Cultural Amnesia

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Authors: Clive James

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CULTURAL AMNESIA

NOTES IN THE MARGIN OF MY TIME

CLIVE JAMES

P I C A D O R

 

To

Aung San Suu Kyi, Ayaan Hirsi Ali,
Ingrid Betancourt

and to the memory of

Sophie Scholl

 

CONTENTS

Introduction

A Note on the
Text

Acknowledgements

Overture:
Vienna

A

Anna Akhmatova

Peter Altenberg

Louis Armstrong

Raymond Aron

B

Walter Benjamin

Marc Bloch

Jorge Luis Borges

Robert Brasillach

Sir Thomas Browne

C

Albert Camus

Dick Cavett

Paul Celan

Chamfort

Coco Chanel

Charles Chaplin

Nirad C. Chaudhuri

G. K. Chesterton

Jean Cocteau

Gianfranco Contini

Benedetto Croce

Tony Curtis

Ernst Robert Curtius

D

Miles Davis

Sergei Diaghilev

Pierre Drieu la Rochelle

E

Alfred Einstein

Duke Ellington

F

Federico Fellini

W. C. Fields

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Gustave Flaubert

Sigmund Freud

Egon Friedell

François Furet

G

Charles de Gaulle

Edward Gibbon

Terry Gilliam

Josef Goebbels

Witold Gombrowicz

H

William Hazlitt

Hegel

Heinrich Heine

Adolf Hitler

Ricarda Huch

J

Ernst Jünger

K

Franz Kafka

John Keats

Leszek Kolakowski

Alexandra Kollontai

Heda Margolius Kovaly

Karl Kraus

L

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

M

Norman Mailer

Nadezhda Mandelstam

Golo Mann

Heinrich Mann

Michael Mann

Thomas Mann

Mao Zedong

Chris Marker

John McCloy

Zinka Milanov

Czeslaw Milosz

Eugenio Montale

Montesquieu

Alan Moorehead

Paul Muratov

N

Lewis Namier

O

Grigory Ordzhonokidze

P

Octavio Paz

Alfred Polgar

Beatrix Potter

Jean Prévost

Marcel Proust

Q

Edgar Quinet

R

Marcel Reich-Ranicki

Jean-François Revel

Richard Rhodes

Rainer Maria Rilke

Virginio Rognoni

S

Ernesto Sabato

Edward Said

Sainte-Beuve

José Saramago

Jean-Paul Sartre

Erik Satie

Arthur Schnitzler

Sophie Scholl

Wolf Jobst Siedler

Manès Sperber

T

Tacitus

Margaret Thatcher

Henning von Tresckow

Leon Trotsky

Karl Tschuppik

U

Dubravka Ugresic

Miguel de Unamuno

Pedro Henriquez Ureña

V

Paul Valéry

Mario Vargas Llosa

W

Evelyn Waugh

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Y

Isoroku Yamamoto

Z

Aleksandr Zinoviev

Carl Zuckmayer

Stefan Zweig

Coda: Kun-Han-Su Eckstein and the Egyptian Kinghopper

Introduction to the
Extras

Illustration
Credits

Index

 

All history is contemporary history.

BENEDETTO CROCE

At certain times the world is overrun by false scepticism. Of the true kind there
can never be enough.

BURCKHARDT,
Weltgeshichtliche
Betrachtungen

One insults the memory of the victims of Nazism if one uses them to bury the memory
of the victims of communism.

JEAN-FRANÇOIS REVEL,
La Grande Parade

In a universe more and more abstract, it is up to us to make sure that the human
voice does not cease to be heard.

WITOLD GOMBROWICZ,
Journal

We should esteem the man who is liberal, not the man who decides to be so.

MACHIAVELLI

To philosophize means to make vivid.

NOVALIS

Those are nearer to reality who can deal with it light-heartedly, because they know
it to be inexhaustible.

GOLO MANN

 
INTRODUCTION

I
N 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. It would be
organized like the top of my desk, from which the last assistant I hired to sort it out has yet to reappear. The book I wanted to write had its origins in the books I was reading. Several times,
in my early days, I had to sell my best books to buy food, so I never underlined anything. When conditions improved I became less fastidious. Not long after I began marking passages for future
consideration, I also began keeping notes in the margin beside the markings, and then longer notes on the endpapers. Those were the very means by which Montaigne invented the modern essay, and at
first I must have had an essay of my own in mind: a long essay, but one with the usual shape, a single line of argument moving through selected perceptions to a neat conclusion.

In the short term, many of my annotations went into book reviews and pieces for
periodicals: writings which took an essay form, and which, when I collected them into volumes, I unblushingly dignified with that term. But there were always annotations that struck me as not
fitting any scheme except a much larger one, to be attempted far in the future, probably towards the end of my life. By the time that terminus was in clear sight, however, I had begun to live
with the possibility that there could be no scheme.

There could only be a linear cluster of nodal points, working the way the mind—or at any rate my mind, such as it
is—works as it moves through time: a trail of clarities variously illuminating a dark sea of
unrelenting turbulence, like the phosphorescent wake of a phantom ship. 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 con- tinued to shake the world as I grew to adulthood. Even
in an ideal world, none of those subjects would be an easily separable category, and in the far from ideal world we had been given to live in they were inextricably mixed. Each of them, it seemed
to me, could have no overt order at the best of times: its order could only be internal, complex, organic. And in the worst of times, which has become our time, any two or more of them taken
together must show the same effect dizzily multiplied: the organic complexities intermingled into a texture so intricate that any order extracted from it could be called only provisional.

