Clive
James
The Meaning of Recognition:
New Essays 2001–2005
Picador, $30 pb, 382
pp, 0330440292
CLIVE
JAMES ONCE said that
the problem with being
famous is that you begin
by being loved for what
you do and end up thinking
that you are loved for
who you are. Quite possibly,
it is to avoid such
a fate that James has
returned in the past
few years to the thing
that got him noticed
in the first place —
writing dazzling prose.
Absenting himself from
the Crystal Bucket,
he has become once more
a full-time writer,
popping up in the Times
Literary Supplement
and Australian Book
Review with gratifying
regularity. The title
of his latest collection
of essays refers to
its first and final
pieces, both of which
deal with the crucial
difference between celebrity
and recognition, a subject
currently dear to his
heart, partly for the
reason outlined above,
partly because the current
media is saturated with
noisy nonentities. Since
James is no doubt frequently
recognised by people
ignorant of the very
achievement for which
he really deserves recognition,
his thoughts on the
subject are clearly
invaluable.
It
is, however, the other
subjects covered in
this new collection
that will grab the serious
reader’s attention.
James is surely right
to say that there are
essayists who can be
‘faithful to the
world’s multiplicity
even when they are writing
about Buffy the Vampire
Slayer’ and
others ‘who can’t
report a war-crimes
trial without writing
flummery’. But
some things are more
important than others,
and the Metropolitan
Critic of old is now
a political voice to
be reckoned with. While
the book contains essays
on The West Wing
and The Sopranos,
it is to the evils of
recent history that
James has increasingly
turned his attention.
The emphasis is by no
means new: From the
Land of Shadows
(1982) most probably
marks the beginning
of the shift from critic
to political man of
letters. But here, in
reviews of Roman Polanski’s
The Pianist or
two new biographies
of Primo Levi, the ghetto
and the gas chamber
weigh more heavily than
ever. Facing them is
a moral imperative —
one ignored by many
intellectuals. One of
the finest things in
the book is a review
of the letters of Isaiah
Berlin, whom James sees
as having overlooked
Nazism largely because
its driving irrationality
does not lend itself
to the history of ideas.
‘A Nightclub in
Bali’ is equally
powerful — part
obituary for the murdered
revellers, part rejoinder
to those who imagine
that the murderers are
moist-eyed anti-imperialists
attempting to avenge
the wretched of the
earth, all of whose
woes are self-evidently
reducible to US support
for Israel. It’s
not just the vices of
liberal democracy that
the bearded, boring
clerics hate: it is,
says James, the virtues,
too. This is incisive
political stuff. To
adapt his own assessment
of Levi: ‘Dreadful
grist, but a brilliant
mill.’
Just
what a brilliant mill
it is could be demonstrated
by quoting one or two
sentences from almost
any page of this book.
Not one sentence comes
down with a bump, and
yet every word is pulling
its weight: nothing
is added for reasons
of sonority. (Not that
the prose isn’t
sonorous, of course:
towards the end of the
third instalment of
his Unreliable Memoirs,
James wrote: ‘All
I can do is turn a phrase
until it catches the
light.’ Note how
he demonstrates the
point while making it.)
The voice is the one
we know and love: diffident,
amorous, aphoristic.
Essential to James’s
style is his humour,
which is, as he says,
a form of compression.
The final piece in the
book is hilarious, the
jokes at President Bush’s
expense quite on a par
with his famous description
of the current governor
of California as a brown
condom full of walnuts.
‘When he searches
for a word, he feels
fear, and his face shows
it. When he finds one,
he feels triumph, and
his face shows that.
Almost always, the word
he finds is the wrong
one, but his look of
relief arouses sympathy
in the audience, as
when a child, sent to
fetch a spoon from the
kitchen drawer, comes
back with a fork.’
The
question of style is
by no means peripheral
to the question of what
one does with it. Style
is the physiognomy of
the soul, ‘a spine
and a brain, not just
a skin’. In prose,
as in the other arts,
the relationship between
content and form is
the key. ‘The fictional
West Wing is realistic,
but only in the sense
of reminding you that
realism is the most
refined form of manufacture.’
Art is artificial: that’s
what makes it art. Over
the years, James the
critic has evolved a
set of aesthetic principles,
one of which is that
the apparent obstacle
is often the departure
point for inspiration.
Applied in the past
to poetic form, acrylic
paints and swearing
bans, here it is pressed
into service again to
explain the appeal of
Bing Crosby’s voice:
‘Too much aural
beauty, indeed, can
get in the way, flooding
the aural reception
system of the listener
before the actual song
gets a chance to register’;
as well as the achievement
of Cyrano de Bergerac:
‘Without the fierce
requirements of rhyme,
his wit would never
have been driven to
its dizzy height, just
as, without the burden
of his nose, he would
never have been compelled
to the nobility of his
sacrifice.’
If
James can be said to
have mellowed at all,
it is probably in his
attitude to academia.
Slowly but surely he
has come to realise
that the distance from
Grub Street to the Ivory
Tower is not so great
as he once thought:
the Republic of Letters
boasts many professors
— Frank Kermode
and John Carey among
them — who know
the way and can show
you the short cuts.
James, however, is as
ruthless as ever when
it comes to exposing
academic folly of the
kind exhibited by Professor
Christopher Ricks. Of
Ricks’s assertion
that the later Yeats
was more rhetorician
than poet, he is as
scathing as one might
hope and expect. Ricks,
he suggests, could have
reached his opinion
‘only after a small
asteroid had passed
through his brain, perhaps
while he was listening
to Bob Dylan’.
Australia
figures larger in this
book than in any of
James’s previous
collections. ‘The
Meaning of Recognition’,
the title-piece on Philip
Hodgins, first appeared
in ABR (September
2003). ‘A Memory
Called Malouf’
is particularly fine.
(‘For any Australian
who first went swimming
at the end of World
War II, the matted board
will have the same effect
as a truck full of madeleines
would have had on Proust.’)
Whether writing about
the Australian essay
or reviewing the state
of Australian poetry,
James doesn’t need
an invitation to point
out that, culturally,
we have little to cringe
about. He doesn’t
have to say it, of course.
He proves it each time
he puts pen to paper.
