While the titles might recall a first-semester college course, the conversation is so quick-witted and entertaining that any thought of sterile lecture halls and dumfounding exam questions is quickly banished. Both men speak at breakneck speed without overwhelming the listener, despite frequent allusions, quotations from the Greek, references to obscure Spanish philologists, and so on. This is how literature ought to be discussed and rarely is - with precision and sophistication, but without fear of the personal, even adulatory, note.
"Camus to me was such a figure," Mr. James gushes at one point, recalling his own student days in Sydney. "He had glamor and he knew it. He wore a Humphrey Bogart coat and knew it was a Humphrey Bogart coat. He had a Gaulois glued to his lower lip. He died romantically in a car crash. When I was reading him, I planned to die romantically in a car crash." Characteristically, this moment of unabashed fandom occurs within the serious context of a discussion of totalitarianism, a topic by which Mr. James has long been obsessed. The epigraph to his definitive collection of essays, "As of This Writing," comes from the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut: "Barbarism is not the prehistory of humanity but the faithful shadow that accompanies its every step."
What really excites Mr. James about Camus is not that trench coat and dangling cigarette but the fact that, unlike his erstwhile comrade, Jean-Paul Sartre, he exhibited a genuine "touch of heroism," both in resisting the Nazi occupation of France and in dissenting from Sartre's Stalinist line on the Soviet Union. There's also some good gossip. Camus, we are told, found out what was really going on in the USSR through the novel means of sleeping with Arthur Koestler's wife, who knew all about it and told him (one would like to think) during their Gaulois-infused postcoital pillow talk.
Interfacing With Clive James
A Chat with the Webmaster
BY BRENDAN BERNHARD
The New York Sun
January 18, 2006
http://www.nysun.com/pf.php?id=26028&v=6395626711
