The subtitle of As of This Writing, Clive James’s new collection of literary and cultural criticism, is “The Essential Essays, 1968–2002.”[1] It would be easy to condemn the adjective as hubristic: “essential” to whom? one might ask. But in fact the forty-seven pieces presented here, which deal with cultural icons ranging from Philip Larkin and Bertrand Russell to Germaine Greer and Federico Fellini, are of a remarkably high level and might without undue hyperbole be called essential—if not to the general reader then at least to the educated one. Good literary critics (and most of these essays are about literature) are rare, and, while James’s enormous output, over a forty-year career that has included long stints as a television performer and critic, has inevitably produced lots of ephemera, his longer essays on subjects he is passionately for or against are well worth keeping for frequent reference. He is also one of the very rare critics who inspire the reader to explore new and more challenging fictional territory, read more poetry, look at familiar movies with a fresh appreciation.

Critics have always been regarded, at least by some, as a species of cultural parasite, and are sometimes obliged to justify their activities to a public that deifies the creative imagination at the expense of what they see as arid intellectualism. As the cliché would have it, those who can’t create, criticize. I was recently attacked, for example, by a sculptress when I told her I was reviewing Claire Tomalin’s biography of Pepys. “A review of a biography of a writer?” she asked incredulously. “Isn’t that a little precious? If people are interested, why don’t they simply read Pepys’s own work?”

I was not able to formulate a pithy explanation at the moment, but I thought, later, about how I should have answered her. The reason, I realized, that criticism is important—even criticism of the work of other critics—is that a culture amounts to a sort of extended conversation, and conversation demands response and commentary as well as declarative statements. As Clive James himself put it, in a recent article in the The Guardian, “The role of the freelance man of letters … is to accept—and to act on the acceptance—that he is engaged in a perpetual discussion, an interminable exchange of views in which he cannot, and should not, prevail. If he could prevail, and the discussion did terminate, he would become his enemy, the dogmatist whose only answer to opposition is annihilation.”

The written cultural discussion in which the critic participates is perhaps more important in the Anglo-Saxon world—Great Britain, the United States, Australia, Canada—than in other societies, because Anglo-Saxon society does not consider literature a fit subject for casual chit-chat. You will not find a group of Americans, even if they are professional critics or academics, discussing Milton at the dinner table. Book contracts, tenure squabbles, even the current state of Milton studies, yes; but not Milton’s actual poetry. The man of letters, then, has an important role in creating the kind of cultural receptivity that will welcome artistic endeavor.  

Criticism is not indispensable to art. It is indispensable to civilization—a more inclusive thing. When Pushkin lamented the absence of criticism in Russia, he wasn’t begging for assistance in writing poems. He wanted to write them in a civilized country. Literary criticism fulfils its responsibility by contributing to civilization, whose dependence in all its forms is amply demonstrated by what happens when critical enquiry is forbidden. Being indispensable to civilization should be a big enough ambition for any critic. Unfortunately some critics, not always the less gifted, want to be indispensable to art.

This is well said, and going back to the example of Pepys it is instructive to note that since the Claire Tomalin biography appeared, accompanied by many favorable reviews and essays, Pepys’s Diary has gained the kind of widespread, middlebrow readership that it has not had for a century or more. There is even a popular website presenting daily installments. This would never have been the case without the intervention of the biographer and the enthusiastic critics in her wake.

Most of the essays in As of This Writing first appeared in print years ago, and in the spirit of treating criticism as discussion, James has appended “postscripts” to each essay, in which he comments on the opinions of his younger self. Most of these postscripts are reprinted from two of James’s earlier collections, The Metropolitan Critic (1974, reprinted in 1992) and Reliable Essays (2001). The postscripts, on the whole, are not really necessary: either the pieces stand on their own (and most of them do so, very well) or they don’t, and if one of them requires too much retrospective commentary it is because it has failed in some fundamental way.

