Cultural Cohesion: The Essential Essays

by Clive James

Clive James presents the “prequel” to his celebrated Cultural Amnesia ―forty-nine essays that form a cultural education in one brilliant volume. Six years after the much-heralded publication of Cultural Amnesia , Clive James presents his “prequel”―forty-nine essays that he has selected as the best of his half-century career. Originally appearing as As of This Writing , Cultural Cohesion examines the twisted cultural terrain of the twentieth century in one of the most accessible and cohesive volumes available. Divided into four sections―“Poetry,” “Fiction and Literature,” “Culture and Criticism,” and “Visual Images”―James comments on poets like W. H. Auden and Phillip Larkin, novelists like D. H. Lawrence and Raymond Chandler (not to mention Judith Krantz!), and filmmakers like Fellini and Bogdanovich. Throughout, James delights his readers with his manic energy and critical aplomb. This volume, featuring a new introduction, is a one-volume cultural education that few recent books can rival.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Criticism, Literary Criticism, Poetry

640 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2013

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

An expatriate Australian broadcast personality and author of cultural criticism, memoir, fiction, travelogue and poetry. Translator of Dante.

Reviews

[Sami · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can't do better than the New Yorker's description: "Clive James is a brilliant bunch of guys."

Here is the consummate guide to both high and low culture and everything in between. James is brilliant company and a colossal intellect. He's funny (He famously described Arnold Schwartzenegger as looking like "a brown condom full of walnuts"), intuitive and conversational but always precise and never sloppy in either his language or his reasoning. He has a mind like a steel encyclopedia and his brain workings are as entertaining as they are formidable in their depth and scope. This book is a collection of James's best essays from 1968 to 2002 and serves as the prequel to his landmark book "Cultural Amnesia." Highly recommended.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Any time spent considering the cultural landscape with Clive James is time well spent. Despite the title, however, there are no real similarities, other than sensibility and wit, between Cultural Cohesion and James’s masterwork Cultural Amnesia so the two works are not comparable. I don’t begrudge James for going with the marketing idea of leveraging the success of Cultural Amnesia to re-package these essays, but they are not what Cultural Amnesia was: an artfully conceived and created book of essays making a considered argument. Cultural Cohesion is a repackaged anthology of essays. It is the difference, say, between Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and One, the Beatles collection of greatest hits. Both are worthy but only one is a masterpiece.

Originally published at the turn of the millennium as As of This Writing, The Essential Essays, 1968-2002, the volume also includes postscript commentaries on many of the gathered essays, some of which are charming or informative, others hardly necessary. The essays are organized by genre or a topic, "Poetry" (Auden, Heaney, Lowell, Larkin, Jarrell, Murray, and others), "Fiction and Literature" (Lawrence, Agee, Chandler, Conan Doyle, Solzhenitsyn, Orwell, Twain, Levi and others), "Culture and Criticism" (Hellman, Mailer and Marilyn, Germaine Geer, Bertrand Russell, books about Nazis, Montale as a music critic, and others), and "Visual Images" (paintings, movies, photography).

This little summary gives you an idea of the range of interests and here are some samples of what makes him so rewarding to read: regarding Gore Vidal he observes, “He sounds like an oracle even when he is wrong: the drawback of oracles.” On fame, “but even if the wrong people sometimes get famous, it is generally true that only the right ones stay that way.” On the criticism of Wayne Booth, “But nowadays you can build an impregnable career out of a polite waffle.” On criticism generally, “Criticism is not indispensable to art. It is indispensable to civilization—a more inclusive thing.”

That last phrase, though not fully necessary would have been a good title for the collection, A More Inclusive Thing. It’s an inclusive and generous intelligence that James brings to the party, which is comprised of him and any and all readers. He waves the flag for Australian literature, world literature, logic and accurate information, civilization, and thoughtful humanity. Cultural Cohesion is an entertaining and rewarding collection of essays. It introduced me to some new artists and made me think freshly about things familiar, validated a few minority opinions of my own and challenged others. All in all, a good and beneficial reading experience that is also reliably entertaining.

[Leandro Oliveira · Rating 5 out of 5]

Always witty, never waggish, "Cultural Cohesion" (2013) is a sophisticated book from the author of the most sophisticated recently published book in cultural history, "Cultural Amnesia" (2007). Thought as prequel more than a sequel to the 2007 masterpiece (it is a reedition to "As of this writing", 2003), "Cultural Cohesion" worths every page even though the former (the latter?) achieved such a high standard. The effect, it may be said, is that readers face a unconfortable position: as Paris audiences after the breathtaking Rite of the Spring première, knowing it would be impossible, even to Stravinsky, surpass the supreme, but longing for more. The reading is charming and engagging, as James' style (style is man himself, said the russian composer) proves that critical view and moral judgment may not be siamese twins, as well as intelligence and high calibrated sense of humour must always be good fellows - the "friends for life" kind. Themes are less relevant nonetheless, as they are more circunscribed to anglophone culture - aussie poetry, american and british literary critics, good and bad translations... but Yeats and Orwell, along with some review to scholarship on general matters, as well. A delightful book.

