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Reliable Essays: The Best of Clive James

Author: Clive James
Creator: Julian Barnes
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book

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Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3 reviews
Sales Rank: 167197

Media: Paperback
Edition: New Ed
Pages: 367
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5.1 x 1

ISBN: 0330481304
Dewey Decimal Number: 808
EAN: 9780330481304
ASIN: 0330481304

Publication Date: June 7, 2002
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: In stock - Sent fast from British booksellers.

Also Available In:

•	Hardcover - Reliable Essays: The Best of Clive James

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Editorial Reviews:

Amazon.co.uk Review
Depending on your generation, Reliable Essays: the Best of Clive James either introduces or re-introduces a seriously entertaining literary talent. Collections of James' essays seem to appear perennially, but in the days before he swapped the TLS for TV, James wrote regular book reviews, a clutch of which are reproduced here. His appraisal of George Orwell, that peerless appraiser of other writers, is worthy of its subject, and the four pieces, in reverse chronology, celebrating Philip Larkin, re-affirm the singular English beauty of his poetry, and the considerable assets of his two novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter. James omits his later review of the Andrew Motion biography, Philip Larkin, which perhaps would have finished, or rather begun, the sequence, but the four pieces stand on their own. One enduring theme in his writing is to judge the artist rather than the man or woman, exemplified in his predilection for writers such as Kingsley Amis and Evelyn Waugh, and the entangled personae of the dauntingly talented--and equally learned--Barry Humphries. Though he mugs Malcolm Muggeridge, and enjoyably mocks the Sherlockologists, his jibes, though never cheap, are always of good value.

James is a polymath, yet as Julian Barnes points out in his pithy, affectionate introduction, perhaps the poetry, novels, television columns, television presenting, documentary-making and all-round celebrity detract from what is a considerable intellectual gift. James defends his more populist activities, yet this one-man "brilliant bunch of guys", as the New Yorker put it, shows with extended pieces on Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved, and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners that he can punch his weight with the best of them, displaying erudition, compassion, depth of reading, and a commitment to language both vigilant and generous. With a new postscript following each piece, the tonal unity remains remarkable, considering the 30-year span of cultural inquiry that shows little sign of abating. Even As We Speak, another recent collection, covers the final decade of the 20th century, and includes his notorious requiem for the late Princess of Wales (it doesn't make the cut here, curiously), but Reliable Essays perhaps best captures his extraordinary breadth of vision, and intellectual agility. Television's loss will be literature's regain.--David Vincent

Customer Reviews:

4 out of 5 stars

Caring Criticism May 26, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful

It isn't the fact that he's funny; it isn't the fact that he's clever; it isn't even the fact that he is fair: it is the fact that he cares.

It is hard not to warm to a man who admits he was expecting to be punched by Norman Mailer as a result of his scalpel-fine dissection of Mailer's biography of Marilyn Monroe. When James' builds to his minor climax, it is with the passing comment that Monroe, good as she was at portraying the ditzy blonde (in 'Some Like It Hot') was so, for a reason. It was because she was good ..."at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short". This comes like the stroke of a samurai-sword passing through the neck silently and frictionlessly. Having been introduced to just some of the hubris of Mailer's house of cards, with this comment we are permitted, slowly, to see the head roll off the shoulders...

On Orwell similarly the reviewer who criticises the style misses the point. James has a very specific aim in repeating himself ad nauseum (KGB, NKVD, MVD etc because they are what we know not because they are what he knows); James is using the repetition to drive home the huge significance of the word "Orwellian." It is a point well made and it is a point well made by a man who knows that this repetition can only bring home to us, at the same time, why there will never be any such word as 'Jamesian'...

