Malcolm Muggeridge once dismissed Clive James’ appetite for culture with the quip: “He seeks it here, he seeks it there, he seeks it everywhere.” The inference being that ‘Australian intellectual’ constitutes an oxymoron, and Clive James learning Russian (not to mention Spanish, Italian, German, French, Polish, Japanese and the rest) in order to read non-English works in the original was akin to putting lipstick on a pig. Maybe James was still smarting from that long ago taunt because in Cultural Amnesia he indulges himself with a couple of brief (and gratuitous) digs at Muggeridge.
There is, to be fair,
something of a self-conscious exhibitionism about Clive James. Take his essay
on Karl Tschuppin, chronicler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Having provided
us with his own translation of a passage from Metternich’s Denkwürdigkeiten (Things Worth Thinking About), James reproaches himself for not
capturing “the vigour” of Metternich’s style. A page later he bemoans the fact
that having bought gorgeous second-hand volumes of works by Masaryk and Benes
in Olomouc (guest of honour at a film festival, please note), he has yet to add
Czech to his linguistic arsenal.
The notion of a vulgar
autodidact in search of a theme is further suggested by the very structure of Cultural
Amnesia: more than
100 essays evaluating a range of famous, not-so-famous and straight-out
infamous characters arranged in alphabetic order. A more random thematic
arrangement of material is hard to conceive; and yet Cultural Amnesia is deceptively coherent. Although
many of James’ artists, thinkers and politicians are illuminated with dazzling
insight, most are props in an overarching construction. Cultural Amnesia is not just a paean to the uniqueness
and fragility of Western civilisation in the twentieth century, but also a
warning about its vulnerability in the twenty-first.
In one essay James
rightly disparages the idea that Trotsky should be revered as “some kind of
lyrical humanist” because he wrote more lucidly than his homicidal comrades.
James’ point is that aesthetic sensibility and psychopathy need not be mutually
exclusive. Nothing especially profound in that, but there is more. Towards the
end of the essay James coolly segues to Osama bin Laden: “According to students
of Arabic, he commands his native language with vibrant fluency, giving a
thrilling sense of its historical depth…” The juxtaposition of Bolshevism and
Al Qaeda alerts us to a deeper purpose in Clive James’ tome.
Cultural Amnesia’s not-so-secret agenda – Sophie Scholl
and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are included in the dedication – is to retell the stories
of our past encounters with tyranny in order to forewarn us of what lies ahead.
Power, asserts James in his essay on Grigory Ordzhonokidze, a Bolshevik
apparatchik, is the real goal of humanity’s oppressors, the various ideologies
of the world no more than a ruse. The victim with a boot in his face or gun to
his head or electrode to his genitals can never expect sympathy from his
tormentor. Any sympathy on the part of the tormentor is jealously reserved for
himself: “Himmler was always telling his lovingly nurtured SS officers how hard
it would be for them to overcome their natural compassion.”
The arts do not in
themselves protect us from tyranny, and numerous great writers and thinkers
failed to recognise tyranny’s appearance. Having “banished God and the Devil”
from his own secular religion, Freud took too long to grasp that a very
different secular religion – National Socialism – came with its own Devil
incarnate. Remarkably enough, the French high priest of human freedom,
John-Paul Sartre, got totalitarianism wrong not once or even twice but three
times. He brazenly lied about his exploits against the Nazis: “He pretended
that he had been brave: the single most shameful thing a man can do when other
men have been brave and paid the price.” For a number of years after the Second
World War, Sartre was an apologist for the USSR, and on one particular trip to
Moscow unknowingly stood within feet “of a black Maria full of innocent
prisoners”: darkly ironic considering he refused to believe there were innocent prisoners in the Soviet
Union. One of the famous philosopher’s final incarnations was as a Maoist.
Contrariwise, some
artists or thinkers have done their finest work in the shadow of
totalitarianism. Heinrich Mann, a “knockabout bore” who never scaled the
heights of his younger brother, understood in 1936 what greater intellects were
still refusing or unable to grasp: “The German Jews will be systematically
annihilated, of that there can be no more doubts.” Moreover, the Third Reich
forced Thomas Mann “to be a better man than he really was”. Raymond Aron was at
his brilliant best during the Cold War “saying hard things” about Soviet
communism when it was not fashionable amongst his liberal compatriots to do so.
