The subtitle of As of This Writing, Clive James’s new
collection of literary and cultural criticism, is “The Essential
Essays, 1968–2002.”[1]
It would be easy to condemn the adjective
as hubristic: “essential” to whom? one might ask. But in fact
the forty-seven pieces presented here, which deal with cultural
icons ranging from Philip Larkin and Bertrand Russell to Germaine
Greer and Federico Fellini, are of a remarkably high level and
might without undue hyperbole be called essential—if not to the
general reader then at least to the educated one. Good literary
critics (and most of these essays are about literature) are rare,
and, while James’s enormous output, over a forty-year career that
has included long stints as a television performer and critic,
has inevitably produced lots of ephemera, his longer essays on
subjects he is passionately for or against are well worth keeping
for frequent reference. He is also one of the very rare critics
who inspire the reader to explore new and more challenging
fictional territory, read more poetry, look at familiar movies
with a fresh appreciation.
Critics have always been regarded, at least by some, as a species
of cultural parasite, and are sometimes obliged to justify their
activities to a public that deifies the creative imagination at
the expense of what they see as arid intellectualism. As the
cliché would have it, those who can’t create, criticize. I was
recently attacked, for example, by a sculptress when I told her I
was reviewing Claire Tomalin’s biography of Pepys. “A review
of a biography of a writer?” she asked incredulously. “Isn’t
that a little precious? If people are interested, why don’t they
simply read Pepys’s own work?”
I was not able to formulate a pithy explanation at the moment,
but I thought, later, about how I should have answered her.
The reason, I realized, that criticism is important—even
criticism of the work of other critics—is that a culture amounts
to a sort of extended conversation, and conversation demands
response and commentary as well as declarative statements. As
Clive James himself put it, in a recent article in the
The Guardian, “The role of the freelance man of letters … is to
accept—and to act on the acceptance—that he is engaged in a
perpetual discussion, an interminable exchange of views in which
he cannot, and should not, prevail. If he could prevail, and the
discussion did terminate, he would become his enemy, the
dogmatist whose only answer to opposition is annihilation.”
The written cultural discussion in which the critic participates
is perhaps more important in the Anglo-Saxon world—Great
Britain, the United States, Australia, Canada—than in other
societies, because Anglo-Saxon society does not consider
literature a fit subject for casual chit-chat. You will not find
a group of Americans, even if they are professional critics or
academics, discussing Milton at the dinner table. Book
contracts, tenure squabbles, even the current state of Milton
studies, yes; but not Milton’s actual poetry. The man of
letters, then, has an important role in creating the kind of
cultural receptivity that will welcome artistic endeavor.
Criticism is not indispensable to art. It is indispensable to
civilization—a more inclusive thing. When Pushkin lamented the
absence of criticism in Russia, he wasn’t begging for assistance
in writing poems. He wanted to write them in a civilized
country. Literary criticism fulfils its responsibility by
contributing to civilization, whose dependence in all its forms
is amply demonstrated by what happens when critical enquiry is
forbidden. Being indispensable to civilization should be a big
enough ambition for any critic. Unfortunately some critics, not
always the less gifted, want to be indispensable to art.
This is well said, and going back to the example of Pepys it is
instructive to note that since the Claire Tomalin biography
appeared, accompanied by many favorable reviews and essays,
Pepys’s Diary has gained the kind of widespread, middlebrow
readership that it has not had for a century or more. There is
even a popular website presenting daily installments. This would
never have been the case without the intervention of the
biographer and the enthusiastic critics in her wake.
Most of the essays in As of This Writing first appeared in
print years ago, and in the spirit of treating criticism as
discussion, James has appended “postscripts” to each essay, in
which he comments on the opinions of his younger self. Most of
these postscripts are reprinted from two of James’s earlier
collections, The Metropolitan Critic (1974, reprinted in 1992)
and Reliable Essays (2001). The postscripts, on the whole, are
not really necessary: either the pieces stand on their own (and
most of them do so, very well) or they don’t, and if one of them
requires too much retrospective commentary it is because it has
failed in some fundamental way.
At their best, the postscripts
serve not so much to correct or improve upon earlier judgments as
simply to remove the velvet gloves. The older James is less
respectful of big reputations than the younger one. For example,
one suspects, reading his 1969 piece on F. R. Leavis, that the
courteous tone is not entirely sincere, considering
the deep
chasm between Leavis’s uncompromising aesthetic and James’s more
flexible one: unlike Leavis, James seems to believe that
literature, like life, is too important to be taken seriously.
