08-27 | Mimi (Austin, TX United States) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Feel the need to balance the case
I have owned this book since it first came out, have read it multiple times over the years, and have all the subsequent four books in the Clive James autobiographical series (plus a few others of his). I hadn't planned to write this review, but having just read the five others on this page I feel the need to do something to help balance things out. The other five reviewers all appear to be Americans, which means they are unlikely to know much about Clive James, who is a household name in Britain and Australia. Nor are they likely to understand childhood in the old Empire in the times about which James is writing. And the comments from the mothers are a sad reflection of the way in which so many people now feel the need to shield their children from everything that could possibly cause them even the slightest harm. (I have two young sons and resolutely refuse, for example, to have them wear those dippy helmets when they are on their bikes.)

You have to understand this book both in the contaxt of the place and of the times. People in Australia, and even to some extent in the US, did this kind of stuff in the 1940s and 1950s. The criticisms of James as a person are hopelessly misplaced. And I can understand the comment about the inside jokes, but I was brought up in Kenya in a British expatriate household in the 1950s and 1960s, so much of what he says rings true to me. Although I live in the US I also lived in London for a long time and well remember James' excellent TV column. This book is one of my ten favourite of all time. It is funny, poignant, self-effacing, and well written, and a valuable record of a time and a set of attitudes long gone (not always necessarily a bad thing). Anyone who takes it too seriously, or who reads it completely out of context, like several other reviewers on this site, will never really understand either the book or the author.

2010-07-04 (Indianapolis, IN United States) | Helpful Votes: 5 | Rating: 5

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Great...if you get the jokes
As a person unfamiliar with Australian geography and even less familiar with Australian cultural references, I merely liked this book. Clive James does a fantastic job in setting up many of the anecdotes he relates in the various chapters here. However, as an American who is merely semi-well traveled, I did not get many of the inside jokes. It is easy to see how funny this book could be if you really were tracking with the culture he grew up in.

This, however, is more of the reader's problem rather than the writer's. The tales related range from sadly familiar (dead father, incredibly caring mother, indifferent son) to some of the truly funniest writing imaginable (trying to tackle a world class rugby player; a chapter entitled The Sound of Mucus). James is really great. There are stories in here that everyone can relate to and it is all told in a way that is sharp in sensational details and vague on everything in between. If I could dump my memories into a book, this is probably what it would be like; only less funny and more stupidly written.

Broaden your horizons and read the book. It is a short read and will have you looking something up in Wikipedia at least once every few minutes.

2010-03-01 | CajunDodger (Los Angeles) | Helpful Votes: 7 | Rating: 4

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Hard to get through
I was told that as a mother of a young boy I needed to read this book. I anxiously awaited for it to arrive in the mail a few weeks ago but have yet to finish it. I lost interest. I thought it was hard to get through with all of the Australian slang. It did make me smile the couple of times I could understand it. Who knows, maybe I will finish it when I run out of other things to read!

2009-11-02 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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disappointing- maybe a better book for men?
I bought this book because it was well reviewed by many credible reviewers and was said to be "laugh out loud" funny. Perhaps I should have been suspicious when such a tiresome cliche was used. This is a fairly typical story of a young boy in a time when children could run loose and endanger their own and others' lives. This one happens in Australia and follows the author through our equivalent of grade school to college, living with his widowed mother. Most of the very young years are tales about how he and his friends did incredibly stupid things while the adults were either very dense or just assumed that dangerous play was the best way to weed out the keepers. Happily, this book was written before we publically pilloried authors for "improving" the story. Nonetheless, I really found the whole thing quite boring and began to hope he would kill himself. As he went off to school, I found it funnier, but only made it up to a smirk, not even a chuckle. However, I did finish the book.
I think that this book would have been enjoyed more by someone who had been less cautious as a child and wasn't a mother now. Forgive me, I know this is genderist, but I could see many men recognizing themselves in this book and maybe they are the people who were laughing. It wasn't me.

