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The IHT
More reviews by Michael Hsu
Readers may purchase reviewed books from Paddyfield.com, Asia's online bookseller.North American readers may prefer to buy US editions from Powells.com.
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As of This Writing: The Essential Essays, 1968-2002 by Clive James
CLIVE JAMES fans should be delighted with this sumptuous feast of the master critic's greatest hits from the last three decades. These "essential essays" represent James's golden oldies where he moves effortlessly from poetry, literature to general culture criticism.
From Auden's death to the more obscure (at least to me) poets from the University of Sydney in the late 1950s, D.H. Lawrence in Ceylon, Casanova's teeth, Nabokov's stiff translation of his own language, Germaine Greer as the female Byron, and Roland Barthes's reflections on photography, James's acute observations and commentaries in these 48 essays are prose to be preserved in a museum, to be framed and admired as the one of finest styles in the English language.
James can hardly write a bad sentence. The following three captured Philip Larkin: "Art, if it knows how to wait, wins out," James says. "Larkin had patience. For him, poetry was a life sentence." Commenting on a second-rate book, Norman Mailer's tribute to the movie goddess, he notes that "Marilyn, says Mailer, suggested sex might be as easy as ice cream. He chooses to forget that for many men at the time she suggested sex might have about the same nutritional value."
For all his eloquence and perfect bon mots, James is sometimes faulted as an anti-theorist who, according to a New York Times reviewer, often sounds more like William J. ("Double Up Caribbean Poker") Bennett with a similar intolerance for contemporary theory. ("Only someone who has not been near a classroom for 20 years could write that," says the critic.)
There is some truth in this assertion. Some of the essays in AS OF THIS WRITING: THE ESSENTIAL ESSAYS, 1968-2002 do not seem to stand the test of time. Re-reading his 1979 obituary of Auden in Commentary, one cannot but feel embarrassed about James's "daring" experiment in articulating a "homosexual" style. In the first sentence, James writes, "for a long time before his death, the fact that a homosexual was the greatest living poet had the status of an open secret." Admitting that he is no expert, James nonetheless claims that "like many homosexuals [Auden] seems to have experienced homosexual congress as the only clean kind, and thus had no reason to hesitate in identifying homosexuality with a new political order."
Citing Auden's Poem XXVI ("Noises at dawn will bring/Freedom for some, but not this peace/No bird can contradict: passing, but is sufficient now/For something fulfilled this hour, loved or endured"), James is moved to opine, "it's a threat which makes the homosexual's peace more poignant than the heterosexual's freedom." And so on. To his credit, James's 2003 postscript on this essay comes with a cheeky confession: "Reading this piece after thirty years, I itch to tone it down."
But there are more essays worth revisiting like an old friend, again and again. Few dare and can succeed in unmasking John le Carre's atmospheric spy world as so much gas. James's review of The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), which stated that "in this book, when you strip away the grandiloquence, the plot is shown to be perfunctionary." To start with, James says, le Carre's prose is "overblown. Incompatible metaphors fight for living space in the same sentence. 'Now at first Smiley tested the water with Sam -- and Sam, like a poker hand himself, tested the water with Smiley.'"
More instructive is James's description of fellow countryman Richard Hughes (of the London Times and Far Eastern Economic Review), who, a close friend of Le Carre, is disguised in The Honorable Schoolboy as another Australian journalist called Craw.
Also a model in Ian Fleming's You Only Live Twice, Hughes (aka Craw) was "meant to be a fountain of humorous invective, but the cumulative effect is tiresome to the extreme [in le Carre's description]," James writes.
As a first-year journalist sitting across the table where Hughes typed out his weekly column at the Review, I however would concur with le Carre that this "legendary foreign correspondent" and chum of MI-6 sleepers in novels often did speak in that "tiresome" idiom as he described. ("Brother Luke, you have committed several acts of war today, and one more will meet with our severe disfavour. Speak clearly and concisely omitting no detail, however slight, and thereafter hold your water, sir," etc.)
However, in higher, analytical (theoretical) discourse, James may have met his match. His Bertrand Russell Struggles After Heaven (2001), reviewing Ray Monk's second volume of the biography, surely is no more than a cartoon of the philosopher in the popular imagination. "On the evidence of Monk's book, Russell, for all his clipped speech and pipe-sucking air of cerebral precision, was a zany, a pantaloon, a fourth Stooge," James writes. "Monk does his best to lend Russell dignity and stature, but that's the way it comes out, like a fanfare from a whoopee cushion."
Maybe that is the way it comes out for James: the second greatest philosopher of the 20th century as the fourth Stooge. The first philosopher, however, did remark, rather famously, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
Michael Hsu
02/09/2003
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Michael Hsu is a senior editor of banking laws in America.
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