Not that he lacks confidence. At one point, his quaternity of professional Australians in Britain includes Germaine Greer and Barry Humphries and also himself, but Rolf Harris gets only a passing reference and John Pilger not even that. Yet it is Pilger who has been Journalist of the Year - twice. And for some of us, it was Pilger's reporting on the effect of sanctions in Iraq for the Guardian which was the start of us suspecting that something was genuinely wrong right at the heart of Westminster. And then Rolf Harris is easily made fun of, as he himself knows, but of them all it is Rolf that has touched the nation over the course of years, as officially Australian. James' is keen to tell us of his private audience with the Queen mother, but when the venerable Rolf painted the even more venerable Queen herself, it was a moment which you *could* see, as when the nation touched Rolf back. If you cared to.

That said, one acknowledges the failings the early reviewer pointed out on factual grounds. James has these failings and more. He is good at spotting the good writing but he does then like to tell us exactly why it is good. A little of this goes a very long way. These failings do raise questions about how much someone cares. But not big questions. The piece on Barry Humphries could be riddled with inaccuracies. It does not matter because it is not his judgement James is pronouncing, it is his loyalty. James and his subjects are not adversaries, they are ships passing in the night. It is James and his feelings which these essays are marrying, with the judicious combination of warm humour and cold-eyed honesty which makes jokes about midgets funny - to midgets, too!

He marries his memories elsewhere and, to me, with less effect.

If a question does arise, I would ask who these essays are really for? Perhaps the question only arises in book form. Perhaps in original published journal form they are simply for the editor; the paymaster, and carry the weight of their time. Slowed to a halt in book form one wonders who will care what James says about Muggeridge now that the dust has settled and history has made its judgement. James is still proud of his fairness (when he wrote about Muggeridge he was 'worth the money') and he is proud of his adventurousness (in Rome) whereas in book form these are easily the weakest pieces. James would do better to think these essays are for James' himself.

But the earlier reviewer was right about the title: a more careless choice you could not look for.

1 out of 5 stars

Not a player August 21, 2007
2 out of 6 found this review helpful

"Reliable essays". Disregard the insipid choice of book title. Proof positive that you can't host TV shows and then moonlight as an intellectual is on nearly every page of this awful "Best of".

Clive James, like H.L. Mencken before him, is an autodidact. And there the similarities begin and end completely. When the great Mencken impressed readers with the breadth of his knowledge, he did so in a concise and sensible manner: any erudition he imparted was always while en route to explaining a far simpler thing, and he never said more than he needed to. In short, Mencken merely *mentioned* the things he knew. James, on the other hand, who suffers the immense handicap of coming from TV, feels the necessity to take everything he knows and spray the reader from head to toe with it. From the very first paragraph of this book, one can pluck the following example:

"It's the Orwell style. But you can't call it Orwellian, because that means Big Brother, Newspeak, the Ministry of Love, Room 101, the Lubyanka, Vorkuta, the NKVD, the MVD, the KGB, KZ Dachau, KZ Buchenwald, the Reichsschrifftumskammer, Gestapo HQ in the Prinz-Albrecht Strasse, Arbeit Macht Frei, Giovinezza, Je suis partout, the compound at Drancy, the Kempei Tai, Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, The Red Detachment of Women, the Stasi, the Securitate, cro-magnon Latino death squad goons decked out in Ray-bans after dark, the Khmer Rouge torture factory whose inmates were forbidden to scream, Idi Amin's Committee of Instant Happiness or whatever his secret police were called, and any other totalitarian obscenity that has ever reared its head or ever will."
[p. 3]

Got all that? The impression generated here is that of someone who plainly doesn't *feel* educated. Nor do they feel like educating others. A "look at me" passage of this variety imparts no useful information to the reader: it is merely a shopping-list of disjointed esoterica that could only impress other intellectual spivs eager to do some name-dropping of their own. If it sounds educated, the sound is a hollow ringing.

Moreover, it's one thing to try and pull the ladder up after you when you're learned, it's another to do so when you're the type to make goofy mistakes. For example: "the NKVD, the MVD, the KGB" are all the same organisation - these are just three of seven name-changes for what eventually became the KGB. So why not also mention the Cheka, GPU, OGPU and NKGB? (It's as if James were asked to name three rock bands and he lists Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship and Starship.) Also, the claim that "Orwell was the first to use the term 'cold war'" [p. 15] is clearly incorrect. Walter Lippmann was the first to promulgate the term (in 1947), and he appears to have borrowed it from the 14th-century writer Don Juan Manuel.

