Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

The lessons of history don't suit our wishes: if they did, they would not be lessons, and history would be a fairy-story.

It would help if the world's large supply of anti-American commentators could decide on which America we are supposed to be in thrall to: the Machiavellian America that can manipulate any country's destiny, or the naïve America that can't find it on the map. While we're waiting for the decision, it might help if we could realize the magnitude of the fix that America got us out of in 1945, and ask ourselves why we expect a people rich and confident enough to do that to be sensitive as well. Power is bound to sound naïve, because it doesn't spot the bitter nuances of feeling helpless.

With their clothes off and their virile members contractually erect, they are merely competitors in some sort of international caber-tossing competition in which they are not allowed to use their hands.

Just because he has an incurable knack of making himself sound arrogant shouldn't deafen us to the truth of his humility.

If the eighteenth century had meant to usher in the age of reason, the nineteenth century, with the cold snick of the guillotine ringing it its ears, meant to supply some of the regrettable deficiencies of reason by the addition of science … By now, after the twentieth century has done its cruel work … the future of science, Renan’s cherished avenir de la science, can be assessed from our past, in which it flattened cities and gassed innocent children: whatever we don’t yet know about it, one thing we already know is that it is not necessarily benevolent.

I have stuck with the traditional masculine dominance of the indeterminate gender … (and) the European tradition by which sufficiently distinguished females … referred to by their first names … Female readers can put all this down to unreconstructed chauvinism if they wish [he doesn’t care], but (their representatives in the book are not slighted) ‘merely outnumbered’.” To be precise, outnumbered by 97 to 9. Then a bone tossed: “This is a book about a world that men made, and it taught plenty of us to wish that women had made it instead.” Oh really? We’ll see how serious he is about that (see Peter Altenberg below).

When I’d given up on the book, I decided to read the essays about women that I hadn’t yet. Here they are.(view spoiler)[

Anna Akhmatova (modernist poet)
(view spoiler)[The first essay, leading off with a woman! But aside from one 8 word quote from “Requiem”, James’ narrative about her focuses on (1) her heroic stand against the tyranny of the state, and (2) “the beautiful incarnation of pre-revolutionary Petersburg” and “she was a femme fatale” and “love for her broken-nosed beauty was a common condition among the male poets”. Compare John Bayley on Akhmatova in The Order of Battle at Trafalgar - pages of quotations and analysis of her poetry. Never called by James simply “Anna”. 5 pages. (hide spoiler)]

Coco Chanel (fashion designer!)
(view spoiler)[This essay is leaky as a sieve. Typical BS quote, “Luxury is a necessity that starts where necessity stops”, is used to document (for the nth time) the miserable conditions of the workers’ paradise that the Soviet Union wasn’t. James urges us to believe that the return of high fashion after WW II was a reflowering of culture and meaning within society. No doubt a great many found happiness in this. But this is culture with a very small “c”, as James himself has urged elsewhere in the book. Here, it suits his purposes to elevate it. Chanel never called by James simply “Coco”. 5 pages (hide spoiler)]

Alexandra Kollontai (Communist revolutionary)
(view spoiler)[An anti-hero for James, about whom he has little good to say. So, just another small piece of the anti-totalitarian theme. Of course never called by James simply “Alexandra”. 5 pages (hide spoiler)]

Heda Margolius Kovaly (Czech writer)
(view spoiler)[This is a rather moving essay, which stays on track unusually well. James does quote from and recommend her masterpiece Prague Farewell. Only – well – it’s the same old totalitarianism is horrible theme. yes yes yes Clive, not only do we understand, you didn’t have to tell us!!! James calls her “Heda” several times. 4 pages (hide spoiler)]

Nadezhda Mandelstam (Russian writer and educator)
(view spoiler)[This is a perhaps the best essay about a woman. Key quote, “Only chance could save you”, from her universally praised (by GR friends) Hope Abandoned. But once we move into the later pages, we’re not only (again!) bogged into the theme mentioned above over and over, but I at least began having questions about the relation between culture, ideology, science – and whether many of the issues James brought up are not, nowadays, major downsides of his beloved American hegemony. (Note also, for about half the essay Mandelstam disappears entirely.) But no doubt an essay worth discussing over a few drinks (each). James calls her “Nadezhda”, I believe to distinguish her from her famous husband Osip Mandelstam. 6 pages (hide spoiler)]

Zinka Milanov (Croatian opera singer)
(view spoiler)[Milanov doesn’t appear to have quite the reputation that James implies, and the quote is only “attributed” to her. Not much here for a reader. Sort of a puff piece. No doubt a favorite singer of James’. James does not call her simply “Zinka”. 4 pages (hide spoiler)]

Beatrix Potter (author)
(view spoiler)[The shortest piece in the book, in which James makes no connection between her books and her interest in natural science & conservation. No surprise there. Fairly worthless, IMHO. James does not call her simply “Beatrix”. 3 pages (hide spoiler)]

