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In his book, Cultural Amnesia, Clive James also offers a steady stream of advice on how to go about the business of self-education. I offer advice, for the most part indirectly, or such is my hope, for I am all too conscious of the limitations of direct advice-giving; I do not advise any must-reads or how-tos. There are, as in James’s work, many anecdotes, but I do not see myself as exemplar. Like James in his Cultural Amnesia I launch a symphony of voices; I hope it is not a cacophony.
My life, like James's, has been richly social, but not in the world of celebrities and media. I have read a great deal, but nothing like the quantity that James has consumed. James says that most of his listening was to the authors behind the books he read; in my case, until I retired in 1999, most of my listening was to people in the raw: individuals, groups, comunities. For a host of reasons--the expansion of universities, of suburbs and of telecommunications, to name three--the kind of face-to-face intellectual-artistic life that was exemplified in coteries in the past, and that flourished in other twentieth-century cities before WW1, simply no longer exists or so James sees it. I agree, but not all the way. I feel as if I’ve done an aweful lot of face-to-face stuff in my life.
James's answer to this intellectual-artistic bereavement is the book itself as is my own memoir—partly. Here is the café, the former place of the intellectual-artist; he has created it in his mind; it is a convocation of voices that respond to one another across the barriers of language, outlook, expressive form and, most of all, time. Over the decades and beginning while at university in the 1960s, I was driven away from academic institutions of higher learning and toward a more journalistic approach, to a plain speech and a style of writing that was not as esoteric as an MA thesis or a PhD dissertation. Direct observation and the necessity to entertain was absolutely crucial for James—and for me. I would never have surived in classrooms had these qualities not surfaced insensibly over the first half-a-dozen years of my teaching experience from 1967 to 1973.
Not in the mass media eye, as James was and with his immense success, I settled for a more modest achievement in the world of “the school†and “the college.†Like James, I wrote essays, reviews, sketches and squibs for students; I also wrote in longer and more conventionally prestigious forms, but always in styles that had been honed by the whetstone of conversation, but without the accruing prestige that James accumulated.
Writing for the student and for the popular press, even at a much less successful and prestigious level of everyday journalism than James, demands both simplicity and compression, and compression, if it is of good quality, makes language glow. I felt, as the years went on, that some light was finally being emitted from the marks on the page that I was putting down. The stylistic models that James and I emulated were much different. However different, they each could "pour a whole view of life, a few cupfuls at a time, into the briefest of paragraphs." James highest hero, "the voice behind the book’s voices" and one of several exceptions to his rule of writing only about twentieth-century figures, was Tacitus.
It was Tacitus who wrote the sentence, says James, out of which the entire volume Cultural Amnesia grew: "They make a desert and they call it peace." James heard the line quoted as a young man and "saw straight away that a written sentence could sound like a spoken one, but have much more in it."
My Tacitus, was Gibbon and Gibbon saw his history as a continuation of Tacitus’ work. I felt James and I were on a similar track. I would like to think that my memoirs are what James’ book Cultural Amnesia was to the reviewer in The Nation; namely, “less a collection of great figures than of great sentences.†But alas and alack, this is not the case. That same reviewer, William Deresiewicz, went on to say, “reading Cultural Amnesia feels like having a conversation with the most interesting person in the world: You're not saying much, but you just want to keep listening anyway.†Well, I’m not sure I have had such a conversation in years—as a talker or a listener—expect in books. But James is, for me, one of my many, one of my crucial, mentors. --Enough for now!-Ron Price, Tasmania:rainy:
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