Guest review by Graeme Fife: CULTURAL AMNESIA by Clive James

 

"James is a wonder: the breadth, the stretch of his curiosity, the range of his cultural interest both in ideas and literature is extravagant, the depth of his knowledge profound..."

Graeme Fife is a regular reviewer here. He has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history and fiction. His novel of the French Revolution, No Common Assassin, tells the story of Charlotte Corday.

Where to start…? The fecundity of knowledge, the extent of learning, the restless fever of curiosity to discover more…it makes one feel like a lazybones, a mere beginner…

Introducing another acerbic comic song at the height of his celebrity, the late Tom Lehrer* said: ‘Some people make you realise how little you’ve achieved. It’s a sobering fact that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for three years.’

I received this book as a gift but it is a gift in itself. James is a wonder: the breadth, the stretch of his curiosity, the range of his cultural interest both in ideas and literature is extravagant, the depth of his knowledge profound, add to this his wit and style and you hold in your hands the remarkable gathering of a lifetime’s inquiry into the human mind and heart.

The book comprises vignettes, some in quite extended essays, of individuals whose life and work has either enriched or compromised their existence. For the most part the men and women whom James remembers and speaks of, he recalls with affection and praise. Not always – he is not averse to censure and sees through cant or failed promise and I need not enumerate those whom he castigates. By and large, the censure they get they most obviously deserve. ‘Like his boss, (Goebbels) was able and industrious. He didn’t miss a trick. All he missed was the point.’

For some of the people celebrated in the pages of this totally compelling book, their legacy is an example, a very demanding example, of fortitude and integrity. Sophie Scholl (to whom the book is, in part, dedicated) was condemned by the Nazis for conducting a fearless pamphlet campaign against their venomous autocracy with her brother and friends, members of the White Rose resistance group. ‘Finally,’ she told the court, ‘someone has to make a start. We only said and wrote what many people think, they just don’t dare to express it.’

As Edward Gibbon (cited here by James in a separate chapter) said of life under the Emperors: ‘To resist was fatal and it was impossible to fly.’ The Gestapo offered Sophie Scholl respite if she recanted. She refused and the executioner, who in a small pity, took her first having allowed the condemned to smoke a last cigarette together, said that he had never seen anyone die so bravely. As James reports: ‘She just glanced up at the steel, put her head down and she was gone. Is that you? No, and it isn’t me, either.’ She was barely twenty-two.

Alongside the frankly solemn, even reverential, there is joyous mockery. His story of Albert Camus gives opportunity for a lively digression on the dumb bigotry of autocrats, their aversion to what Shakespeare’s King John calls ‘that idiot laughter’ and it’s a riotous comic gem: I cried with laughter. It’s evidence of the cool style of the man, his ecstasies of humour, so to put it. Nor does James the raconteur ever fail in wit, though his asides are never acidic, always gentle. In a captivating digression on the choice of book titles, he writes: ‘(T. S.) Eliot's own idea of a terrific title was Ara vos prec, a sure-fire hit with any bookshop browser who spoke medieval Provençal.’

In the portrait of Diaghilev (‘Why should I waste my imagination on myself?’) he riffs on the contrast between the exquisite structure of the work with the hopeless disarray of the life’. Of Auden: ‘The man whose lyrics were showpieces of carpentry – try to imagine a poem more accurately built than The Fall of Rome – kept a kitchen that could have doubled as a research facility for biological warfare….(he) lived long enough for me to see his tie. I thought it had been presented to him by Jackson Pollock until I realised that it was a plain tie plus food.’

Of Heda Margolius Kovály – heard of her? Nor I … look her up, read on – ‘If the world can’t be ruled by the values that come naturally to a woman like her, how can it be worth living in?’ There were, on the other side, apparatchiks and I won’t name them but what emerges from James is an urgent sense that he has thought deeply about these people and their contribution to our culture, thought very hard indeed and is, therefore, to be relied on. Yeats, he acknowledges had some pretty batty ideas about mystic inspiration, the spiritualist claptrap which vitiates much of his early work, but he eventually saw through it and his magnificent later poetry confirms how ‘art was, for him a system of solid knowledge by far transcending his own fads.’ That is the triumph of his intellect and his allegiance to the deeper requirements of the work. This book is peppered through with such gemlike insights into the matter of artistic creation, social idea and action, the driving force of human courage in the face of adversity, such as the ‘misuse of language linked to fraudulent politics’. It’s generous, unfailing in honesty and an absolute delight. As I say: a gift in and of itself. With astonishing skill James combines penetrating enquiry with an aphoristic style, a happy blend which has a particular attraction: the steady unpeeling of reputation, deserved or not, with sudden explosions of mirth and brilliant turn of laconic phrase..

