Cultural Amnesia – Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

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Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2012-12-19 18:04:17 Bookplateleaf 0004 Boxid IA1343704 Boxid_2 CH120820 City New York, NY [u.a.] Donor A lifetime in the making and containing over one hundred essays, this is a definitive guide to twentieth-century culture. James catalogues and explores the careers of many of the century's greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists and philosophers, with illuminating excursions into the minds of those historical figures – from Sir Thomas Browne to Montesquieu – who paved the way. Altogether, it is an illuminating work of extraordinary erudition. Latin America figures prominently -- Borges, Paz, Sabato, Vargas Llosa -- as does the Soviet-dominated East. So he not only pays tribute to Sophie Scholl but dedicates the book to her memory (along with three others) -- and it's one of the few portraits where he really gets carried away, for example quoting without questioning that: "The chief executioner later testified that he had never seen anyone dies so bravely as Sophie Scholl".

How does Cultural Amnesia stand up to the more rigorous criteria of meaning and coherence that it has taken upon itself? An opening browse through the 106 names in its table of contents is both intriguing and disconcerting. Alongside those eminences who would likely receive consideration in any roundup of intellectual contributions worth preservingSigmund Freud, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Ludwig Wittgensteinthere are groupings of European, and particularly Viennese, figures for whom the basis for inclusion is not immediately self-evident. This catholicity of reference is, to a significant degree, a notable strength of Cultural Amnesia, which reflects both James’s impressively wide learning and his willingness to go against the grain in focusing on individuals who will be unfamiliar to many of his readers. In this case, he makes a convincing argument for the need to remember and respect the legacy of those such as Peter Altenberg, Egon Friedell, Karl Kraus, Alfred Polgar, and Stefan Zweig, who made pre-World War II Vienna one of Western civilization’s most generative and stimulating atmospheres, and he is also good on the merits of French (Raymond Aron, Albert Camus, Jean Cocteau, Paul Valéry), Italian (Gianfranco Contini, Benedetto Croce, Eugenio Montale), Russian (Anna Akhmatova, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Aleksandr Zinoviev), and many other representatives of European national traditions whose work is always in danger of being forgotten by English-language readers. If Nowadays, I can go on stage to relax. I'm never more at ease than when I go on stage and talk for an hour, an hour and a half." I've been trying to make up for it ever since, I suppose. As I get older, I've become more and more aware of what a tragedy it was for my mother and, of course, for him. I feel more and more that it's the impulse behind my work. In some ways, it's a gift from heaven because it's an education in reality, but in other ways it does feel like a curse. But work makes up for it.If this weren’t bad enough, we are told that Waugh “was the supreme writer of English prose in the twentieth century,” (p. 797), followed with “Nobody ever wrote a more unaffectedly elegant English; he stands at the height to English prose; its hundreds of years of steady development culminate in him.” (p. 799). Shakespeare and Waugh, I guess, then everybody else. He planned a sixth and last volume of memoirs, “the final chapter of which”, he told one interviewer, “will be dictated while I have an oxygen tent over my head. I wouldn’t like to spare the public my conclusions.” James is currently diagnosed with leukemia and emphysema. A number of articles published in Australian papers earlier in March 2013 featured interviews with his daughters and some examples of his recent poetry. In a somewhat similar vein, antipodean James was perhaps getting his seasons mixed up when he stated that in Vienna: "in spring you can drink Heurige Wein in the gardens" (5).

For decades, the two men were at the heart of British cultural life, both as theoreticians and practitioners. And now, within days of each other, they are both gone. A lifetime is exactly what it has taken Clive James to read them, and at times this book is presented as being something of a life's work for him. It's arranged alphabetically, from Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, and the first thing you find yourself examining is who's made the list. Although it putatively focuses on the twentieth century, there are some notable names from rather earlier, including Keats and Montaigne. There are a lot of people you won't have heard of, as well as several surprising absences. Hitler is there, but Stalin isn't. Albert Einstein is not there, but his cousin Alfred is. Michael Mann, bizarrely, is included although there's no mention of Scorsese or Lynch. There is a heavy bias towards writers, and specifically towards European writers: among other things the book is a celebration of the fertile intellectual ground that was the café culture in Vienna and Paris, before the literary scene in those cities was crushed by fascism. He got through all that. Then in the end, the camp was liberated. They were sent home on a flight of B-24 Liberators so they wouldn't have to wait for a ship. One of the Liberators got caught in a typhoon over Taiwan and crashed with all aboard. My father was one of them. 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). 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."

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.” With the random disappearance of my father at the age of six — there was no guarantee that it wouldn't happen to me. And I've always lived my life as if today was a gift and tomorrow might not come.