2009-07-26 (Vermont) | Helpful Votes: 7 | Rating: 3

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Meaning of Recognition: New Essays 2001-2005

Description

Literary critic, cultural commentator, TV personality, journalist, poet, political analyst, satirist and Formula One fan: Clive James is a man (and master) of many talents, and the essays collected here are testament to that fact. Whether discussing Bing Crosby, Bruno Schulz or Shakespeare, he manages to prioritize style and substance simultaneously, his tone never less than pitch-perfect, his argument always considered. With each phrase carefully crafted and each piece offering cause for thought, the resulting volumewhich takes the reader from London to Bali, theatre to library, from pre-election campaigning to sitting in front of the TV at home, watching The Sopranos and The West Wingis remarkable not only for its range and insight, but also its intimacy and honesty.

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Customer Reviews

Afternoon Light
Clive James is an expatriate Australian who travelled to Britian as a young man and has made a career as a writer and columnist. These are a collection of essays and talks that he has created in the last few years.

James combines the ability to be extremely funny with being highly intelligent. Some of the essays are gems and laugh out loud, especially the last. His essays on the television programs West Wing and the Sopranos are both insightfull and a delight to read.

The book also reflects James drift to the right. He is a person who sees himself as a social democrat but he is clearly becoming impatient with do goodist leftism or simple ideological positions. The interesting thing is his impression of Australia. James left at a time when a large number of talented people in the arts left thinking Australia a backwater. Now he thinks about it differently. Australia of course has changed in the forty or so years since he left but there is an acknowledgement of the fact that the backwater tag perhaps missed something. That is that Australia is one of the oldest and best functioning democracies around. It has a spirit of egalaterianism which perhaps characterises it. His essays on Britian suggest a gentle decay. London a city with a dreadful subway system strange functionalist white elephants like the Millenium Dome. Compared to this was Sydney at the height of its glory during the olympics. Of course this simply could be a bit of grovelling hoping to push up the Australian sales. Regardless the essays are not only the product of one of the most intelligent cultured minds going around but they are some of the funniest going around as well.

2006-02-05 | tomfrombrunswick (Melbourne, Victoria Australia) | Helpful Votes: 10 | Rating: 4

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The Revolt of the Pendulum: Essays 2005-2008

Description

Illuminating, insightful, informed, inspired, and intelligent. These are words that could - and do - apply equally to book or author; in fact, "The Revolt of the Pendulum", Clive James' latest essay collection, shows James at his most dazzling and versatile best yet. From the rules of grammar to the fundamentals of religion, from the culture of fandom to the cult of the critic, it's all there: his customary wit, learning and understanding; his precise way with words and pointed comments; his ear for language and eye for detail; and, his ability to focus on the finer points and the bigger picture simultaneously - not to mention the sheer scope of his subject matter. Praise for Clive James: 'Lively, shrewd and resourceful, James' writing is impeccably fluent, flexible and urbane: parodies, jokes and slang sit comfortably with moral and political arguments, lightly-worn erudition and scrupulously close readings of poetry and prose' - "Sunday Telegraph". 'Sober and skittish, learned and lewd, rhetorically rambunctious and epigrammatically concise; Clive James is an intellectual as well as a joker, a wise man as well as a wit' - "Observer".

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Falling Towards England (Picador Books)

Description

'When we got off the ship in Southampton in that allegedly mild January of 1962 I had nothing to declare at customs except goose-pimples under my white nylon drip-dry shirt.' In the first volume of "Unreliable Memoirs", we said farewell to our hero as he set sail from Sydney Harbor, bound for London, fame and fortune. Finding the first of these proved relatively simple; the second two less so. Undaunted, Clive moved into a bed and breakfast in a Swiss Cottage where he practiced the Twist, anticipated poetical masterpieces and worried about his wardrobe. 'A comic triumph, full of terrific jokes and brilliantly sustained set pieces' - Ian Hamilton, "London Review of Books". 'It is something to do not merely with talent but with energy, chutzpah, appetite. Mr James has total mastery of his medium' - Anthony Burgess, "Observer".

