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Authors: Martin Amis

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The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE MORONIC INFERNO

Martin Amis was born in Oxford on 15 August 1949. He was educated in Britain, Spain and the USA, attending over thirteen schools and then a series of crammers in London and Brighton. He gained a formal First in English at Exeter College, Oxford. He has been an editorial assistant on
The Times Literary Supplement
and was Literary Editor of the
New Statesman
from 1977 until 1979. He then worked as a Special Writer on the
Observer
and now contributes regularly to the
Independent on Sunday.
He is also the author of
Einstein's Monsters,
a collection of stories about the nuclear age, and his novels are
The Rachel Papers,
which won the 1974 Somerset Maugham Award,
Dead Babies, Success, Other People: A Mystery Story, Money, London Fields
and
Time's Arrow.

His novels have won widespread acclaim: writing about
Success,
Blake Morrison in
The Times Literary Supplement
said, 'The narrative economy and manipulation of sympathy make this Martin Amis's most assured work so far. The presentation of city life in its sadness is forceful in itself, but what is especially impressive is that all the detail counts in the overall design'; J. G. Ballard called
Other People
'Powerful and obsessive ... a metaphysical thriller. Kafka reshot in the style of
Psycho',
and the
Sunday Times
thought it 'dazzling . . . obligatory reading'. Reviewing
Einstein's Monsters
in the
London Evening Standard,
John Walsh wrote, 'The writing remains as vivid as ever, full of risky, throw-away conceits and perfectly cadenced terms of description.'
London Fields
was praised in the
Sunday Telegraph
as 'The most ambitious Amis to date, the most compassionate, and the most chilling . . . [his] voice has been the most original and distinctive of British fiction writers in the 1980s' while the
Guardian
wrote of
Time's Arrow.
'Amis's profound book adds a new and terrifying dimension to the Shakespearean tragic conception of time being "out of joint".’

MARTIN AMIS

The Moronic Inferno

and Other Visits to America

PENGUIN BOOKS

Copyright © Martin Amis, 1986

To
Christopher, Eleni and Alexander

Introduction and Acknowledgments
On a couple of occasions I have been asked to write a book about America; and I must have spent at least four or five minutes contemplating this monstrous enterprise. America is more like a world 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 drawers to prepare a selection of occasional journalism (and this book is offered with all generic humility), I found that I had already written a book about America — unpremeditated, accidental, and in instalments. Of the hundreds of thousands of words I seem to have written for newspapers and magazines in the last fifteen years, about half of them seem to be about America. I hope these disparate pieces add up to something. I know you can approach America only if you come at her from at least a dozen different directions.

The academic year 1959—60 I spent as a ten-year-old resident of Princeton, New Jersey. I was the only boy in the school — the only male in the entire city - who wore shorts. Soon 1 had long trousers, a crew cut, and a bike with fat whitewalls and an electric horn. I ate Thanksgiving 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 assignment. My mother lived in America for years, and many of my expatriate friends live in America now. My wife is American. Our infant son is half-American. I feel fractionally American myself.

Oh, no doubt I should have worked harder, made the book more representative, more systematic, et cetera. It remains, however, a collection of peripatetic journalism, and includes pieces where the travel is only mental. I have added links and postscripts; I have wedged pieces together; I have rewritten bits that were too obviously wrong, careless or bad. I should have worked harder, but it was quite hard work getting all this stuff together (photocopying back numbers of journals can be a real struggle, what with the weight of the bound volumes and that Xerox flap tangling you up and getting in the way). And it was hard work writing it all in the first place. Journalists have two ways of expending energy: in preparation and in performance. Some exhaust themselves in securing the right contacts, the intimate audits, the disclosures. I am no good at any of that. I skimp it, and so everything has to happen on the typewriter. I find journalism only marginally easier than fiction, and book-reviewing slightly harder. The thousand-word book review seems to me far more clearly an art form (however minor) than any of the excursions of the New Journalism, some of which are as long as
Middlemarch.

