Mick Hartley

Great Snobs of our Times

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Mick Hartley

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A N Wilson reviews Clive James’ latest book “Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time“:

[T]hroughout this book, James sits on the judge’s bench assessing each author for their views. This is no mere collection of bits; it is a book with a theme, namely how the Kingdom of Letters did or did not stand up to the murderous philistinism of the dictators, especially Hitler and Stalin. An essay that is especially puzzling is about the great German scholar Ernst Robert Curtius. “It is comprehensible and forgivable that Curtius said nothing about Nazi atrocities during the war. Incomprehensible and unforgivable is that he said nothing about them after it.” Who, in these sentences, is doing the comprehending or the forgiving? Curtius wrote a great book, as James begins by stating – European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages. But, as with the other entries, James does not really get round to telling you what is in the book. His essay is one of attitude.

James spends much time in this book wielding his sledgehammer to crack a Nazi nut. Curtius wrote his book to retrieve from the postwar rubble the great European mainstream of civilised literature from the late Middle Ages to the time of Diderot. In a way, Curtius’s book does in prose what Ezra Pound did in poetry in the Pisan Cantos, a work about which James is cheaply unfair. (Pound made appalling fascist broadcasts, but it would be as unjust to judge his poetry in their lurid light, as it would be to judge James the intellectual by the cheeky-chappy TV broadcasts he made 20 years ago.)

There is something toe-curling in James’s dedication of the book to Sophie Scholl, the 22-year-old Munich student beheaded by the Nazis and the subject of a recent painful film. Does the perpetual banging of his drum serve to drown out an uncomfortable question? What has had the more devastating effect on the great European cultural tradition – the vile tyrannies that we all, in common with James, deplore, or television and American popular culture as gleefully espoused by James for half his professional life?

Suggesting that American popular culture has been more damaging to the European cultural tradition than the Nazis – or that Clive James appearing on TV was somehow equivalent to Ezra Pound making those pro-fascist and anti-semitic broadcasts – says a great deal more about A N Wilson than it does about Clive James.

What was it that hoax Betjeman letter spelled out? – ah yes, “A N Wilson is a shit”.

Comments

  1. dearieme Avatar
    dearieme

    The fact that James loathes Stalin as well as Hitler puts him in a blessed minority among “intellectuals” I guess. Or more precisely, that he did so before The Wall came down. As for Pound, I commend to you Larkin’s jazz criticism and his remarks on Pound, Parker and Picasso.

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  2. Richard Brown Avatar
    Richard Brown

    Pound wrote the greatest injunction in the language..Pull down thy vanity..which has an aesthetic scope that is light years beyond anything Larkin could conceive of.
    (Churchill..preposition)

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  3. Chris Avatar
    Chris

    You’re right. It does say something about AN Wilson, and maybe not complimentary. But… the thing is, AN Wilson is right in two regards. First, having read some of them over at Slate, I agree with him that the essays by Clive James are utter, utter, utter wank. Second, since Wilson’s not saying that America is worse than Nazis and Communists (I admit that’s how it reads at first, especially if one is used to reading Comment is Freakish articles), but rather suggesting that the Nazis and Communists in their brief domination possibly couldn’t be as pernicious as American popular culture, then it’s a question that could be considered as legitimate. It may be snobbish but I don’t think it’s necessarily a rhetorical question, unless you think damage to culture can be measured solely in bodycounts. And, cynically, nothing does more for art and culture than war and social upheaval.
    Also, the last thing I want to see on a book is the label ‘100% Certified Free From Sympathy To Totalitarianism: Inspector Clive ‘Let’s Make Sarcastic Statements About Foreign Advertising’ James.

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  4. Mick H Avatar
    Mick H

    I didn’t read him as saying America’s worse than Nazis and Communists. And yes, it’s a legitimate question, but only if you’re a complete snob about “popular” culture.

