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THE MORONIC INFERNOAnd Other Visits to America

by the same authorTHE RACHEL PAPERSDEAD BABIESSUCCESSOTHER PEOPLE: A MYSTERY STORYMONEYjournalismINVASION OF THE SPACE INVADERS

THE MORONIC INFERNOAnd Other Visits to AmericaMARTIN AMISVIKING

VIKINGViking Penguin Inc.40 West 23rd StreetNew York, New York 10010, U.S.A.First American EditionPublished in 1987Copyright Martin Amis, 1986All rights reservedThe 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 DATAAmis, Martin.The moronic inferno.1. United States-Social life and customs. I. Title.1971E169.02.A663 198786-40229973.92ISBN 0-670-81432-6Printed in the United States of America byR. R. Donnelley & Sons Company, Harrisonburg, VirginiaSet in Sabon

To Christopher, Eleniand Alexander

ContentsIntroduction and AcknowledgmentsSaul Bellow and the Moronic InfernoThe Killings in AtlantaThe Case of Claus von BulowTruman Capote: Knowing EverybodyPhilip Roth: No SatisfactionElvis Presley: He Did It His WayDiana Trilling at Claremont AvenueNorman Mailer: The Avenger and the BitchPalm Beach: Don't You Love It?Brian De Palma: The Movie BruteHere's Ronnie: On the Road with ReaganMr Vidal: Unpatriotic GoreToo Much Monkey Business: The NewEvangelical RightVidal v. FalwellJoseph Heller, GiantslayerNewspeak at Vanity FairKurt Vonnegut: After the SlaughterhouseGloria Steinem and the Feminist UtopiaWilliam Burroughs: The Bad BitsSteven Spielberg: Boyish WonderJohn Updike: Rabbitland and BechvilleJoan Didion's StyleIn HefnerlandIXII222334250535774798997I09I20I 25I29I32I3 8144I47I55I6oI70

Paul Theroux's EnthusiasmsGay Talese: Sex-AffirmativeDouble jeopardy: Making Sense ofSaul Bellow in ChicagoAIDS

Introduction andAcknowledgmentsOn a couple of occasions I have been asked to write a book aboutAmerica; and I must have spent at least four or five minutescontemplating this monstrous enterprise. America is more like aworld 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 drawersto prepare a selection of occasional journalism (and this book isoffered with all generic humility), I found that I had already writtena book about America - unpremeditated, accidental, and in instal ments. Of the hundreds of thousands of words I seem to havewritten for newspapers and magazines in the last fifteen years, abouthalf of them seem to be about America. I hope these disparate piecesadd up to something. I know you can approach America only if youcome at her from at least a dozen different directions.The academic year 1 9 5 9-60 I spent as a ten-year-old resident ofPrinceton, New jersey. I was the only boy in the school - the onlymale 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 ateThanksgiving 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 myexpatriate friends live in America now. My wife is American. Ourinfant son is half-American. I feel fractionally American myself.Oh, no doubt I should have worked harder, made the book morerepresentative, more systematic, et cetera. It remains, however, acollection of peripatetic journalism, and includes pieces where thetravel is only mental. I have added links and postscripts ; I havewedged pieces together; I have rewritten bits that were too obviouslyix

brtroduction and Acknowledgmentswrong, careless or bad. I should have worked harder, but it wasquite hard work getting all this stuff together (photocopying backnumbers of journals can be a real struggle, what with the weight ofthe bound volumes and that Xerox flap tangling you up and gettingin the way) . And it was hard work writing it all in the first place.Journalists have two ways of expending energy: in preparation andin performance. Some exhaust themselves in securing the rightcontacts, the intimate audits, the disclosures. I am no good at any ofthat. I skimp it, and so everything has to happen on the typewriter. Ifind journalism only marginally easier than fiction, and book reviewing slightly harder. The thousand-word book review seems tome far more clearly an art form (however minor) than any of theexcursions of the New Journalism, some of which are as long asMiddlemarch.All these pieces were written left-handed. They were written, thatis to say, not for my own satisfaction but for particular editors ofparticular journals at particular times and at particular lengths. Thehack and the whore have much in common : late nights, venalgregariousness, social drinking, a desire to please, simulated live liness, dissimulated exhaustion - you keep on having to do it whenyou don't feel like it. (Perhaps this bond accounts for the hypocriti cal burnish of the vice-entrapment story, where in the end thereporter always makes his excuses and staggers off nobly into thenight. ) Insidious but necessary is the whorish knack a journalistmust develop of suiting his pitch to the particular client. Luckily it allseems to be done subliminally. You write like this for the LondonReview of Books, and you write like that for the Sunday TelegraphMagazine. You can swear here but you can't swear there. (I havegreatly enjoyed debowdlerising these pieces - and restoring cuts,some of which, as in the Brian De Palma profile, approached about8o per cent of the whole.) The novelist has a very firm conception ofthe Ideal Reader. It is himself, though strangely altered - older,perhaps, or younger. With journalism the entire transaction is muchwoollier: every stage in the experience seems to involve a lot ofpeople.I got the phrase 'the moronic inferno', and much else, from SaulBellow, who informs me that he got it from Wyndham Lewis.Needless to say, the moronic inferno is not a peculiarly Americancondition. It is global and perhaps eternal. It is also, of course,primarily a metaphor, a metaphor for human infamy: mass, gross,X