Cultural Amnesia is published by Picador.

*Updated following the death of Tom Lehrer in July 2025.

More of Graeme's choices:

A Telling of Stones by Neil Rackham

At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell

The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason

An interview with Graeme about No Common Assassin, his novel of the French Revolution

Lockdown Sunday extra: ADOLFO KAMINSKY: A FORGER'S LIFE, reviewed by Graeme Fife

"The calculation was simple. If I slept for one single hour, thirty people would die ..."

Graeme Fife has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is now a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography and works of history. Great Cycling Climbs, which brings together his books on the French Alps, is published by Thames and Hudson. He says, 'I urge everyone to buy from their independent bookshop, if they're lucky enough - as I am - to have one nearby. If not, by any means possible to counter the sprawl of the online consumer graball.'

Occupied Paris, 1942: ‘To stay awake. As long as I could. To fight against sleep. The calculation was simple. In one hour, I could produce thirty forged papers. If I slept for one single hour, thirty people would die.’

It was a race against time, against death.

The pun in French – contre la montre, contre la mort – does not translate into English, nor can I vouch for the translation of this remarkable book, but what I can vouch for is the piquancy, the grip on this reader of Kaminsky’s remarkable story as recounted by his daughter. Born in Algeria, Sarah grew up knowing nothing of her father’s past. He was a photographer. It was in the course of going through documents to establish French citizenship that she lit on the names of contacts of some standing and some throwaway reference to her father’s connection with the Secret Service during the latter part of the Second World War. Her father was a spy?

This led to a long and extended conversation between father and daughter on which the book is based. When I talked to her in Paris, Sarah told me that delving into and unravelling the facts of a life so long hidden away, overborne by memories of such dangerous times, was a delicate process. She was asking him to expose secrets which he’d kept buried for so long, out of what had been an ingrained habit of mistrust and caution. As he said, the only hope of survival had been in a deep and unremitting wariness of every action, every person. In the course of their dialogue, she inevitably found herself asking her father things which no daughter would, normally, ever broach with a parent. And, in exchange, she invited her father to pose equally intrusive questions of her.

In putting the story together, at first she could find neither balance nor appropriate tone. She therefore took on what I consider to be a very bold decision: to write it as a novel, using her father as the narrator. It could so easily have failed – been too sensational, too mawkish, too incredible, too self-serving. But it is none of those things. It is a tense narrative, written in spare language but not devoid of passion, passion which flames out, perhaps the most cogent proof that the voice speaking here is truthful and personal.

Kaminsky was fascinated by chemistry from an early age and it very soon became apparent that he had a genius for it, particularly in the composition of inks. Working in a dye factory after he left school, the boss told him they had a problem with some material that had been stained with indelible ink. Kaminsky said: ‘There is no such thing as indelible,’ and removed the stain. He was fourteen years old.

This brilliance led to work for the resistance in Paris, forging papers and ID cards, mostly to help Jewish children get away from the Gestapo and the collaborating French police.

Working from secret laboratories in the city, always in imminent danger of discovery, under an unimaginable strain of crushing toil, lack of sleep and fresh air, the prowling menace outside in the streets, his will and energy never flagged. At one point, he collapsed with fatigue. One of his assistants said: ‘Adolfo, we need a forger, not another corpse.’

His driving principle was one of outrage at the brutality of any regime which denied individuals liberty of movement, not only under the Nazis but, after the war, Jews desperate to get to Palestine, Algerian freedom fighters in refuge from the merciless French police, other rebels in Spain, South America, those avoiding the draft for the Vietnam war…He produced forged papers for victims of oppression for nearly thirty years and was never caught.

These are the bare bones of his astonishing story, no spoilers. It’s too packed with drama for spoilers to have any effect.

He’s 94, now. When I met him, in company with Sarah, we talked for a long time. In conclusion, he spoke of his marriage to her mother, an Algerian Muslim. It was, when they married, illegal for a Muslim to marry a Jew – they had to go to Switzerland and, eventually, came to France to live. That marriage, he said, was his final political act, one of defiance. Perhaps one element in his character may explain his tenacity: his humility. Added to a grace of humour and deep humanity, a lucid moral sense, it kept him, improbably, safe.

ADOLFO KAMINSKY: a Forger’s Life is translated from the French of Sarah Kaminsky (ADOLFO KAMINSKY Une Vie de Faussaire, Livre de Poche) by Mike Mitchell, Los Angeles, Doppelhaus Press