The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE MORONIC INFERNO

  Martin Amis was born in Oxford on 15 August 1949. He was educated in Britain, Spain and the USA, attending over thirteen schools and then a series of crammers in London and Brighton. He gained a formal First in English at Exeter College, Oxford. He has been an editorial assistant on The Times Literary Supplement and was Literary Editor of the New Statesman from 1977 until 1979. He then worked as a Special Writer on the Observer and now contributes regularly to the Independent on Sunday. He is also the author of Einstein's Monsters, a collection of stories about the nuclear age, and his novels are The Rachel Papers, which won the 1974 Somerset Maugham Award, Dead Babies, Success, Other People: A Mystery Story, Money, London Fields and Time's Arrow.

  His novels have won widespread acclaim: writing about Success, Blake Morrison in The Times Literary Supplement said, 'The narrative economy and manipulation of sympathy make this Martin Amis's most assured work so far. The presentation of city life in its sadness is forceful in itself, but what is especially impressive is that all the detail counts in the overall design'; J. G. Ballard called Other People 'Powerful and obsessive ... a metaphysical thriller. Kafka reshot in the style of Psycho', and the Sunday Times thought it 'dazzling . . . obligatory reading'. Reviewing Einstein's Monsters in the London Evening Standard, John Walsh wrote, 'The writing remains as vivid as ever, full of risky, throw-away conceits and perfectly cadenced terms of description.' London Fields was praised in the Sunday Telegraph as 'The most ambitious Amis to date, the most compassionate, and the most chilling . . . [his] voice has been the most original and distinctive of British fiction writers in the 1980s' while the Guardian wrote of Time's Arrow. 'Amis's profound book adds a new and terrifying dimension to the Shakespearean tragic conception of time being "out of joint".’

  MARTIN AMIS

  The Moronic Inferno

  and Other Visits to America

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Copyright © Martin Amis, 1986

  To Christopher, Eleni and Alexander

  Introduction and Acknowledgments

  The Moronic Inferno

  The Killings in Atlanta

  Truman Capote: Knowing Everybody

  Philip Roth: No Satisfaction

  Elvis: He Did It His Way

  Diana Trilling at Claremont Avenue

  Mailer: The Avenger and the Bitch

  Palm Beach: Don't You Love It?

  Brian De Palma: The Movie Brute

  Here's Ronnie: On the Road with Reagan

  Mr Vidal: Unpatriotic Gore

  Too Much Monkey Business: The New Evangelical Right

  Vidal v. Falwell

  Joseph Heller, Giantslayer

  Newspeak at Vanity Fair

  Kurt Vonnegut: After the Slaughterhouse

  Gloria Steinem and the Feminist Utopia

  William Burroughs: The Bad Bits

  Steven Spielberg: Boyish Wonder

  John Updike: Rabbitland and Bechville

  Joan Didion's Style

  In Hefnerland

  Paul Theroux's Enthusiasms

  Gay Talese: Sex-Affirmative

  Double Jeopardy: Making Sense or aids

  Saul Bellow in Chicago

  Introduction and Acknowledgments

  On a couple of occasions I have been asked to write a book about America; and I must have spent at least four or five minutes contemplating this monstrous enterprise. America is more like a world than a country: you could as well write a book about people, or about life. Then, years later, as I was up-ending my desk drawers to prepare a selection of occasional journalism (and this book is offered with all generic humility), I found that I had already written a book about America — unpremeditated, accidental, and in instalments. Of the hundreds of thousands of words I seem to have written for newspapers and magazines in the last fifteen years, about half of them seem to be about America. I hope these disparate pieces add up to something. I know you can approach America only if you come at her from at least a dozen different directions.

  The academic year 1959—60 I spent as a ten-year-old resident of Princeton, New Jersey. I was the only boy in the school — the only male in the entire city - who wore shorts. Soon 1 had long trousers, a crew cut, and a bike with fat whitewalls and an electric horn. I ate Thanksgiving turkey. I wore a horrible mask on Hallowe'en. America excited and frightened me, and has continued to do so. Since that time I have spent at least another year there, on assignment. My mother lived in America for years, and many of my expatriate friends live in America now. My wife is American. Our infant son is half-American. I feel fractionally American myself.

