I like the guy. He hates Sartre even more than I do.
He just misquoted Auden, saying "art makes nothing happen" [Auden actually wrote "poetry makes nothing happen" here], and James seems content to note that quoting poetry does not stop the tank from rolling over you.
James is here positing a radical dissociation between art and the material world. He reinforces this point when he quotes Theodor Adorno to the effect that after Auschwitz there was no possibility of lyric poetry, then notes out that obviously lyric poetry is being produced everywhere. He takes satisfaction in noting that Adorno's statement was so wrong it was "not even false."
Now, I myself have a strong aversion to Adorno and the whole Frankfurt School, although I respect the integrity of their effort to explain the incomprehensible horror of the Holocaust, but the link between art and existence Adorno intuited was not just a fantasy.
That is something Nelson Mandela affirmed when he wrote:
Poetry cannot block a bullet or still a sjambok, but it can bear witness to brutality -- thereby cultivating a flower in a graveyard.[here]
And here is where I lose patience with Clive James. He is far too dismissive in his judgments. I can sit and nod in agreement as he savages Sartre or Coltrane, but at the back of my mind a small voice is saying, "he's not really being fair..., there's more to it than that."
You can check out selections from James' latest book at Slate magazine here.