At their best, the postscripts serve not so much to correct or improve upon earlier judgments as simply to remove the velvet gloves. The older James is less respectful of big reputations than the younger one. For example, one suspects, reading his 1969 piece on F. R. Leavis, that the courteous tone is not entirely sincere, considering the deep chasm between Leavis’s uncompromising aesthetic and James’s more flexible one: unlike Leavis, James seems to believe that literature, like life, is too important to be taken seriously. And we find that the 1994 postscript to the Leavis essay confirms our suspicion: “Though a few chips had appeared in his plinth by that stage, F. R. Leavis’s prestige was still mighty, so it was quite standard procedure to screw up the tone of awe a notch or two when going against him… . I had never thought him much of a judge of poetry… . I already thought there were totalitarian tendencies in all this but had not yet found the nerve to say so: hence the strained tone, of respect trying to conceal repulsion.” Similarly “D. H. Lawrence in Transit” (1972) is pretty devastating, but perhaps not as devastating as it would be if James were to tackle Lawrence today.

The essay destroys Lawrence’s claim to being a serious thinker but is reverent about his descriptive gifts: fair enough, although the reverence, deserved though it may be, seems suspiciously like a mere matter of giving the devil his due. Sure enough, James admits as much in the 1994 postscript: “I thought Lawrence was a greatly gifted writer. I just didn’t think he was a great writer. To put it another way, I thought he could write but didn’t like what he wrote.” In reflecting on his treatment of Lawrence, though, James articulates an important principle of criticism, one that his fellow-critics, drunk with the joys of demolition, too often forget: “a limiting judgment of an artist should be offered only after full submission to whatever quality made him remarkable in the first place.”

Qualified respect is all very well, but real passion inspires us, a principle illustrated by James’s essays on his heroes—Philip Larkin, Mark Twain, Federico Fellini, Primo Levi, and others. What he writes of Randall Jarrell is true also of himself, at his best: “We never feel, when reading him, that he is at his most concentrated when he is being most destructive. It is in the effort to draw our attention to merit that he achieves real intensity, and there are very few critics of whom that can be said.” The essay on Twain is a valuable reminder of the unique gifts of a writer so much a part of our mental furniture we have come to take him for granted: “Twain’s journalism is a daunting reminder that he was ready to lavish everything he had on everybody, every time… . [R]emarkably, his magic survived translation—indirect proof that it was his point of view that drove his style, and not vice versa… . [T]he America we like best sounds like him.”

James’s favorite writer, to judge from this book, is Philip Larkin, and the four essays on Larkin presented here serve as a fine guide not only to the poet’s aesthetic but to James’s as well. “Larkin’s readability seems so effortless that it tends to be thought of as something separate from his intelligence. But readability is intelligence… . He has no special poetic voice. What he brings out is the poetry that is already in the world.” It is not only Larkin’s crystalline clarity of expression that James admires, but his unpretentious, and unportentous, manner. “To look for a life-transforming theme, surely, is as self-defeating as to look for a life-enhancing one. Good poetry transforms and enhances life whatever it says.” This is a vitally important principle, one that makes a mockery of much modern critical work and, in the universities, of curriculum planning. Meaning, and form, derive from a central simplicity. Writing of Stevie Smith, James says that “she can deconstruct literature in the only way that counts—by constructing something that feels as if it had just flown together, except you can’t take it apart.” The same is true of Larkin.

Again using Larkin as a touchstone, James writes of “a level of seriousness which only those capable of humour can reach.” This is a profound comment, and is linked with his corresponding low opinion of “the frolicsome prose of the incorrigibly humourless.” Humor in literature is not, except in the hands of rare geniuses, a matter of piling effect onto effect; it is the sure choice of the one perfect word, phrase, or image. James is himself a funny man (his review of the absurd Judith Krantz’s Princess Daisy had me laughing aloud from beginning to end), and the writers and artists he loves the most are all funny, though they are not necessarily “humorists.” The artist will not achieve true seriousness by taking himself seriously, as James points out in his discussion of John Le Carré’s later novels, “Go Back to the Cold!”

[G]enerally the book has been covered with praise—a response not entirely to be despised, since The Honourable Schoolboy is so big that it takes real effort to cover it with anything. At one stage I tried to cover it with a pillow, but there it was, still half visible, insisting, against all the odds posed by its coagulated style, on being read to the last sentence… . [Smiley] has been called the most representative character in modern fiction. In the sense that he has been inflating almost as fast as the currency, perhaps he is.

