The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America

by Martin Amis

  'No, I'm just — exhausted ... Did four hours of TV interviews about the new book ... No, you know, I uh never drank that much! I mean ... I just developed a kind of — suddenly an allergy. It would make me, not exactly — oh, well, very, very sick, like someone who's drunk a quart and a half or something. Norman Mailer must drink... twenty times as much as I ever did. In one day, you know, and it doesn't seem to affect him. Irwin Shaw!... drinks a tremendous amount. Practically everyone I know does. Tennessee! Edward Albee!’

  I had read somewhere that Capote's voice was thin and high. But nothing had prepared me for this quavering, asthmatic singsong, a mixture of Noel Coward and Lillian Carter. Turds, ee-bait, inner-stain and wide-ass, for instance, are his renderings of 'towards', 'about', 'understand' and 'White House'. Capote was born in New Orleans, and was then farmed out to rural relations; much of his childhood was spent as a resident of Monroeville, Alabama. There is still something of the erudite hillbilly about him, and this perhaps explains how his obsession with the beau monde co-exists so peacefully with an interest in the underworld of murder and madness. He gives new scope to the cliche about 'knowing everyone'. Capote knew Bob Kennedy, but he also knew Sirhan Sirhan.

  Capote knew Jack Kennedy, but he also knew Lee Harvey Oswald — whom he met in Moscow in 1959, at which point Oswald was a gibbering paranoid considering defection to the East ... When I mentioned early on in our talk that I also worked for the Observer, we discussed the paper's relationship with its current owners, Bob Anderson's Atlantic Richfield Company. Capote then added reliably: 'I know Bob Anderson very well. He's one of my closest friends. He's a very cultivated man, you know — a charming man, a shy man. We went to Iran together once, had the most fantastic day with the poor old Shah.' (Laughter and coughing.) 'You know, this oil business, this ARCO thing — that's just a sideline for Bob. He's the world's largest single property-owner. Brazil, Arizona, New Mexico, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles of ranches. As a matter of fact it was me who told him to buy the Observer.’

  'Well, could you tell him not to sell it,' I said.

  'Oh all right. If you want.’

  Fame and its mysteries have always been intimately bound up with what Truman Capote does and is. 'I knew damn well I was going to be rich and famous,' he has often said. He appears to have sensed early on that celebrity, particularly in America, can be self-generated.

  His first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, published in 1948 when Truman was Z3, received as much attention for the pretty-boy photograph on the book's jacket as for the precocity of its contents. 'I didn't even choose that photograph!' protests Capote. Ironically, he is the scandalised one these days, 'It was not even posed! I was just lying on the couch after lunch! I didn't even choose it, I said just take any old photograph from the drawer!’

  Capote's early novels and stories, with their cloying Southern settings and high incidence of snaggled grotesques, would have seemed to place him in the Gothic tradition of Carson McCullers and Eudora Welty. But in mid-career his work became squibbish and metropolitan. Above all, his novelistic ear proved adaptable: the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) showed that he could listen to New York as sharply as he had listened to New Orleans, At this time Capote was also turning out some exceptionally acute and original journalism — a cruelly finessing portrait of Marlon Brando, an hilarious account of a trip to Russia with a company of black Americans playing Porgy and Bess. During these years Capote became convinced that an unnoticed art form lay concealed within the conventions of journalism: the idea was that a true story could be told, faithfully, but so arranged as to suggest the amplitude of poetic fiction.

  That idea eventually became In Cold Blood (1966), the story of the apparently pointless murder of the Clutter family in Garden City, Kansas. Capote spent six years 'on and off — and mostly on' following the trail in 'this fantastically depressing Mid-West town, where, you know, there was nothing. The shaken townsfolk never took to Capote, and he had to withstand a good deal of local hostility. One day he sauntered into the courtroom and was confronted by a squad of glowering sheriffs. 'Oh, you don't look so tough to me,' said Capote in his highest voice. One of the men stood up and punched his fist through the courthouse wall. 'I'm beside myself, I'm beside myself!' cried Capote in a sarcastic wail. 'Those years were nerve-shattering,' says Capote now. 'I mean, I never knew whether I had a book or not.’

  Capote's 'non-fiction novel' earned him several million dollars — and a highly ambivalent critical reception. The most serious attack came from the late Kenneth Tynan, who accused Capote of hastening the execution of the two murderers in order to safeguard the profitability of his book. 'The opposite was true,' says Capote. 'I was just — so shocked. Right up to that moment I thought Tynan was my friend — What did he die of, anyway?' Although Capote seems to have behaved pretty well irreproachably throughout, the controversy surrounding In Cold Blood could be seen as the start of our present permissiveness about turning tragedy into entertainment. 'It was an interest in the form that made me write that book, nothing else.' In terms of technique, In Cold Blood was seminal, and much-imitated. Capote himself is still following up its implications.