  Oh, no doubt I should have worked harder, made the book more representative, more systematic, et cetera. It remains, however, a collection of peripatetic journalism, and includes pieces where the travel is only mental. I have added links and postscripts; I have wedged pieces together; I have rewritten bits that were too obviously wrong, careless or bad. I should have worked harder, but it was quite hard work getting all this stuff together (photocopying back numbers of journals can be a real struggle, what with the weight of the bound volumes and that Xerox flap tangling you up and getting in the way). And it was hard work writing it all in the first place. Journalists have two ways of expending energy: in preparation and in performance. Some exhaust themselves in securing the right contacts, the intimate audits, the disclosures. I am no good at any of that. I skimp it, and so everything has to happen on the typewriter. I find journalism only marginally easier than fiction, and book-reviewing slightly harder. The thousand-word book review seems to me far more clearly an art form (however minor) than any of the excursions of the New Journalism, some of which are as long as Middlemarch.

  All these pieces were written left-handed. They were written, that is to say, not for my own satisfaction but for particular editors of particular journals at particular times and at particular lengths. The hack and the whore have much in common: late nights, venal gregariousness, social drinking, a desire to please, simulated liveliness, dissimulated exhaustion — you keep on having to do it when you don't feel like it. (Perhaps this bond accounts for the hypocritical burnish of the vice-entrapment story, where in the end the reporter always makes his excuses and staggers off nobly into the night.) Insidious but necessary is the whorish knack a journalist must develop of suiting his pitch to the particular client. Luckily it all seems to be done subliminally. You write like this for the London Review of Books, and you write like that for the Sunday Telegraph Magazine. You can swear here but you can't swear there. (I have greatly enjoyed debowdlerising these pieces — and restoring cuts, some of which, as in the Brian De Palma profile, approached about 80 per cent of the whole.) The novelist has a very firm conception of the Ideal Reader. It is himself, though strangely altered — older, perhaps, or younger. With journalism the entire transaction is much woollier: every stage in the experience seems to involve a lot of people.

  I got the phrase 'the moronic inferno', and much else, from Saul Bellow, who informs me that be got it from Wyndham Lewis. Needless to say, the moronic inferno is not a peculiarly American condition. It is global and perhaps eternal. It is also, of course, primarily a metaphor, a metaphor for human infamy: mass, gross, ever-distracting human infamy. One of the many things I do not understand about Americans is this: what is it like to be a citizen of a superpower, to maintain democratically the means of planetary extinction? I wonder how this contributes to the dreamlife of America, a dreamlife that is so deep and troubled. As I was collating The Moronic Inferno (in August 1985, during the Hiroshima remembrances), I was struck by a disquieting thought. Perhaps the title phras
e is more resonant, and more prescient, than I imagined. It exactly describes a possible future, one in which the moronic inferno will cease to be a metaphor and will become a reality: the only reality.

  I am particularly grateful to The Observer, under whose auspices, in effect, this book was written; I am also indebted to the New Statesman, the Sunday Telegraph Magazine, the London Review of Books, Tatler and Vanity Fair. Throughout I have been exceptionally lucky in my editors and colleagues, and here salute them, in roughly chronological order: Terence Kilmartin, Arthur Crook, John Gross, Claire Tomalin, Anthony Howard, Julian Barnes, Deirdre Lyndon, Donald Trelford, Miriam Gross, Trevor Grove, Karl Miller and Tina Brown. Special thanks are due also to Ian Hamilton and to Clöe Peploe.

  The Moronic Inferno

  Iggy Blaikie, Kayo Obermark, Sam Zincowicz, Kotzie Kreindl, Clara Spohr, Teodoro Valdepenas, Clem Tambow, Rinaldo Can-labile, Tennie Pontritter, Lucas Asphalter, Murphy Verviger, Wharton Horricker ... The way a writer names his characters provides a good index to the way he sees the world — to his reality-level, his responsiveness to the accidental humour and freakish poetry of life. Thomas Pynchon uses names like Oedipa Maas and Pig Bodine (where the effect is slangy, jivey, cartoonish); at the other end of the scale, John Braine offers us Tom Metfíeld, Jack Royston, Jane Framsby (can these people really exist, in our minds or anywhere else, with such leadenly humdrum, such dead names?). Saul Bellow's inventions are Dickensian in their resonance and relish. But they also have a dialectical point to make.

