The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America

by Martin Amis

  The previous or 'reformist' school of feminists, she explained, 'wanted a piece of the existing pie. We want to bake a new one.' The more radical view centres on the home — 'on families, not the "family", which has become a codeword for reactionary power-groups'. When Ms Steinem talks of 'democratic parenthood' she has more in mind than a bit of male nappy-changing. If the rearing of children were undertaken equally then the intractable stereotypes of Male and Female would finally begin to fade. No longer would a child perceive femininity in terms of warmth, care, devotion, and masculinity in terms of energy, action and business elsewhere. 'We grow up dividing our natures because of the way we're raised.' And this is her Children's Crusade in another sense, because 'sex roles', she believes, 'are in the anthropological, long-term view a primary cause ot violence. Any peace movement without that kind of challenge to violence — well, it's like putting a Band-Aid on a cancer.’

  Then what? If, as she says, 'the sex or race of an individual is one of 20,000 elements that go into making up an individual person', the proliferation of human types would be ceaseless. Sexually 'there would be thousands of ways to be', rather than the existing three or four. 'There would be no average. Sameness would be done away with.’

  'And so,' I said, with my last ironic breath, 'there might be an enclave in your Utopia where the Victorian marriage still thrived.’

  'It's possible,' said Ms Steinem doubtfully. 'But they'd be living that way through choice.’

  Up on stage in the Arts Theatre at the Community College, Ms Steinem suavely delivered her stump speech, 'Equality: The Future of Humankind'. The audience, like the institution, was modest enough — a mere five or six hundred people, compared to the rock-concert-sized crowds she has attracted elsewhere. Once a painfully nervous speaker, she now performs with brisk panache. She marches up to the mike, returning the applause of the audience. 'Friends,' she begins. There are laughs ('We now have words like sexual harassment and battered women. A few years ago they were just called life'), but no cheap jokes. Maximum clarity and suasion are what she is after. 'Yes,' you keep thinking, 'that's true. That's right.’

  After the speech, the applause, the questions ('I'm a homemaker, or a uh "domestic engineer" ...'),! drank a lot of coffee and smoked a lot of cigarettes with Eddie, our young, black chauffeur. I asked him if he worked for the Ms. Foundation, and he revealed, hesitantly (though it's no great secret), that he worked for Ms Steinem's 'friend', a high-level but low-profile company lawyer. Ms Steinem, like most eminent feminists, is unmarried and childless. The nature—nurture axis, one gathers, takes quite a wobble when you have kids of your own - but then Steinem's Utopia is many generations away. 'I've driven Gloria out to speak at places three or four times now,' said Eddie. 'It's going to happen a lot more times, I can tell. I'm looking forward to it. I like to hear her speak.’

  Eddie went on to say that it had taken only three months of Gloria's example to convert him to the cause. 'Me and my wife, we had a talk. Now I do my bit in the home. When she goes out — I used to make her take the kids with her. Now she can leave them with me. She can do what she likes. It's better, for her, for me. I never knew my father, and it's too late now. I don't want to make the same mistake. I like to be with my children. Watching them grow.’

  Well, by this stage I was on the verge of calling my friend in London — to tell her that it would all be different from now on. While Ms Steinem held court in the corner, I strolled round the common room among the dissolving crowd. A noticeboard advertised some forthcoming attractions: Frisbee Tournament, Human Potential Fra-Sority. The average age of the American college student is now twenty-seven, and I marvelled at their variety — not least the variety of the student body: some as thin and tightly-cocked as whippets, some like walking haystacks, with all the intervening shapes and sizes fully represented. As soon as you leave New York you see how monstrously various, how humanly balkanised, America really is. And yet in Steinemland — home of the Polymorphous Perverse — such diversity would not be remarkable, and would certainly not be amusing. A sense of humour is a risky thing to have out here, in the big mix, where mere oddity is no cause for laughter. Do all these people actually have a human potential? Don't we need the norms? How much variety can a society contain? How much can it stand?

