the resulting story made Eleanor Roosevelt, whose idea the GI Bill was, into the most effective woman in the history of world culture up until that time, and continues to make her name a radiant touchstone for those who believe, as I do, that the potential liberation of the feminine principle is currently the decisive factor lending an element of constructive hope to the seething tumult within the world’s vast Muslim hegemony, and within the Arab world in particular." James claimed to have an “ungovernable ego” but was quite capable of uxoriousness. He was married to Prue Shaw, a Cambridge scholar, with whom he had two daughters: Claerwen and Lucinda. James protected all three from media intrusion, though he gave an insight into his admiration for his wife when he produced her book on Dante for an interviewer: “That’s the real McCoy. That will always be there. The kind of stuff I do is more conjectural. I am still trying to impress her.” He once said: “I think marriage civilised me. It may sound sexist, but it is one of the roles of women to civilise men.” Some made great claims for his literary talents. Writing under the headline As Good as Heaney in 2009, Julian Gough in Prospect magazine championed two volumes of James’s collected verse. But how could one take seriously a TV critic who wrote satirical verse epics such as The Fate of Felicity Fark in the Land of the Media: A Moral Poem (1975) or Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage Through the London Literary World (1976), still less compare them to the Nobel laureate’s? But (Sperber) doesn’t say enough about the Social Democrats. There were always more people voting Social Democrat than voting Communist, right to the end. Why did not the Social Democrats see the Party as the only hope? Sperber doesn’t tell us. Once can only conclude that even while he was writing his monumental autobiography, at the end of his life, he still clung to the belief that the people who fell for neither of the political extremes weren’t fully serious about politics. Such is the long-term effect of an ideological burden: when you finally put it down, you save your pride by attributing the real naivety (sic? Is this a British variation of naiveté?) to those who never took it up.” (p. 726)

Cultural Amnesia - Clive james

For a more detailed critique of the Introduction: James tells us that throughout his reading and writing career, he made “annotations” which seemed to be beyond a narrow subject, belonging to a “scheme” which could perhaps be approached far in the future, perhaps near the end of his life. He talks of the threads of this larger scheme as “clarities variously illuminating a dark sea of unrelenting turbulence … Far from a single argument, there would be scores of arguments. I wanted to write 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 (World War I was the first) I had been born in 1939, and which continued to shake the world as I grew to adulthood.” James certainly endorses some very worthwhile books (and does so with quite convincing enthusiasm). His frustration is perhaps best summed-up in his attempts to explain his issues with Brecht (who doesn't rate an entry of his own). From the French viewpoint, liberalism had been able to do so little in staving off the kind of Nazi brand of totalitarianism, it was thought that only another brand of absolute power--the Soviet Union--could fill the vacuum." James’s philosophy of criticism is marvelously summarized in his intention about the book, which is to demonstrate the truth of his belief that our literary inheritance “is our real and inextinguishable fortune.” 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. And I take it that this is what he wants us to do with the contents of Cultural Amnesia - talk exuberantly about the wealth which is there for the taking.In the absence of an intelligible argument, or through line, in a volume that never quite dispels the suspicion that the author is frugally recycling some ancient intellectual compost, James and his editors have resorted to a helpful alphabetical arrangement, in which the essential link is its author's autodidactic fervour. The disproportion of gravy to beef makes Cultural Amnesia a wonderful book for a long afternoon in a left-bank cafe, or a transatlantic plane ride, but perverse and sometimes baffling to fans who might have been hoping for a Jamesian summation." - Robert McCrum, The Observer But it gets worse. The section on Sophie Scholl (the German college student who was executed for protesting the Nazi regime) was somewhat more on topic, but took a far stranger turn when James embarked on speculating who should play Scholl in the talkies, speculation that then took him on a long dewy-eyed bout of incontinent praise directed towards actress Natalie Portman. Whether you agree with him or not about Portman, in James’ ardor, poor old guillotined Sophie Scholl gets lost in the Hollywood gush and semi-amateur movie casting. To make matters worse, James dedicates the whole book to Scholl, and yet he spills five times more ink on Tony Curtis. With fascinating essays on artists from Louis Armstrong to Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud to Franz Kafka and Beatrix Potter to Marcel Proust, Cultural Amnesia is one of the crowning achievements in Clive James's illustrious career as a critic.

