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Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time

A gallery of pen portraits

Clive James
Picador, pp. 876pp, ££25,

Alberto Manguel

Wednesday, 8th August 2007

Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time
by Clive James

More than 100 parallel lives fill Cultural Amnesia’s close-to-900 pages, lives that, in James’s non-Euclidian universe, meet at one luminous point: Clive James himself, exemplar of his time, surviving witness of the past millennium’s final gasps. Cultural Amnesia is an intellectual autobiography, sufficiently lucid to efface its subject and sufficiently generous to include every one of its readers.

Plutarch’s method of choosing a series of notable figures to describe a historical period serves James as a model, but while Plutarch’s period stretches over ten centuries, James has modestly limited himself to one, the 20th, ‘out of which [James says, addressing himself to the younger readers] your century grew as surely as a column of black smoke grows from an oil fire’. This is no doubt more than enough, because James is one of those rare spirits whose library is, in a very real sense, universal and whose focused reading, in its very punctiliousness, includes (almost) everything. ‘From the force of cohesion,’ he says in relation to something else, ‘[comes] the power of suggestion, and one of the things suggested should be the existence of other voices.’ For that reason, James’s book does not require a chronological or thematic order to sustain its coherence: in this 20th-century pageant, Sir Thomas Browne, Montesquieu and Tacitus, as well as various 19th-century notables, make guest appearances, while the visual artists (with the exception of three film-makers) are conspicuously absent. The randomness of an alphabetical classification does very well for James’s all-embracing purpose, forming startling associations and curious brotherhoods: Thomas Mann and Mao, Beatrix Potter and Octavio Paz, Coco Chanel and Paul Celan.

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