Cultural Amnesia

Title: Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of my Time

Author: Clive James

Pages: 800+

Genre: Biographical Essays

Grade: B

Synopsis: This book is a collection of historical biographical essays penned by the author, Clive James.  Preceding each essay is a short biography of 2-4 pages or so about each individual.  The essays are about a wide range of 20th century artists, politicians, entertainers, writers and more often focused upon those who were a part of the cultural scene in Vienna, Austria in the 1920's.  In total there are 106 essays from Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, including essays about the following:

Louis Armstrong
Dick Cavett
Chamfort
Coco Chanel
Charles Chaplin
Alfred Einstein
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Charles De Gaulle
Josef Goebbels
Adolf Hitler
Ernst Junger
Franz Kafka
Nadezhda Mandelstam
Thomas Mann
Mao Zedong
Marcel Proust
Margaret Thatcher
Dubravka Ugresic
Isoroku Yamamoto

My Review: This book was too smart for me.  I enjoyed the essays and especially the short biographies, but I was overwhelmed with the scope of the book (and the slowness of my reading of the essays). After I made it through the A's, B's and C's, I ended up only reading the biographies about each person and the essays about the people that I was interested in.  Still, it was a very interesting book and I wish that I was better able to retain the things that I read about.

 From the Book: p. 88, Albert Camus

"Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes" --Albert Camus, The Rebel

"When I first read The Rebel, this splendid line came leaping from the page like a dolphin from a wave. I memorized it instantly, and from then on Camus was my man. I wanted to write like that, in a prose that sang like poetry. I wanted to look like him. I wanted to wear a Bogart-style trench coat with the collar turned up, have an untipped Gauloise dangling from my lower lip, and die romantically in a car crash. At the time, the crash had only just happened. The wheels of the wrecked Facel Vega were practically still spinning, and at Sydney University I knew exiled French students, spiritually scarred by service in Indochina, who had met Camus in Paris: one of them claimed to have shared a girl with him. Later on, in London, I was able to arrange the trench coat and the Gauloise, although I decided to forgo the car crash until a more propitious moment. Much later, long after having realized that smoking French cigarettes was just an expensive way of inhaling nationalized industrial waste, I learned from Olivier Todd's excellent biography of Camus that the trench coat had been a gift from Arthur Koestler's wife and that the Bogart connection had been, as the academics say, no accident. Camus had wanted to look like Bogart, and Mrs. Koestler knew where to get the kit. Camus was a bit of an actor--he though, in fact, that he was a lot of an actor, although his histrionic talent was the weakest item of his theatrical equipment--and, being a bit of an actor, he was preoccupied by questions of authenticity, as truly authentic people seldom are. But under the posturing agonies about authenticity there was something better than authentic: there was something genuine. He was genuinely poetic. Being that, he could apply two tests simultaneously to his own language: the test of expressiveness, and the test of truth to life. To put it another way, he couldn't not apply them."