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  5. Chris Avatar
    Chris

    ‘Clive James appearing on TV was somehow equivalent to Ezra Pound making those pro-fascist and anti-semitic broadcasts’ sounds like you’re making an equivalence statement. Or, rather, suggesting that Wilson is making one. Apologies – I took it, rhetorically, to the next level. Too much Naomi Wolf in my gut, I guess. But feel free to change ‘America is worse than Nazis and Communists’ to ‘America is the same as Nazis and Communists’ because it doesn’t make any difference since he’s arguing neither. Praising crap is not the same as preaching anti-semitism.
    Have you read any of the James essays? This was the one that really ticked me off, but the style and theme is similar in the others – nothing of work or ability in either subject or writer. I think that whether or nor Wilson has a point depends more or less entirely on whether or not you like the following. As for toe-curling, my digits twisted at the thought of how Clive James imagines he resists or would have resisted, the brave soul.
    http://www.slate.com/id/2162891/
    ‘When it was safe to do so, he nerved himself to say that anti-Semitism was a bad thing. Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate even contains a good epigram: Armed with anti-Semitism, Sartre said, even an idiot can be a member of an elite. Though the trains had already left from Drancy—by the time he wrote the pamphlet, the Nazis were gone as well—at least his opinion was published. He slammed the stable door. But he never made a beginning on the question of how the writers and intellectuals who continued with their careers during the occupation could do so only at the cost of tacitly conniving with Nazi policies, all of which radiated from one central aim, which was the extermination of the Jews.’
    Apparently, Sartre is to be discarded as anything other than an occasional wit because he didn’t shout loud enough at the time, didn’t take enough risks, didn’t die for his cause. Tell me – when the roll call of those who are righteous today is made, does Clive James stride high? Is this his attempt to be noticed? Is this his What’s Left? If so, ugh, if not then he’s a hypocrite himself. In any case, if that is not snobbery it’s something that is kissing cousins to snobbery – judging something or someone not on any actual merit but on an invented scale, whether of fidelity to an ideal of European culture or devotion to the Clive James School of Decency.
    PS – It’s a stupid, minor point, but I had asterisks around popular culture, which are sometimes used for emphasis online, like italics/bold. I meant that even Wilson would acknowledge there’s plenty of American culture that is good. They were no scare quotes, a la ‘popular’ culture, in either my comment or Wilson’s correctly snobbish original.

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  6. J.Cassian Avatar
    J.Cassian

    I’ve just read “Cultural Amnesia” and I thought it was generally excellent. A quotation from the chapter on Jean Prevost (whom James imagines as the equivalent to a George Orwell who had died in the Spanish Civil War) puts the Sartre comments in perspective: “..Prevost really was the Resistance fighter that Sartre only pretended to be – a pretence we could forgive him for, if he had not later on accused others of cowardice.” Where James really gets Sartre’s number is the following sentence: “In the ‘Gulag Archipelago’ there is a great moment when prisoners are sweltering in a Black Maria while Jean-Paul Sartre is standing a few feet away on the footpath proclaiming the wonders of the Soviet Union.” The bit where James compares Sartre and Heidegger to Abbott and Costello is worth the price of admission alone.

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  7. J.Cassian Avatar
    J.Cassian

    As for Pound, “Pull down thy vanity” is one of the very few lines anyone remembers from the 800-page gallimaufry of pedantry and tedium that is “The Cantos”. The “thy” says it all. After a lifetime of trying to resist temptation, Old Ez the Iconoclast falls back into the arms of his beloved Swinburne and Rossetti with a huge sigh of relief. Pound was the Robert Southey of poetic modernism.

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  8. J.Cassian Avatar
    J.Cassian

    I suspect this comment James once made about a biography of Philip Larkin also throws some light on the linked review: “Glumly we learn that [Larkin] wasn’t just a racist, a wanker, a miser and a booze artist, he was also prey, in his decling years, to such nameless vices as forming a friendship with A.N. Wilson.”

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  9. J.Cassian Avatar
    J.Cassian

    That should be “declining years”.

    Reply
  10. Dom Avatar
    Dom

    If you read Sartre after the occupation — stupid comments about Cuban Communism going beyond the need for elections, and so much more along those lines — you start to wonder what he was resisting during the occupation.

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  11. Andy Avatar
    Andy

    Pound was the Robert Southey of poetic modernism.
    The good thing about stupidity like that it that it renders all comment superfluous.

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  12. J.Cassian Avatar
    J.Cassian

    “The good thing about stupidity like that it that it renders all comment superfluous.”
    Or maybe you just don’t have a leg to stand on, Andy, you genius. Eliot, Stevens, Yeats – I can imagine these poets being read in a hundred years time, but Pound? “The Cantos” will go the same way as “The Curse of Kahama” (unless there’s a big 22nd audience for an incoherent hodgepodge of superficial Classical learning, American constitutional history, Chinoiserie, crank economics and good old Jew-baiting).

