In one of the rollicking essays in this collection, Clive James hails his countryman Robert Hughes as a representative of Australian expatriate writers at their most exuberant. His writing, James observes, is "the product of an innocent abroad who has consciously enjoyed every stage of his growing sophistication without allowing his original barbaric gusto to be diminished."
The Australian expat, he argues, "loots the world for cultural references," and "if he can write like Hughes, he may combine these into a macaronic, coruscating prose that would be as precious as a cento or an Anacreontic odelette if it were not so robust, vivid and clearly concerned with defining the subject, rather than just displaying his erudition."
The same of course might be said of James' own prose. At his best he combines the most potent attributes of what Philip Rahv called redskin and paleface writers, managing to be street smart and scholarly, swaggering and cerebral, all at the same time. Like John Updike he's adept at using his gift for metaphor and pictorial language to delineate the work of others. And like Martin Amis he's equally at home with the high and the low, a cultural magpie eloquent on the arcane and the vernacular, on the allusive poetry of Galway Kinnell and the sexual drivel of Judith Krantz.
In this volume James, who is perhaps best known in Britain these days as a television personality, emphasizes his serious side. As of This Writing, which bears the self-important subtitle The Essential Essays, does not contain the amusing television columns he once wrote for The Observer, nor does it contain his musings on the ice dancers Torvill and Dean or his much mocked piece on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Instead the book focuses on James' literary essays with a few forays into film criticism and some asides about dance and photography.
Although the reader wishes that James had used his copious talents as a critic to write about American novelists like Thomas Pynchon, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and such British contemporaries as Ian McEwan and Graham Swift, this volume shows his gift for describing an artist's achievement (a writer's distinctive vision, sensibility, technique and tone) while at the same time conveying a wonderfully tactile sense of the artist's work.
"He was beyond words," James writes of James Agee. "Everything he wrote, and not just the scripts, was the work of a frustrated director: the page was a wrap-around screen with four-track stereophonic sound. Fundamentally anti-economical, it was the approach of a putter-in rather than a leaver-out, and all too frequently his prose had a coronary occlusion right there in front of you."
As for Raymond Chandler, James writes: "Flaubert liked tinsel better than silver because tinsel possessed all silver's attributes plus one in addition -- pathos. For whatever reason, Chandler was fascinated by the cheapness of LA. When he said that it had as much personality as a paper cup, he was saying what he liked about it. When he said that he could leave it without a pang, he was saying why he felt at home there."
James is keenly attuned to the shape of a writer's career, the fallout that the political or cultural spirit can have on a reputation, and the unexpected ways in which an artist's work can mature by accident or by choice.
"For the educated man," he writes, "there is a moment of his early acquaintanceship with Dante when he realizes that all he has slowly taught himself to enjoy in poetry is everything that Dante has grown out of. A comparable moment of fear is to be had with Auden, when we understand that his slow change through the 1940s entails a renunciation of the art-thrill, and that the Audenesque dazzle is forever gone. For a poet to lose such a talent would have been a misfortune. For a poet to give it up was an act of disciplined renunciation rarely heard of in English."
Several of the longer pieces in As of This Writing concern writers and critics -- most notably Edmund Wilson, Mark Twain, George Orwell and Gore Vidal -- who have been inspirations to the author, and it quickly becomes clear to the reader that James is at his most persuasive and illuminating in the role of enthusiast, as someone who can communicate his visceral love for a particular artist's work by explicating his gifts and making palpable his magic.
He makes you want to run out and rewatch Fellini's Eight-and-a-Half and Amarcord on the big screen. And he makes you want to reconsider your doubts about Solzhenitsyn's artistry as writer, given the magnitude of the job he faced: "Because Solzhenitsyn deals with modern events over which there is not merely dispute as to their interpretation, but doubt as to whether they even happened, he is obliged to expend a great deal of effort in saying what things were like. The task is compounded in difficulty by the consideration that what they were like is almost unimaginable."
As for Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz and Sylvia Plath, they elicit this cruel and self-consciously clever put-down, "To any of them nothing mattered more than the ticker tape that carried the stock market quotation of their status. A 10-point drop could send them to the window sill: for the artist concerned with his own share price, it is always 1929."
Such missteps, reminiscent of the snarky tone that intruded in the author's 1998 novel The Silver Castle are thankfully rare. The bulk of this volume not only reminds us of James' ability to be funny and touching at the same time, but it also attests to his shrewd gifts as a critic.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
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Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located