Amis, Martin - The Moronic Inferno & Other Visits to America (v1.0)

by The Moronic Inferno

  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 ...’

  The third type of Roth woman does not scare the Roth man. Instead, she is scared by him. She is the tender realist, methodical, protective, self-abnegating. She is not a Dickensian Little Woman; on the contrary, she is a Big Woman, with a determined if precarious working relationship with reality. Despite her past bruises and hurts, she sees things the way things really are, and longs to rescue the Roth man for the sane world: she is, above all, unpsychotic. The Pumpkin and The Pilgrim shared the role of the Big Woman in Portnoy, Susan played her in My Life, and in Desire she edges into centre-stage as Claire, with whom the crippled Roth man, at the end of his tether, played out by all that sex and spite, tries to rebuild his life. The great hitch about the Big Woman, though — and now we see Roth's anxieties turning full circle — is that they will not quite do Anything. And this tiny omission is enough to allow sexual boredom to nip giggling through the bedroom door; suddenly, a lifetime of depleted possibilities is on view. 'Anything', as usual, is symbolised by enthusiastic fellatio (or perhaps it just is enthusiastic fellatio). Claire will do fellatio, but she won't... you know, do it' enthusiastically. This is all it takes. Some people are never satisfied.

  Well, never being satisfied is Roth's great theme. I wish I had 5op for every time the phrase 'on good terms with pleasure' is wistfully summoned in the 'My Life' trilogy. For pleasure and the Roth man are incompatible: they just do not get along, they just cannot work it out, they just get on each other's nerves. In Portnoy the condition was seen as a subject for black satire (the hero's desires harshly ridiculing his highmindedness), in My Life as a subject for tragic farce (the hero's highmindedness proscribing his desires); in the last book, however, the condition is seen as too disabling to be a subject for anything but itself. This is not only no joke, Roth seems to be saying, it is no novel either, nor anything else that has a shape: it is simply how it is. One feels both relieved and surprised when Roth expresses it so poignantly (in a projected introduction to a course of lectures which Claire calls 'Desire 341'):

  I am devoted to fiction, and I assure you that in time I will tell you whatever I may know about it, but in truth nothing lives in me like my life.

  Paradoxically, too, Roth seems in this novel to have moved beyond autobiography. He no longer looks at life with the selective eye of the novelist: he looks at his own past with the fastidious frown of the literary critic, grading, evaluating, trying to separate the serious from the unserious. (I have always wondered why Roth's 'bookish-ness' relies on translated works — Chekhov, Gogol, Kafka, Dostoevsky — for its points of reference. I suspect that Roth now regards novels as how-to books about life, and he prefers to get their tips on living without the distractions and evasions of a responsive verbal surface.)

  And what a sorrily half-tone world seeps through the self-immersion. The Professor of Desire is by far the most exotic in its locations of all Roth's novels — the East and West coasts, London, France, Italy, Prague, Hong Kong — and yet the changing landscapes remain blissfully unobserved (a derisory 'Sorry, Yank, 'e seems a bit sleepy tonight', for instance, is the extent to which Roth captures the texture of life in our own country). 'The whole damn thing could have taken place in Cincinnati!' says Kepesh after his Far East debacle — and indeed it could have done. My Life as a Man contains a good, sharp section in which the narrator focuses his eyes on the year of 1968 and realises just how much has happened while he's been asleep inside himself. Not even this release — or injection of balance — is available to Kepesh: he is lost in a truly lugubrious solipsism, a mere patball of the neuroses which stride unchallenged through his psyche. Accordingly, all ironic distance has gone; nothing separates author and narrator; Roth sees no more than Kepesh sees.

  How else has the world changed? It is quieter and flatter than it used to be, and there is no delight in it. Roth's novelistic ear, arguably his greatest gift as a writer, has evidently been well cauliflowered by recent events: only the Jewish-American characters retain their own voices, while everyone else joins the stilted and lachrymose debate on the hero's despair. Even the expository prose has lost its relish, settling for a droll, automatic elegance: it is full of ugly chimes ('my father intends, by the very intensity ...', 'ending the term's work with three masterworks', etc.) and back-to-the-drawing-board formulations ('my year as a visiting fellow in erotic daredevilry', 'she is not only stunning-looking, she is also real', etc.). Some of the book's aridities may be an attempt to create a reflection of despair, but the zestlessness does sometimes read like a failure of professional sincerity, or nerve.