Book Review: Cultural Amnesia - The New York Times Book Review: Cultural Amnesia - The New York Times

Though it can be overdone, there is nothing like a trading of quotations for bringing cultivated people together, or for making you feel uncultivated if you have nothing to trade. Nowadays very few people can quote from the Greek or would think to impress anyone if they could, and even quoting from the Latin-still a universal recognition system in the learned world when I was young-is now discouraged. Quoting from the standard European languages is still permissible at a suitably polyglot dinner table: I was once at dinner in Hampstead with Joseph Brodsky when we both ended up standing on restaurant chairs clobbering each other with alexandrines." Stalin's obduracy was the historical fact that defeats imagination. Given his intransigence, no other scenario than armed confrontation was really possible. The idea that the United States chose to fight the Cold War can be discussed, but only in the context of the reality that it could not have chosen to call it off." As he notes: Mao "started off as a benevolent intellectual: a fact which should concern us if we pretend to be one of those ourselves." The book extends] from Marx’s own lifetime to those crucial years after Stalin’s death when the dream, somehow deprived of energy by the subtraction of its nightmare element, was already showing signs of coming to an end, in Europe at least. The lessons of history don't suit our wishes: if they did, they would not be lessons, and history would be a fairy-story.

Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time

Hitler’s) reasoning was clever on the level of grand strategy. But on the level of military strategy it ignored a fact which has had on relevance in Napoleon’s time, but was now crucial: Moscow was the Soviet Union’s communications centre. If Hitler had concentrated his forces and gone all out for Moscow in the autumn of 1941, he could have had all the oil and minerals he wanted not long after. But he was far to smart: or, if you like, too stupid, except that it strains the meaning of the word.” The clarity and wisdom of this impressed me greatly, even if I wish Sperber’s autobiography hadn’t been so predictably characterized as being “monumental.” This distrust of extremes while maintaining political passion is one of James’ most appealing traits. His take on Margaret Thatcher, while not exactly brilliant, was at least balanced and made some interesting points (her inability, apparently, to ever let anybody around her ever complete a sentence). I was reminded of this many times while reading Clive James's new and enormous book of biographical essays, Cultural Amnesia, because Bond's breezy insouciance is something Clive James seems constantly trying to pull off. Of the hundred-plus figures James writes about, fewer than twenty-five worked in English. Some of the others don't even exist in translation yet, but that's all right because James has read every single one of them in the original, and he's going to make damn sure you know about it.

Cultural Amnesia - Clive James - Complete Review Cultural Amnesia - Clive James - Complete Review

Gough argued: “James is an absolute master of surface, and the great critic of surfaces, not because he is superficial but because he believes that the distortions on the surface tell you what’s underneath. Style is character. His simplicity isn’t simple and his clarity has depth. With the essays and the poems – which I think you have to consider as one great project – he’s built an immense, protective barrier reef around western civilisation.” James himself learned German, Spanish,Italian and French so he could read literature and philosophy in those languages. He is leaving us a remarkable collection which stands as a significant cultural monument in its own right, as well as passing on on the memory of men and women who played culturally significant roles in the evolution of modern Europe (mostly Europe, thought the book starts with Louis Armstrong as a vehicle to comment sparingly on racism). Among the other slips: "The Germans have a word for it: Todgeschweigen" (330) -- no, they don't: the word they have (in this form) is totgeschwiegen. James offers an interesting mix of good and bad guys, and it makes for a good overview of all that went wrong in the 20th century, especially from the intellectual angle. An Indian summer of writing was just beginning, long after the valedictory interviews were done. He wrote a translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy (2013), a collection of essays, Poetry Notebook: 2006-2014 (2014) and an analysis of the radical change in TV viewing habits, Play All: A Bingewatcher’s Notebook (2016).

Plenty enough comments about this one--and after reading through it with a couple of reading friends, I feel like I've said all I want to say about it already. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the cultural history of the 20th Century, James' point in all these essays is to raise ideas that, if we are not careful, could be forgotten as Liberal Democracy moves forward into the 21st Century. Some of the figures that James focuses on will be unfamiliar to the common reader (close to half of the names were unknown to me before reading, and of those I did know of, many were just a name I'd heard), but the personalities whose names stand as titles for the essays often have little to do with the essay itself: instead, they provide a quote which James then uses to expound on nearly any subject imaginable--but one which James doesn't want us to forget. Thus, many of the subjects deal with the uncomfortable reality of the past, and an attempt to debunk any romanticizing myths; to realistically look at the choices people had during the era of the Nazis and the Stalinists, and to examine why people chose as they did; and, not least, to give us examples that might help us as we face the future.

