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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

James is too good a reader not to be aware that no choice is ever innocent. Random as his selection of luminaries may appear (why Proust and not Joyce? Why Fellini and not Bergman? Why Hitler and not Stalin? Why Alan Moorehead and not Nicolas Bouvier? And where are those others without whom, for me at least, the world today would be unthinkable, such as Karl Marx, Carl Gustav Jung, Igor Stravinsky, Richard Dawkins?) it serves perfectly the purpose of allowing us to see the forest by means of certain individual trees. Any anthology (because, after all, Cultural Amnesia is, in the very best sense, an anthological work made up of the quotations and anecdotes culled throughout a lifetime of reading) unfolds a myriad parallel anthologies made up of the rejects, the doubles, the consciously or unconsciously forgotten. And yet James’s intelligence and style are of such high order that his readers, even while disagreeing with a choice or objecting to a counterpoint (I have a whole carcase to pick with him about Borges), must feel that any such criticism has a petty, whiney, irrelevant ring.

To the skimming eye, Cultural Amnesia appears as a sort of literary, artistic and political dictionary, haphazard or idiosyncratic, as if put together from fortuitous book reviews and biographical sketches. A closer look, however, suggests that the apparent randomness is in fact carefully planned, a gallery of portraits whose different gazes focus on an ineffable centre that mysteriously identifies what it means to be human. The 19th century, James notes in his introduction, ‘meant to supply some of the regrettable deficiencies of reason by the addition of science’. This faith in science, in its hopeful future,

can be assessed from our past, in which it flattened cities and gassed innocent children: whatever we don’t yet know about it, one thing we already know is that it is not necessarily benevolent. But somewhere within the total field of human knowledge, humanism still beckons us as our best reason for having minds at all.

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