  Now what? Will the vision re-expand, as it seems to yearn to do, or will it squirm deeper into the tunnel of the self? Is Roth's subject the situation of the American writer (something that could do with a little analysis)? Or is Roth's subject identical to — entirely contiguous with — his life as a man?

  * * *

  It is an awkward and recent truth that most contemporary novelists are deeply influenced by their own lives, and not least by the amount of praise, fame and money their work attracts. A few unpierceable geniuses may smile at the thousandth rejection-slip, may yawn at that staggering cheque, but such things tend to affect the confidence — and the writing. This doesn't matter so much in England, where the boundaries between success and its opposite are often hard to establish. (J. Cowper Powys is the obvious example, a monument of neglect far more renowned for his obscurity than many of his rivals were famed for their fame.) Over in America, though, you can't help knowing where you stand.

  In his inimitably wholehearted way, Roth has let success go to his head. Success arrived there in 1980, with a big suitcase, and hasn't moved out. The Anatomy Lesson may be the third and final instalment of the Zuckerman trilogy, but it is also Roth's second consecutive novel about what success is like. Such fixity! Though they all want it, in a way, writers tend to be mistrustful of the ridiculous accident of bestsellerdom. Trust Roth, then, to embrace it as his subject. Completing the self-beleaguerment, he has now written two autobiographical novels about the consequences of writing autobiographical novels. I may be wrong (perhaps I'm very old-fashioned), but the question appears to me to be: do we need this new kind of autobiographical novel? I mean, we seemed to begetting on pretty well without it.

  Whereas a British work on literary success would be rather low on incident (do radio interview; have lunch with publisher; get boiler mended), it is true that the American version provides considerable drama... You become a millionaire. You are mobbed in the street. Pale 'loners' have your picture tacked to the dartboard. Gossip columnists pair you off with Liza Minelli. Your sexual confessions increase the sale of pantihose, nationwide. PR firms want your mother to star in their rollmop commercials. Bestsellerdom rips the hard covers off life, because 'everyone has read that book'. In Roth's quasi-fictional world, that book is called 'Carnovsky'. We know it as Portnoy's
Complaint, and we've all read it too.

  Starting with the premonitory novella The Ghost Writer, moving on through the fame-flurry of Zuckerman Unbound, Roth now confronts the aftermath of literary success. Despite the 'trilogy' tag, you often wonder whether they aren't simply three books running with the same hero: Roth's post-Portnoy alter egos are so uniform that you could argue for a full pentathlon, roping in The Professor of Desire and My Life as a Man. The Zuckerman novels, at any rate, have no plot and little patterning. The Anne Frank motif from The Ghost Writer, for instance, is briefly taken up in Zuckerman Unbound, yet nothing of the first book survives into the third — nothing, that is to say, of artistic centrality.

  Zuckerman is there, Aunt Essie is there, but structure is not there. You get joists, braces, buttresses (a skipful of teachabilities): you don't get a house. The books have a shape, that of the case history. Although the author may feign weary contempt for any Roth-Zuckerman equations, it must be said that the novels read like experience. Experience reworked, displaced, mordantly heightened — but not distanced, and not transformed.

  The Roth themes, or reiterations, are compelling enough, and they are intricately deployed. Nathan Zuckerman's disaffection with the writer's calling has now reached the point where he is blocked, drugged, drunk and practically bedridden, assailed by 'untreatable pain of unknown origin' which makes writing physically as well as mentally unendurable. His persecution at the hands of the Jewish establishment continues, though in more highbrow form. Rabbi Wapter from The Ghost Writer has evolved into Professor Milton Appel (a nasty Commentary type), whose more sophisticated disapproval takes the same basic line: the charge of self-loathing anti-Semitism, as evinced in that 'mocking, hate-filled bestseller' with its lewd satire on Jewish ideals, sentiments and terrors. This is particularly hard on Zuck, whose pre-'Carnovsky" image was one of crew-necked maturity and high seriousness. But his most stinging excruciations come from guilt, and from a transgression that lies much closer to home.

