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Tag Archives: Edmund Wilson

Clive James: Mortality and the Next Generation

28 Saturday Mar 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview

≈ Comments Off on Clive James: Mortality and the Next Generation

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Bill Moyers, Clive James, Edmund Wilson, interview, meaning, Mortality, PBS

Bill Moyers: You quote Edmund Wilson, who writes:

The knowledge that death is not so far away, that my mind and emotions and vitality will soon disappear like a puff of smoke has the effect of making earthly affairs seem unimportant, and human beings more and more ignoble. It is harder to take human life seriously, including one’s own efforts and achievements and passions.

Clive James: You know, I believe he was a great man, but I think exactly the opposite. As death approaches, I think more and more of the next generation and their importance. And I just — I just don’t think in the way that he thought.

But that was his limitation. He was a bit of a misogynist, and I’m not. I’m continually astonished by the creativity of human beings and their bravery, especially women. I’ve always been impressed by women’s bravery. They’re on the whole tougher than men… They seem anchored in a way that men aren’t; men are quite often fantasists and idealists. I know I am. It’s my bad tendency, which I have to try and control.

__________

The closing exchange in Moyers’s interview with James on Bill Moyers Journal in 2007.

You can pick up a copy of James’s excellent, expansive survey of civilization Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts or check out more posts and interviews with the Aussie polymath.

And you can also read more:

  • One of my favorite modern poems “Lessons of Darkness” by CJ
  • A passage from Edmond de Goncourt’s journal, which hauntingly twists that ‘puff of smoke’ image
  • The girl who wasn’t Anne Frank

CliveJames

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What Good Is Art in the Face of 21st Century Terrorism?

09 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Philosophy

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal, civilization, Clive James, Edmund Burke, Edmund Wilson, humanism, interview, Islamic Terror, Martin Amis, PBS, Russian Revolution, Terrorism, Western Civilization

Charlie Hebdo

Bill Moyers: This barbarism we see today, the rise of radical elements of Islam. What good is humanism against it?

Clive James: Well, the constant message of my book is that you must pursue humanism for its own sake. A utilitarian view won’t work. You’ve got to know and love these things for its own sake.

There’s no guarantee that civilization will continue. It’s always shown fairly robust signs of being able to overcome any kind of totalitarian organization. The interesting thing about World War II was that the Nazis were quite well organized and the Japanese were quite well organized — compared with, say, the U.S. and Britain at the start of the war, which weren’t organized at all. I mean, the U.S. had a smaller armed forces than Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s.

But within a very short time the democracies organized themselves better. There’s something about the creative force of liberal democracy which gives you hope that it can overcome any challenge including terrorism.

I’m sure terrorism can punch very large holes in western civilization and probably will. Let’s be fatalistic: yeah, it’s very hard to stop a bomber who’s ready to kill himself — very hard. But there’s every reason to think that civilization is simply too strong to be brought down by terrorist activity. But I don’t want to foist on you any false hopes; and it would be a false hope to say that if you learn enough, if you love Botticelli enough, if you listen to Beethoven enough then the enemy will retreat. It’s not going to happen.

Clive James 2

__________

Clive James and Bill Moyers, talking on Bill Moyers Journal on August 3rd, 2007.

More:

  • A century ago, Joseph Conrad theorized that terrorists have two defining traits
  • Martin Amis on 21st century terrorism and the male psyche
  • Salman Rushdie on the banality of life under Islamic totalitarianism

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After She Was Gone

19 Sunday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, Philosophy

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Edmund Wilson, Journal, Julian Barnes, Love, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, The Thirties

Julian Barnes

“My grandfather said that remorse was the worst emotion life could contain. My mother did not understand the remark, and I do not know what events to attach it to…

Ever since I first read it, I have remained haunted by a line from Edmund Wilson’s journals. Wilson died in 1972; the events referred to happened in 1932; I read about them in 1980, the year The Thirties was published.

At the beginning of that decade, Wilson had married, as his second wife, one Margaret Canby. She was a stocky, humorous-face, upper-class woman with ‘champagne tastes’: Wilson was the first man she had known who had worked for a living. In the previous volume of his journals, The Twenties, Wilson had called her ‘the best woman drinking companion I had ever known.’ There he noted his first intention of marrying her, and also his sensible hesitation: ‘Well though we got along, we did not have enough in common.’ But marry they did, into a companionship marked from the first by infidelity and temporary separations. If Wilson had his doubts about Canby, she had even stronger reservations about him. ‘You’re a cold fishy leprous person, Bunny Wilson,’ she once told him — a remark which Wilson, with typical unsparingness, confided to his diary.

