Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

The main claims of the author are that Western liberalism (the classic definition) nearly perished in the 20th century, due almost entirely to a persistent and recurring urge to totalitarianism; that these movements were paralleled by waves of fawning essays from liberal intelligentsia who apologized for butchers; that the cross-connections between history, music, and the arts are what humanism is (or should be) all about; and that we forget the history of the 20th century at our peril. So it's dismaying that few reviews even touch on these points. Personally, I was very intrigued on first reading of the book-- enough to buy and read 3 European and World histories. What I found was corroboration of his facts (Norman Davies' estimate of deaths due to Stalin is at least 54 millions. Mao would make him look like an amateur. Pol Pot-- he had fewer to work with, so he went for the record percentage killed.) And in a fresh way, I can trace modernism and its associated destructive forces from the French Revolution onward. I then re-read Cultural Amnesia and more fully appreciated Clive James' genius. A superb accomplishment.

Clive James' eminently readable collection of essays on intellectuals, artists, and other remarkable people seems to channel Hannah Arendt via Hegel in sounding a clarion on the seductive dangers of totalitarianism and a variety of individuals who aided, or sabotaged, the struggle toward a liberal democracy. But do not let that weighty message deter you from this important work. As other reviewers have pointed out, James toggles between high and low culture with bone-jarring alacrity and, upon occasion, digresses into pet irritations and infatuations (Richard Burton's haircut; Natalie Portman), but he fully succeeds in weaving disparate essays on 20th century personages into a coherent meditation on moral responsibility in the face of fascism. James does exhibit an almost Sontagian propensity for carpet-bombing his text with the names of obscure intellectuals. Again, don't be put off by virtuoso displays of erudition. I, for one, am envious. I read this book on the heels of the marvelous Joan Acocella's equally enjoyable Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints (compare their respective takes on Stefan Zweig). Overall, I found James' to be rather more acerbic than Acocella's in tone, but both writers convey meaning with astringent clarity and rich insight. And finally, I agree with the reviewer who reserved his highest rating for James' poignent essay on the unutterably brave Sophie Scholl. This is the book's true coda. By keeping alive the memory of Scholl and The White Rose, James lets fly an arrow of inspirational courage and hope straight into the heart of repressive regimes past, present, and future. That single essay is reason enough to buy this book.

Clive James has written in an earlier work that he wanted to be "the arch example of the Metropolitan Critic, the critic who operates in the vital space between hack reviewers of periodicals and the dust contractors of the universities." The 107 beautifully written mini-portraits in this very thick volume (876 pages) were written over the course of a lifetime and they go a long way in securing his desired place between hack and academe. There is no single argument running through these essays. Their selection seems to be entirely random, other than being in alphabetical order. Any kind of order or grand narrative would be an indicator of James' arch nemesis: totalitarian ideology. His deities are liberal democracy and free-market capitalism, which are the preconditions for the humanism that he espouses. Of the writers, artists, intellectuals, and demagogues that populated the 20th century, James has a special loathing for Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre may not have been directly responsible for the mass murders of the last century, as were Hitler and Mao; but the fact that he was smarter, and more clever at explaining away the atrocities of totalitarian societies made him an accomplice to those crimes. According to James, "Sartre was the most conspicuous single example of a fully qualified intellectual aiding and abetting the opponents of civilization." James, in contrast, is much more attracted to Sartre's more moderate and centrist contemporary: Raymond Aron. James is also very harsh on the more recent crop of intellectuals hailing from France - such as Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Jean Baudrillard, to name a few. These ubiquitous blowhards are largely responsible for the obscurantist nonsense that one finds in today's university humanities departments. The current professoriat seems always to be in pursuit of a meaning that is too obscure to be expressed in ordinary language. But this nonsense is not as dangerous as many critics claim; it is nonsense that is of no consequence outside the university. In contrast to the sterility of postmodern French thinking, James has a special place in his heart for the coffee-house culture of turn-of-the-century Vienna. It was the Vienna of not only Freud, Kraus, Schnitzler, and Wittgenstein, but also of lesser-known figures such as Egon Friedell and Alfred Polgar. What attracts the author to this cultural milieu is the clarity of language and meaning as expressed, for example, in the works of Kraus and Wittgenstein. It was a place that was conducive to new ideas and the life of the mind. Unfortunately it was short-lived, destroyed by the totalitarian movements that followed. If there is a single unifying theme in Cultural Amnesia, it can be said that it is a consistent and continuous warning against the dangers of totalitarian thinking and those who are seduced by it.