  British critics tend to regard the American predilection for Big Novels as a vulgar neurosis — like the American predilection for big cars or big hamburgers. Oh God, we think: here comes another sweating, free-dreaming maniac with another thousand-pager; here comes another Big Mac. First, Dos Passos produced the Great American Novel; now they all want one. Yet in a sense every ambitious American novelist is genuinely trying to write a novel called USA. Perhaps this isn't just a foible; perhaps it is an inescapable response to America - twentieth-century America, racially mixed and mobile, twenty-four hour, endless, extreme, superabundantly various. American novels are big all right, but partly because America is big too.

  You need plenty of nerve, ink and energy to do justice to the place, and no one has made greater efforts than Saul Bellow. His latest novel, The Dean's December, has caused some puzzlement in its country of origin, and one can see why. Far more sombre and less exuberant than its major predecessors, it has every appearance of being an 'engaged' novel, a mature novel, a statement, a warning; Bellow himself has gone on record, perhaps incautiously, as stressing the difficulty people will have in 'shrugging this one off. In 1976 Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, praised by the Swedes 'for human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture'. T.S. Eliot said that the Nobel was like an invitation to one's own funeral: no beneficiary of the prize had ever gone on to write anything good, ft may be coincidence (as opposed to an onset of Delphic delusion), but Bellow's first post-Nobel novel transmits all the strenuousness of a juggernaut changing gear. The vision has widened but also become narrower; most noticeably, the fluid musicality of Bellow's epics — the laughter, the didactic generosity, the beguiling switches of register — has disciplined itself, in the interests of literary form. This, it seems to me, is what Late Bellow is going to be like. It is all very interesting.

  If we take an introductory glance through the dramatis personae of the new book, we see the usual rhythmical clinches but also sense that Bellow is playing in a minor key, and using the mute. There are various judges, shysters and ambulance-chasers with names like Ellis Sorokin, Wolf Quitman and Maxie Detillion (these hardly rival the three divorce lawyers in Humboldt's Gift, who are called Tomchek, Pinsker and Srole); there is a rock-hard black whore called Riggie Hines, and a suave black rapist called Spofford Mitchell; there is an ageing athlete called Silky Limpopo, a prison-reformer called Rufus Ridpath, a world-famous journalist called Dewey Spangler... That last name looks a bit artful and specific for a Bellow character, and perhaps this provides a more general clue to the novel's intentions. A pivotal figure in the book, Dewey Spangler is somewhere between Walter Lippmann and Andre Malraux, a flashy trader in geopolitical generalities and global diagnoses. 'Dewey', of course, is America's great philosopher, its star-spangled thinker; and 'Spangler', I suspect, has something to do with the decline of the West.

  The Dean's December is spent in Bucharest, 6,ooo miles from home. The Dean is Albert Corde, ex-journalist, ex-womaniser, ex-trivialiser (he is also a Gentile — surprising for such an obvious and detailed Bellow surrogate). Home is Chicago. The year is uncertain: there are mentions of Carter, Margaret Thatcher, but also of Entebbe, Cambodia. The Dean has come to Bucharest with his Rumanian wife Minna, a distinguished astronomer. Minna's mother Valeria is dying. 'Corde had come to give support.' He is consciously testing his reserves as a good husband, exhaustively considerate and correct. He is a reformed character, proving his seriousness. In a way, this is what the novel is doing too. It is a necessary connection. 'I was then becoming careless about time,' says Charlie Citrine in Humboldt's Gift, 'a symptom of my increasing absorption in larger issues.' Such a crack would be unthinkable in The Dean's December. There has been a moral tightening. No more gadabouts like the unpunctual Citrine. You have to get life right before you start going on about its meaning.

  Old Valeria, one-time Minister of Health, is in an ambiguous position vis-à-vis the Party, and Minna herself is a defector. The powers that be being what they are, Mr and Mrs Corde are given a hard time as they brace themselves for their bereavement. And 'the city was terrible!' says Corde, helplessly, in a bracketed aside. 'Aged women rose at four to stand in line for a few eggs'; the queues have 'an atmosphere of compulsory exercise in the prison yard'. But this is not crudely emphasised. Bucharest is summoned in terms of peeling stucco, bad food and bad light. 'Air-sadness, Corde called this. In the final stages of dusk, a brown sediment seemed to encircle the lamps. Then there was a livid death moment. Night began. Night was very difficult here, thought Albert Corde.’