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Customer Reviews

damn funny.
If you're a tortured artist, a sucker for wit, a would-be critic, a bit of loser when it comes to attractive women, Do you have a passion for bohemian culture, want to travel around europe? Do you have a hard time trying to hold down menial jobs? Have you got a university education? Well, then "Falling towards england" is your book. If you've watched Clive in "post-cards", and remember his hillarious deadpan voice, you'll laugh out loud as you read his hard-to-put down 2nd installment within his "unreliable memoirs" series. If you're a bit of comedian and a bit of a geek at uni, then reading this book will help relieve the pain a little bit as James' details countless romantically inept experiences which he includes in what he calls "Another chapeter in the history of what never happened". pure gold.

* keep an eye out for the talking book version. listening to it is damn funny.

2005-01-14 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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A CLEVER BOY
Clive James should be 65 by now, if the arithmetic of the years works in the same way for him as for me. This volume of his memoirs, the second, was issued in 1985, but presumably it calls on diaries kept in his 20's, the period the book covers, so one can't really gauge how it reflects his maturation.

His greatest strength and his main weakness are one and the same thing. He produces some brilliant one-liners, but so many of them, and so similar in style, that they become just a little wearisome over the length of even a shortish book. I became familiar with him first as the BBC film pundit and then as the television critic of The Observer on Sundays. Within the scale of a half-hour programme or a Sunday review he was absolutely unsurpassable for wit and originality. He did various other tv programmes over the years, and I remember in particular a series on a tour he had made in eastern Europe, at the time still the Evil Empire of fond memory. There was a clip of a rock band consisting of various balding 40ish gents in dull suits, on which James commented in his flat Australian accent `They don't just look like secret policemen, they sing like secret policemen'. Does that have you rolling in the aisles? It did me. It still does, and this book rarely goes two pages in succession without something of the kind. As a writer of English he is a consummate workman on his own terms. The tone is studiously light and informal, but the expression is never careless or cheap. Indeed his other fault as a stylist is a kind of demotic pretentiousness. The relaxed and plain-Joe paragraphs are liberally larded with obscure literary and cultural allusions, and it would serve him right if some readers find this patronising. What do you make of a chapter-heading `Solvitur acris James', for instance? I happen to recognise the reference to the ode of Horace starting `Solvitur acris hiems' (Sharp winter melts) but not only will it totally escape many, perhaps most, it doesn't have all that much point anyway in its context.

The period narrated is from his arrival in England in 1962 until just before he went up to Cambridge. As a document of an impoverished, chaotic, Hogarthian gin-lane existence it is simply brilliant. It would be hard to describe the feel of his account as precisely introspective - Rabelaisian might be nearer the mark. In saying that, I begin to suspect that James's manner is beginning to infect me too - the style of Rabelais is nothing like what you might expect from its English dictionary definition or the common usage of the word insofar as it has a common usage. Towards the end I thought I detected a distinctly deeper tone. I wonder what he could really do if he really tried.

2004-07-15 (Glossop Derbyshire England) | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 4

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Very funny and clever!
This is one of a series of autobiographical books from Clive James - Unreliable Memoirs and May Week Was in June being the others - which take Clive from his boyhood in Australia to the hallowed halls of Cambridge University. Clive has a clever, satirical and self-deprecating style. The humor is sly, very personal, and tends to creep up on you. It helps if you have heard him speak and can imagine the text in his rhythmic, expressive voice. The book, although written from the vantage point of Clive's current, and considerable, fame as a television presenter and journalist, does not endow Clive with any more talent than he had at that time. In fact you begin to wonder how he would ever make his mark, let alone a living. The characters he introduces are rich and colorful, presented honestly, to be liked or hated, much as Clive did. The pace is easy and undemanding, it's a gentle book, but not wimpy, rather it is very much in the style of the author himself. I highly recommend reading the books in sequence - Unreliable Memoirs is first - but if not possible, this one is a great place to start to appreciate Clive's work.

