The whole book and I cannot pretend to have read all 856 pages is like a
free-form jazz piece. He assures me that "it's designed to be dipped
into I hope that people when they dip, won't be able to stop dipping".
It is also meant to be useless, he says: "It has no obvious use.
Learning is not utilitarian. It should be pursued for its own sake. I wrote
the book for its own sake. Although I do hope to get my money back."
Each small essay is so clotted with information and quotes and bridges
between different times and people that although there is much to enjoy, it
can also feel strangely airless and certainly too much to digest at one
sitting. He acknowledges these challenges himself in his introduction,
writing, "If I have done my job properly, themes will emerge from the
apparent randomness and make this work intelligibleŠ I hope that the
episodically intermixed account of direct experience from my own charmed
life will alleviate the difficulties of a densely woven text".
A clue to his thinking behind the book comes when I ask him how he rates his
poetry. "I rate it very highly, actually," says James, who
reserves his self-deprecation for the things that don't matter to him. "And
it's gratifying that as the years go by, the rating gets higher. As a
showbusiness name, I was crossed off the list of the serious [those Japanese
game shows can't have helped]. But that problem is going away and now I'm
getting estimated somewhere near my true worth, which I think is fairly high
up the second rank." I cannot think of a living English poet who would
have the gall to assess themselves in this way, with the possible exception
of the deeply eccentric Fiona Pitt-Kethley.
So what poets do you rank yourself alongside? "I wouldn't say but I know
where I want to be," he says. "I want to be with the poets who
some of what they wrote is remembered and recited. My favourite poets wrote
something a stanza, perhaps that you can remember."
It is not the names in Cultural Amnesia that matter, so much as what
they represent or, more crucially, the significance of what they said
often just a line or two (like the poet's stanza), that may endure long
after they have gone, often in this case, because they sparked something in
James's imagination.
There are occasions when Clive James disappears from his own prose, and allows
an image of such shimmering, lovely economy to emerge that you catch a
glimpse of that poetic soul. Describing his inability to squeeze his book
into a conventional schematic straitjacket, he writes that he could only
produce: "a trail of clarities variously illuminating a dark sea of
unrelenting turbulence, like the phosphorescent wake of a phantom ship".
But elsewhere, he cannot prevent his Clive James ventriloquist's doll from
taking centre stage that glib, punny TV persona as in the essay on
Sophie Scholl ("You've really got to chill, Will," trills Marty
cutely", part of a drawn-out explanation as to why the actress Natalie
Portman should playŠ oh, please, just read the book).
To learn about the brief, brave life of Sophie Scholl is one illustration of
why Cultural Amnesia is an important book. She was a member of the
White Rose student pacifists who was guillotined by the Nazis at Stadelheim
prison in Munich on February 22, 1943, for publishing and distributing
anti-Nazi leaflets. She, unlike her brother Hans, was offered the chance to
recant.
But she refused and died, with her whole life stretching ahead of her, at the
age of 21. At her trial, Sophie said simply: "Finally, someone has to
make a start. We only said and wrote what many people think. They just don't
dare to express it." The Scholl siblings were Aryans protesting against
the fate of the Jews, as James writes, "purely out of common humanity".
Humanity, and what binds us together, being the central thread of his
thinking.
How do we account for such selfless courage in someone so young? James has
clearly spent a great deal of time thinking about such matters and, indeed,
dedicates his book in memory to Scholl, along with three other fearless
women, but he has no answers for me. "I can't account for it and the
book is saying that you can't account for it," he says.
The linking theme of the book, James says, is the reaction of the thinker or
the writer to a political development, particularly to totalitarianism. In
the introduction he refers to "the worst of times which has become our
times" and I wonder what makes him so certain that this is history's
darkest age. "I didn't actually phrase myself well there," he
says. "I think that the time that I was growing up was the worst of
times when the Soviets and the Nazis were both going full blastŠ and things
have eased off a bit. Totalitarianism hasn't gone away entirely. It's still
there like aer--os--ol spray," an extravagant wave of the arm, "but
people are dying now in thousands not millions. That's about as good as it
gets."
James is presumably thinking, in part, about the toxic spray of the Taleban
and al-Qaeda terrorists, but he's reluctant to be drawn into a discussion on
the new totalitarians. "I try to keep my counsel and reserve my
opinions for articles at the very least and for books if possible," he
says. It could be said that people who have spent their lives reading and
thinking have a duty to speak out about the crucial issues of our day, I
say. "Yes, but I'd rather wait and find 'the words for my bewilderment,'"
he says quoting a French philosopher.
I don't get it. There's barely a writer I've interviewed from Martin Amis to
Norman Mailer to Salman Rushdie (naturally) who hasn't felt it necessary
to engage in this subject. It seems miserly, almost ignoble, to hoard his
nuggets of wisdom for some future publication date. And it's particularly
odd when the entire raison d'être of his new book which we are, after all,
here to discuss is that democracy is worth fighting for at all costs.
After some badgering, he says, "Anti-semitism is a great enemy of the
Palestinians and I state it as a paradox that's true because they're really
saying that the Israeli state should disappear and it will only disappear in
one way in a great mass of heated light that will melt the entire district
so you do the Palestinians no service by giving a moment's credibility to
anti-semitism as a position... But that's as far as I will go towards a
sound-bite."
