{"id":4052,"date":"2017-06-05T09:03:57","date_gmt":"2017-06-05T16:03:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=4052"},"modified":"2017-06-05T09:03:57","modified_gmt":"2017-06-05T16:03:57","slug":"from-my-interview-archive-critics-clive-james-and-james-wood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=4052","title":{"rendered":"From my interview archive: critics Clive James and James Wood"},"content":{"rendered":"

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This year, I’m listening again\u00a0to\u00a0selections from the archive of long-form interviews I conducted on the public radio program\u00a0<\/em>The Marketplace of Ideas and podcast\u00a0<\/em>Notebook on Cities and Culture\u00a0between 2007 and 2015.<\/em><\/p>\n

Clive James called his first book\u00a0The Metropolitan Critic<\/em><\/a>, which\u00a0always struck me as a decent job title, if a vague one. But only a vague title could\u00a0capture the expansiveness of the man’s professional interests, which ranks high on the list of qualities I respect\u00a0about him. James’\u00a0bibliography includes not just criticism but cultural essays, fiction, poetry, “unreliable memoir,”\u00a0travel writing (to go along with his travel television<\/a>), and more recently a series of columns in the\u00a0Guardian<\/em>\u00a0called “Reports of My Death.”<\/a>\u00a0In that last, he writes on varying subjects in varying relation to one theme: his own passage from this mortal coil, which looked\u00a0imminent on his cancer diagnosis seven years ago but now, thanks to an “experimental drug,”<\/a>\u00a0seems, at least to his readers, to recede further back into improbability with each passing year.<\/p>\n

“I’m not terribly interested in originality,” James said once<\/a>, or probably more than once. “Vitality is all I care about.” Though an offhand remark in an interview rather than one of his\u00a0phrases wrought with famous care and delivered for laughs\u00a0(such as his immortal description of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a “brown condom stuffed with walnuts”), it’s stuck with me: the word\u00a0vitality<\/em> may well sum up much or all of what I seek out\u00a0in any given work myself. I suspect, though, that on average I go in for a more controlled, less exuberant variety of the stuff \u00a0than James does: I’ve never read or heard him express any enthusiasm for, say, J.M. Coetzee, though Coetzee did blurb James’ essay collection\u00a0Cultural Amnesia \u2014\u00a0<\/em>a favorite book of mine, and not just because it revealed our shared fascination with Chris Marker \u2014 as “a crash course in civilization,” I think approvingly.<\/p>\n

And of course I also admire the vitality of James himself, which now manifests as a faintly embarrassed but robust instinct for survival, but which has also driven him to write so prolifically over such a wide range of cultural territory, to learn French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Japanese, and to dance the tango now and again. It may have also played a part in the unsavory scandal that came to light in 2012, but you’ve got to take your yin with your yang. Not that I’d have suspected it in the least back when I interviewed him on\u00a0The Marketplace of Ideas<\/em> in 2009, ostensibly about his\u00a0then-new poetry collection\u00a0Opal Sunset<\/em> but really about all the things\u00a0I could possibly ask him about \u2014 and more to the point, all the things I could learn from him \u2014 in a mere hour.<\/p>\n

But not everyone I know, and that includes other writers whose work I enjoy, think James deserves the time of day as a critic. As near as I can tell, they\u00a0find him too frivolous, too unserious, too jokey, too concerned with his own writing style and too unconcerned with serious evaluative labor\u00a0\u2014 the same charges often leveled at film critic Anthony Lane, one of the\u00a0New Yorker<\/em> writers whose work I never, ever miss.\u00a0(When I heard another film critic I respect write\u00a0Lane off for having “no theory of cinema,” I realized that was one of the main reasons I do read him.) While I never did get the chance to interview Lane, and not for lack of un-replied-to e-mails to his employer, I did get to interview another of my personal\u00a0New Yorker<\/em> A-listers: literary critic and occasional novelist James Wood.<\/p>\n

“I sleep very poorly these days,” Wood wrote in a 2013 piece on his parents<\/a>. “I lie awake, full of apprehensions. All kinds of them, starting with the small stuff, and rising. How absurd that I should be paid to write book reviews! How long is that\u00a0<\/em>likely to last?” Indeed, both he and James bear the mark of another time, one in which critics enjoyed a higher cultural profile, or at least could engage with\u00a0a single book for three or four thousand words instead of having\u00a0to crank out image-intensive clickbait on the problematic casting choices of the latest superhero blockbuster franchise\u00a0at sixty bucks a pop. (Intriguingly, critics do seem to have retained their importance to the common reader and viewer, or more recently gained it, here in Korea, where they still go round and round the circuit of media and public appearances.)<\/p>\n

But then, I’ve never really longed to become a full-time critic: my interest lies in the essay form itself, and throughout their careers writers\u00a0like Wood, James, and in critic mode even\u00a0Coetzee, have done their part to maintain that form into the 21st century. You could even argue, as no less a desired but never landed interviewee as Paul Graham did in 2004<\/a>, that we’ve entered the Age of the Essay. Whatever their commercial viability, essays, critical and otherwise, have\u00a0an appealing potential not just as treatments of single subjects but nexuses of a variety subjects \u2014 as, in a different way, do interviews, at least when done right. Wood, and even more so the still-vigorous James, covered\u00a0a great deal of intellectual ground\u00a0during our conversations. “Thank you for reading my book,” said the latter after we finished recording, and I told him any interviewer would’ve done the same. His reply: “That’s the first naive thing you’ve said all hour.”<\/p>\n