The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump

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The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump Page 6

by Martin Amis


  In Washington, DC, I’m converting the Old Post Office Building on Pennsylvania Avenue into one of the world’s greatest hotels. I got the building from the General Services Administration (GSA). Many people wanted to buy it, but the GSA wanted to make sure whoever they sold it to had the ability to turn it into something special, so they sold it to me. I got it for four reasons. Number one—we’re really good. Number two—we had a really great plan. Number three—we had a great financial statement. Number four—we’re EXCELLENT, not just very good, at fulfilling or even exceeding our agreements. The GSA, who are true professionals, saw that from the beginning. That’s the way the country should be run.

  * * *

  —

  Before we turn to the naked manifestations of advanced paranoia (defined as delusions not only of “persecution” but also of “self-importance”), we had better tick off the ascertainable planks in Trump’s national platform; they are not policies, quite, more a jumble of positions and intentions. On climate change: he would instantly desist from any preventive action, which is “just an expensive way of making tree-huggers feel good.” On health care: he would stoke up interstate competition among insurers, and let the market sort it all out. On governmental style: he would “restore a sense of dignity to the White House,” bringing back all “the pomp and circumstance.” On religion: “In business, I don’t actively make decisions based on my religious beliefs,” he writes, almost comatose with insincerity, “but those beliefs are there—big-time.” On gun control: here, Trump simply quotes the Second Amendment with its famously controversial line about the necessity of “well-regulated militias,” and then appends the one-word paragraph “Period.”

  But by now the one-word paragraph has taken up long-term residence in Trump’s prose:

  …people say I don’t provide specific policies….I know it’s not the way the professional politicians do it….But there’s nobody like me.

  Nobody.

  Or:

  I have proven everybody wrong.

  EVERYBODY!

  If we agree that referring to yourself in the third person is not usually a sign of psychological well-being, how do we assess the following?

  Donald Trump builds buildings.

  Donald Trump develops magnificent golf courses.

  Donald Trump makes investments that create jobs.

  And Donald Trump creates jobs for legal immigrants and all Americans.

  Well, Martin Amis thinks, for a start, that the author of Crippled America is a lot crazier than the author of The Art of the Deal.

  Martin Amis has taken it on board that Crippled America was published on November 3, 2015, at which point only a couple of blatant no-hopers had quit that crowded field.

  Martin Amis is sure that Crippled America would be even crazier if Trump updated it now, with the nomination under his belt.

  And Martin Amis concludes that after a couple of days of pomp and circumstance in the White House, Trump’s brain would be nothing more than a bog of testosterone.

  Emotionally primitive and intellectually barbaric, the Trump manifesto would be a reasonably good sick joke—if it weren’t for one deeply disturbing observation, which occurs on page 163. Every now and again Americans feel the need to heroize an ignoramus. After Joe the Plumber, here is Don the Realtor—a “very successful” realtor, who, it is superstitiously hoped, can apply the shark-and-vulture practices of big business to the sphere of world statesmanship. I will italicize Trump’s key sentence: after he announced his candidacy, “A lot of people tried very hard to paint a bleak picture of what would happen.” New paragraph: “Then the American people spoke.” Remember the old witticism about democracy? “The people have spoken. The bastards.”

  Who are they? Trump’s base, we are told, is drawn from the members of the proletariat who feel “left behind”; white, heterosexual, and male, they have discovered that the prestige of being white, heterosexual, and male has been inexplicably sapped. At the same time they imagine that their redemption lies with Trump Inc., which has the obvious credentials (“We manage ice-skating rinks, we produce TV shows, we make leather goods, we create fragrances, and we own beautiful restaurants”) to turn it around for the nonrich and the noneducated—as well as for the noncolored, the nongay, and the nonfemale.

  Telling it like it is? Yes, but telling what like what is? Throwing off the shackles of political correctness, Trump is telling us that he, like every other honest Republican, is a xenophobe, and proud of it. That is worth knowing. And what he is additionally telling us is that roughly 50 percent of Americans hanker for a political contender who (a) knows nothing at all about politics and (b) won’t need to learn—because the “old politics” will be rendered defunct on his first day in office. In 2012, Joe the Plumber, a.k.a. Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, failed to win his race for the Ninth Congressional District in Ohio. In 2016, as I write, Donald Trump has odds of 9 to 4 (and shortening) for the US presidency.

  * * *

  *

  In valediction, two characterological footnotes.

  First, Trump and violence. As we know, he has championed mass deportations, torture, and murderous collective punishment; and then there are the bullying incitements at his Nuremberg-like rallies…When did Trump become an admirer of the kinetic? There is nothing substantial on this question, or on any other, in Crippled America. In The Art of the Deal he describes one of his rare interventions in the fine arts: he gave his music teacher a black eye (“because,” Trump bafflingly clarifies, “I didn’t think he knew anything about music”). But otherwise he comes across as someone naturally averse to the wet stuff of brutality; the chapter-long reminiscence entitled “Growing Up” quite convincingly suggests that it was the father’s rough way of doing things (rent collecting in assault conditions) that made the son decide to quit the outer boroughs. I think the taste for violence has come with the taste of real power. It is something new in him—a recent corruption.