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  13. Andy Avatar
    Andy

    Oh, no, don’t give what passes for your argument more credit than it deserves. No doubt Eliot will be read in a hundred years; perhaps when pondering this claim we might remember how indebted the organisation and structure of his most famous poem was to the, what was it, “Robert Southey of poetic modernism,” that dull-as dust and technically conservative minor Romantic from Idaho. But then again, are we really meant to take seriously the opinion of someone who sees in Pound’s use of “thy” a flailing reference back to Swinburne rather than the tonal approximation of a liturgical resonance? I don’t, for a start.

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  14. J.Cassian Avatar
    J.Cassian

    “the tonal approximation of a liturgical resonance”
    That says more about you than it does about Pound.
    Christopher Hitchens on Pound and Eliot: “As dedicatee of The Waste Land, Pound is usually credited with trimming and improving the text, and certainly deserves recognition for promoting and marketing it. Most of the changes, however, turn out to have been for the worse. (In any case, as a reader of the Cantos will readily see, if Pound was truly any good at pruning and refining, he must have been literature’s most salient example of the physician who could not heal himself.)”
    Apart from the anthology piece you selected, “The Cantos” contain plenty of gems like this:
    “IGNORANCE, sheer ignorance ov the natr of money
    sheer ignorance of credit and circulation.
    Remarked Ben: better keep out the jews
    or yr/ grand children will curse you
    jews, real jews, chazims, and “neschek”
    also super-neschek or the international racket
    specialité of the Stinkschuld
    bomb-proof under their house in Paris
    where they cd/ store aht voiks
    fat slug with three body-guards
    soiling our sea front with a pot bellied yacht in the offing,
    governments full of their gun-swine, bankbuzzards, poppinjays.
    Did commit, that he did in the Kingdom of Italy…
    of the two usuries the lesser is now put down.
    that he did in the Kingdom of Britain etc/”
    Check the liturgical resonance. Just beautiful…

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  15. Andy Avatar
    Andy

    My reference to a liturgical resonance was clearly to the passage cited by Mr Brown. I haven’t actually “selected” any “Anthology pieces” (close reading clearly isn’t your forte, is it), but don’t let the facts get in the way of a bad rant. The idea that The Waste Land would have been improved by retaining Eliot’s third-rate burlesques and parodies is once that would not survive serious analysis (and of course it hasn’t: no series Modernist critic would support it), which is no doubt why you are happy to corroborate it. But then again, you have the magisterial literary reputation of Mr Hitchens on your side; I only have Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport on mine. So you must be right.

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  16. J.Cassian Avatar
    J.Cassian

    You selected the “Pull down thy vanity” section just like everybody else does. It’s usually the only bit of “The Cantos” that appears in anthologies. I’ll take those Hitchens comments over the Pound idolater Kenner’s any day. I think it’s unarguable that “The Cantos” do nothing for Pound’s reputation as an editor, to put it mildly. They could have done with quite a bit of pruning – down from 800 to about ten pages max, I’d say. “Mega biblion, mega kakon” as the “shades of Callimachus” would no doubt put it.
    By the way, the Southey reference is to his once being mentioned in the same breath as Wordsworth and Coleridge, just as Pound is with Eliot and Yeats. Future generations will be scratching their heads as to why. Southey only sucked up to King George III, while Pound described Mussolini in Christ-like terms (“but the twice crucified/Where in history will you find it?”), so the comparison is rather unfair to the turncoat laureate.
    I don’t need a “series Modernist critic” or anyone else to do my judging for me. I decided that after my experience with Kenner, whose advocacy for Pound becomes mightily unpersuasive once you get down to the turgid business of ploughing through “The Cantos” themselves. More importantly, I’ve read the poets Pound is trying to compete with- Homer, Ovid and Dante- and I wouldn’t even award him the wooden spoon in that contest. Some of Pound’s early work is worthwhile -usually where he’s translating another poet- but “The Cantos” are an artistic disaster, no matter how many pretty fragments you salvage from the wreckage.

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  17. Andy Avatar
    Andy

    Once again: I didn’t select the Pound passage; I commented upon it, as did others before me on this thread (and only to correct an egregious misreading). No more, no less. As for the rest, I don’t go in for the business of extracting the nice “lyrical” bits from poems and using them as the supreme arbiter of literary value. I leave that to those of you with a sweet tooth.
    I should thank you, though, for alerting me to some of the constituents of the James volume. Now I can look forward to the imperishable bathos of reading James on Heidegger in the confident expectation that he will impart the epochal news that the latter was sometimes a Very Bad Man. As you say, worth the price of admission alone.

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