Cultural Cohesion: The Essential Essays

by Clive James

Overview

Clive James presents the “prequel” to his celebrated Cultural Amnesia—forty-nine essays that form a cultural education in one brilliant volume.

Six years after the much-heralded publication of Cultural Amnesia, Clive James presents his “prequel”—forty-nine essays that he has selected as the best of his half-century career. Originally appearing as As of This Writing, Cultural Cohesion examines the twisted cultural terrain of the twentieth century in one of the most accessible and cohesive volumes available. Divided into four sections—“Poetry,” “Fiction and Literature,” “Culture and Criticism,” and “Visual Images”—James comments on poets like W. H. Auden and Phillip Larkin, novelists like D. H. Lawrence and Raymond Chandler (not to mention Judith Krantz!), and filmmakers like Fellini and Bogdanovich. Throughout, James delights his readers with his manic energy and critical aplomb. This volume, featuring a new introduction, is a one-volume cultural education that few recent books can rival.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393347111
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/25/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	640
File size:	994 KB

About the Author

Clive James (1939—2019), author of the best-selling Cultural Amnesia and Poetry Notebook, was an Officer of the Order of Australia and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. His writing appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic.

Table of Contents

A Note on the Text ix

Foreword xi

Introduction to the Paperback Edition xix

Part I Poetry

1 On Auden's Death 3

2 On Seamus Heaney 19

3 Robert Lowell's Marble Chips 25

4 Four Essays on Philip Larkin 38

5 Poetry's Ideal Critic: Randall Jarrell 84

6 Two Essays on Theodore Roethke 90

7 Charles Johnston's Catacomb Graffiti 102

8 Nabokov's Grand Folly 117

9 Stevie Smith: Not Drowning but Waving 123

10 Galway Kinnell's Great Poem 129

11 Les Murray and His Master Spirits 136

12 The Great Generation of Australian Poetry 149

Part II Fiction and Literature

13 D. H. Lawrence in Transit 165

14 The Perpetual Promise of James Agee 179

15 The Sherlockologists 190

16 Raymond Chandler 201

17 Bitter Seeds: Solzhenitsyn 214

18 Go Back to the Cold! 227

19 A Blizzard of Tiny Kisses 236

20 A Death in Life 245

21 Primo Levi's Last Will and Testament 259

22 Primo Levi and the Painted Veil 274

23 The All of Orwell 284

24 Mark Twain, Journalist 305

25 Casanova Comes Again 328

26 Hamlet in Perspective 340

Part III Culture and Criticism

27 F. R. Leavis in America 349

28 A Whole Gang of Noise: Susan Sontag 358

29 Germaine Greer: Getting Married Later 362

30 The Metropolitan Critic 370

31 If is of a Windiness: Lillian Hellman 387

32 Mailer's Marilyn 394

33 From Log Cabin to Log Cabin 409

34 Hard-Core Gore 421

35 Evelyn Waugh's Last Stand 427

36 As a Matter of Tact 436

37 These Staggering Questions 443

38 How Montale Earned His Living 456

39 N.V. Rampant Meets Martin Amis 466

40 Hitler's Unwitting Exculpator 470

41 He That Played the Fool 497

42 Bertrand Russell Struggles after Heaven 502

Part IV Visual Images

43 The New Diaghilev 521

44 Pier Paolo Pain in the Neck 525

45 Mondo Fellini 539

46 Who Was That Masked Man? 561

47 The Gentle Slope to Castalia 568

48 Pictures in Silver 585

Index 605

What People are Saying About This

John Bayley

Clive James is in the tradition of Hazlitt, Bagehot, and Edmund Wilson, with a gusto to succeed theirs.

Editorial Reviews

"Clive James is in the tradition of Hazlitt, Bagehot, and Edmund Wilson, with a gusto to succeed theirs."

John Bayley