Anyway, this painful inferiority complex suffuses the entire book. James could never, for example, write the simple sentence: "It is a surrealist image." He has to say that "It is a surrealist image which might have been cooked up by Dali in the presence of Bunuel, by Andre Breton in the presence of Eluard" [p. 183]. It's equally difficult to simply say "My conversation with Norman Mailer ended" when highbrow pretensions demand that you say: "My colloquy with the patriarch was soon suspended." [p. 181]

This brings us to the small matter of prose style. "Postcard from Rome", for example, is allegedly one of James' most celebrated essays. Visiting the city seems to trigger his Roman pun reflex:

"Rome lay below. Those strings of lights were roads all leading to the same place."

"A lot of water has gone over the viaduct since then ..."

"Out on the old Appian Way it was as cold as Caligula's heart."

"While terrorists maim and murder at will, the cops are chasing contraltos. It's a clear case of fiddling while Rome burns."
[p. 135 et seq.]

... And so on. If I were parodying the James style right now I suppose I'd be adding some Latin and stating that this essay is the reductio ad absurdum of the expression "When in Rome ..."

It gets worse. James follows Margaret Thatcher to China. The reflex triggers again. This time it's Sino-punnery, heavily leavened with more intellectual spivvery. Thatcher's airplane lands:
"... out of a pale sky as delicately transparent as the finest ch'ing-pai ware of the Sung Dynasty".

Thatcher has:
"... gratified them by looking her best, in a plum blossom and quince-juice silk dress finely calculated to remind Chinese guests of a mo ku painting of the Late Northern Sung."

We're informed that:
"That rings a bell with the Chinese - a large bronze chung bell of the Western Chou period, decorated with projecting knobs and interlaced dragons"

As for Thatcher herself:
"Nothing like that skin had been seen since the Ting potters of Hopei had produced the last of their palace-quality high-fired white porcelain with the creamy glaze; her hair had the frozen flow of a Fukien figurine from the early Ch'ing; and her eyes were two turquoise bolts from the Forbidden City's Gate of Divine Prowess, an edifice which ..."
[p. 144 et seq.]

... but by now, who cares? As Emerson once said of Thomas Babington Macaulay, no one ever knew so much that was so little to the purpose.

Then there is the question of plain sense. What are we to make of the statement that Vladimir Nabokov "was solipsistically proprietorial about Russia, the novel and art itself" [p. 103]? Or of the post-Holocaust claim that "we're different now. But nobody is that different now. Because nobody was that different then" [p. 261]? Or the assertion that 'China is a big place. Here, at the edge, it is a bit like the West, but the edge, we had learned, is a long way from the middle' [p. 158]?

The first words printed on the opening page of this book are from a press review. Michael Schmidt beams: "When I come across a Clive James essay in a periodical, I save it for last, knowing it will be a treat." This giddy compliment confirms that Clive James has probably earned the kind of admirers he deserves - grown-ups who react to his writing in the same way that a 10-year-old reacts to a box of gooey chocolates. And for the same reasons.

******************************************************

Done? Almost. Why not end with another Clive James' shotgun-blast of trivia? Did you know that ...

"Germaine Greer is a storm of images; has already been promoted variously as Germaine de Stael, Fleur Fenton Cowles, Rosa Luxemburg and Beatrice Lillie; and at the time of writing needs only a few more weeks' exposure in order to reoccupy the corporeally vacant outlines of Lou-Andreas Salome, George Sand, Marie von Thurn un Taxis-Hohenlohes and Marjorie Jackson (the Lithgow Flash)."
[p. 197]

5 out of 5 stars

Wonderful June 25, 2001
6 out of 10 found this review helpful

Worth the cover price for the postscript on the poet Sir charles Johnston alone.

Buy it. Devour it.

Discover Horace's dictum that writing should both entertain and inform.