Sophie Scholl (student)
(view spoiler)[An essay about a 21-year old student who joined her brother’s clandestine (not clandestine enough) White Rose revolutionary anti-Nazi group of young idealists in Munich in the early 1940s. They were all arrested in 1942. Sophie, given a chance (maybe) to recant her mistaken ways, refused, and was guillotined by the Nazis. This moving story is almost worth the price of admission (a German movie was made in 2005, never shown in the U.S. apparently). But even here, James ruins things by making more out of this heroism and idealism than it can carry, and moreover digressing for two plus pages about how, if an American movie were it to made, it would HAVE to star Natalie Portman, then going on about his own infatuation with Portman blah blah … James has no choice but to refer to Scholl as “Sophie”. 9 pages, the longest essay on a female. (hide spoiler)]

And finally
Margaret Thatcher
(view spoiler)[This essay is mostly about British politics at the time of Thatcher’s rule. No damn connection to “culture” of any kind, as far as I can see. James seems quite in tune with her anti-union, anti-socialist, anti-leftist views. He winds up this curious and, to this American, rather pointless essay, with the outlandish assertion that when Thatcher, in 1982, met with Chinese leaders in Beijing about handing over Hong Kong, she implied to them that if things were not handled properly (from a Western point of view) they could be faced with the possibility of atomic war. (view spoiler)[James gives to footnotes in the book, so there’s no indication of what his claim is based on. Check out the web to see if you can find any evidence for this – I couldn’t. (hide spoiler)]James does not call her simply “Margaret”. 7 pages (hide spoiler)]

The score:

9 essays (8%) on women, occupying 6% of the book.

1 is of an anti-hero, so doesn’t count. Throw her in the bag with Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Sarte, Goebbels, and several others, who only appear in their own essays to be pilloried and condemned.
1 of an English conservative politician
1 of a rather obscure opera singer
1 of an English writer of children’s stories (though she did more)
1 of a fashion designer
1 of a student murdered by the Nazis, who should be played by Natalie Portman
3 of writers who lived under Communist regimes. (hide spoiler)]

Finally, two of my least-favorite essays.

Peter Altenberg

(view spoiler)[A strange case. Why is he here? Because he was a café favorite, admired by many real writers for the succinct little sparks that he threw off, basically on the back of a napkin, while cadging drinks and loans from the cognoscenti.

And what does James do with him, with this man that he admits used his wit and reputation to get “bluestockings” into bed, when he was tired of patronizing prostitutes? The phrase that sends him off on the long discussion that frames the entire piece is “Was ist so nur?”, as a riposte to a young woman who complained “that his interest in her was based only (nur) on sexual attraction”.

The point being that sexual attraction, to Altenberg (and to Fraser?) is everything. And this seems to be the whole reason why females enter into the picture at all. They don’t contribute to “culture” or “humanism” (at least not often), but they frequently promote/elevate the male in his sublime creation of these things - through the romantic aura which the initial sexual attraction somehow softens into.

How many times will James repeat this “What’s so only?” He finds it both clever & profound.
(hide spoiler)]

Chamfort

(view spoiler)[Seems like a somewhat up-scale Altenberg. “In the rich tradition of French aphorists” he committed suicide when faced with the guillotine in 1794. James says he “forecast the modern age by the reason for his death”. In this clumsy phrase he implies that those victims of the Terror who did not commit suicide but faced the blade did somehow not “forecast the modern age”, one would suppose.

Chamfort was “a mighty lover of women”. This seems to be a wonderful point in a man’s favor for James. Chamfort’s “Maximes” took their place in literature “for those connoisseurs of the aphorism who positively liked the idea that there was a wasted lifetime behind the wisdom.” This seems to most definitely apply to James himself, who is most impressed with this person who according to his Wiki article was much more like Altenberg than James bothers to acknowledge, and whose suicide (botched so horribly that he lived for a year afterward, unbothered by the authorities) was because he was to be returned to prison, not to the guillotine. No matter.

But the aphorism. It’s plain that James himself wished most painfully to be known as this sort of wit, that his pronouncements will have the charm of the sophisticated aphorism and be remembered for the fine phrase which he himself could craft. But here’s an example (which I could already repeat a dozen times) of James’ phrasing: Speaking of Chamfort’s “easy, wristy flourish to his phrasing”, James quotes Revel: “Systems of literary criticism are made to satisfy the devouring lack of interest in literary works that calls itself a thirst for culture”. This is itself one of these “easy, wristy flourishes” which James so admires, and he comments at length on it, to wit: “If that sentence turned on “calls itself a thirst for culture” it would just be a Wildean paradox. But devorante gives it savour, because the consuming energy of the deafness to art that goes into a critical system is always one of its distinguishing features – distinguishing it, that is, from the decently reticent poise of a sensitive response.”

And that last sentence, in all its awkwardness and so-preachy exposition, its scornful lecturing to the students who cannot by themselves see the amazingly suave wit of Revel’s “wristy flourish”, is so typical of James. He aches for that “wristy flourish” himself, and simply produces a messy ejaculation.

And that oh-so-suave “wristy”! What exactly James means by this foolish word is anyone’s guess – what it refers to most usually nowadays is a “hand-job”. Which now that I think of it, is pretty much what we watch James doing again and again – intellectual masturbation. (hide spoiler)]