The world according to Clive James

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Since 1969, when his first book, "The Metropolitan Critic," appeared (Edmund Wilson was its titular hero), Clive James has given us a prodigious flow of essays on the arts; reviews of film and television; many poems, some of them fine; and much forgettable fiction and memoirs. He has hosted innumerable television extravaganzas, the most lively of which had him tooling around Rome in a Vespa, showing us where the action was.

He is also an amateur historian of a serious sort: The large volume of essays he published four years ago devoted pages to Primo Levi's significance and to the holocaust scholarship of Daniel Goldhagen. "Cultural Amnesia," his new book, is subtitled "Necessary Memories from History and the Arts," and only an "Australian overachiever" -- as he once termed his fellow countryman, the art critic Robert Hughes -- could have achieved it.

The book's almost 900 pages consist of over 100 biographical and critical portraits organized from A to Z -- from Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig. Mr. James' therapeutic aim is "to help establish a possible line of resistance against cultural amnesia," an enterprise he has been reading and thinking about for 40 years.

Among other things it is a bid for remembering Mr. James as a remarkably prescient and entertaining commentator on our time. In that time, the fate of the Jews and events leading up to it are central to the volume, whose "overture" focuses on the Vienna of 100 years ago that Hitler would destroy.

Mr. James notes that "a book about culture in the twentieth century which did not deal constantly with just how close culture came to being eradicated altogether would not be worth reading." So the volume is heavy with many German, Austrian, Polish and Russian men and women who acted and spoke out against the eradications that Hitler and Stalin conducted.

But as anyone the least familiar with his writings knows, Mr. James has also been incorrigibly gifted with what Wyndham Lewis called "the curse of humor" in its many varieties. One of them is a determinedly playful refusal always to provide a "responsible" portrait of the individual figure; instead he selects a sentence or quotation from the figure and sees where he can run with it.

What, we may ask, in this book about 20th century players and their precursors, is the 17th century English writer Sir Thomas Browne doing? He is there mainly, it seems, on the basis of a memorable figure from his "On Dreams" ("Dreams out of the ivory gate and visions before midnight").

Convinced that "Visions before Midnight" would make an excellent title, Mr. James considers other excellent ones like Raymond Chandler's "The Big Sleep" or "Farewell, My Lovely" -- titles as good as the books they adhere to. A chapter on Gianfranco Contini, whom Mr. James considers the foremost Italian philologist of his time (heard of him?) turns out to be about various poetic verse forms, ending with a juxtaposition of stanzas by W.B. Yeats and Philip Larkin.

Miguel de Unamuno inspires Mr. James to useful thought about the activity of book reviewing, its credits and debits. So you never know just where you're going to be taken in an essay, though the ride is almost always agreeable.

For a Yankee reviewer however, the slighting of American figures is notable; only a handful show up, consisting mainly of two novelists (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Norman Mailer), three jazz musicians (Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis) and a couple of talk-show hosts (Johnny Carson and Dick Cavett -- the latter especially well portrayed).