  The guilt theme appeared to have peaked out at the end of Zuckerman Unbound, when the hero's father died with the word 'Bastard' on his lips after reading 'Carnovsky' in hospital. 'You killed him,' confirmed Zuckerman's brother. 'With that book.' In The Anatomy Lesson, Zuckerman pins his mother's death on 'Carnovsky' too. The loved son inflicted a fatal wound on his mother: 'literature is literature, but still, there were things that were real that Nathan has used' — used, with the additional sense of violation and betrayal. Interestingly, his guilt is never for a moment identified as literary. There are literary reasons, after all, for not 'using' real things, including oneself, without some countervailing broadness of vision or design. Zuckerman never blames himself as a writer. He blames himself, and he blames writing, but never both at once.

  And here he is, doing it all over again. Is the present book a way of compounding the sin or of absolving it? As if to propitiate the ghosts of his parents, Zuckerman decides (like Bellow's Eugene Henderson) to make a late bid for medical school, to become, however tardily, the good boy in the Portnoy joke. 'Help!' cries the Jewish mother on the beach. 'My son the doctor is drowning!' He flies out to Chicago, spurning his New York celebrity, his four mistresses, his inertness, abandoning above all and for ever those three hated words that have stared him in the face for twenty years: 'qwertyuiop, asdfghkl and zxcvbnm.’

  High on booze and pain-killers, on despair and mother-grief, Zuckerman undergoes his elaborate crack-up. He passes himself off as a gross, blaspheming pornographer (called Milton Appel: the intention is clear, as usual, though the humour here is way off beam); at a snowbound cemetery he attacks a pious and elderly Jewish mourner (Mr Freytag, one of several superb cameos): he falls (or is he pushed by his Nazi-ish chauffeuse?) and splits his face open on a headstone. Hospitalised, and silenced by his wired jaw, Zuckerman finally submits to the only real anatomy lesson. He finds out what pain can do - 'he'd had no idea' — and what it does to others. And he learns the impossibility, so the last sentence promises, of escaping 'the corpus that was his'.

  Well. Roth's corpus certainly has a funny shape to it by now, entirely transformed as it has been by that 'hate-filled bestseller', Portnoy's Complaint. No modern writer, perhaps no writer, has taken self-examination so far and so literally. What would Roth's oeuvre look like now, if Portnoy had simply sunk without trace? He recognises that 'the size of the success' was largely fortuitous, and yet he has written three whole novels about what that success did to him. Where next? A novel about this novel? A tetralogy about the trilogy?

  'It wasn't literary fame,' says Zuckerman, 'it was sexual fame, and sexual fame stinks.' This may be true, but Portnoy remains the only novel in which Roth's contorted genius managed to shed its inhibitions. With the case of Nathan Zuckerman, the self-revelation exhausts its power to titillate or scandalise, and the reader starts looking for the artistic content of the work, not the symbols, the decor, so much as the phrasing, the responsiveness. Roth's prose is usually elegant and sprucely ironic, but it has lost the capacity to surprise. There is not enough laughter or lyricism, there is not enough weather, there is not enough happening on the page. The Zuckerman novels look like life looks before art has properly finished with it. And Roth's corpus still gives the impression of a turbulent talent searching for a decorous way to explode.

  New Statesman 1978 and Observer 1984

  Elvis: He Did It His Way

  At this stage in the obsequies, a genuinely 'shocking' book about Elvis Presley would disclose that the King secretly gave away vast sums to charity, that he was actually very slim and healthy, and spent much of his free time working with handicapped children. But it is not to be. Following the slanderous testimonies of every hanger-on in the entourage, we are now offered a definitive summation of the grossness, egomania and barbaric vulgarity that was, apparently, Elvis.

