The mysterious causes Clive James' illegibility

I told von Kottwitz that I could not read Clive James, that he bored me. He wrote back saying that it was my dislike for things Anglo-Saxon which made it so. Fascinated by the hypothesis, I wrote to von Kottwitz:

I must forgive you if you do not find the topic fascinating and beg your forgiveness in turn if I continue to bore you with it; the matter won’t let me rest; hence I harry you; but whom else can one harry with this sort of drivel but his forgiving and ever-long-suffering friends? Do bear with me; and help me if you can.

It’s the Clive James business. (But even more so, your diagnosis of my trouble with it).

Overall, I have found the book impenetrable: quite literally, a thicket of words in which I got stuck, unable to keep my dazed and wondering eye on the page; half the words which I managed to read, I did not seem to understand the point of! What you said about it – that it had something to do with my disapproval of Anglo-Saxons – struck me powerfully because I was reminded of all the essays in the New Yorker – and on the Valve, and on a friend’s website –which had the same effect on me: the deadly combination of bafflement and boredom, not unlike what some may feel while reading the Introduction to Inorganic Chemistry.

I was also reminded of my advanced degree history teacher at U of M who lambasted my style of writing: one simply does not write like this, he said firmly, causing me to drop the course and flee all the way to Taiwan in panic (what on earth did I hope to learn from him?). I did not understand him then – except that he seemed to object to my tone (which was one of lively polemic, I thought) – but perhaps he meant that I should write more like Clive James? Is there a secret Anglo-Saxon style-book of whose existence I am not aware but which all wishing to be featured in the New Yorker are obliged to use? If so, why do you not write to it? Is your prose somehow un-Anglo-Saxon-like in its pleasing legibility?

The other half of the words in the book – the ones which I have managed to read and understand – seemed to me to make points so infinitesimally pithy, so remarkably unremarkable, such plain small grey mice of thoughts, that I just cannot get it through my head that anyone would spend anytime of his life thinking them, let alone three years writing them. (Three years!)

Which brings me to my real worry here: do I lack in education? I remember being bored by Sontag’s Notes on Camp, but their foreignness is understandable, she was writing about a New York fashion in the 60s or 70s (I guess); I didn’t know any of the names she named in that essay and I was not going to set out on a crash course of learning them just to understand what seemed to me a historical phenomenon of passing relevance; but I know this stuff: Mann, Milosz, Mandelstam – these are my people (for better or for worse) in a way in which, say, Normal Mailer or Rothko are not. So why do Clive’s observations about them seem to me – well – so profoundly indifferent? Are you saying that there is a special Anglo-Saxon way of seeing the world, a kind of color lens, having something to do with Normal Mailer and Rothko perhaps, viewed through which my part of the world looks – well – incomprehensibly dull? And is this only something one acquires through advanced degrees (since only those with advanced degrees seem to write this way, the rest resting content with Strunk and White)?