  Meanwhile, of course, the stylish Mr Capote had ensconced himself as the ubiquitous lap-dog of high society. I imagine he cut a reassuring and innocuous figure, spryly perched on the edges of sofas and beds, with his crooning, questioning voice, no threat to the menfolk — no threat to anyone, it would seem. Capote's presence immediately induces a mood of sympathetic intimacy — why, I myself nearly poured out my fears and hopes to him. 'But I'm a writer,' says Capote with a thin-lipped smile. 'What did they expect?’

  Capote is referring here to the elaborate scandals created by Answered Prayers, his unfinished autobiographical novel 'about the Very Rich'. Four sections of this labyrinthine roman à clef appeared in Esquire in 1975, precipitating many a broken íriendship, ostracism and snub — as well as Truman's brief bout of pill and drink cross-addiction. Nowadays he tends to pooh-pooh the extent of his own distress at the time; you feel that what bewildered him most was the fact that he had miscalculated, and so gravely. 'I thought they'd all think it was funny. I'd have thought it was funny ...”

  Acrimony on this scale has a habit of feeding off itself. Soon afterwards, Capote found himself engaged in litigation with his one-time friend Gore Vidal. In a 1975 interview with Playgirl Truman claimed that Gore had been 'thrown out' of the White House after drunkenly insulting Jackie Kennedy (Gore and Jackie, after all, had a step-father in common).

  'It's been printed about nine times,' says Capote, his eyes bulging indignantly.

  The spat spread to include Jackie's little sister, Princess Lee Radziwill. Lee was Truman's source for the anecdote; she then 'betrayed' him by signing an affidavit for Vidal and telling a New York gossip columnist: 'They are two fags. It is just the most disgusting thing.' An infuriated Capote went on a local TV chat show to poormouth the Princess. 'I know that Lee wouldn't want me tellin' none of this,' he simpered, 'but you know us Southern fags. We just can't keep our mouths shut.' The litigation with Vidal continues. So does the book. 'Just wait till they see the rest of it,' broods Capote.

  Music for Chameleons was published in New York during the week of my visit. Capote had already made $4 million from this stop-gap collection of stories, journalism and non-fiction fiction, and, as I talked to him that afternoon, he lay swaddled in reams of laudatory press clippings. Not bad going, you think. For all his fragility, Capote is an operator, and a shrewd and confident one. Evidently he spends months planning the promotion of each book. Up there in the UN Plaza, I was simply a minor puppet in Capote's vast dream. 'The thing about people like me', he says firmly, 'is that we have always known what we were going to do. Some people never really find out.’

  At this point I nerved myself to ask Capote about his love life — an exiguous topic these days, it would seem. It has been Truman's complex affliction always to be attracted to upright heterosexuals,
rather as E.M. Forster was (Forster is, coincidentally, the English writer whom Capote most admires). Such men seem to relish all the difficult ramifications — consternated wives to placate, and so on. Again like Forster, Capote has also been known to hanker for representatives of the less privileged orders. He once squired an ex-prison guard to a dinner-party thrown by Princess Grace at her palace in Monaco. 'At dinner a man sitting next to him said, "Is this your first time in Europe?" And he said, "Yes it is, except for that time in Vietnam."‘

  'I don't have a love life any more,' says a stoical Capote. 'You see, I'm attracted to practically «obody. It's just — sad. I just don't find many people - I really have to like them, you know? No, I don't have a love life. It's too exhausting,' he said with a yawn.

  Capote had seemed to be on the point of fitful sleep at several stages in the course of the interview; so I now thought it prudent to take my leave.

  'Would you be kind enough,' I asked reflexively, 'to sign my copy of your book?’

  'Oh, certainly,' he said warmly. Rousing himself, Capote sat up in bed and began to fuss with his pen. He opened Music for Chameleons, and stared for several seconds at its blank first page. To my alarm, I realised that he had forgotten my name — if indeed he had ever known it. He sniffed, and looked up cautiously.

  'The name's Tony, isn't it?' he croaked.

  'No. Martin,' I said, trying to make Martin sound quite like Tony.

  'Oh, Martin. Yes, of course.' He wrote on the blank page for a very long time.