Introduction and Acknowledgmentsever-distracting human infamy. One of the many things I do notunderstand about Americans is this : what is it like to be a citizen of asuperpower, to maintain democratically the means of planetaryextinction ? I wonder how this contributes to the dreamlife ofAmerica, a dreamlife that is so deep and troubled. As I was collatingThe Moronic Inferno (in August 1 9 8 5, during the Hiroshimaremembrances) , I was struck by a disquieting thought. Perhaps thetitle phrase is more resonant, and more prescient, than I imagined. Itexactly describes a possible future, one in which the moronic infernowill cease to be a metaphor and will become a reality: the onlyreality.I am particularly grateful to the Observer, under whose auspices, ineffect, this book was written ; I am also indebted to the NewStatesman, the Sunday Telegraph Magazine, the London Review ofBooks, Tatler and Vanity Fair. Throughout I have been exception ally lucky in my editors and colleagues, and here salute them, inroughly 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 IanHamilton and to Cloe Peploe.XI

THE MORONIC INFERNOAnd Other Visits to America

The Moronic InfernoIggy 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 charactersprovides a good index to the way he sees the world - to hisreality-level, his responsiveness to the accidental humour and frea kish poetry of life. Thomas Pynchon uses names like Oedipa Maasand Pig Bodine (where the effect is slangy, jivey, cartoonish}; at theother end of the scale, John Braine offers us Tom Metfield, JackRoyston, Jane Framsby (can these people really exist, in our mindsor anywhere else, with such leadenly humdrum, such dead names ?}.Saul Bellow's inventions are Dickensian in their resonance andrelish. But they also have a dialectical point to make.British critics tend to regard the American predilection for BigNovels as a vulgar neurosis - like the American predilection for bigcars or big hamburgers. Oh God, we think: here comes anothersweating, free-dreaming maniac with another thousand-pager; herecomes another Big Mac. First, Dos Passos produced the GreatAmerican Novel; now they all want one. Yet in a sense everyambitious American novelist is genuinely trying to write a novelcalled USA. Perhaps this isn't just a foible; perhaps it is aninescapable response to America - twentieth-century America,racially mixed and mobile, twenty-four hour, endless, extreme,superabundantly various. American novels are big all right, butpartly 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 latestnovel, The Dean 's December, has caused some puzzlement in itsI

The Moronic Infernocountry of origi n, and one can see why. Far more sombre and lessexuberant than its major predecessors, it has every appearance ofbeing an 'engaged' novel, a mature novel, a statement, a warning;Bellow himself has gone on record, perhaps incautiously, as stress ing the difficulty people will have in 'shruggi ng this one off' . ln 1 976Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, praised by theSwedes 'for human understanding and subtle analysis of contempo rary culture'. T.S. Eliot said that the Nobel was like an invitation toone's own funeral : no beneficiary of the prize had ever gone on towrite anything good. It may be coincidence (as opposed to an onsetof Delphic delusion) , but Bellow's first post-Nobel novel transmitsall the strenuousness of a j uggernaut changing gear. The vision haswidened but also become narrower; most noticeably, the fluidmusicality of Bellow's epics - the laughter, the didactic generosity,the beguiling switches of register - has disciplined itself, in theinterests of literary form. This, it seems to me, is what Late Bellow isgoing to be like. It is all very interesting.If we take an introductory glance through the dramatis personaeof the new book, we see the usual rhythmical clinches but also sensethat Bellow is playing in a minor key, and using the mute. There arevarious judges, shysters and ambulance-chasers with names likeEllis Sorokin, Wolf Quitman and Maxie Detillion (these hardly rivalthe three divorce lawyers in Humboldt's Gift, who are calledTomchek, Pinsker and Srole) ; there is a rock-hard black whorecalled Riggie Hines, and a suave black rapist called SpoffordMitchell; there is an ageing athlete called Silky Limpopo, a p rison reformer called Rufus Ridpath, a world-famous journalist calledDewey Spangler . . . That last name looks a bit artful and specific fora Bellow character, and perhaps this provides a more general clue tothe novel's intentions. A pivotal figure in the book, Dewey Spangleris somewhere between Walter Lippmann and Andre Malraux, aflashy trader in geopolitical generalities and global diagnoses.'Dewey', of course, is America's great philosopher, its star-spangledthinker; and 'Spangler', I suspect, has something to do with thedecline of the West.The Dean's December is spent in Bucharest, 6,ooo miles fromhome. The Dean is Albert Corde, ex-journalist, ex-womaniser,ex-trivialiser (he is also a Gentile - surprising for such an obviousand detailed Bellow surrogate). Home is Chicago. The year isuncertain: there are mentions of Carter, Margaret Thatcher, but2.