This is a fascinating volume, in fact, almost a nonvolume. James notes at the outset that (page xv): "In the forty years it took me to write this book, I only gradually realized that the finished work, if it were going to be true to the pattern of my experience, would have no pattern." He goes on to note of the many brief biographical sketches that he presents in the book (with reflections on related thinkers and on context): "As the time for assembling my reflections approaches, I resolved that a premature synthesis was the thing to be avoided" (page xvi). As such, "If I have done my job properly, themes will emerge from the apparent randomness and make this work intelligible" (Page xvi). Thus, the reader is the workforce to make sense of the various reflections and vignettes. James puts emphasis, in an "Overture," on Vienna of the late 19th and early 20th century. From there, he provides brief character sketches from "A" (e.g., Anna Akhmatova, Louis Armstrong, Raymond Aron) to "Z" (e.g., Aleksandr Zinoviev, Stefan Zweig), with stops at other letters in between. Thus, the ordering is simply alphabetical, again to make the reader pull things together him or herself. While the thoughts that he injects into these sketches can sometimes be rather close minded (his rather haughty dismissal of thinkers such as Derrida and Foucault), that is easily forgiven for the erudition and provocative comments that recur throughout this book. Let's take a look at a handful of the biographical treatments to illustrate his approach. Louis Armstrong, while a victim of racism from birth to death (in 1971), rose above that. The intriguing tie between him and Bix Beiderbecke (a white jazz musician, in an era when many said that whites could not play the genre) is one example. Just so, a brief sidebar on Benny Goodman (white) and his skills in jazz, all justaposed with Armstrong's appreciation of Beiderbecke. An interesting essay tying several themes together. Then there is William Claude Duckenfield (W. C. Fields). The essay focuses on how increasingly strong censorship in movies began to strangle Fields' career--maybe more than alcohol or age. One aspect of this essay is the observation that (page 208) Fields was ". . .one of those people who are born exiles even if they never leave home." He discusses, in the book, some people whom he defines as evil. One of those is Mao Zedong. However, he portrays things in a bit more nuanced fashion. For instance, he says that Mao began very differently than other terrors such as Hitler and Stalin. While, in the end, he was responsible for a massive number of deaths, Mao "started off as a benevolent intellectual: a fact which should concern us if we pretend to be one of those ourselves" (page 457). In the end, James suggests, ". . .to concentrate on Mao's late-flowering monstrosity is surely a misleading emphasis. His early-flowering humanitarianism is a much more useful field of study" (page 459). What mak

Intrigued by the excerpts running on Slate.com, I snapped this one up when it came out. It consists of capsule essays on a wide range of scholars, artists, writers, philosophers, political figures, and so on. The common thread running through the essays is a defense of the humanist impulse in the face of totalitarianism, and how this issue is perpetually relevant. The tone is a mournful one at times, as if the author feels this battle of ideas has been forgotten by succeeding generations. The figures represented run the gamut from Louis Armstrong to Wittgenstein, from Borges to Satie. There are also numerous lesser known figures like philologist Ernst Robert Curtius or polymath Egon Friedell, as well as villains (Hitler and Mao, among others). James's dismantling of Sartre is almost worth the price of admission itself, but perhaps the single best essay is on Sophie Scholl, a young member of the White Rose resistance group in Nazi Germany, who chose to die in solidarity with her friends, as a symbolic gesture of defiance. This essay is the only piece of writing (other than old love letters) that has ever made me tear up. James often goes on his own idiosyncratic tangents in the middle of a chapter, but this is one of the book's charms, like having a conversation with a learned and, at times, frustrating friend. I was tempted to dock a star in my rating because of the unusually high level of typos. In all seriousness, I have never encountered a book with so many - It may border on an average of one typo per page. Norton, someone was asleep at the switch here. Despite this distraction, a wonderful read.