Clive James Books | Waterstones Clive James Books | Waterstones

Quoting Joseph Goebbels,January 25, 1944: "Since Stalingrad, even the smallest military success has been denied us. On the other hand, our political chances have hugely increased, as you know." Cultural Amnesia is designed to be dipped into casually, but it can be read from beginning to end if you want to set your scalp on fire. (...) Although he takes aim at literary theory, academic obscurantism, racism, reverse-racism and intellectual dishonesty of every stripe, Mr. James’ recurrent theme is the danger of political ideologies. Signing onto an ideology entails ignoring all evidence to the contrary. It’s a mind-shutting maneuver. (...) Mr. James’ tone ranges from confiding to bombastic, and he’s entertaining at either extreme. His conclusions are brilliantly reasoned, but his relentless focus on World War II, the Holocaust, Stalin’s purges and extreme authoritarianism is enough to convince you that there were no hula hoops, no soap operas, no cupcakes in the 20th century -- in fact, that intellectual seriousness demands that there be no cupcakes." - Regina Marler, The New York Observer Such a platitude excites few intellectuals. In fact it bores and disgusts so many of them that they prefer to deal in high-sounding justifications for violence. Thus another way of summarizing James’s ambition might be to say that he tries to glamorize the uninspiring—tries to show how tough and shapely were the commonsense formulations of Raymond Aron, for example, when set against the seductive, panoptic bloviations of Jean-Paul Sartre. This might appear to be too easy a task—how much nerve does it really take to defend the vital center?—but James succeeds in it by trying to comb out all centrist clichés, and by caring almost as much about language as it is possible to do. Most of the figures are from the 20th century, with a stray ancient (Tacitus) and a few figures from more recent times (from Montesqieu to Hegel to Chamfort). Note that last CliveJamesian sentence – hyperbole combined with a too-easy conclusion combined with some punctuation and grammar I am not sure I understand, with a near-cliché closer (“strains the meaning of the word”). As for the rest, I’m no military genius myself, but destroying “communications” in the Soviet Union was not, I think, the key to success for Hitler. Stalin had already dismantled and moved beyond the Urals much of the USSR’s industrial capacity. Horrible winter weather, massive Soviet armies, and thousands upon thousands of T-34 tanks would overcome Nazi-occupied Moscow and a disrupted “communications centre.” Anybody who dismisses Hitler as stupid (or for that matter “a monster”) is in fact detaching Hitler from history, not engaging him. All of this is far too easy and its been done a thousand time before.And this is odd, because the whole book is dedicated to Aung San Suu Kyi, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ingrid Betancourt, and the memory of Sophie Scholl, as much as to say that these women are exemplars of the humanism that the author holds so dear. Indeed, while discussing postwar American education, he writes, It's hard to dislike though. James has the endearing and all-too-rare quality of assuming the same intellectual curiosity (and capacity) in his readers as he has in himself, and authors are consistently introduced with helpful comments on how amenable their work is to the student of French, German, Italian or whatever. Occasionally he admits some shortcomings – ‘I can't read Czech. Not yet, anyway’, or reminisces that ‘There was a time when I could fairly fluently read Russian, and get through a simple article in Japanese’ – but these self-criticisms are decidedly self-serving. The section on the 2nd half of xvii is hard to summarize. He doesn’t define exactly what he means by humanism, hence I must assume he means the most common definition. A major theme of the book is: doing the right thing, and James is pretty hard on several authors who he feels didn't. As a journalist and critic, a premature post-modernist, I was often criticized in my turn for talking about the construction of a poem and of a Grand Prix racing car in the same breath, or of treating gymnasts and high divers (in my daydreams, I astonish the Olympic medalist Greg Louganis) as if they were practising the art of sculpture. It was a sore point, and often the sore point reveals where the real point is. Humanism wasn’t in the separate activities: humanism was the connection between them. Humanism was 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. Builders of concentration camps might be creators of a kind . . . but they were in business to subtract variety from the created world, not to add to it."