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 intelligible… 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
play… 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 blast… 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.”
Is that really it? “If I wrote a long article or a short book on the subject,
I’d say that waiting until Islam secularises itself as our religions have
done is too long a wait, and what we have to hope is that moderate Islam –
which, of course, is the majority – will see its way clear to denouncing
extremism and get out of this trap where you can’t denounce extremism
without being seen to favour the West. But that’s as far as I’m prepared to
go, because I don’t want to be consulted as though I’m some sort of expert
when I’m just a writer. If I’ve got something to contribute, I’ll contribute
it as a writer, not as a public figure.”
There’s more circumspection, albeit less surprisingly, on Diana, Princess of
Wales, as we gear up towards the tenth anniversary of her death. The very
mention of her name prompts an urgent desire in my interviewee to retreat to
the kitchen and make a pot of coffee. I tell him about the time, a few years
before her fatal accident, when I was lunching with Sir Hardy Amies at
Launceston Place. Towards the end of our meal, Diana walked past our table,
looking radiant – close up, she did take your breath away – in a
bright-yellow suit (a colour not many women could carry off with such
aplomb), and ducked her head, in that nervous birdlike gesture of her early
photographs, at the sight of the Queen’s couturier. “She’s a very bad
princess,” Amies said loudly, as she walked out of the door, followed some
minutes later by… Guess who?
