What once was a popular art is now unsustainable without institutional subsidy

An interesting biographical, Clive James’ Last Act by John Broening.

I first came across Clive James sometime in the early 1980s and quite enjoyed his autobiography Unreliable Memoirs which chronicled his journey from WWII, lower middle class, culturally circumscribed Australia, to a much wider world, a journey further elaborated in the second in the autobiographical series, Falling Towards England.

I enjoyed the verve and out of the mainstream insights of those first two books. I enjoyed them so much that I have continued occasionally acquiring books by James in subsequent years even though the others have gone sampled but largely unread. James has always impressed me as being highly intelligent, immensely well-read, impressively versed in the technical minutiae of literature and particularly poetry. But that wasn't all. In the later books there was neediness and insecurity and crassness and all sorts of other intimations. Not enough to quit hoping of finding writing akin to the first two books but too much to invest time reading the newer books.

Broening captures much of my view in his review of James's life and works. I liked this passage.

The lifetime close study of poetry leads James to a wealth of intimate insights. Rereading Frost, he discovers something he hadn’t noticed before:

Then I pick him up again and find that his easy-seeming, usually iambic, conversational forward flow is a deception, a way of not just bringing show-stopping moments to your attention but of moving them past your attention, so that you will form the correct impression that he has wealth to spare and does not want the show stopped for such a secondary consideration as brilliance.

Poetry has of late become like jazz; what once was a popular art is now unsustainable without institutional subsidy; and as the audience for it has disappeared, or rather deserted it for hip-hop, the number of professionally-trained practitioners has paradoxically increased. Like jazz, one of the reasons poetry appeals to initiates is because of its difficulty. James himself is a workmanlike poet rather than a brilliant one, a diligent versifier, really, but he has tried and failed at it enough that he understands what those difficulties are.

I like that line by Broening - "What once was a popular art is now unsustainable without institutional subsidy."

Not just jazz. Painting, most other genre's of music, poetry, literature. Whole swaths of what should be the crowning glories of culture are no longer commercially viable in a way they once were. In some fields, it is just a change and we'll come through the winnowing stronger. For example, after a couple of decades seeing the traditional vinyl era of commercial music disappearing, the new model, radically different, is commercial viability through performance rather than sale of discs. One can argue and complain of the relative merits of either business model, but there is at least a viable model.

Poetry - no. Gone. Not the writing of poetry which is, in some ways, too much with us. A vomiting forth of lines with no eyes to read them or ears willing to listen. Too much supply and too little demand. Sometimes poetry feels like the canary in the coal mine, signalling to the other muses of literature and painting what might be in store for them as well.

My most recent disappointing acquisition was Cultural Amnesia about which Broening has to say:

James’ magnum opus, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from the Arts is an incoherent failure, perhaps because its stated aim, to showcase the culture of liberal democracy, is at odds with it true aim-to exist as a monument to its creator. Cultural Amnesia rigorous organization – it is alphabetized by subject and each entry has a capsule biography of its subject and two quotations – highlights rather than camouflages James’s intellectual disarray, his inability to engage in systematic thought. Cultural Amnesia also draws attention to James’s weaknesses as writer, which have become more pronounced over the years: his tendency to drag in off-topic personal information and to make himself the center of an essay no matter what the given assignment; his inclination to hold forth on a huge range of issues and subjects, whether or not he has anything of interest to say; his atrocity-mongering (as Tibor Fischer said about Martin Amis, James is ‘constantly on the prowl for gravitas-enlargement offers'); his fanboy’s fascination with the particulars of show business; his knack for making a showy display of simple common sense.

Another good line from Broening is this

A common theme of James’ excellent literary criticism, in his writings on Yeats, Shaw, Solzhenitsyn, Auden and others is that it is futile to wish away the follies and blindnesses of great artists, because those failings come from the same place as the art and accomplishments we cherish.

Indeed. It is always a tricky proposition when we are invited to condemn some reasoning, behavior or set of actions of an artist (or anyone of achievement). In some regards, it sounds like the right thing to do. They said something unforgivably bad, they behaved cruelly, they held beliefs widely divergent from our own - You are encouraged to show you are not tarred with the same brush of bad thoughts by disavowing them. But the thing of beauty is its own piece. It has no antecedents else we banish all beauty from the world. Vespasian's maxim, pecunia non olet, holds as true now as in the first century AD. The moral stewards of right thinking are merely the most recent manifestations of the barbarism that always threatens civilization and things of beauty.