  Feminism is a salutary challenge to one's assumptions — including your assumptions about feminism. I wonder, though, how much it has to offer as an all-informing idea. And is the racial analogy, so often claimed, really fully earned? Busy systematisers, with a thing called 'Women's Studies' to erect, the feminists have systematised an ideology, a history, an enemy. Yet surely there has been a good deal of collusion, and dumb human accident, on both sides. Adjustments in thought are necessary, but some of the reparations look alarmingly steep.

  Ms Steinem has a literary gift — her prose is swift and sure — yet this is not quite the same thing as a gift for literature. Inevitably her artistic values are now ideologically determined, for the greater good, as is her view of language itself. She is against all idioms that are 'divisive' or 'judgmental', so it's birth names for 'maiden names', back salary for 'alimony', preorgasmic for 'frigid'. 'Peace on Earth, Good Will to People' is the sort of 'rewrite' she recommends. And at this point I have to ask myself: would I want to be a writer in the feminist Utopia? Would anybody? People might be happier or less anxious under such a tactful populism, but one wonders about the kinds of personality they would knock up for themselves. The result might simply strengthen the American how-to culture, the general thirst for ready-made or second-hand lives.

  We returned to the limousine and headed back for Manhattan. Gloria talked of her forthcoming visit to England, her intention to visit the Greenham Women and 'to seek political asylum' here if Ronald Reagan, 'a smiling fascist', won a second term. The frequency of her smile at first suggests, not falsity, but settled habit; after a time, though, it suggests a real superabundance of warmth — also energy and self-belief. Here is a woman riding the crest of conviction, of achievement. 'Look!' she said with a triumphant laugh (this was one of her daily rewards). 'There are people working signs on the road ahead.’

  Observer 1984

  William Burroughs: The Bad Bits

  Like many novelists whose modernity we indulge, William Burroughs is essentially a writer of 'good bits'. These good bits don't work out or add up to anything; they have nothing to do with the no-good bits: and they needn't be in the particular books they happen to be in. Most of Burroughs is trash, and lazily obsessive trash too — you could chuck it all out and not diminish what status he has as a writer. But the good bits are good. Reading him is like staring for a week at a featureless sky; every few hours a bird will come into view or, if you're lucky, an aeroplane might climb past, but things remain meaningless and monotone. Then, without warning (and not for long, and for no coherent reason, and almost always in The Naked Lunch), something happens: abruptly the clouds grow warlike, and the air is full of portents.

  The good bits are so fortuitous, indeed (mere reflexes of a large and callous talent), and the no-good bits so monolithic, that the critic's role is properly reduced to one of helpless quotation. Here is a good bit; this is another good bit; take, for example, this good bit. Eric Mottram, however, in his adoring and humourless new study, "William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need, swallows Burroughs whole: every section of jaded agitprop, every page of trite assertion and denatured rhetoric, every abstract noun finds an honoured place in the inter-disciplinarian's filing-system. John Fletcher, general editor of this Critical Appraisals series, says that to qualify for inclusion writers need to be 'demonstrably "masterly" in the sense of having made a real impact on the contemporary arts' (I think he must mean 'modern-masterly'). Mr Mottram, anyway, has unsmilingly accepted the brief. His book is, in effect, about the bad bits.

  Here are two of the funnier ínsensitivities ensured by this approach. There is, by common consent, a great deal about drugs in Burroughs's four main novels (or 'tetralogy'
, as they are here typically dignified). Many of his characters are junkies, they talk about junk a lot, their senses - in common with Burroughs's prose — are peeled by junk: on junk, says Burroughs, 'familiar objects seem to stir with a writhing furtive life'. From Mr Mottram's Delphic lectern, though, 'the junk world is the image of the whole world as a structure of addiction and controls'. Well, this is the radical falsification line of the Beat school, and fair enough in its way. But evaluative criticism of Burroughs (and all criticism of living authors should be evaluative) would be far better off with the unglam-orous premise that Burroughs was just a junkie himself, that he got lost for a long time in the junk world, and that it is in this reality that his imagination — and his style - has been conclusively formed. An index of Mr Mottram's futile reverence is that he seldom refers to Burroughs as 'being dependent on' drugs, or 'taking' drugs, or even 'using' drugs. What Burroughs does is 'experiment' with them. (At one point Mr Mottram pictures Burroughs 'experimenting' with alcohol. I hereby confess that, during his longer chapters, I conducted a few experiments with the stuff myself.)

