AS OF THIS WRITING: The Essential Essays, 1968-2002, by Clive James. Norton, 619 pp. 

In the early 1990s, Clive James wrote and apeared in a television series (shown here on PBS) on the cultural history of fame in the 20th century. In consequence, he became what might be called a meta-celebrity, partaking of the fame that comes from well-informed proximity to the famous.

But such renown can have a curiously self-negating effect. For a long time, I was vaguely aware that there was someone out there named Clive James who possessed expert knowledge on the lifestyles of the rich and mediagenic. That seemed adequate grounds for ignoring him entirely.

As coincidence had it, there was an essayist, poet and novelist by the same name.

Realizing that they were, in fact, the same person was not a matter of sudden astonishment, but rather a fairly drawn-out experience, like solving a hard crossword puzzle. Some things intersect neatly. But there are spaces that remain blank. In a postscript to one of the critical pieces included in his new collection, James gripes about the state of contemporary cultural journalism: "There are people reviewing books, even reviewing poetry, who can read only with difficulty, and begrudge the effort." His theory? "[A]ll they really care about is the movies." A plausible diagnosis, but one that renders even more puzzling the question of how a man of letters learns to function on both sides of the TV screen.

As of This Writing is the single largest, and broadest, selection of James' essays. That they now appear between covers at all, much less en masse, is undoubtedly a benefit of meta-celebrity. ("You have to be somebody before you can publish a collection of essays," as a New York editor once explained to me in tones suitable for the instruction of small children.) But at the deeper levels of its coherence, the book owes nothing to "the media," which term always implies speed, commercials and a severely curtailed attention span. As a critic and cultural commentator, James writes in an old-fashioned mode--with a consciousness of the essay as a literary form with a history, even when the piece in question begins life (as most in this volume did) as an article for a newspaper or magazine.

The energy of such writing comes from its paradoxical status. "[C]ontributing to a periodical designed to be thrown away," he writes, "the essayist composed his piece as if it were meant to be kept. There was always the chance that he might be the only one to keep it, but if he failed in his aim of bringing permanence to ephemerality, he could always congratulate himself on having respected his disrespectable work by devoting his best efforts to it."

While James is Australian, the tradition he invokes is British; its development over two centuries was chronicled by John J. Gross in his book The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969). The critical pieces on George Orwell and Kenneth Tynan are, in part, repayments of debt to that heritage. What comes as a real surprise is to find passages in which James acknowledges his debt to figures such as James Agee, Randall Jarrell and Dwight Macdonald -- "the long list of modern American critical journalists ... whose colloquial verve gave me support for writing about serious art in a conversational manner, and about unserious art as if it counted."

His gift as a critic is neither for grand revaluations of literary eras or careers, nor for building the theoretical architecture that scholars so admire. If anything, he has a positive aversion to academic critics, unlike most readers (who simply ignore them.) But he does have a knack for apt characterization, which often takes the form of the one-liner. "As a work of art," he writes about a novel by Judith Krantz, "it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks...."

On a somewhat higher cultural plane, he focuses on a passage from poet Theodore Roethke in which the borrowing from T.S. Eliot verges on felony: "There it stands, like a stolen car hastily resprayed and dangerously retaining its original number-plates."

Only occasionally does the wit seem forced -- the product of will, rather than of insight. At the same time, the quality of James' critical intelligence is so tightly linked to his conversational style (so distinct, that is, from the authoritative tone of the lecture or the seminar) that it seems on the verge of disappearing into thin air. That sounds like a complaint. But I'm not sure it's a bad thing; it might be necessary to the health of the cultural ecosphere. When "workaday" books are well-written, as James puts it, "a culture starts to pick up: The best of the spoken language is fed back into itself, by way of writers whose ear for speech informs the content of their prose, and whose mastery of composition makes them selective."

A couple of years ago, in the introduction to a smaller collection of James' pieces that appeared in England, Julian Barnes described his friend as "a passionate amateur, a full-time dilettante." In certain quarters, that phrase would be pronounced with a note of conspicuous disdain. With "amateur," and even more with "dilettante," there always seems to be a "mere" lodged somewhere between the lines.

But in the 18th century sense that Barnes had in mind, a dilettante was simply someone informed enough to take delight (dilettare, in Italian) from a wide range of the arts. That it has devolved into a term of abuse may be one of the more dubious side effects of the contemporary culture of expertise. An energetic mind and a deft way with the apothegm ought to be credentials enough for the essayist. Whether he applies them to the writings of Eugenio Montale or the bustier of Madonna is probably, in the end, a minor consideration.