Essays:Let me not wait till December to name my book of the year. This is it. If Cultural Amnesia doesn't figure prominently when the pundits recommend their Christmas favourites, good sense and understanding will have perished from the earth.
Clive James begins this immense book by hymning humanism, which he takes to be "a particularised but unconfined concern with all the high-quality products of the creative impulse" - as opposed to the destructive impulse, which strips the world of its glorious variety. The essays that follow are a gallery of cultural heroes - Louis Armstrong, Camus, the brothers Mann, Montale, Beatrix Potter and Sophie Scholl are among them. The usual anti-life suspects - Hitler, Stalin, Mao and co - are joined by others whom James sees as villains, notably Sartre.
In fact, the French don't do too well here. Coco Chanel "rolled over for the Nazis". Cocteau, "a cocktail-party collaborator", was glad to prosper in Paris under the occupying masters. James reminds us of Robert Brasillach and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, collaborators executed once France was rid of the Germans. But it's the case of Sartre that rouses his savage indignation. Too long an apologist for communist regimes that contemptuously wiped out mere human lives, Sartre was "debarred by nature from telling the truth for long about anything that mattered". James declares him "the most conspicuous single example in the twentieth century of a fully qualified intellectual aiding and abetting the opponents of civilization".
THOSE WHO OPPOSED totalitarian rule, and paid with their lives (such as Sophie Scholl, executed in 1943 for distributing anti-Nazi flyers, or French historian Marc Bloch, executed as a Resistance fighter in 1944) or survived in despair and adversity (Anna Akhmatova, Nadezhda Mandelstam), rank highest in James's personal pantheon. Close to them are those who recognised the anti-life forces for what they were (Thomas Mann's brother, Heinrich, who predicted the systematic annihilation of the Jews, or Ricarda Huch, who resigned her position as first-ever woman president of the Prussian Academy of the Arts because the Nazi idea of what it was to be German wasn't hers).
But throughout, Clive James celebrates those who rejoice in the full carolling vigour of the mind in its creative play. One of the several smaller books tucked into this huge book is a paean sung to Viennese cafe life in the early 20th century. Familiar and not-so- familiar figures (Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig) are joined by Peter Altenberg, Egon Friedell and Alfred Polgar, not even on the radar for most English-speaking readers. Much of my own life has been involved with German and Austrian writing, and of course I warm to James's account of the "cultural cosmopolitanism" that was inside the dying Habsburg monarchy and its aftermath, just as I applaud his realisation that German well-handled is a deft, light-footed language. Still, I'm almost as amazed to see these insights in print in English as I am to read James's advocacy of a writer I'd never so much as heard of, Paul Muratov (1881-1950), author (I learn) of a great book on Italian art and life, and one of the truly overlooked labourers in the vineyards of civilisation.
Muratov's virtual oblivion highlights the amnesia that James diagnoses and combats in this book. The message is a simple one: forget the best that's been thought and made, and we forget the very foundation of all we hope to live by. It's a message that always needs re-stating, and James, always compellingly readable, proves once again that serious intellectual work can be written in a prose that crackles with the sparking of connections. The asides alone are worth the price of admission: Gibbon, Pope, Lichtenberg and Cuvilliés are "the four master dwarves of the Rococo", Adolf Hitler "should need no introduction", the awful style of Walter Benjamin is "the prose equivalent of a velvet fog: breathe it in and you'll choke on cloth". (How true.) As a master of style, James is entitled to his precepts: "Bad writers never examine anything. Their inattentiveness to the detail of their prose is part and parcel of their inattentiveness to the detail of the outside world".
ANOTHER BOOK HIDDEN inside this big one is an intellectual autobiography. From "my first cafe table" in Sydney in the 1960s, through dinner with Joseph Brodsky or the opera with Gianfranco Contini, to the gallery visits in pauses between filming, bibliophile triumphs, and the Russian Suprematist paintings on "the walls of my library", Clive James reminds us that the civilisation he wants preserved has been the passion and substance of his own life. And that is the great example of this book: he preserves and enhances the civilisation he writes of, by living it.
Poet and translator Michael Hulse is a judge of the Günter Grass Foundation's Albatross Prize
Cultural Amnesia By Clive James Picador, 876pp. £25