This won't win us many friends in China
Rainy Day fans of Cultural Amnesia by Clive James can now look forward to three exclusive web films that he has made for the Times as part of a venture titled "Notes in the margin of my time". In the first one, he focuses on an unlikely trio: Coco Chanel, Albert Camus and Chairman Mao — "a despicable dictator who killed more people than Stalin and Hitler put together." The clip runs for 15 minutes and there's a great moment a third of the way in when he discusses materialism vs. spiritualism. In Stalin's evil empire people pined for "toilet paper that did not cut and scissors that did," says James wickedly, and adds: "No Soviet diplomat based abroad ever returned to his homeland without a few bottles of Chanel No. 5. So, Coco Chanel, who rolled over for the Nazis, played her part in discomfiting the next dictatorship that came along."
Between the fragrant collaborationist Chanel and the mass murderering Mao, stands the hero Camus. James invokes this Camus gem to make his essential points about Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro and the other monsters: "Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes." An immortal sentence, if ever there was one.
Comments
Thanks for the tip! I don't think I've been as engrossed in a work of non-fiction since I read Camille Paglia's "Sexual Personae."
Clive James has been wreaking havoc on my sleep patterns for the past few nights, since I keep reading well past my bedtime. "Oh, damn, it's 1 in the morning - but well, just one more essay. This next one, on Tony Curtis, isn't too long. Heck, what's Tony Curtis doing in this book anyway?" Then I want to go on to the next one,...,
His point about the tyrant's perogative to bore reminded me of an observation made by the humorist P.J. O'Rourke. O'Rourke visited Eastern Europe a few years before the Berlin Wall came down. He found the most salient feature of Communism wasn't fear (although the fear factor was not to be dismissed), but the dismal, relentless, mind-numbing dullness of it all. He compared it to being stuck in a dusty, dilapidated summer camp with awful beds, terrible food, and a million do's and don'ts and lectures and rule. You're in there for all eternity and you can't call your parents and beg them to come get you, because they're sleeping in the next bunk.
Posted by: Donna | May 23, 2007 3:11 AM