I read books.

Clive James puts to bed the oxymoron “Australian intellectual” with this hefty tome, “Cultural Amnesia – Notes in the Margin of My Time” (2007), a collection of over 100 essays on cultural figures he has come across in his lifetime of reading, book buying and globe trotting. 850 pages packed with references to and discussions of a swathe of Central European, Latin American and Russian (among others) writers, philosophers, film makers, musicians, activists, politicians and assorted dictators that don’t fail to dazzle and intrigue. 

I had not heard of many of them, so apart from his exhortations to start reading their output in the original language and thus you should learn French, Italian, Spanish, German and Russian, it was highly interesting to hear of all these (mainly) 20th Century personalities and their lives and works inspired and determined by, but also defied, that most lethal of centuries. 

He is especially good at pre-Anschluss Vienna’s coffee house culture. (k.u.k. Vienna even gets its own introduction. I always thought k.u.k. stood for Kaffee und Kuchen, but no, it’s ‘kaiserlich und königlich’, an abbreviation for the Austrian-Hungarian empire) with its large cast of geniuses great and small proclaiming upon the world. All essays are built around quotes of aphorisms and epigrams by their subject. His favourites are obviously (they have longest essays devoted to them) Egon Friedell, Georg Lichtenberg, and Arthur Schnitzler, with Jean-Paul Sartre as his favourite philosophical and hypocritical bogeyman popping up everywhere. The fact that they were mainly Jewish (just like many of the German entries) is a leitmotif but it must be remembered that they were not a separate category in their societies (only Hitler made them so, not before). 

James is an inveterate liberal democrat and thus rails constantly against the century’s dictators and totalitarianisms (be they Fascist, Nazi, or Communist – with some explicit criticism of multiculturalism too in the aftermath of Islamic terrorism at the time of writing). What they have done to destroy European culture is not just a Holocaust story, as Stalin and Mao also did their damnedest to root out intellectuals in their societies – this is always the surest and fastest way to genocide. 

A large number of essays are elegiac in tone because of the acute loss suffered for any country that was ruled or occupied by non-democratic systems. Stay or run and collaborate or resist were not always easy options and James is generous to the individuals and their choices they made (and lived or died by them). 

James almost never fails to mention where he got his books from during a lifetime of globe trotting to collect them in markets and second hand bookshops around the world. Detailed prescriptions of their paper quality, print, binding and covers get a bit tedious. Since he packed that massive volume of reading (and understanding) into his life of reviewing, broadcasting, interviewing and comedy routines, one has to marvel at when he could find the time to cheat on his wife! 

He posits that every book has its best page, and in this book it is page 400 where he exasperatedly admits that “male homosexual promiscuity is impossible to imagine” (for a straight male). It made me laugh out loud since his argument is that “it doesn’t sound like enjoyment” and “Can all these targets [male partners] be seen as beautiful?” He is genuinely puzzled by Christopher Isherwood being a sexual decathlete in the Turkish bath, and Constantine Cavafy’s poems are dreaming about nothing else. But he thankfully comes to the sensible conclusion that in a rational world, anybody could be attractive, even if he cannot imagine it.