James Joyce & Doris Day
Fame in the 20th Century.
by Clive James.
Random House. 256 pp. $27.00.
It is inconceivable that the eight-hour BBC series, Clive James’s Fame in the 20th Century, first broadcast in this country last June on PBS and repeated a number of times since, would have been aired by a commercial TV network. ABC, CBS, and NBC long ago shelved most traditional documentaries in favor of “newsmagazine” shows like 60 Minutes. There are those who point to this fact as further proof of the total depravity of the commercial networks, just as there are those who believe everything they see on PBS, especially the documentaries that invariably win basketsful of awards yet attract only minuscule audiences more interested in PC than TV. Though Fame in the 20th Century is not quite like that, it is close enough to remind the viewer of how the world looks through the taxpayer-subsidized cameras of the Public Broadcasting System.
A greatly expanded version of the script of Fame in the 20th Century is now available in book form. Clive James, the author, is a journalist of a sort unknown in this country: an intellectual and writer (mainly of light verse, failed novels, TV reviews, and, from time to time, serious literary criticism) who moonlights as the host of popular BBC shows, among them The Clive James Great American Beauty Pageant and Clive James Finally Meets Frank Sinatra. The premise of his latest undertaking is that “20th-century fame” is an insidious American invention which is slowly strangling the rest of the world.
In his introduction, James advances the absurd claim that both book and script are actually an interpretation of “the big story of modern times—the long conflict between democracy and totalitarianism.” In fact, they are hardly more than a collection of one-liners about “the 250 20th-century people who were genuinely, undeniably world-famous.” One need say no more about this list than that it includes Michael Jackson but not Harry Truman. As for the one-liners, some are clever (“Doris Day was energetic and sexless, a deadly combination which left a man nothing to do except contemplate marriage—usually the one he already had”), some trite (“Billy Graham himself was more like a rock star than like Christ, who never rented a stadium or held a press conference”), a few breath-takingly vulgar (“Home movies shot at Hitler’s hidey-hole in Bavaria suggested that Adolf and Eva were a great screwball comedy team in the making”).
James’s politics are by no means of the usual knee-jerk variety—he can be contemptuous of a socialist hero like George Bernard Shaw and respectful of a conservative like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—but they are nevertheless generally predictable. His main political stock in trade seems to be the familiar resentment of American power and influence that one has learned to expect from British journalists (though James is a transplanted Australian), and it is no fresher for having been smeared over the glossy pages of a coffee-table book.
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But, of course, Fame in the 20th Century is nothing more than a companion volume to the TV series, in which James’s one-liners take a distant back seat to the hundreds of tantalizingly rare film clips (of, among many others, George Gershwin, James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling, Isadora Duncan, Henry Ford, and Mahatma Gandhi) compiled by BBC archivists. Like all TV documentaries, Clive James’s Fame in the 20th Century is ultimately about pictures, not words. This is nowhere more true than in the lengthy sequence about Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
On the soundtrack as in the book, James does his best to belittle these “two stars . . . , bathing in each other’s glow.” Reagan, says James, “was all fame and nothing else,” while “no parody by others could match [Thatcher’s] supremely confident self-parody of vim, decisiveness, and bustle.” But the viewer sees only footage of two strong, self-assured leaders, an unintentionally vivid evocation of the not-so-distant time when they shared the helm of the free world.
Such is the nature—and power—of television. Cynics claim that TV is incapable of penetrating the mirrored surface of fame to show the hard substratum of character. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher knew better. So did the English and American citizenries, who believed what they saw on TV (rather than what they were told they were seeing), and voted accordingly. And so, unexpectedly, does Clive James himself, whose last words about Reagan and Thatcher begin with a dubious proposition and end with an insight:
Yet although neither Margaret Thatcher nor Ronald Reagan would ever have been elected if socialist ideology had not first collapsed, both of them had the essential political gift of attracting loyalty from people cleverer than they were. Finally leadership, in any democracy, is a matter of character—a fact few intellectuals find palatable.
And, one might add, even fewer TV hosts.