  There is not much Corde can do in Bucharest. He attends to his wife's grief, and to the stiff cousins who glide in their bad clothes through the antique apartment. He sits in his wife's childhood room. He goes to bed after breakfast. 'As he did this, he sometimes felt how long he had lived and how many, many times the naked creature had crept into its bedding.' For the Bellow hero, however, solitude always opens the way to the gregariousness of memory — to the inner riot of the past. In Herzog, Herzog relives a marriage while putting on his tie. In Humboldt, Citrine reviews a literary career while meditating on his sofa. Albert Corde has his own 'restless ecstasy' to contend with: but the Dean's December, like The Dean's December, is caught up in more public matters.

  Corde's troubles emerge slowly, piecemeal. Humboldt's Citrine came out of his Chicago apartment block one morning to find that his Mercedes had been beaten up with baseball bats: 'Now the moronic inferno had caught up with me.' The phrase recurs here:

  but this time we are closer in, much nearer the first circle. As college dean, Corde is involved in an investigation into the murder of one of his students. It happened during a torrid Chicago night: 'one of those choking, peak-of-summer, urban-nightmare, sexual and obscene, running-bare times, and death panting behind the young man, closing in'. On the night of his murder, the student 'had been out for dirty sex, and it was this dirty sex momentum that had carried him through the window'.

  The Dean's involvement with the moronic inferno has another dimension. Recently Corde published two long articles in Harper's — articles about Chicago, 'the contempt centre of the USA'. (One reflects that Bellow has been very lucky with his home town: a great city, vast, bloody, hugely mercantile, and not trodden flat by writers.) In these pieces Corde submitted to an atrocious anger: 'he gave up his cover, ran out, swung wild at everyone'. The articles examine Chicago's 'underclass', the disposable populations of the criminal poor. Born
into slums, jails and hospitals, the Morlock sub-race is permitted — even expected — to destroy itself with violence, lead-poisoning and junk. In Bucharest, with its 'strict zero-blue and simple ice', 'the trees made their tree gestures, but human beings were faced by the organised prevention of everything that came natural'. Chicago is repeatedly described as a jungle populated exclusively by rats. In Bucharest, the city rodents have been 'rolled flat by trucks and cars'; they are 'as two-dimensional as weather vanes', just like everything else. In Bucharest, a communist dog barks in the street, 'a protest against the limits of dog experience (for God's sake, open the universe a little more!)'. In Chicago, a capitalist Great Danç wallows at his own birthday party, showered with 'ribboned presents' and 'congratulatory telegrams': 'the animal came nudging and sighing. What to do with all this animal nature, seemed to be the burden of the dog's groans.’

  The Rumanian ordeal continues. During the frigid Christmas, Corde and Minna preside over Valeria's obsequies. Tottering relatives in fake fur coats join the Cordes at the suburban crematorium. Feeling himself 'crawling between heaven and earth', Corde descends from the fiery crematorium into the deep-frozen crypt, 'the extremes of heat and cold splitting him like an ax'. It is a memorable scene, conspicuously intense, the emotional crisis of the book. And here, the slowly solidifying 'thesis novel' - so carefully and subtly arrived at - is abandoned, rejected, put aside. The Dean's December ceases its inspection of East and West, the vying perversions of humanity, and goes on to bigger things.

  The heroes of Saul Bellow's major novels are intellectuals; they are also (if you follow me) heroes, which makes Bellow doubly remarkable. In thumbnail terms, the original protagonists of literature were gods; later, they were demigods; later still, they were kings, generals, fabulous lovers, at once superhuman, human and all too human; eventually they turned into ordinary people. The twentieth century has been called an ironic age, as opposed to a heroic, tragic or romantic one; even realism, rock-bottom realism, is felt to be a bit grand for the twentieth century. Nowadays, our protagonists are a good deal lower down the human scale than their creators: they are anti-heroes, non-heroes, sub-heroes.