Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time

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On the other hand, it is a great relief to read his scathing remarks about that old unrepentant Stalinist Jean-Paul Sartre, and a delight to come across his lovely and unexpected encomium of Beatrix Potter, while his essay on Proust, whom he quite obviously reveres, will send you straight to the man himself. From the force of cohesion would come the power of suggestion, and one of the things suggested should be the existence of other voices. Humanism was a particularized but unconfined concern with all the high-quality products of the creative impulse, which could be distinguished from the destructive one by its propensity to increase the variety of the created world rather than reduce it. Although it putatively focuses on the twentieth century, there are some notable names from rather earlier, including Keats and Montaigne.

And the amount of reader’s time devoted to this lame material is inexcusable within the context of the rest of the book and James’ stated goal of rescuing us from “cultural amnesia. In the three years it took to compose the actual text, I was faced more and more, as it moved forward, with the consequences of not having isolated my themes.

A number of articles published in Australian papers earlier in March 2013 featured interviews with his daughters and some examples of his recent poetry. I moved from Louis Armstrong to Raymond Aron, from Albert Camus to Dick Cavett, from Coco Chanel to Charlie Chaplin. It is mostly among these that I appreciate my own lack of education as well as James’s superb erudition and taste. There is nothing inherently wrong with erudition: it’s not as if we’re drowning in it, and anyway Proust himself wrote the most erudite book in the whole of French literature.

Witty, insightful and unashamedly erudite, the book is a superb miscellany of 20th-century cultural and political subjects.It's a pity that he seems to have felt it was inappropriate, because when it does emerge, in his lighter moments, the sentences can really come alive. Active from the early years of the twentieth century until the Nazis turned off the lights in Austria, the Viennese prodigy knew everything, or talked as if he did.

Note that some figures lived in earlier centuries, but James always makes their relevance to the 20th century clear. And that last sentence, in all its awkwardness and so-preachy exposition, its scornful lecturing to the students who cannot by themselves see the amazingly suave wit of Revel’s “wristy flourish”, is so typical of James. Certainly it was in my case, during all those intervals in a busy life when I escaped to be alone in the café, and found that I was never alone for a moment.

While he stays focused on the life of the individual being profiled in some cases, in others his thoughts take him to other cultural and political figures. In the nineteenth century, in the time of the great philologist Ernest Renan, and despite the contrary evidence already provided by the French Revolution, Studia humanitatis was still thought of as an unmixed blessing. He says that, if he has done his work in assembling this volume properly, “themes will emerge from the apparent randomness and make this work intelligible. If the eighteenth century had meant to usher in the age of reason, the nineteenth century, with the cold snick of the guillotine ringing in its ears, meant to supply some of the regrettable deficiencies of reason by the addition of science … By now, after the twentieth century has done its cruel work … the future of science, Renan’s cherished avenir de la science, 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. In that sense, the best sense, there is no such thing as an individual voice: there is only an individual responsibility.