One should turn, for contrast, to James’s greatly sympathetic treatment of Raymond Chandler, a genre writer who knew his place, however often he might have soared above it. Following his own rule that a good critic quotes from a writer “almost as creatively as the writer writes,” James presents a series of Chandler lines that go so far beyond our by now stereotyped impression of Chandlerese as to startle and charm us as Chandler must have done when he first appeared on the scene. Of Joseph P. Toad in The Little Sister: “The neck of his canary-yellow shirt was open wide, which it had to be if his neck was going to get out.” Fabulous! And what about the description of Jessie Florian’s bathrobe in Farewell My Lovely? “It was just something around her body.” “The thrill of his books,” James comments, “was that they were so much better than they needed to be.”

James, who has spent a large part of his career interviewing artists, writers, and performers, has a strong feeling for the contribution personality makes to the work of art. He doesn’t confuse the artistic persona with the human one; he knows that to do so is a trap, and that the only really important version of the writer is the one that appears in the written work. But the artist’s character enhances, or warps, the art. Gore Vidal, for instance, brilliant but vain, “sounds like an oracle even when he is wrong.” Nabokov, even in translating his beloved Pushkin, was “incapable of being anybody’s servant;” he “managed to make Pushkin sound like Nabokov.” Worse, he made him sound like a Scrabble buff. Bertrand Russell’s goofiness made it just the tiniest bit difficult to take his work seriously; if a movie were ever made of Russell’s life, James suggested that the ideal actor would be Gene Wilder—except that even Wilder “has a bit too much gravitas for the role.” Pier Paolo Pasolini’s sexual vanity merged into the vanity of his work, so that it might have been a good thing, James suggests, that he died relatively young and was spared the indignities of aging. Otherwise, “What next? Charlus with his rouged cheeks? Aschenbach with his rinse? Rage, rage against the dyeing of the hair.”

But the critic’s job (I take care to avoid the pompous phrase “the Critical Task,” which makes James snort in derision) is to evaluate the work without being terribly swayed by personal taste or distaste for its author. “What the true artist says from instinct, the true critic will hear by the same instinct. There may be more than instinct involved, but nothing real will be involved without it.” Instinct, intelligence, receptivity, a broad culture: each of these is vital in a critic; so too, he says, is one I found absolutely correct, “the capacity not to be carried away by a big idea” (a test he says Susan Sontag fails). In criticism as in art, a central simplicity is important; he cites Edmund Wilson, who managed to build a magnificent career without gimmicks, rigidity, reductive formulas, or hobbyhorses, as his ideal.

A public, however small, is what establishes a poem, or any other work of art, as worthwhile… . To the public’s response there is always something that informed criticism can add, but it is never as much or as important as what the public has decided on its own account. Sensibility comes first and most, formal intellect last and least… . A good critic is always an ordinary reader in the first instance. A bad critic, not being that, is usually obliged to come up with an angle in order to stay in business.

James takes a certain pride in his own sanity, his own incapacity to be carried away by big ideas. He states that his chosen location, in London rather than in New York, the epicenter of contemporary culture, has helped him keep this detachment: “The center of the magnetic field is the wrong place to see the distortions it creates,” he says, and cites Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, and Salman Rushdie as compatriots who have hazarded their artistic integrity in their eagerness to be where the action is. This is a little disingenuous. London is hardly a backwater—many people consider that it is still the center of the literary world—and in any case the English have always enjoyed playing Athens to America’s Rome, a temptation which James, Aussie though he is by birth and upbringing, does not resist. But it must be said that in terms of keeping aloof from fashion, he has indeed stayed outside the magnetic field and retained a sense of proportion. His criticism is unusually fair, neither politically nor artistically partisan; he doesn’t go in for easy demolition jobs. His nose for the bogus is practically unerring. I found several judgments in As of This Writing that I disagreed with but was willing, because of James’s great intelligence and powers of persuasion, to consider. There was only one that I found truly untenable: his contention that the coy Charade is a better movie than its great Hitchcock progenitor, North by Northwest. One foolish judgment in over six-hundred dense pages—it is quite an achievement.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. As of This Writing: The Essential Essays, 1968–2002, by Clive James; W. W. Norton & Company, 606 pages, $35. Go back to the text.