And we find that the 1994 postscript to the Leavis essay confirms
our suspicion: “Though a few chips had appeared in his plinth by
that stage, F. R. Leavis’s prestige was still mighty, so it was
quite standard procedure to screw up the tone of awe a notch or
two when going against him… . I had never thought him much of a
judge of poetry… . I already thought there were totalitarian
tendencies in all this but had not yet found the nerve to say so:
hence the strained tone, of respect trying to conceal repulsion.”
Similarly “D. H. Lawrence in Transit” (1972) is pretty
devastating, but perhaps not as devastating as it would be if
James were to tackle Lawrence today.
The essay destroys
Lawrence’s claim to being a serious thinker but is reverent about
his descriptive gifts: fair enough, although the reverence,
deserved though it may be, seems suspiciously like a mere matter
of giving the devil his due. Sure enough, James admits as much
in the 1994 postscript: “I thought Lawrence was a greatly gifted
writer. I just didn’t think he was a great writer. To put it
another way, I thought he could write but didn’t like what he
wrote.”
In reflecting on his treatment of Lawrence,
though, James articulates an important principle of criticism,
one that his fellow-critics, drunk with the joys of demolition,
too often forget: “a limiting judgment of an artist should be
offered only after full submission to whatever quality made him
remarkable in the first place.”
Qualified respect is all very well, but real passion inspires us,
a principle illustrated by James’s essays on his heroes—Philip
Larkin, Mark Twain, Federico Fellini, Primo Levi, and others.
What he writes of Randall Jarrell is true also of himself, at his
best: “We never feel, when reading him, that he is at his most
concentrated when he is being most destructive. It is in the
effort to draw our attention to merit that he achieves real
intensity, and there are very few critics of whom that can be
said.”
The essay on Twain is a valuable reminder of the
unique gifts of a writer so much a part of our mental furniture
we have come to take him for granted: “Twain’s journalism is a
daunting reminder that he was ready to lavish everything he had
on everybody, every time… . [R]emarkably, his magic survived
translation—indirect proof that it was his point of view that
drove his style, and not vice versa… . [T]he America we like best
sounds like him.”
James’s favorite writer, to judge from this book, is Philip
Larkin, and the four essays on Larkin presented here serve as a
fine guide not only to the poet’s aesthetic but to James’s as
well. “Larkin’s readability seems so effortless that it tends to
be thought of as something separate from his intelligence. But
readability is intelligence… . He has no special poetic voice.
What he brings out is the poetry that is already in the world.”
It is not only Larkin’s crystalline clarity of
expression that James admires, but his unpretentious, and
unportentous, manner. “To look for a life-transforming theme,
surely, is as self-defeating as to look for a life-enhancing
one. Good poetry transforms and enhances life whatever it
says.”
This is a vitally important principle, one that
makes a mockery of much modern critical work and, in the
universities, of curriculum planning. Meaning, and form, derive
from a central simplicity. Writing of Stevie Smith, James says
that “she can deconstruct literature in the only way that
counts—by constructing something that feels as if it had just
flown together, except you can’t take it apart.”
The same is true of Larkin.
Again using Larkin as a touchstone, James writes of “a level of
seriousness which only those capable of humour can reach.”
This is a profound comment, and is linked with his corresponding
low opinion of “the frolicsome prose of the incorrigibly
humourless.”
Humor in literature is not, except in the
hands of rare geniuses, a matter of piling effect onto effect; it
is the sure choice of the one perfect word, phrase, or image.
James is himself a funny man (his review of the absurd Judith
Krantz’s Princess Daisy had me laughing aloud from beginning to
end), and the writers and artists he loves the most are all
funny, though they are not necessarily “humorists.” The artist
will not achieve true seriousness by taking himself seriously, as
James points out in his discussion of John Le Carré’s later
novels, “Go Back to the Cold!”
[G]enerally the book has been covered with praise—a response not
entirely to be despised, since The Honourable Schoolboy is so
big that it takes real effort to cover it with anything. At one
stage I tried to cover it with a pillow, but there it was, still
half visible, insisting, against all the odds posed by its
coagulated style, on being read to the last sentence… . [Smiley]
has been called the most representative character in modern
fiction. In the sense that he has been inflating almost as fast
as the currency, perhaps he is.