In September 1932 the couple, then married two years, were having one of their separations. Margaret Canby was in California, Wilson in New York. She went to a party in Santa Barbara wearing high heels. As she left, she tripped, fell down a flight of stairs, broke her skull, and died. The event produced, in Wilson’s journal, forty-five pages of the most honest and self-flagellant mourning ever written. Wilson starts taking notes as his plane slowly hedge-hops west, as if the enforced literary act will help block off emotion. Over the next days, these jottings open out into an extraordinary monologue of homage, erotic remembrance, remorse, and despair. ‘A horrible night but even that seemed sweet in recollection,’ he notes at one point. In California, Canby’s mother urges him: ‘You must believe in immortality, Bunny, you must!’ But he doesn’t and can’t: Margaret is dead and unreturning.

Wilson spares himself, and his putative reader, nothing. He preserves every impaling rebuke Canby delivered. She once told her critical, complaining husband that the epitaph on his tombstone should read: ‘You’d better go and fix yourself up.’ He also celebrates her: in bed, in drink, in tears, in confusion. He remembers fighting off the flies when they made love on a beach. He calls to mind the ignorances that charmed him — ‘I’ve found out what that thing over the door is — it’s a lentil’ — and placed them alongside her running complaints: ‘I’ll crash someday! Why don’t you do something about me?’ She accused him of treating her as just another luxury item, like Guerlain scent: ‘You’d be charmed if I were dead, you know you would.’

The fact that Wilson treated his wife badly, both before and after marriage, and that his grief was contaminated by justified guilt, is what gives this stream of mourning consciousness its power. The animating paradox of Wilson’s condition is that he has been released into feeling by the death of the person who accused him of lack of feeling. And the line that has never left my memory is this: ‘After she was gone, I loved her.’

It doesn’t matter that Bunny Wilson was a cold, fishy, leprous person. It doesn’t matter that their relationship was a mistake and their marriage a disaster. It only matters that Wilson was telling the truth, and that the authentic voice of remorse is sounded in those words: ‘After she was gone, I loved her.'”

__________

From Julian Barnes’s book Nothing to Be Frightened Of.

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The Company of Saints

30 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Afterlife, Arthur Koestler, Dom Perignon, Edmund Wilson, heaven, Ian McEwan, Isaac Bashevis Singer, saints

Saint Patrick“Arthur Koestler expressed ‘some timid hopes for a depersonalized afterlife.’ Such a wish is unsurprising — Koestler had devoted many of his last years to parapsychology — but to me distinctly unalluring. Just as there seems little point in a religion which is merely a weekly social event (apart, of course, from the normal pleasures of a weekly social event), as opposed to one which tells you how to live, which colors and stains everything, which is serious, so I would want my afterlife, if one’s on offer, to be an improvement — preferably a substantial one — on its terrestrial predecessor. I can just about imagine slopping around half-unawares in some gooey molecular remix, but I can’t see that this has any advantage over complete extinction. Why have hopes, even timid ones, for such a state? Ah, my boy, but it’s not about what you’d prefer, it’s about what turns out to be true. The key exchange on this subject happened between Isaac Bashevis Singer and Edmund Wilson. Singer told Wilson that he believed in survival after death. Wilson said that as far as he was concerned, he didn’t want to survive, thank you very much. Singer replied, ‘If survival has been arranged, you will have no choice in the matter.’

The fury of the resurrected atheist: that would be something worth seeing. And while we’re on the subject, I think the company of saints might be distinctly interesting. Many of them led exciting lives — dodging assassins, confronting tyrants, preaching at medieval street corners, being tortured — and even the quieter ones could tell you about beekeeping, lavender-growing, Umbrian ornithology, and so on. Dom Perignon was a monk, after all. You might have been hoping for a broader social mix, but if it ‘has been arranged,’ then the saints would keep you going for longer than you might expect.”

__________

From Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes.

I stayed up most of last night reading Barnes’s highly anticipated new work Levels of Life. It’s one of the most refined, and probably the most heartbreaking book I’ve ever read. The last third is an extended essay on loss and bereavement — a meditation so heavy that the only thing keeping you from collapsing under its emotional weight is the lucidity and beauty with which it’s crafted. Barnes is an absolutely masterful writer. For my money, Ian McEwan is the only living author who can write such intricate prose.

Pick up a copy of Levels of Life.

Read other parts of Nothing:

Julian Barnes

Identity is Memory

Julian Barnes

Because the Universe is Happening to You

Julian Barnes

Mere Human Love

Julian Barnes

Nothing to Be Frightened Of

Saint JeromeBarnes on Belief and Doubt in Religious Art

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