Clive James: ‘America can’t do the bitchery of British book reviewing and literary commentary’

One of the reasons people hate me and my writing is that I brought myself up on Orwell, British humor mags and music reviews, and it shows.

They say “negative” like it’s a bad thing…

The polite bullshit that passes for “journalism” in North America is a foreign language to me.

(I was actually told to only write positive reviews for a major — and now-defunct [I assume] — major Canadian literary quarterly.)

Clive James writes:

Watching “High Noon” again the other day, I wondered how postwar British culture ever found the strength to continue breathing. America’s global economic clout can be belittled only if you believe that no American cultural product is any good. Since it is undeniable that the occasional American cultural product is marvelous, I was left looking for cultural things that the Americans couldn’t do. The only one I can think of is hostile literary criticism. (…)

…like the late Christopher Hitchens, she voiced her British acerbity in a polite context, and found, as he did, that the locals were wonderfully easy to stir up. (The British expression is “wind up”: rather more cruel, when you think about it, because it treats people as tin toys.)