All these pieces were written left-handed. They were written, that is to say, not for my own satisfaction but for particular editors of particular journals at particular times and at particular lengths. The hack and the whore have much in common: late nights, venal gregariousness, social drinking, a desire to please, simulated liveliness, dissimulated exhaustion — you keep on having to do it when you don't feel like it. (Perhaps this bond accounts for the hypocritical burnish of the vice-entrapment story, where in the end the reporter always makes his excuses and staggers off nobly into the night.) Insidious but necessary is the whorish knack a journalist must develop of suiting his pitch to the particular client. Luckily it all seems to be done subliminally. You write like this for the
London Review of Books,
and you write like that for the
Sunday Telegraph Magazine.
You can swear here but you can't swear there. (I have greatly enjoyed debowdlerising these pieces — and restoring cuts, some of which, as in the Brian De Palma profile, approached about 80 per cent of the whole.) The novelist has a very firm conception of the Ideal Reader. It is himself, though strangely altered — older, perhaps, or younger. With journalism the entire transaction is much woollier: every stage in the experience seems to involve a lot of people.

I got the phrase 'the moronic inferno', and much else, from Saul Bellow, who informs me that
be
got it from Wyndham Lewis. Needless to say, the moronic inferno is not a peculiarly American condition. It is global and perhaps eternal. It is also, of course, primarily a metaphor, a metaphor for human infamy: mass, gross, ever-distracting human infamy. One of the many things I do not understand about Americans is this: what is it like to be a citizen of a superpower, to maintain democratically the means of planetary extinction? I wonder how this contributes to the dreamlife of America, a dreamlife that is so deep and troubled. As I was collating
The Moronic Inferno
(in August 1985, during the Hiroshima remembrances), I was struck by a disquieting thought. Perhaps the title phrase is more resonant, and more prescient, than I imagined. It exactly describes a possible future, one in which the moronic inferno will cease to be a metaphor and will become
a
reality: the only reality.

I am particularly grateful to
The Observer,
under whose auspices, in effect, this book was written; I am also indebted to the
New Statesman,
the
Sunday Telegraph Magazine,
the
London Review of Books, Tatler
and
Vanity Fair.
Throughout I have been exceptionally lucky in my editors and colleagues, and here salute them, in roughly 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 Ian Hamilton and to Clöe Peploe.

The Moronic Inferno

Iggy Blaikie, Kayo Obermark, Sam Zincowicz, Kotzie Kreindl, Clara Spohr, Teodoro Valdepenas, Clem Tambow, Rinaldo Can-labile, Tennie Pontritter, Lucas Asphalter, Murphy Verviger, Wharton Horricker ... The way a writer names his characters provides a good index to the way he sees the world — to his reality-level, his responsiveness to the accidental humour and freakish poetry of life. Thomas Pynchon uses names like Oedipa Maas and Pig Bodine (where the effect is slangy, jivey, cartoonish); at the other end of the scale, John Braine offers us Tom Metfíeld, Jack Royston, Jane Framsby (can these people really exist, in our minds or anywhere else, with such leadenly humdrum, such dead names?). Saul Bellow's inventions are Dickensian in their resonance and relish. But they also have a dialectical point to make.

British critics tend to regard the American predilection for Big Novels as a vulgar neurosis — like the American predilection for big cars or big hamburgers. Oh God, we think: here comes another sweating, free-dreaming maniac with another thousand-pager; here comes another Big Mac. First, Dos Passos produced the Great American Novel; now they all want one. Yet in a sense every ambitious American novelist is genuinely trying to write a novel called USA. Perhaps this isn't just a foible; perhaps it is an inescapable response to America - twentieth-century America, racially mixed and mobile, twenty-four hour, endless, extreme, superabundantly various. American novels are big all right, but partly 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 latest novel,
The Dean's December,
has caused some puzzlement in its country of origin, and one can see why. Far more sombre and less exuberant than its major predecessors, it has every appearance of being an 'engaged' novel, a mature novel, a statement, a warning; Bellow himself has gone on record, perhaps incautiously, as stressing the difficulty people will have in 'shrugging this one off. In 1976 Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, praised by the Swedes 'for human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture'. T.S. Eliot said that the Nobel was like an invitation to one's own funeral: no beneficiary of the prize had ever gone on to write anything good, ft may be coincidence (as opposed to an onset of Delphic delusion), but Bellow's first post-Nobel novel transmits all the strenuousness of a juggernaut changing gear. The vision has widened but also become narrower; most noticeably, the fluid musicality of Bellow's epics — the laughter, the didactic generosity, the beguiling switches of register — has disciplined itself, in the interests of literary
form.
This, it seems to me, is what Late Bellow is going to be like. It is all very interesting.

