Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts [Hardcover]

Clive James (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 17, 2007

Forty years in the making, a new cultural canon that celebrates truth over hypocrisy, literature over totalitarianism.

Echoing Edward Said’s belief that “Western humanism is not enough, we need a universal humanism,” the renowned critic Clive James presents here his life’s work. Containing over one hundred original essays, organized by quotations from A to Z, Cultural Amnesia illuminates, rescues, or occasionally destroys the careers of many of the greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists, and philosophers of the twentieth century. In discussing, among others, Louis Armstrong, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, James writes, “If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into the new century, it will need advocates. These advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive.” Soaring to Montaigne-like heights, Cultural Amnesia is precisely the book to burnish these memories of a Western civilization that James fears is nearly lost.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, Tacitus to Margaret Thatcher, this scintillating compendium of 110 new biographical essays plumbs the responsibilities of artists, intellectuals and political leaders. British critic James (Visions Before Midnight) structures each entry as a brief life sketch followed by quotations that spark an appreciation, a condemnation or a tangent (a piece on filmmaker Terry Gilliam veers into a discussion of torturers' pleasure in their work). Sometimes, as in his salute to Tony Curtis's acting or his savage assault on bebop legend John Coltrane's penchant for "subjecting some helpless standard to ritual murder," James's purpose is just bravura opinionating. But most articles are linked by a defense of liberal humanism against totalitarianisms of the left and right—and ideologues who champion them. He lionizes prewar Vienna's martyred Jewish cafe intellectuals; castigates French apologists for communism—especially Sartre, who "could sound as if he was talking about everything while saying nothing"; and chides Borges for not noticing Argentina's descent into fascism. This theme can grow intrusive; even in an entry on children's author Beatrix Potter, he feels called upon to denounce Soviet children's books. But James's brilliantly aphoristic prose, full of aesthetic insights but careful not to let aesthetics obscure morality, makes for a delightful browse suffused with a potent message. Photos.
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From Bookmarks Magazine

For more than 40 years a critic, writer, and public personality, the Australian-born Clive James, prolific author of Unreliable Memoirs, The Meaning of Recognition, and North Face of Soho, among many other books, has garnered a well-deserved reputation as "an eclectic master of the high/low" (Los Angeles Times). James's wide-ranging intellect is on display here in a big way: "doorstop" appears more than once in reviews of the book. Fortunately, the book moves along—thanks to the author's deft prose, his keen sense of humor, and his ability to connect a host of disparate subjects. Though the book clearly isn't meant to be read straight through, even those skeptical of James's agenda admire the scope of the undertaking. Red flags: the seeming randomness of some of James's entries, his digressions, and his inclusion of fewer than a dozen women (including Coco Chanel and Margaret Thatcher) on the list.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 912 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition edition (March 17, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393061167
• ISBN-13: 978-0393061161
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.3 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (54 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #569,983 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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103 of 110 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Like having a conversation with a learned friend, March 11, 2007

By 

James (Lambertville) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (Hardcover)

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.

48 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What was the 20th century for?, August 4, 2007

By 

Bodacious Reader "jackie" (Lakeville, MN USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (Hardcover)

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.

55 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating reflections, April 13, 2007

By 

Steven A. Peterson (Hershey, PA (Born in Kewanee, IL)) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (Hardcover)

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 makes this essay compelling is that it recognizes the evil unleashed by Mao--but also a different potentiality when he was younger.

A final example: Isoroku Yamamoto, the Japanese Admiral who orchestrated Pearl Harbor and the failed Midway offensive. James plays with some of the well known themes--Yamamoto's years at Harvard University, his artistic sensibilities (as Patton, he composed poetry), his pessimism that Japan could defeat the United States if the war lasted very long.

Even looking at this volume as a series of intriguing character sketches makes this an interesting volume. Questions raised by James about some of the people studied lead to the reader reflecting on exactly what is at stake with the individual being discussed. There are also the larger questions hinted at in earlier pages of the volume. A fascinating potpourri by an intellectual who seats each character in a deep historical context, even by a few well chosen comments.