Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time [Paperback]

Following some explicit hints to my daughter, I was delighted to receive this as a Father's Day gift. I consider myself a fairly well-read person, but only in the extremely limited sense of having read just about everything Clive James has ever written, ranging from his TV reviews, literary criticism, autobiography, novels and verse to his lyrics for singer-songwriter Pete Atkin. More broadly, what I've read in his books has introduced me to other writers, and it's always been entertaining to see his opinion (particularly when it's not high) on books which I've already read.

There's more of the same in this book, but its scale and structure dwarfs anything he's produced up until now. Some four years in the writing, it's been viewed as the culmination of his life's work (although he's rumoured to have already started work on a second volume). At first glance, it's a collection of more than a hundred critical essays on selected cultural or historical figures, mostly from 20th century Europe. Digging deeper reveals other things, as he uses his ideas about the person as a jumping-off point for musings on other topics such as plagarism, fame, memory, reading, grammar and bibliophilia.

His range of reference is extraordinary, taking in books written in German, French, Italian and Spanish (all of which he apparently reads fluently). There's a strong didactic element running through this work, as he breaks off to give advice on the most profitable way to learn languages, the best dictionaries and translations, and which books are most easily used as a starting point for breaking into a specific language. He also tells stories of the tracking down of books in shops all over the world that are explicit - even loving - in their physical detail as he describes their bindings, typeface and paper, and how they look on his shelves at home.

His main theme here, however, is culture and the struggles of liberal humanism against totalitarianism. This is clearly a big subject, and each one of these essays illuminates it from a slightly different angle until you're left feeling wiser, older and sadder at the heroism and destruction that inspired this work. Along the way, his lively and playful turns of phrase are enough to make you start making notes in the margin yourself - to take just one example at random, on p498 he describes the constant need to refresh our memory of good things that we've read as "a polishing of the pipe, like El Dorado's throat". I'm sure I won't read a better book this year, and perhaps for some time to come afterwards as well.

This is an amazing book, unlike anything else I’ve ever come across. Don’t be put off by its sheer size, by its odd title, by the unfamiliarity of many of the names in its alphabetical list of subjects (writers, film stars, musicians, politicians, you name it), or by the fact that it looks at first glance like a work of reference. A better title would perhaps have been “Reliable Memoirs”, because what it’s really doing is filling in the gaps in Clive James’s sequence of “Unreliable Memoirs”.

It consists of a hundred or more brief articles based on quotes noted down during a lifetime’s extensive reading, any one of which is liable at any point to go off at a tangent on a hugely entertaining digression. It’s not meant to be read from cover to cover, but you’ll have a great time dotting around in it. Guaranteed you’ll make loads of notes yourself in your own turn – memorable quotes, jokes, revelatory perceptions, writers you’d never heard of whom all of a sudden you really want to read.

If you’ve ever enjoyed any of Clive James’s writing – reviews, memoirs, songs, whatever – don’t hesitate. It’s a book to keep with you always and to keep returning to.

I have just completed this superb intellectual auto-biography by Clive James, and I am lost in admiration, not just for the breadth of his erudition, but for the depth of his wisdom and the clear sincerity of his humaniny. Along with this goes a prose style that performs the miracle of being, at the same time, absolutely limpid and superbly readable, whilst being unfailingly eloquent and possessed of a lapidary turn of phrase. Clive frequently extols the mastery of the prose styles of other expository writers, but I can actually think of no one else I would rather read on the topics he makes his subjects.

I consider myself a reasonably well read person, as I would guess does anyone that might have this book in prospect. Why is it though, that for all my reading, my view of the world only seems to become more confused, more filled with questions I don't know how to answer? James, on the other hand has managed to synthesise a world view from all his reading, that, while facing squarely all the worst that humans are capable of, levaes him with no doubt about the concreteness of value of all that is best.

The book is organised as a selection of essays, each of which takes as a starting point a particular individual, for the most part writers, but also including the odd politician, activist or media personality, who's life and work, and all the significant criticism on it, James has totally devoured at some point or other in his book devouring life. The essays are simply arranged in alphabetical order of the subject's surnames. Some of the authors or personalities will be known to all readers. Some will be known only to more specialist readers, the selection being truly global, and many not easily available in English. Few readers, I would guess, will be familiar with all, or even most of them. Some of the essays stay focussed on the subject, while others take off on an elliptical journey through associated personalities and events. All take some quote or choice aphorism of the subject as grist for the ensuing discussion.

There is a certain charming disingenuity about Clive's style in that he flatters the reader into believing that, he believes at least, that you are his intellectual equal. There is an implicit assumption that we're all cultivated people; that we all have devoted as much of our lives to books and the acquistion of learning and insight to the same degree as him, or at least we could have done so if we had wanted. We all could have picked up just enough of seven or so foreign languages to read all the most significant authors and cultural critics in each, or again, we could have done if we had not had more pressing things to do. We all do these things all of the time, whilst sipping coffee in the piazzas of Florence, perhaps after visiting its galleries, or in downtown Beunos Aires while waiting for our tango lesson. He is a man who truly knows how to get the absolute best out of a civilsed life, and while you are reading him, you are such a person too, for just a little while.

The essays in the book range very widely, but the two most recurrent themes are those of prose and politics. Politics is considered in the context of the disasterous ideologies of the 20th Century, and the possibilities afforded by a future of liberal democracy. His writing about writing is most illuminating, and I supect I shall be looking at other authors with a closer eye in the future. With respect to politics much of his analysis is about the way his subjects conducted themselves in relation to the ideological extremities of their day. This he does with a clear and critical, but also compassionate eye, being under no illusions about how such circumstances can cause even the most moral of people to behave.

I have long admired Clive for his wit and humour and was expecting some portion of that in this book. It is by no means absent; his observations on Richard Burton's hairstyle in Where Eagle's Dare are unforgetably funny. But for the most part the themes of the book are informative or serious, so wit takes a subsidiary place alongside charm, compassion, honesty, and sundry other literary virtues.

Advice on my future reading that I have picked up from Clive along the way is that I should give Proust at least one more go; that I should ignore Thomas Mann no longer; that I should finally steel myself to face the horrors of Jung Chang's Wild Swans, and that if I have given the time to reading Sartre's novels, which I have, then I should also give the time to Camus. What I've also got from him is that Walter Benjamin is too impenetrable, and too wrong about too many things to bother with, in a life where only a finite number of books can be read. Also, if Clive thinks that Sartre's major philosophical works are not just deliberatley obscure but ultimately meaningless humbug as well, then that's good enough for me, and I can finally forgive myself for bouncing off Being and Nothingness more times than I can count on one hand.

He's also altered my estimation of Hegel, though he has not instilled me with a desire to read him. In a book filled with excellent quotations the one he saved for the very last sentence of the book was from Hegel - "History is the story of liberty becoming conscious of itself". This so perfectly captures the essence of the journey on which the reader has been taken.