First Reactions
Kaplan, Howard
FIRST REACTIONS Clive James Knopf, $12.95, 240 pp. Howard Kaplan AROUND fifteen years ago Clive James went into business as a highbrow lit critic on Grub Street. The trade's as profitable as a...
...The essays are so packed with insights - loving insights, with just the right amount of severity - that any one of them could serve as an intro to the collected works of whichever author James is discussing: Edmund Wilson, Raymond Chandler, Lawrence, Auden, Cummings...
...He believes they were born not made ("What other men occasionally achieve was all there as a gift," he writes of Auden, and of that he has gone on clarifying "what he was sent to say...
...several verse epics...
...his specialty lies in relating how they equip themselves to scale them - or try to scale them...
...but he doesn't let the matter rest there...
...an autobiographical volume entitled Unreliable Memoirs...
...he's also a poet, which sounds suicidal...
...James admits to showing off deliriously here...
...That's the point, of course: there is nothing better to do...
...James needn't make excuses for being an enthusiast (he isn't in his TV reviews, but more on these in a minute...
...The trade's as profitable as a beggar's, but he's still at it...
...James is less interested in ideas than he is in questions of style, and more interested in understanding how a good style works than in knocking a poor one...
...The real prizewinners are the pieces on Auden, Cummings, and Philip Larkin, James's personal all-star poets...
...If you liked Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage or Frederic Raphael's Glittering Prizes, James may change your mind...
...He senses where the walls are for each of his favorites...
...In the preface to First Reactions he says that he left out most of his mean pieces, that he can be quite bitchy when he wants...
...If he could only have managed to dream up an objective correlative, or a few types of ambiguity . . . he would be more fashionable now than he is...
...He never strains to make a point, though, and the judgments are sound...
...style and pins down another...
...The final essay, for instance, rightly sums up Mailer's Marilyn as the expression of an elitist succumbing to plebeian tastes...
...His descriptions of stylistic effects are themselves little show-stoppers, like this one from "The Metropolitan Critic": "The most difficult escape Houdini ever made was from a wet sheet, but since he was in the business of doing difficult-looking things he had to abandon this trick, because to the public it seemed easy...
...For that kind of work James needs room to stretch, say five thousand words...
...Still...
...More often than not the wisecracks are duds - sure sign of a man killing time...
...TV critic for The Observer...
...Another one of his is the fairly standard make-them-thinkyou've-read-everything, but maybe he has...
...Sandwiched between the literary articles are fifteen TV reviews...
...There's no analysis of Shaw's style in it, though...
...Meanwhile the real work goes on: essays for TLS, The Listener, Encounter, Commentary, The New York Review of Books...
...How does one talk intelligently and seriously about something as mindless as TV often is...
...What Wilson was doing was never easy, but he had the good manners to make it look that way...
...He spends a lot of time catching sportscasters in verbal slip-ups, and you can practically see him lying in wait with all the glee of an English prof with nothing better to do...
...When you're not taking refuge in the groves of Academe you need a few tricks...
...I wonder...
...Not that he can much stomach the pap...
...It's when he's up against shows sanctioned by the culture vultures that he performs best...
...Then he's like the bouncing ball in cartoons, taking us syllable by syllable down a line of poetry or prose...
...He's got the bookworm's bias against the tube, and the more literate shows can sometimes irk him more than the blatantly silly ones...
...It's not a bad sinecure, and if anyone deserves a wider audience it's James.ce it's James...
...The flashy analogy drawn from pop entertainment, the sarcasm toward highfalutin talk: James simultaneously exhibits his own...
...A wonderful killing of two birds...
...For the last eight years this native Australian, resident in England since 1961, has turned out a thousand words per week on fluff like Star Trek and The Rockford Files (he admires James Garner's "miraculous social ease and the way the California air looks so warm...
...In the course of being nasty about Lillian Hellman's Pen-timento he also sneers at An Unfinished Woman ("The very first time Hammett's drinking was referred to as 'the drinking,' you knew your were in for a solid course of bastardized Hemingwayese...
...TJut he's not just a quoting machine...
...To keep himself in beer money he watches TV for The Observer, the London Sunday newspaper...
...Even his slender review of Shaw's correspondence achieves the utmost in sugges-tiveness - a three-minute egg of an article that captures the man as neatly as his three-letter signature...
...His new book of thirty-two essays (heavy on the lit crit) is his first to appear on this side of the Atlantic...
...The assumption is that any attempt at formal critical discourse would fall on its face...
...Thank you, Clive...
...James's solution is to act like a lowbrow's conception of the critic as Big Snob...
...but by the end you see him squirming: the article closes with a veiled apology to the effect that Hellman herself always wanted critics to tell it to her straight...
...The pain and self-discipline involved make these pieces read like hagiographies...
...James has riled some people for being a cut-up, but a man in his position probably has to be...
...While working toward that appraisal the essay crackles with so many provocative observations that one is tempted to call it the best in the book - until one remembers that the subject of Mailer seems to lend itself to provocative observations...
Vol. 108 • October 1981 • No. 19