One should turn, for contrast, to James’s greatly sympathetic
treatment of Raymond Chandler, a genre writer who knew his place,
however often he might have soared above it. Following his own
rule that a good critic quotes from a writer “almost as
creatively as the writer writes,”
James presents a series of
Chandler lines that go so far beyond our by now stereotyped
impression of Chandlerese as to startle and charm us as Chandler
must have done when he first appeared on the scene. Of Joseph P.
Toad in The Little Sister: “The neck of his canary-yellow shirt
was open wide, which it had to be if his neck was going to get
out.”
Fabulous! And what about the description of Jessie
Florian’s bathrobe in Farewell My Lovely? “It was just
something around her body.”
“The thrill of his books,”
James comments, “was that they were so much better than they
needed to be.”
James, who has spent a large part of his career interviewing
artists, writers, and performers, has a strong feeling for the
contribution personality makes to the work of art. He doesn’t
confuse the artistic persona with the human one; he knows that to
do so is a trap, and that the only really important version of
the writer is the one that appears in the written work. But the
artist’s character enhances, or warps, the art. Gore Vidal, for
instance, brilliant but vain, “sounds like an oracle even when he
is wrong.”
Nabokov, even in translating his beloved
Pushkin, was “incapable of being anybody’s servant;” he “managed
to make Pushkin sound like Nabokov.”
Worse, he made him
sound like a Scrabble buff. Bertrand Russell’s goofiness made it
just
the tiniest bit difficult to take his work seriously; if a
movie were ever made of Russell’s life, James suggested that the
ideal actor would be Gene Wilder—except that even Wilder “has a
bit too much gravitas for the role.”
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s
sexual vanity merged into the vanity of his work, so that it
might have been a good thing, James suggests, that he died
relatively young and was spared the indignities of aging.
Otherwise, “What next? Charlus with his rouged cheeks?
Aschenbach with his rinse? Rage, rage against the dyeing of the
hair.”
But the critic’s job (I take care to avoid the pompous phrase
“the Critical Task,” which makes James snort in derision) is to
evaluate the work without being terribly swayed by personal taste
or distaste for its author. “What the true artist says from
instinct, the true critic will hear by the same instinct. There
may be more than instinct involved, but nothing real will be
involved without it.”
Instinct, intelligence, receptivity,
a broad culture: each of these is vital in a critic; so too, he
says, is one I found absolutely correct, “the capacity not to be
carried away by a big idea”
(a test he says Susan Sontag
fails). In criticism as in art, a central simplicity is
important; he cites Edmund Wilson, who managed to build a
magnificent career without gimmicks, rigidity, reductive
formulas, or hobbyhorses, as his ideal.
A public, however small, is what establishes a poem, or any other
work of art, as worthwhile… . To the public’s response there is
always something that informed criticism can add, but it is never
as much or as important as what the public has decided on its own
account. Sensibility comes first and most, formal intellect last
and least… . A good critic is always an ordinary reader in the
first instance. A bad critic, not being that, is usually obliged
to come up with an angle in order to stay in business.
James takes a certain pride in his own sanity, his own incapacity
to be carried away by big ideas. He states that his chosen
location, in London rather than in New York, the epicenter of
contemporary culture, has helped him keep this detachment: “The
center of the magnetic field is the wrong place to see the
distortions it creates,”
he says, and cites Christopher
Hitchens, Martin Amis, and Salman Rushdie as compatriots who have
hazarded their artistic
integrity in their eagerness to be where
the action is. This is a little disingenuous. London is hardly
a backwater—many people consider that it is still the center of
the literary world—and in any case the English have always
enjoyed playing Athens to America’s Rome, a temptation which
James, Aussie though he is by birth and upbringing, does not
resist. But it must be said that in terms of keeping aloof from
fashion, he has indeed stayed outside the magnetic field and
retained a sense of proportion. His criticism is unusually fair,
neither politically nor artistically partisan; he doesn’t go in
for easy demolition jobs. His nose for the bogus is practically
unerring. I found several judgments in As of This Writing that
I disagreed with but was willing, because of James’s great
intelligence and powers of persuasion, to consider. There was
only one that I found truly untenable: his contention that the
coy Charade is a better movie than its great Hitchcock
progenitor, North by Northwest. One foolish judgment in over
six-hundred dense pages—it is quite an achievement.
Notes
