THE MORONIC INFERNO and Other Visits to America by the Same Author
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THE MORONIC INFERNO And Other Visits to America by the same author THE RACHEL PAPERS DEAD BABIES SUCCESS OTHER PEOPLE: A MYSTERY STORY MONEY journalism INVASION OF THE SPACE INVADERS THE MORONIC INFERNO And Other Visits to America MARTIN AMIS VIKING VIKING Viking Penguin Inc. 40 West 23rd Street New York, New York 10010, U.S.A. First American Edition Published in 1987 Copyright© Martin Amis, 1986 All rights reserved The essays in this collection first appeared, some in different form, in the London Review of Books, The Observer, The Tatler, New Statesman, Vanity Fair, and Sunday Telegraph. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA Amis, Martin. The moronic inferno. 1. United States-Social life and customs- 1971- . I. Title. E169.02.A663 1987 973.92 86-40229 ISBN 0-670-81432-6 Printed in the United States of America by R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company, Harrisonburg, Virginia Set in Sabon To Christopher, Eleni and Alexander Contents Introduction and Acknowledgments IX Saul Bellow and the Moronic Inferno I The Killings in Atlanta I 2 The Case of Claus von Bulow 22 Truman Capote: Knowing Everybody 33 Philip Roth: No Satisfaction 42 Elvis Presley: He Did It His Way 50 Diana Trilling at Claremont Avenue 53 Norman Mailer: The Avenger and the Bitch 57 Palm Beach: Don't You Love It? 74 Brian De Palma: The Movie Brute 79 Here's Ronnie: On the Road with Reagan 89 Mr Vidal: Unpatriotic Gore 97 Too Much Monkey Business: The New Evangelical Right I09 Vidal v. Falwell I 20 Joseph Heller, Giantslayer I 2 5 Newspeak at Vanity Fair I29 Kurt Vonnegut: After the Slaughterhouse I32 Gloria Steinem and the Feminist Utopia I 3 8 William Burroughs: The Bad Bits 144 Steven Spielberg: Boyish Wonder I47 John Updike: Rabbitland and Bechville I55 Joan Didion's Style I6o In Hefnerland I7 0 Paul Theroux's Enthusiasms Gay Talese: Sex-Affirmative Double jeopardy: Making Sense of 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 instal ments. Of the hundreds of thousands of words I seem to have written for newspapers and magazines in the last fifteen years,ab out 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 I 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 assign ment. 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 ix brtroduction and Acknowledgments 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 firstpl ace. 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 live liness, dissimulated exhaustion - you keep on having to do it when you don't feel like it. (Perhaps this bond accounts for the hypocriti cal 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 particularclient. 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 8o per cent of the whole.) The novelist has a very firmconception 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 he 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, X Introduction and Acknowledgments 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 phrase 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 exception ally 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 Cloe Peploe. XI THE MORONIC INFERNO And Other Visits to America The Moronic Inferno Iggy Blaikie, Kayo Obermark, Sam Zincowicz, Kotzie Kreindl, Clara Spohr, Teodoro Valdepenas, Clem Tambow, Rinaldo Can tabile, 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 frea kish 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 Metfield, 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 plentyof 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 I The Moronic Inferno country of origin, and one can see why.