1997-12-30 | Helpful Votes: 6 | Rating: 5

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Clive James' Reliable Essays: The Best Of Clive James

Description

Introduced by Julian Barnes, Reliable Essays is the definitive selection of Clive Jamess outstanding essays, chosen from thirty years of spellbinding prose. Including such classic pieces as his Postcard From Rome and his memorable observations on Margaret Thatcher, it also contains brilliantly funny examinations of characters like Barry Humphries, while elsewhere showcasing Jamess more reflective and analytical side. From Germaine Greer to Marilyn Monroe, from the nature of celebrity to German culpability for the Holocaust, Reliable Essays is an unmissable cultural index of the twentieth century.

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Customer Reviews

Not a player
"Reliable essays". Disregard the insipid choice of book title. Proof positive that you can't host TV shows and then moonlight as an intellectual is on nearly every page of this awful "Best of".

Clive James, like H.L. Mencken before him, is an autodidact. And there the similarities begin and end completely. When the great Mencken impressed readers with the breadth of his knowledge, he did so in a concise and sensible manner: any erudition he imparted was always while en route to explaining a far simpler thing, and he never said more than he needed to. In short, Mencken merely *mentioned* the things he knew. James, on the other hand, who suffers the immense handicap of coming from TV, feels the necessity to take everything he knows and spray the reader from head to toe with it. From the very first paragraph of this book, one can pluck the following example:

"It's the Orwell style. But you can't call it Orwellian, because that means Big Brother, Newspeak, the Ministry of Love, Room 101, the Lubyanka, Vorkuta, the NKVD, the MVD, the KGB, KZ Dachau, KZ Buchenwald, the Reichsschrifftumskammer, Gestapo HQ in the Prinz-Albrecht Strasse, Arbeit Macht Frei, Giovinezza, Je suis partout, the compound at Drancy, the Kempei Tai, Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, The Red Detachment of Women, the Stasi, the Securitate, cro-magnon Latino death squad goons decked out in Ray-bans after dark, the Khmer Rouge torture factory whose inmates were forbidden to scream, Idi Amin's Committee of Instant Happiness or whatever his secret police were called, and any other totalitarian obscenity that has ever reared its head or ever will."
[p. 3]

Got all that? The impression generated here is that of someone who plainly doesn't *feel* educated. Nor do they feel like educating others. A "look at me" passage of this variety imparts no useful information to the reader: it is merely a shopping-list of disjointed esoterica that could only impress other intellectual spivs eager to do some name-dropping of their own. If it sounds educated, the sound is a hollow ringing.

Moreover, it's one thing to try and pull the ladder up after you when you're learned, it's another to do so when you're the type to make goofy mistakes. For example: "the NKVD, the MVD, the KGB" are all the same organisation - these are just three of seven name-changes for what eventually became the KGB. So why not also mention the Cheka, GPU, OGPU and NKGB? (It's as if James were asked to name three rock bands and he lists Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship and Starship.) Also, the claim that "Orwell was the first to use the term 'cold war'" [p. 15] is clearly incorrect. Walter Lippmann was the first to promulgate the term (in 1947), and he appears to have borrowed it from the 14th-century writer Don Juan Manuel.

Anyway, this painful inferiority complex suffuses the entire book. James could never, for example, write the simple sentence: "It is a surrealist image." He has to say that "It is a surrealist image which might have been cooked up by Dali in the presence of Bunuel, by Andre Breton in the presence of Eluard" [p. 183]. It's equally difficult to simply say "My conversation with Norman Mailer ended" when highbrow pretensions demand that you say: "My colloquy with the patriarch was soon suspended." [p. 181]

This brings us to the small matter of prose style. "Postcard from Rome", for example, is allegedly one of James' most celebrated essays. Visiting the city seems to trigger his Roman pun reflex:

"Rome lay below. Those strings of lights were roads all leading to the same place."

