The sprinter tries a marathon

Published on August 26, 2007

Clive James shot to fame as the author of a slim and very funny book, "Unreliable Memoirs", about his childhood and young adulthood in Australia. He followed this up with "Falling Toward England", about his university days at Cambridge where he ran around with the likes of Eric Idle and Germaine Greer.

He has written two further memoirs that I confess I haven't read. He has also published four slender novels, one about Bollywood called "The Silver Castle", which I found fast-paced and entertaining.

His mainstays, however, are newspaper and magazine articles that he slaps together into books of criticism - literature, history, movies, TV, music - of which he's churned out 14. "Earning his crust", as he puts it.

He's also well known as a TV presenter and documentary filmmaker.

Now he's swinging for the stands with an 876-page masterwork to set the capstone on his career: "Cultural Amnesia", subtitled "Necessary Memories from History and the Arts". The sprinter is now trying to run a marathon.

His theme is nothing less than the triumph of liberal democracy over the two great totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century: Nazism and communism. Showing how things turned out that way, liberal democracy's supporters and antagonists - 106 of them to be precise - are profiled in this book.

The only order imposed is alphabetical. Thus, American TV director Robert Mann, creator of "Miami Vice", bumps up against German literary giant Thomas Mann, who bumps up in turn with Mao Zedong.

Louis Armstrong precedes French political theorist Raymond Aron. Then there are Albert Camus, Dick Cavett, WC Fields, F Scott Fitzgerald, Charles De Gaulle, Edward Gibbon, Heinrich Heine, Adolf Hitler and on to Tacitus next to Margaret Thatcher, and Evelyn Waugh rubbing shoulders with Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Each profile sticks to a formula: a photo, followed by an biographical sketch, a quote and a meditation upon the quote - much like a preacher would take a biblical text as the basis for his sermon.

It took James three years to write the text, but it still reads like a random collection of magazine articles. For this he is unapologetic: His theme is the protean nature of liberal democracy against the lockstep thinking of totalitarian ideology.

The weak point of the book is all the obscure essayists most readers have never heard of, going back a couple centuries - Robert Brasillach, Ricarda Huch, Viginio Rognoni, Dubravka Ugresic ...

The best thing about the book is his gleeful slaughter of sacred cows like Edward Gibbon, Miles Davis and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Of the opaque prose of Gibbon's alleged masterpiece, he writes: "'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' is a Grand National with a fence every ten yards, each to be jumped backwards and well as forwards; and you have to carry your horse."

He paints affectionate portraits of his heroes Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, but rounds on Miles Davis and his ilk: "Always a sucker for the sweet shout of the open horn, I never much liked even the most famous work of Davis, because his trumpet sounded as if it had been shrunk within the diameter of a drinking straw. "

And don't get him started on Jean-Paul Sartre and other lefty French obscurantist philosophers.

"For the book's author, Sartre is a devil's advocate to be despised more than the devil, because the advocate was smarter."

The attack swiftly turns personal. Sartre pretended to be a hero of the Resistance but never put himself at risk and showed his plays to Nazi audiences.

"Sartre, the philosopher, the man of truth, lied in his teeth

about the most elemental fact

of his adult life all the way to the end, so it is no wonder that his philosophy is nonsense."

Literate in Latin, French, Spanish, German and Russian, James is a facile writer, quick with irony and paradox and the well-turned phrase. He's a modern day GK Chesterton, and it's a disappointment that his appreciative essay on Chesterton strays off on a tangent, to the prevalence of crap in modern culture - like "the unalleviated stupidity of 'The Da Vinci Code' " - and stays there to the end.

Similarly, an essay on documentary filmmaker Chris Marker turns into a brilliant polemic against the left-wing critics of Australian Premier John Howard's immigration policy.

In fact, this is a pattern of many of the pieces in this book, a strange mixture of gems and dross.

Since the only order is alphabetical, the best way to read this book is to cherry-pick the gems. If you're a book reviewer, you have to go back and trudge through the dross. But if not, don't.

James Eckardt's eighth book, "Singapore Girl", published by Monsoon Books, is on sale at Kinokuniya, Bookazine and Asia Books.