  Ten minutes later I stood smoking a cigarette on fiery First Avenue. I got the book out of my bag and turned to the first page, where it said, in an exemplarily rickety hand:

  for Martin

  I tried!

  and you were so patient Truman Capote

  198

  That '198' wasn't his apartment number: it was a shot at the date. I walked on, hoping that little Truman would get well soon.

  * * *

  Postscript Truman never did. He died six years later, to the month. I liked him, and with hindsight I now find my bedside manner somewhat callous — but there it is. Appropriately doctored, the piece was used elsewhere as an obituary. However, I should like to add, in belated tribute, a brief review of the posthumous Conversations with Capote 'by' Lawrence Grobel, which follows.

  Two unrelated points. Why do American writers tend to hate each other — hatreds which often extend to litigation (Vidal v. Capote; Lillian Hellman v. Mary McCarthy, an especially vicious attempt at financial persecution)? Perhaps one of the answers relates, as so much relates, to the size of America. In England writers mix pretty well: they have a generally middle-class, generally liberal unanimity. In America writers are naturally far flung (Alabama, Washington, Chicago, New England); to come together, they have to traverse great distances; it isn't surprising, when they meet, that they seem so strange to one another.

  The second point concerns In Cold Blood and the business of the 'non-fiction fiction*. In the Conversations, while incidentally rubbishing Mailer's The Executioner's Song, Capote repeats his contention that the non-fiction fiction is, or can be, at least as 'imaginative' as the non non-fiction fiction: i.e., the novel. Now it is true that Capote (and Mailer) expends a good deal of imagination and artistry in the non-fiction form. What is missing, though, is moral imagination, moral artistry. The facts cannot be arranged to give them moral point. When the reading experience is over, you are left, simply, with murder — and with the human messiness and futility that attends all death.

  * * *

  Jackie Kennedy? 'I hate her.' John Updike? 'I hate him.' Jane Fonda: 'ucch, she's a throw-up number.' Joyce Carol Oates: 'she's the most loathsome creature in America. She's so... oooogh!' As for Georgia O'Keeffe, 'I wouldn't pay twenty-five cents to spit on a painting [of hers]. And I think she's a horrible person, too.' While gentle, twinkly old Robert Frost is 'an evil, selfish bastard, an egomaniacal, double-crossing sadist*. In such a galère, literary comrades are doing pretty well if they are merely 'ghastly' (Thomas Pynchon), 'unreadable’

  (Bernard Malamud), 'boring' and 'fraudulent' (Donald Barthelme), or 'unbelievably bad' (Gore Vidal).

  Truman Capote lived the life of the American novelist in condensed and accelerated form. By the age of eight he was a writer, by the age of twelve he was a drunk, by the age of sixteen he was a celebrity, by the age of forty he was a multimillionaire, and by the .age of fifty-nine he was dead. All the excess, solipsism, enmity, paranoia and ambition of American letters was crammed into those years — and, glancingly, into these pages. One would expect Conversations with Capote to provide some scandalous entertainment; but the book, semi-accidentally, goes one further and gives us an endearing portrait of the man.

  Called 'the Interviewer's Interviewer' by Playboy magazine (his frequent employer), Lawrence Grobel is disciplined, persistent, thorough, and stupid. He is not quite as stupid as James A. Michener, who contributes a wonderfully galumphing foreword, but he is not nearly as smart as Truman Capote. Thus Grobel is thoroughly insensitive to Capote's standard interviewing persona, which is that of the Tease. Frowning now at his tape-recorder, now at his list of questions, Grobel unsmilingly processes the wanton bitchiness and boastfulness that Capote tosses out at him.

  There is hidden comedy here, in the narrative links. Grobel is always telephoning, pestering, suddenly flying in from Los Angeles; with some awe and cautious affection, yet quite without self-consciousness or pudeur, he repeatedly nags Capote into yet another session with the Sony. And there is pathos too, for by now Capote often has to drag himself from the sickbed to cope with the Californian wretch.

  Actually the whole book glows with the pale fire of illness, and one suspects that not a day of Capote's life was uncoloured by it. 'This small brilliant man', as Grobel dubs him, had everything in the American package — everything except brutish good health. His medical chart is dotted with seizures, addictions, dryouts; and yet the malaise sounds habitual and pervasive, as if Capote drank and drugged chiefly to assuage pain. Towards the end, his life appeared to be a bleak alternation between major surgery and Lawrence Grobel. One admires Capote the more for giving such a spirited account of himself.