Dissent, of course,
takes on an infinitely darker hue for those trapped inside a terror state or
threatened by terrorists. Osip Mandelstam’s satirical portrait of Stalin has to
be one of the twentieth century’s wittier suicide notes. In that context,
Leszek Kolakowski, a Polish dissident, was ‘lucky’ to be exiled. He went on to
write Main Currents of Marxism,
a crucial treatise on the nature of totalitarianism. Aleksandr Zinoviev’s
oeuvre was the nightmare of everyday life in the Soviet Union. He too was
exiled, but when the Soviet Union disappeared so did Zinoviev’s prominence;
today “very little of him is in print”.
Context, then, is
critical. Twenty-one-year-old Sophie Scholl wrote very little before the Nazis
guillotined her at Stadelheim prison in 1943. The totality of her work is a
collection of “skimpy pamphlets”. There is nothing Shakespearean about the
language she employs at her ‘trial’, and yet her words tell us all we need to
know about the potential of the human spirit: “Finally, someone has to make a
start. We only said and wrote what many people think. They just don’t dare to
express it.” James’ essay on Sophie Scholl is my favourite in Cultural
Amnesia, its final
two sentences the most affecting passage in the entire book: “But part of the
sad truth about Sophie Scholl is that nobody remembers a thing she said, and in
her last few minutes alive she said nothing at all. If she had said something,
the man who bore witness to her bravery would have remembered it.” Sophie’s
stillness, James
intimates, is a valiant girl’s fierce concentration as she heroically conquers
her sense of horror: “The rest is silence”.
Clive James’s fate –
the fate of most writers and artists and thinkers – is not to play Hamlet the Dane and be “set
naked” upon the shores of an evil kingdom in order to right all wrongs. More
than enough to be Horatio: to tell the story of Hamlet – or Sophie – and thus
reclaim a “wounded name”. Better, as James argues, to be a literary “plodder”
like Victor Klemperer, conscientiously assembling a detailed study of evil (I
Shall Bear Witness
and To the Bitter End),
than a literary savant who fails to recognise the “most deadly enemy of the
humanist culture” he purports to embody. A point as true today as ever it
was.
Clive James is the best
kind of expatriate. His leave-taking in 1962 proved a blessing for Australia,
although not in the way (say) John Pilger’s departure the same year was a
blessing. In his essay on another Australian émigré, Alan Moorehead, a notable
Second World War correspondent and author (African Trilogy), James acknowledges the importance
to adventurous Australian artists of “Moorehead’s pioneering example of the
confident interloper who showed how it could be a positive advantage to come
from somewhere else”. Moorehead not only paved the way for those who came after
him, his work helped explain to Australia its role in the world – the
significance of Tobruk, for instance. This is an echo of James’ line about a
very different expatriate: “Gombrowicz served the eternal Poland by being
Polish in Buenos Aires.”
The writings of Alan
Moorehead are an antidote to Australian parochialism: the same might be said of Clive James’s
work. Still, if Australia benefited from the dispersion of its finest artists
and thinkers to the wider world, then the wider world profited in equal measure.
James speaks not only of the “dignified vigour” of Moorehead’s prose, but also
his capacity to see the world with fresh yet knowing eyes. A European of sorts,
Moorehead was a European of no particular persuasion: just like Vivian Clive
James. A man from the Antipodes can be truly cosmopolitan, a writer or artist
who speaks “complex and vital truths” to Europe without fear of national
chauvinism. Here, rather than some cheap jibe, is the perfect rejoinder to
Malcolm Muggeridge.
Western civilisation,
when we open our eyes, is in peril. The great paradox is that a person who
lives their entire life in walking distance of the Musée du Louvres can be more
blinkered than someone who spent their childhood in the dusty outer suburbs of
Sydney. Since September 11 our destinies have become more interdependent than
ever, and Clive James’ masterpiece might serve as a handy reminder in any
future moment of forgetfulness.