  Albert Goldman's Elvis, which one is obliged to call an investigative biography, begins and ends with an eerie evocation of the mature Presley. First, the house — Graceland. It looks like a brothel or a gangster's triplex: red velour, gilded tassels, simulated waterfalls, polyurethane finish. Elvis always insisted that everything around him had to be new. 'When I wuz growin' up in Tupelo,' he is quoted as saying, 'I lived with enough fuckin' antiques to do me for a lifetime.’

  On to the master bedroom — black suede walls, crimson carpets and curtains, 81 square feet of bed with mortuary headboard and speckled armrests. To one side is an easel supporting a large photograph of Elvis's mother Gladys; to the other is a sepia-toned portrait of Jesus Christ in his pink nightie. On the bed lies Elvis himself — 'propped up', in Goldman's gallant formulation, 'like a big fat woman recovering from some operation on her reproductive organs.’

  Before going to work, Elvis rings his valet and junk-food guru, Hamburger James. After a midnight snack — $ioo worth of Fudgesicles - Elvis consumes a pound of Dixie Cotton bacon, four orders of mash with gravy, plus lots of sauerkraut and crowder peas.

  He sleeps in diapers these days, thick towels pinned round his middle. He weighs over 18 stone.

  This is a modern biography, so we now follow Elvis from the bedroom to the bathroom. Not that Elvis can get there under his own steam: a bodyguard has to carry him. The bulb-studded sanctum is full of devotional literature, high-powered laxatives, and the King's special 'medication' — i.e., his drugs. Elvis hates drug-addicts; he would like to see them herded into concentration camps. He once had an audience with Nixon, offering himself as a figurehead in the battle against dope. He was stoned at the time. In fact, he is a drug-addict. His doctor must delve between his toes for an unpopped vein.

  In his six-door Batmobile Elvis leads the motorcade to Memphis Airport. His private plane, like his house, is a kitsch nightmare of velvet and plastic. At dawn the Lisa Marie (named after Elvis's daughter) lands at Las Vegas. Waiting limos ferry the party to the Imperial Suite of the Hilton International. Elvis is cranked down into sleep. 'Mommy, I have to go to the bathroom!' he tells his girlfriend. '
Mommy will take you.' He sleeps. He is cranked awake. He eats, with a handgun beside his plate.

  Bandaged and 'braced' — i.e., corseted — Elvis dons an outfit embroidered with the crowned head of King Tutankhamun and buckles his $10,000 gladiator's belt. He stumbles and mumbles through his act, climaxing with his 'American Trilogy': 'Dixie', 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic', 'All My Trials'. He comes off stage pouring with sweat and screaming for his medication. Soon he is back in his tomb, vowing that never again will he play 'this fuck'n' Vegas'.

  Elvis: What Happened?, published just before Presley's death, was the first expose, cobbled together by a couple of sacked goons. Since then, everyone has blabbed. Well, what did happen? How did Elvis's life, like his voice, turn from energy and innocence into canting, parodic ruin? Goldman's answer is that the whole phenomenon was corrupt and farcical from the beginning. 'There is', he warns, 'absolutely no poignance in this history.’

  Elvis's family were hillbillies, 'a deracinated and restless race'. Elvis's father Vernon, 'greedy and stupid', 'a dullard and a donkey', was clearly a fine representative of the breed. Elvis was 'a silly little country boy' who just happened to be able 'to sing like a nigger', the 'acne-spotted self-pity' of his early songs making a strong appeal to 'the hysterically self-pitying mood of millions of teenagers'.

  Nursing dreams of becoming a new Valentino, Elvis's real ambition was to become a movie star. Soon 'the biggest putz in the history of film-making' was well established as 'one of the ugliest and most repulsive presences on the American screen'. When this bubble burst, he settled for the Vegas routine. The audience was ideal, consisting of 'a couple thousand middle-aged people sated with food and drink'.

  Personally Elvis was always 'a momma's boy', a bully, a coward and a fool. His career as 'pervert', 'voyeur1, 'masturbator', and so forth, was predictable as early as 1956, when Goldman pictures him 'thrusting his fat tongue into the mouth of a backstage groupie'. Finally, the 'freak', the 'pig junkie', completes his 'deterioration into homicidal madness'.