  Serious literary questions are raised, by Capote, and left hanging there by Grobel. This isn't surprising, because the Playboy interviewer shows no differentiation of interest, whether the subject is John Updike or Jackie Kennedy. Presumably a fuller treatment of the life and work is on the way. Let us leave Capote, for now, in one of his more triumphant moments, displaying a characteristic mix of fearlessness, spite, and, no doubt, self-flattering embellishment:

  I was sitting there with Tennessee. And this woman came over to [our] table ... and she pulled up her shirt and handed me an eyebrow pencil. And she said, 'I want you to autograph my navel' ... So I wrote my name: T-R-U-M-A-N C-A-P-O-T-E. Right round her navel, like a clock ... Her husband was in a rage. He was drunk as all get-out ... He looked at me with this infinite hatred, handed me the eyebrow pencil, unzipped his fly, and hauled out his equipment ... Everybody was looking. And he said, 'Since you're autographing everything, how'd you like to autograph this? There was a pause ... and I said, 'Well, I don't know if I can autograph it, but perhaps I could initial it.’

  Taller 1978 and Observer 1985

  Philip Roth: No Satisfaction

  Philip Roth has just completed a trilogy — the Zuckerman books — and we will come to that in due course. Looking back, though, we see that Roth's previous nine novels arrange themselves in trilogies too — or they do if you nudge them. To begin with we have the three apprentice works: Goodbye, Columbus and Letting Go, which survey the waking novelist's immediate experience, and When She Was Good, which steps self-consciously outside it. Next we have that lip-smacking threesome of frisky Menippean satires, Our Gang, The Breast and The Great American Novel, where Roth took a manic holiday from his normally sober preoccupations — namely Jewish family life, heartbreak in the Humanities, and the impossibility of get
ting on with women. Flanking the satires are Portnoy's Complaint (1969) and My Life as a Man (1974), obsessively personal accounts of emotional failure and collapse, followed by The Professor of Desire, which rounds off the trio. Like its weepy, ball-broken hero, David Kepesh, Desire is an oddly helpless, melancholy and apathetic continuation of Roth's protracted self-scrutiny; having long been adept at turning his life into literature, Roth here lets life just wash all over him. The new persona is the prostrate man, limping from psychiatrist's couch to psychiatrist's couch, from bed to bed, and from bad to worse.

  Roth's women. There are three kinds of them, too, and each novel in the trilogy gives emphasis to a different type (I think we had better call it the 'My Life' trilogy. But stay, gentile reader: mere Jewishness is seen as ever less central to the Roth predicament, and is given only incidental treatment here). The first kind of girl is the Girl Who Will Do Anything. And not many girls, it seems, will Do that. Portnoy's Complaint inspected this type most closely, in the person of The Monkey, the hero's reckless companion, and also, even more enjoyably, through comic fantasy — the world of swinish, gloating sexuality opened up by Thereal McCoy, Portnoy's dirty-talking, cupcake-nippled phantasm. She reappears as Sharon Shatsky in My Life as a Man and, one book later, as Birgitta, a daring and predatory Scandinavian with whom Kepesh has a tremulous European jaunt. The good thing about these girls is that you can do whatever the hell you like to them in bed. The bad thing is that you wish they wouldn't let you. While the girls are unfrightened by their own waywardness, the Roth man always is — in the end, anyway. There is something deeply unladylike, also, in the ease with which they get on with their own desires.

  The Roth man is not as frightened of the first type of Roth woman as he is of the second type of Roth woman, whom he nonetheless tends to marry. This type is the Ball-Breaker, and her starkest representative in the trilogy is Maureen in My Life as a Man (her prototype, though one brilliantly transposed in social context, was Lucy in When She Was Good). The Ball-Breaker's mission is to ensnare, flatten and stomp on the Roth man; when she has got him impotent, enervated and wondering if he is a homosexual, she has got him where she wants him. The Ball-Breaker makes a cleverly varied guest-appearance in The Professor of Desire as Helen Kepesh, where added stress is given to her vanity, aimlessness, alcoholism, her grandiose fantasies and her wasted intelligence and beauty. You have to look rather harder for the Ball-Breaker in Portnoy. The Monkey is a handful all right, but she lacks the Ball-Breaker's destructive energy and deluded self-belief. Who is it, then, who stands over the hero with a knife, who lets him glimpse her menstrual blood, who in some sense 'marries' him with ineluct-ably horrendous results? Why, Sophie Portnoy, the Jewish Mother — whose hips, Portnoy can't help noticing, even towards the end of the novel, 'aren't bad ...’