  Second, the connected topic—Trump and women. This isn’t new. This is something old that has recrudesced, an atavism that has “become raw again.” This is a wound with the scab off. And now he just can’t hold it in, can he, he just can’t stop himself—out they come, these smoke signals of aggression. And he is being empirically stupid. The question you want to ask Trump is clearly not “If you’re so smart, how come you aren’t rich?”; it is “If you’re so rich, how come you aren’t smart?” Has something very grave happened to Trump’s IQ? He’s been worrying about it, too, it seems. Responding on the air to David Cameron’s opinion of his ban on Muslims (“stupid, divisive, and wrong”), Trump touchily (and ploddingly) shot back: “Number one, I’m not stupid, okay? I can tell you that right now. Just the opposite.” Don’t you blush for the lavishness of his insecurity? But Trump is insecurity incarnate—his cornily neon-lit vulgarity (reminding you of the pinups on Lolita’s bedroom wall: “Goons in luxurious cars, maroon morons near blued pools”); his desperate garnering of praise (Crippled America quotes encomia from Travel + Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, Businessweek, and Golf Digest, among many other outlets); his penile pride.

  To Democrats at least, “Crossing the Line: How Donald Trump Behaved with Women in Private,” the detailed analysis in The New York Times (fifty interviews with “dozens of women”), was a sore disappointment. All we got from it was Miss Utah’s “Wow, that’s inappropriate” (Donald’s introductory kiss on the lips, which might not have bothered Miss California or Miss New York). Trump was born in 1946. Almost every reasonably energetic baby boomer I know, women included, would be utterly destroyed by an equivalent investigation; we behaved far more deplorably than Trump, and managed it without the wealth, the planes and penthouses, the ownership of modeling agencies and beauty pageants. The Times piece, in effect, “flipped” the narrative: the story, now, is one of exceptional diffidence—and fastidiousness (obsessive self-cleansing is a trait he twice owns up to in The Art of the Deal). A gawker, a groper, and a gloater; but not a lecher.
*2 In Trump’s eros one detects a strong element of vicariousness. As with the Greek antihero: “What you hope / To lay hold of has no existence. / Look away [from your own reflection] and what you love is nowhere” (Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid).

  Trump’s sexual yellow streak is, in itself, an interesting surprise. Where, then, does it come from—the rancor, the contempt, the disgust? In 1997 he agreed with Howard Stern’s proposition that “every vagina is a potential land mine” (and therein, perhaps, lies a tale). Yet Donald remains an indifferent student, and needs more tuition in biology. As a man of the world he has (as we know) faced up to the fact that women menstruate. But it is as if he has never been told (a) that women go to the bathroom (“disgusting,” he said of a Clinton toilet break) and (b) that women lactate (“disgusting,” he said of a lawyer who had to go and pump milk for her newborn). Has no one told him (c) that women vote? And I hope he finds that disgusting, too, in November. Because this race will be the mother of a battle of the sexes, Donald against Hillary—and against her innumerable sisters in the ballot box.

  Any visitor to the United States in an election year will be touched by how seriously Americans take their national responsibility, how they vacillate and agonize. They very seldom acknowledge that their responsibility is also global. At an early stage in Trump’s rise, his altogether exemplary campaign staff decided that any attempt to normalize their candidate would be futile: better, they shruggingly felt (as they deployed the tautologous house style), “to let Trump be Trump.” As a lover of America (and as an admirer of the planet), I offer this advice: Don’t shrug. Don’t stand by and let President Trump be President Trump.

  Harper’s August 2016

  *1 This piece was delivered on May 23, not long after the two remaining candidates, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, dropped out of the primaries (May 3 and May 4), and just before Trump questioned Judge Gonzalo Curiel’s fitness to preside over the civil fraud lawsuits brought against Trump University. The piece was published on July 15, at which point Trump was girding himself for the Republican Convention (July 18–21).

  *2 This last word was ill-chosen, I thought, even at the time. No, Trump is not a lecher, but only in the sense that lechers (those who show “excessive or offensive sexual desire”) want to get on with it and mean what they insinuate. Trump isn’t like that. Why does he keep making passes at female strangers in public, at gala luncheons, in crowded parking lots? Because he can throw his weight around while feeling free of any pressure to get on with it….So lecher is no good, and stud and swordsman are no good for the same reason. Perhaps ladies’ man was all I meant. Trump is not a ladies’ man.

  Literature 1

  Philip Larkin: His Work and Life*

  In the mid-1970s I edited the Weekend Competition in the literary pages of the New Statesman (with the judicious assistance of Julian Barnes). One week we threw down the following challenge: contestants were asked to reimagine Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” in the style of any modern poet. It was a corpulent postbag: many Gunns, Hugheses, Hills, Porters, Lowells, Bishops, Plaths; and many, many Larkins. First place went to our most trusted star—a reclusive gentleman named Martin Fagg. At the comp we gave out small cash prizes (Fagg got the maximal fiver), but no prizes are now on offer for guessing which poet he had in mind. This was his opening stanza:

  You mean you like that poncy crap

  Where some sex-besotted chap

  Makes love a kind of shopping list?

