The complete review of Cultural Amnesia by Clive James

Cultural Amnesia looks, at first glance, to be a collection of brief portraits (mainly of

authors and 'intellectuals') arranged in alphabetical order. It turns out not to be quite
that: many of the pieces are brief summings-up of these people's lives, but James
presents each first with a brief biographical sketch, then a quote attributed to the person
in question -- and then a longer bit that generally takes the quote as its starting point. (In
a few cases James works with several quotes.) So while the focus is on some aspect of
the person's life and work in a majority of the cases, James occasionally leaves them far
behind and offers something completely different: the Thomas Browne leads to a
discussion of arriving at book titles, Terry Gilliam leads to torture, and Heinrich Heine to
fan letters. In fact, these are often the most fun, because of the connexions he makes --
though he makes connexions everywhere else as well.

It's not quite a 20th century book, though the focus is clearly on that century --
specifically its art and inhumanity. Most of the figures are from the 20th century, with a
stray ancient (Tacitus) and a few figures from more recent times (from Montesqieu to
Hegel to Chamfort). There are clusters of interest, specifically from Vienna's coffee-
house culture (Altenberg, Friedell, Polgar) as well as the larger circle of Viennese
intellectuals from the first half of the 20th century (Freud, Kraus, Schnitzler,
Wittgenstein, Zweig, etc.) and a variety of French intellectuals. Latin America figures
prominently -- Borges, Paz, Sabato, Vargas Llosa -- as does the Soviet-dominated East.
Conspicuously absent: Scandinavia, Africa (Camus is about as far he ventures), and
most of Asia (Mao, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, and Isoroku Yamamoto are pretty much the
extent of it). (There are also more philologists and jazz musicians than one might
expect.)

James does often mention reading (or trying to) many of the authors in the original,
suggesting which are best-suited to picking up a language, and one of the many
secondary purposes of the book is to serve as a sort of reader's guide to much
overlooked (and occasionally untranslated) literature and intellectual history. James
certainly endorses some very worthwhile books (and does so with quite convincing
enthusiasm).

A major theme of the book is: doing the right thing, and James is pretty hard on
several authors who he feels didn't. Borges' silence in totalitarian Argentina troubles
him, while he seems to have little more than contempt for Saramago. His frustration is
perhaps best summed-up in his attempts to explain his issues with Brecht (who doesn't
rate an entry of his own). After stating that "Brecht's fame as a creep will prevail, as it
ought to" he adds:

Brecht's fame as a poet will depend on a wide appreciation of what he could do with
language, and there lies the drawback: because the more you appreciate what he could
do with language, the more you realize how clearly he could see, and so the more you
are faced with how he left things out. You are faced, that is, with what he did not do with
language.

Speaking (and standing) up -- and for the right thing -- is what counts for James.
Nothing is more honourable, nothing 'better' (in the absolute sense of the world) than
selfless commitment to the ideals of the world as it should be. 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". But even this sort of ideal-worship
comes with its cleverly presented twist, as James (convincingly) makes the case for why
Natalie Portman should play Scholl in a film version.

James offers an interesting mix of good and bad guys, and it makes for a good
overview of all that went wrong in the 20th century, especially from the intellectual
angle. Part of his warning is obvious: humanism didn't save us, ideals are easily twisted
(especially by those who are smart and/or have a way with words). As he notes: Mao
"started off as a benevolent intellectual: a fact which should concern us if we pretend to
be one of those ourselves." But worthy figures, the ones who saw the horror and
warned of it, dominate, James trying to show example after example of what people
were capable of (though admitting also often that it defeated them).

Still, there's a lot else mixed in the book. The fascination with language (such as the
precision of Kraus' and Wittgenstein's), the looks at film (from Chaplin to Michael Mann
to Chris Marker), TV (Dick Cavett), and music (mainly jazz): a great deal seems to pull
from its centre. There are some great quotes and quite a few good anecdotes, but it's
no surprise that James seems to revel particularly in writers who didn't necessarily
collect their thoughts in the neatest way. From Lichtenberg's Sudelbücher to Valéry's
notebook (with so many volumes to it that James notes that: "Even in French it has
been published only in facsimile") and the coffee-house-writers of Vienna, he seems
drawn to the attempts that gather in as much as possible, if not always as neatly as
possible. (Though he has a thing for the monumental histories too -- Friedell's is a
particular favourite.)

It is an interesting and appealingly mixed assemblage (it's hard not to approve

when he even throws Dubravka Ugresic into the mix), and there are good points made
by these examples. Ironically, Cultural Amnesia probably makes a better impression if
the gallery of characters isn't that familiar, if the people he introduces are new (as way
well be the case for many readers) -- i.e. part of that 'cultural amnesia' he's concerned
with. For those for whom the majority or all are more or less familiar it's harder to see
quite as much to it, and while the individual pieces are almost all worthwhile the sum
doesn't add up quite as convincingly. It's frustrating, because there are threads running
through all of this, several at a time -- but it's not tied together well enough to truly make
for an argument (or several).

The pieces outweigh the whole, but that's also enough for considerable reading
pleasure and thought-provoking. Still, an odd book, overall.
 Note that Cultural Amnesia gets off to an odd start: in the last paragraph of 'A Note
on the Text' James thanks Tom Mayer of Norton for ensuring that: "the process of
correcting the corrections did not finish off the author along with the book". The same
paragraph about "correcting the details" is printed two pages later, at the end of the
'Acknowledgements.' That would feel like merely an amusing copy-editing oversight
were it not for the lack of corrections elsewhere in the text, specifically in the use of
German words.

A few missing Umlauts might pass (though there are many, many), but at a certain
point one has to wonder why Norton didn't hire the services of a German-speaker to go
through the few dozen pages where James uses German terminology or mentions titles.
And some of these even a literate English speaker should have caught -- like the claim
that: "In the original German, The Tin Drum is Der Blechtrommel" (81), when, of course,
it is Die Blechtrommel.

Among the other slips: "The Germans have a word for it: Todgeschweigen" (330) --
no, they don't: the word they have (in this form) is totgeschwiegen. And Rilke's poem is
Das Karussell, not Das Karrussel (617). Indeed, the title-slips are most baffling, since
that's the sort of stuff that's easily checked even by non-German speakers: it's Jünger's
Das abenteuerliche Herz, not Das abenteuerliches Herz (338), for example.

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). While you can find open 'Heuriger' to go to and drink wine at, the
namesake wine is, of course, that year's wine (that's what 'heurig' means) and that is
only ausgesteckt start late summer and fall