  Burroughs's militant homosexuality, also, is seen as yet another suave literary device. Mr Burroughs doesn't really like women: one feels safe in this observation, since he has gone on record with the vow that he would kill every woman alive if he could. Although this is not in itself a criticism of his writing, it is certainly a clue to it. But here is Mottram, in a biographical stroll-in:

  Burroughs returned to the academy to study psychology ... Then he went to Mexico (where he accidentally killed his wife with a revolver), and on a GI grant, studied native dialects and was able to obtain drugs with comparative absence of legal restriction.

  That parenthesis is all she rates. Similarly - and to take only the most spectacular example - Burroughs's obtrusive interest in the sexual hanging of young boys (orgasm to be synchronised with the pathetic voiding at the moment of death) is duly accorded the status of a 'symbol', a symbol, in this case, of 'critical anarchism'. So it is, though not in the sense intended. At no point will Mr Mottram admit a human value. He does not answer to any of the gods we answer ro: he sits up late at night, listening for the knock of The Semiologic Police.

  Burroughs's principal 'theme' — in that he goes on about it more than he goes on about anything else — is 'control', social, sexual and political. Mr Mottram annotates this theme with some rigour (his book has good bits too), and he does draw haphazard attention to the things that make Burroughs worth looking at: his great scenes of interrogation and manipulation, the desolate evil of his wound-down cities and inert, vicious bureaucracies, that sense of wasted and pre-doomed humanity which animates his best writing. What Mr Mottram never addresses himself to, however, is the question of artistic control, of the artist's control of his material and his talent. Control is not something one grafts on to natural ability: it is part of that ability. Burroughs has vacated the control tower, if indeed he ever went up there. No living writer has so perfidiously denied his own gifts — most of which are, incidentally, comic and exuberant rather than admonitory and bleak. It may be his just reward, then, to be studied by people who don't find him funny.

  New Statesman 1977

  Steven Spielberg: Boyish Wonder

  Steven Spielberg's films have grossed approximately $1,500 million. He is thirty-four, and well on his way to becoming the most effective popular artist of all time... What's he got? How do you do it? Can I have some?

  'Super-intensity' is Spielberg's word for what he comes up with on the screen. His films beam down on an emotion and then subject it to two hours of muscular titillation. In Jaws ($410 million) the emotion was terror; in Close Encounters ($150 million) it was wonder; in Raiders of the Lost Ark ($310 million) it was exhilaration; in Poltergeist ($480 million and climbing) it was anxiety; and now in E.T. — which looks set to outdo them all — it is love.

  Towards the end of E.T., barely able to support my own grief and bewilderment, I turned and looked down the aisle at my fellow sufferers: executive, black dude, Japanese businessman, punk, hippie, mother, teenager, child. Each face was a mask of tears. Staggering out, through a tundra of sodden hankies, I felt drained, pooped, squeezed dry; I felt as though I had lived out a year-long love affair — complete with desire and despair, passion and prostration — in the space of izo minutes. And we weren't crying.for the little extra-terrestrial, nor for little Elliott, nor for little Gertie. We were crying for our lost selves. This is the primal genius of Spielberg, and E.T. is the clearest demonstration of his universality. By now a billion Earthlings have seen his films. They have only one thing in common. They have all, at some stage, been children.

  It is pretty irresistible to look for Spielberg's 'secret' in the very blandness of his suburban origins — a peripatetic but untroubled childhood spent mostly in the south-west. As I entered his offices in Warner Boulevard, Burbank Studios, I wondered if he had ever really left the chain-line, ranch-style embryos of his youth. The Spielberg bungalow resembles a dormitory cottage or beach-house — sliding windows, palm-strewn backyard. The only outre touch is an adjacent office door marked twilight zone accounting: perhaps it is into this fiscal warp that the millions are eventually fed, passing on to a plane beyond time and substance ...