"A lot of water has gone over the viaduct since then ..."

"Out on the old Appian Way it was as cold as Caligula's heart."

"While terrorists maim and murder at will, the cops are chasing contraltos. It's a clear case of fiddling while Rome burns."
[p. 135 et seq.]

... And so on. If I were parodying the James style right now I suppose I'd be adding some Latin and stating that this essay is the reductio ad absurdum of the expression "When in Rome ..."

It gets worse. James follows Margaret Thatcher to China. The reflex triggers again. This time it's Sino-punnery, heavily leavened with more intellectual spivvery. Thatcher's airplane lands:
"... out of a pale sky as delicately transparent as the finest ch'ing-pai ware of the Sung Dynasty".

Thatcher has:
"... gratified them by looking her best, in a plum blossom and quince-juice silk dress finely calculated to remind Chinese guests of a mo ku painting of the Late Northern Sung."

We're informed that:
"That rings a bell with the Chinese - a large bronze chung bell of the Western Chou period, decorated with projecting knobs and interlaced dragons"

As for Thatcher herself:
"Nothing like that skin had been seen since the Ting potters of Hopei had produced the last of their palace-quality high-fired white porcelain with the creamy glaze; her hair had the frozen flow of a Fukien figurine from the early Ch'ing; and her eyes were two turquoise bolts from the Forbidden City's Gate of Divine Prowess, an edifice which ..."
[p. 144 et seq.]

... but by now, who cares? As Emerson once said of Thomas Babington Macaulay, no one ever knew so much that was so little to the purpose.

Then there is the question of plain sense. What are we to make of the statement that Vladimir Nabokov "was solipsistically proprietorial about Russia, the novel and art itself" [p. 103]? Or of the post-Holocaust claim that "we're different now. But nobody is that different now. Because nobody was that different then" [p. 261]? Or the assertion that 'China is a big place. Here, at the edge, it is a bit like the West, but the edge, we had learned, is a long way from the middle' [p. 158]?

The first words printed on the opening page of this book are from a press review. Michael Schmidt beams: "When I come across a Clive James essay in a periodical, I save it for last, knowing it will be a treat." This giddy compliment confirms that Clive James has probably earned the kind of admirers he deserves - grown-ups who react to his writing in the same way that a 10-year-old reacts to a box of gooey chocolates. And for the same reasons.


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Done? Almost. Why not end with another Clive James' shotgun-blast of trivia? Did you know that ...

"Germaine Greer is a storm of images; has already been promoted variously as Germaine de Stael, Fleur Fenton Cowles, Rosa Luxemburg and Beatrice Lillie; and at the time of writing needs only a few more weeks' exposure in order to reoccupy the corporeally vacant outlines of Lou-Andreas Salome, George Sand, Marie von Thurn un Taxis-Hohenlohes and Marjorie Jackson (the Lithgow Flash)."
[p. 197]

2007-08-21 (Australia) | Helpful Votes: 6 | Rating: 1

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When Princess Di died, Clive was here to Speak For All Of Us
From Clive's blessed sacred obituary for Princess Diana: "No. It was the first word of that cataclysmic Sunday morning: 'no' pronounced through an ascending sob, the consonant left behind in the chest voice as the vowel climbed into the head voice, the pure wail of lament whereby anyone, no matter how tone deaf, for one terrible moment becomes a singer."

Oh the humanity! Clive then goes on to brag about his cherished dinner dates with Di. Seriously. (I swear I'm not making this up.)

2005-04-24 (c/o your haunted slab of Velveeta) | Helpful Votes: 7 | Rating: 5

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