[John Cooper · Rating 4 out of 5]

For my first Clive James book I chose this over "Cultural Amnesia" because the short, accessible essays in "Amnesia" came off in my bookstore browsing as imperious, even glib; I like non-fiction that has some depth. As a result I was often out of my own. James is the exceedingly rare polymath critic who seems to know everything important about every field of art, and he writes for readers who are already familiar with his subjects. This means that James's essays aren't the place to be introduced to new writers, poets, and media; their purpose is to throw new light on what you've already thought about. So the first 160 pages, about poets, were a struggle—I know less about poetry than about almost any other art form, and lack even the vocabulary to discuss it intelligently. The next section, on fiction and literature, was better going, with essays on Chandler, Le Carré, Primo Levi, Mark Twain, and Casanova. The final two parts, on culture and media, were the best. I enjoyed more articles than I can list, and particularly loved the short piece on Peter Bogdanovich, a far more interesting figure than I'd known.

This writing originally appeared in various periodicals from the 1970s through the 2000s, and James updates each with a postscript putting it in context and adding thoughts that were unformed or left unexpressed at the time. His postscript to the Twain essay astonishingly becomes a thought piece on the societal impact of holding politicians to wishful ideals of how private life should be managed, with the Bill Clinton scandal as an example, and he makes some excellent points that I have not seen made by another commentator in 20 years. Brilliant pieces like these, so unexpected, make the book well worth the weeks I spent plowing dutifully through thousands of words above my intellectual pay grade. Someone who's more given to skimming might find them faster.

[Jeremy Walton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sticking it together
This book is a reissue of an earlier collection of Clive James's critical pieces, As of This Writing: The Essential Essays, 1968-2002, which had been assembled for the US market in 2003 and which is now out of print. In this incarnation, it's been given a new title (though retaining the original subtitle) which echoes that of Cultural Amnesia, to which this book is described as a prequel by the author in a new introduction written for this volume. The reasons why he opted to give this collection a new lease of life and explicitly link it to Cultural Amnesia rather than (as he once said he was planning to do) write a second volume of that monumental work can only be guessed at, but they can't be unconnected to his health, which has been failing in recent years.

So much for the form - what about the content? Any selection of James's writings is a showcase for his skill as a stylist as he (in his own words) "turns a phrase so that it catches the light". Here, for example, he is in the middle of an attack on literary theory (p441): "You can't help wondering why it is thought to be good that the study of literature should so tax the patience. After all, literature doesn't. Boring you rigid is just what literature sets out not to do." Here is his conclusion to a closely-argued and wide-ranging piece on George Orwell (p303): "To write like him, you need a life like his, but times have changed, and he changed them." And here is the end of a surprisingly sympathetic review of Richard Nixon's autobiography (p419): "They were right to throw him down. Here is proof that they were not entirely wrong to raise him up in the first place".

Elsewhere, he employs the stylistic trick of allowing an author to hang themselves by a judiciously chosen quote. Thus, his hilarious review of Judith Krantz's Princess Daisy ("to pour abuse on a book like this makes no more sense than to kick a powder puff") consists for the most part of a running commentary on the text (p240): "Daisy fears Ram but goes for what he dishes out. 'Deep within her something sounded, as if the strung of a great cello had been plucked, a note of remote, mysterious but unmistakable warning.' Boing."

Two of the overarching themes of this collection (and of James's work in general) are his hatred of totalitarianism and - to a lesser extent - literary theory. The former is best expressed in two thoughtfully sympathetic pieces on Primo Levi, and on Solzhenitsyn. The latter is highlighted by a distinctly unfavourable review (already quoted from above) of an academic treatise which - in his opinion - only adds to the obfuscation surrounding literary criticism by creating a mare's nest. To tenously link the two themes together, this review originally appeared in his 1982 collection From the Land of Shadows, which focussed attention on the deprivations of the Soviet Union.

I greatly enjoyed re-reading the pieces in this handsome collection, particularly when I came across some articles I hadn't paid so much attention to the first time around (I'm thinking particularly of a couple of stimulating essays on the films and lives of Pasolini and Fellini). I'd recommend it strongly to anyone who's already a fan, or who needs a introduction to this most erudite and engaging of authors.

Originally reviewed 12 July 2013

[Danny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wise and illuminating stories from cultural nooks and crannies worth revisiting.

[Dan Brock · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Simon Harrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a blast!

[P · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Cultural Amnesia" was phenomenal. This collection of recycled essays with CYA additions from 2002 has flashes of the same brilliance that makes Clive James such an eminently quotable (and undoubtedly erudite) critic, but it lacks the unity that made his other book so enthralling.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Minor James. The writing is still exquisite, the criticism sharp as ever, but the subjects he chooses are either not worthy of his time or so narrow as to be incomprehensible to all but the most studied devotees.