  Within, all is feminine good humour. Spielberg has always surrounded himself with women — surrogate aunts, mothers, kid sisters. These gently wise-cracking ladies give you coffee and idly shoot the breeze as you wait to see the great man. That girl might be a secretary; this girl might be an executive producer, sitting on a few million of her own. Suddenly a tousled, shrugging figure lopes into the ante-room. You assume he has come to fix the coke-dispenser. But no. It is Mr Spielberg.

  His demeanour is uncoordinated, itchy, boyish: five foot nine or so, 150 pounds, baggy T-shirt, jeans, running-shoes. The beard, in particular, looks like a stick-on afterthought, a bid for adulthood and anonymity. Early photographs show the shaven Spielberg as craggy and distinctive; with the beard, he could be anyone. 'Some people look at the ground when they walk,' he said later. 'Others look straight ahead. I always look upward, at the sky. This means that when you walk into things, you don't cut your forehead, you cut your chin. I've had plenty of cuts on my chin.' Perhaps this explains the beard. Perhaps this explains the whole phenomenon.

  Spielberg sank on to a sofa in his gadget-crammed den, a wide, low room whose walls bear the usual mementoes of movie artwork and framed magazine covers. 'I had three younger sisters,' he began. 'I was isolated, left alone with my thoughts. I imagined the very best things that could happen and the very worst, simply to relieve the tedium. The most frightening thing, the most uplifting thing.' He stared round the room, seemingly flustered by the obligation to explain himself for the thousandth time — weighed down, indeed, by the burden of all these mega-hits, these blockbusters and smasher-oos. 'I was the weird, skinny kid with the acne. I was a wimp.’

  His mother Leah has confirmed that Steven 'was not a cuddly child'. Evidently he kept a flock of parakeets flapping around wild in his room. Leah never liked birds, and only reached a hand through the door once a week to grope for the laundry bag. She didn't go in there for years. Steven also kept an 8mm camera. According to his sister Anne, big brother would systematically 'dole out punishment’

  while forcing the three girls to participate in his home movies. This technique is well-tried in Hollywood: it is known as directing.

  Spielberg's films deal in hells and heavens. Against the bullying and bedevilled tike, we can set the adolescent dreamer, the boy who tenderly nursed his apocalyptic hopes. One night, when he was six, Steven was woken by his father and bundled into the car. He was driven to a nearby field, where hundreds of suburbanites stood staring in wonder (this is probably the most dominant image in his films). The night sky was full of portents. 'My father was a computer scientist,' said Spielberg. 'He gave me a technical explanation of what was happening. "These meteors are space debris attracted by the gravitational..." But
I didn't want to hear that. I wanted to think of them as falling stars.’

  All his life Spielberg has believed in things: vengeful ten-yard sharks, whooping ghosts, beautiful beings from other worlds. 'Comics and TV always portrayed aliens as malevolent. I never believed that. If they had the technology to get here, they could only be benign ... I know they're out there.' The conviction, and desire, lead in a straight line from Firelight (one of his SF home movies) to the consummation of E.T. 'Just before I made Close Encounters I went outside one night, looked up at the sky and started crying. I thought I was falling apart.’

  In Poltergeist, a suburban family is terrorised by demons that emerge from the household television set. When Spielberg describes the film as 'my revenge on TV', he isn't referring to his own apprenticeship on the small-screen networks. 'TV was my third parent.' His father used to barricade and boobytrap the set, leaving a strand of hair on the aperture, to keep tabs on Steven's illegal viewing. 'I always found the hair, memorised its position, and replaced it when I was through.’

  Rather to the alarm of his girlfriend, Kathleen Carey, Spielberg still soaks up a great deal of nightly trivia. 'All I see is junk,' she says, 'but he looks for ideas.' It is clear from the annuals and pot-boilers on his office shelves that Spielberg is no bookworm (this is Hollywood after all, where high culture means an after-dinner game of Botticelli). TV is popular art: Spielberg is a popular artist who has outstripped but not outgrown the medium that shaped him. Like Disney - and, more remotely, like Dickens — his approach is entirely non-intellectual, heading straight for the heart, the spine, the guts.