  Item: two juicy tits. Get pissed!

  The lines have a pleasantly hysterical tone (as do many of the best parodies). They also have the virtue of being rich in allusion: allusion to Marvell (the octosyllabic couplets, the poet’s fantasized vow to spend two hundred years adoring “each breast”); and allusion, also, to Larkin. The crap/chap rhyme inverts the chap/crap rhyme in “A Study of Reading Habits” (whose antiliterary sullenness Fagg noisily endorses); that poem ends, “Don’t read much now…Get stewed: / Books are a load of crap.” Now, to transform “Get stewed”—where “I” is torpidly or indeed drunkenly understood—into an emphatic imperative (“Get pissed!”) surely veers close to genius. More than this, though, Fagg manages to imitate what is surely inimitable. I read his lines twice, thirty-five years ago, and yet I summoned them without the slightest strain. This is the key to Larkin: his frictionless memorability. To use one of Nabokov’s prettiest coinages, he is mnemogenic.

  Literary criticism, throughout its long history (starting with Aristotle), has restlessly searched for the Holy Grail of a value system—a way of separating the excellent from the less excellent. But it turns out that this is a fool’s errand. Northrop Frye has great fun with the “evaluative” style in his classic Anatomy of Criticism (1957); he takes three poets, Shakespeare, Milton, and Shelley, and “promotes” and “demotes” them in all possible permutations, which include

  4. Promoting Shakespeare, on the ground that he preserves an integrity of poetic vision which in the others is obfuscated by didacticism.

  5. Promoting Milton, on the ground that his penetration of the highest mysteries of faith raises him above Shakespeare’s unvarying worldliness and Shelley’s callowness.

  6. Promoting Shelley, on the ground that his love of freedom speaks to the heart of modern man more immediately than poets who accepted outworn…

  Et cetera, et cetera (there are eight permutations in all). The “value” words here, both positive and negative, are in effect mere synonyms for individual preferences. Evaluative criticism is rhetorical criticism: it adds nothing to knowledge; it simply adds to the history of taste. After all, when we say “Shakespeare is a genius” we are joining a vast concurrence; but we are not quite stating a fact.

  How good/great/important/major is Philip Larkin? Instinctively and not illogically we do bow, in these matters, to the verdict of Judge Time. Larkin died twenty-five years ago, and his reputation (after the wild fluctuation in the mid-1990s, to which we will return) looks increasingly secure. And we also feel, do we not, that originality is at least a symptom of creative worth. Larkin certainly felt so. In a letter of 1974 he quotes a remark by Clive James—“originality is not an ingredient of poetry, it is poetry”—and adds, “I’ve been feeling that for years.” Larkin’s originality is palpable. Many poets make us smile; how many poets make us laugh—or, in that curious phrase, “laugh out loud” (as if there’s any other way of doing it)? Who else uses an essentially conversational idiom to achieve such a variety of emotional effects? Who else takes us, and takes us so often, from sunlit levity to mellifluous gloom? And let it be emphasized that Larkin is never “depressing.” Achieved art is quite incapable of lowering the spirits. If this were not so, each performance of King Lear would end in a Jonestown.

  * * *

  *

  I said earlier that Larkin is easily memorized. Like originality, memorability is of course impossible to quantify. Yet in Larkin these two traits combine with a force that I have not seen duplicated elsewhere. His greatest stanzas, for all their unexpectedness, make you feel that a part of your mind was already prepared to receive them—was anxiously awaiting them. They seem ineluctable, or predestined. Larkin, often, is more than memorable. He is instantly unforgettable.

  Let us now consider the diversity and scope of Larkin’s registers and moods. From “Self’s the Man,” militant antiromanticism:

  He married a woman to stop her getting away

  Now she’s there all day,

  And the money he gets for wasting his life on work

  She takes as her perk

  To pay for the kiddies’ clobber and the drier

  And the electric fire…

  From “Aubade,” epigrammatic brilliance and truth:

  This is a special way of being afraid

  No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

  That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

  Created to pretend we never die…

  From “The Trees,” an onomatopoeic prayer for renewal:


  Yet still the unresting castles thresh

  In fullgrown thickness every May.

  Last year is dead, they seem to say,

  Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

  From “Toads Revisited” (toad being Larkin’s metaphor for salaried employment), the grimmest and most plangent stoicism:

  What else can I answer,

  When the lights come on at four

  At the end of another year?

  Give me your arm, old toad;

  Help me down Cemetery Road.

  From “A Study of Reading Habits,” callow dreams of power and predation:

  Later, with inch-thick specs,

  Evil was just my lark:

  Me and my cloak and fangs

  Had ripping times in the dark.

  The women I clubbed with sex!

  I broke them up like meringues.

  From “Livings II,” an unusually modernist description—spondee-laden, with almost every syllable stressed—of a nightscape as seen by a lighthouse keeper:

 

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