Cultural Remembering

There’s an atavistic part of me -- I work mightily to ignore it, usually -- convinced Clive James wrote Cultural Amnesia for me. Not readers like me, whatever that demographic might represent, but me, the guy writing these words, the guy reading an 876-page edifice of a book who is already, on page 497 (Eugenio Montale), anxious about its too-imminent conclusion. James, born in Australia, a poet, journalist and television “personality,” is a throwback to some heroic age of amateur learning and reading. I intend amateur in the etymological sense – rooted in love. He is unapologetically non-academic. Reviewers have likened James to Edmund Wilson, but Wilson was too dull and provincial, his prose too flat-footed. James recalls aspects of Johnson, Coleridge and Henry James the nonfiction writer, as well as such less familiar figures as Ernst Renan, George Saintsbury and several polymathic writers James includes in Cultural Amnesia –Gianfranco Contini, Egon Freidell and Marcel Reich-Ranicki.

The format is simple: James writes essays about 106 men and women, mostly from the 20th century, using quotations from each figure as a springboard into – what? Enthusiastic digressions, learned rambles in which books and life twine, untwine and twine again, like DNA, in unexpected combinations. These are not potted biographies. The chapter on Peter Altenberg, the Viennese writer of feuilletons, begins with this Groucho Marxian two-liner from Fechsung:

“There are only two things that can destroy a healthy man: love trouble, ambition, and financial catastrophe. And that’s already three things, and there are a lot more.”

James briefly summarizes Altenberg’s centrality to Vienna’s café, after having already given us an Overture devoted to Vienna’s centrality to the 20th century, then proceeds to anatomize love in its sexual and romantic aspects. He drops Altenberg entirely for three or four pages, stops along the way for mentions of Ring Lardner, Lenny Bruce, three Roman poets, Dante and Petrarch, Donne, Marvell and Pope…You get the idea. Don’t confuse James with a self-serving name-dropper. He is a raconteur of culture, yes, but deeply serious. He tells us a story that in other hands might have been smutty and sniggering:

“One of Altenberg’s many young loves had tearfully protested that his interest in her was based only (nur) on sexual attraction. Altenberg asked, `Was ist so nur?’ (What’s so only?)”

Here, five pages later, is how James concludes his essay:

“For men, the first and shamefully unthinking flood of worship is the opposite of casual. It is monumental, and Peter Altenberg got it in a phrase. What’s so only? He had self-knowledge. He could have added the lack of it to his long list of the two things that can ruin a man’s life.”

Key figures for this reader are absent from James’ core sample of culture. I wish he had taken on William James, Ford Madox Ford, Isaac Babel, Samuel Beckett and Zbigniew Herbert, among others. But I sound petty. James is no snob. With all the certified priests of high culture, James finds room for Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, W.C. Fields – and Tony Curtis. One could draw a commonplace book to sustain a lifetime from Cultural Amnesia.