Well, that would fit. Modern history had given us enough warning against treating simplifications as
real. The totalitarian states, the great sponsors of mass atrocity against innocent human beings, had been propelled by ideologies, and what else was an ideology except a premature synthesis? As
the time for assembling my reflections approached, I resolved that a premature synthesis was the thing to be avoided.

SO THIS IS
a book about how not to reach one.
If I have done my job properly, themes will emerge from the apparent randomness and make this work intelligible. But it will undoubtedly be a turbulent read. The times from which it emerged
were hard on the nerves, even for those of us who were lucky enough to lead charmed lives. I hope that the episodically intermixed account of direct experience from my own charmed life will
alleviate the difficulties of a densely woven text, but I make no excuse for them. If this book were not difficult, it would not be true.

To younger readers who might find themselves wondering why it is so full of forgotten names, and takes such a violently
unpredictable course, the first thing to say is: welcome to the twentieth century, out of which your century grew as surely as a column of black smoke grows from an oil fire. The second thing,
though an adjunct of the first, is even more important: there is a lot at stake here. In the nineteenth century,
in the time of the great philologist Ernest Renan, and
despite the contrary evidence already provided by the French Revolution,
Studia humanitatis
was still thought of as an unmixed blessing. If the eighteenth
century had meant to usher in the age of reason, the nineteenth century, with the cold snick of the guillotine ringing in its ears, meant to supply some of the regrettable deficiencies of
reason by the addition of science. Apart from the prophets—Dickens, despite his inborn optimism, was one of them—few people with any aspirations to a philosophical view doubted that
the extension of human knowledge would, in Renan’s typically generous phrase,
élargir la grande famille
: produce a race of the enlightened to
lead a life of mathematically calculable justice. By now, after the twentieth century has done its cruel work, that is exactly what we doubt. The future of science, Renan’s cherished
avenir de la science
, can be assessed from our past, in which it flattened cities and gassed innocent children: whatever we don’t yet know about it,
one thing we already know is that it is not necessarily benevolent. But somewhere within the total field of human knowledge, humanism still beckons to us as our best reason for having minds at
all.

That beckoning, however, grows increasingly feeble. The arts and their attendant scholarship are
everywhere—imperishable consumer goods which a self-selecting elite can possess while priding itself as being beyond materialism; they have a glamour unprecedented in history—but
humanism is hard to find. For that, science is one of the culprits: not the actual achievement of science, but the language of science, which, clumsily imitated by the proponents of Cultural
Studies, has helped to make real culture unapproachable for exactly those students who might otherwise have been most attracted to it, and has simultaneously furthered the emergence and
consolidation of an international cargo cult whose witch doctors have nothing in mind beyond their own advancement. By putting the humanities to careerist use, they set a bad example even to
those who still love what they study. Learned books are published by the thousand, yet learning was never less trusted as something to be pursued for its own sake. Too often used for ill, it is
now asked about its use for good, and usually on the assumption that any goodwill be measurable on a market, like a commodity. The idea that humanism has no immediately ascertainable use at
all, and is invaluable for precisely that reason, is a hard sell in an age
when the word “invaluable,” simply by the way it looks, is begging to be construed
as “valueless” even by the sophisticated. In fact, especially by them. If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into this new century, it will need
advocates. Those advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive.

It was terrible, that age. Bright, sympathetic young people who now face a time when innocent human
beings are killed by the thousand can be excused for thinking that their elders do not care enough, and indeed it is true that complacency tends to creep in as the hair falls out. But their
elders grew to maturity in a time when innocent human beings were killed by the million. The full facts about Nazi Germany came out quite quickly, and were more than enough to induce despair.
The full facts about the Soviet Union were slower to become generally appreciated, but when they at last were, the despair was compounded. The full facts about Mao’s China left that
compounded despair looking like an inadequate response. After Mao, not even Pol Pot came as a surprise. Sadly, he was a cliché.

Ours was an age of extermination, an epoch of the abattoir. But the accumulated destruction yielded one constructive
effect, salutary even if solitary. It made us think hard about the way we thought. For my own part, it made me think hard about all the fields of creativity that I seemed to love equally,
whatever their place in a supposed hierarchy. I loved poetry, but such towering figures as Brecht and Neruda were only two of the gifted poets who had given aid and comfort to totalitarian
power. I loved classical music, but so did Reinhard Heydrich and the ineffable Dr. Mengele. I loved modern fiction in all its fearless inclusiveness, but Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the
author of that amazing phantasmagoria
Voyage au bout de la nuit
, had also written
Bagatelles pour un massacre
, a
breviary for racialist fanatics. On examination, none of these exalted activities was a sure antidote in itself to the poison of irrationality, which is inseparable from human affairs, but
fatal to them if granted a life of its own. And for the less exalted activities, examination was scarcely necessary. I loved popular music, but one look at Johnny Rotten was enough to show you
why even the SS occasionally court-martialled a few of its personnel for nihilistic behaviour beyond the call of duty, and more recently there have been rap lyrics distinguishable
from the “Horst Wessel Song” only in being less well written. I loved the art sports, but so had Leni Riefenstahl, who also provided evidence that there was nothing
necessarily humanist about the movies:
Triumph of the Will
is a spectacle everyone should see, but no one should adore. It would have been nice to believe
that comedy, one of my fields of employment, was of its nature opposed to political horror, but there were too many well-attested instances of Stalin and Molotov cracking each other up while
they signed death warrants, and there was all too much evidence that Hitler told quite good jokes. If there was no field of creativity that was incorruptibly pure, where did that leave
humanism?

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