If we take an introductory glance through the dramatis personae of the new book, we see the usual rhythmical clinches but also sense that Bellow is playing in a minor key, and using the mute. There are various judges, shysters and ambulance-chasers with names like Ellis Sorokin, Wolf Quitman and Maxie Detillion (these hardly rival the three divorce lawyers in
Humboldt's Gift,
who are called Tomchek, Pinsker and Srole); there is a rock-hard black whore called Riggie Hines, and a suave black rapist called Spofford Mitchell; there is an ageing athlete called Silky Limpopo, a prison-reformer called Rufus Ridpath, a world-famous journalist called Dewey Spangler... That last name looks a bit artful and specific for a Bellow character, and perhaps this provides a more general clue to the novel's intentions. A pivotal figure in the book, Dewey Spangler is somewhere between Walter Lippmann and Andre Malraux, a flashy trader in geopolitical generalities and global diagnoses. 'Dewey', of course, is America's great philosopher, its star-spangled thinker; and 'Spangler', I suspect, has something to do with the decline of the West.

The Dean's December is spent in Bucharest, 6,ooo miles from home. The Dean is Albert Corde, ex-journalist, ex-womaniser, ex-trivialiser (he is also a Gentile — surprising for such an obvious and detailed Bellow surrogate). Home is Chicago. The year is uncertain: there are mentions of Carter, Margaret Thatcher, but also of Entebbe, Cambodia. The Dean has come to Bucharest with his Rumanian wife Minna, a distinguished astronomer. Minna's mother Valeria is dying. 'Corde had come to give support.' He is consciously testing his reserves as a good husband, exhaustively considerate and correct. He is a reformed character, proving his seriousness. In a way, this is what the novel is doing too. It is a necessary connection. 'I was then becoming careless about time,' says Charlie Citrine in
Humboldt's Gift,
'a symptom of my increasing absorption in larger issues.' Such a crack would be unthinkable in
The Dean's December.
There has been a moral tightening. No more gadabouts like the unpunctual Citrine. You have to get life right before you start going on about its meaning.

Old Valeria, one-time Minister of Health, is in an ambiguous position
vis-à-vis
the Party, and Minna herself is a defector. The powers that be being what they are, Mr and Mrs Corde are given a hard time as they brace themselves for their bereavement. And 'the city was terrible!' says Corde, helplessly, in a bracketed aside. 'Aged women rose at four to stand in line for a few eggs'; the queues have 'an atmosphere of compulsory exercise in the prison yard'. But this is not crudely emphasised. Bucharest is summoned in terms of peeling stucco, bad food and bad light. 'Air-sadness, Corde called this. In the final stages of dusk, a brown sediment seemed to encircle the lamps. Then there was a livid death moment. Night began. Night was very difficult here, thought Albert Corde.’

There is not much Corde can do in Bucharest. He attends to his wife's grief, and to the stiff cousins who glide in their bad clothes through the antique apartment. He sits in his wife's childhood room. He goes to bed after breakfast. 'As he did this, he sometimes felt how long he had lived and how many, many times the naked creature had crept into its bedding.' For the Bellow hero, however, solitude always opens the way to the gregariousness of memory — to the inner riot of the past. In
Herzog,
Herzog relives a marriage while putting on his tie. In
Humboldt,
Citrine reviews a literary career while meditating on his sofa. Albert Corde has his own 'restless ecstasy' to contend with: but the Dean's December, like
The Dean's December,
is caught up in more public matters.

Corde's troubles emerge slowly, piecemeal.
Humboldt's
Citrine came out of his Chicago apartment block one morning to find that his Mercedes had been beaten up with baseball bats: 'Now the moronic inferno had caught up with me.' The phrase recurs here:

but this time we are closer in, much nearer the first circle. As college dean, Corde is involved in an investigation into the murder of one of his students. It happened during a torrid Chicago night: 'one of those choking, peak-of-summer, urban-nightmare, sexual and obscene, running-bare times, and death panting behind the young man, closing in'. On the night of his murder, the student 'had been out for dirty sex, and it was this dirty sex momentum that had carried him through the window'.

The Dean's involvement with the moronic inferno has another dimension. Recently Corde published two long articles in
Harper's —
articles about Chicago, 'the contempt centre of the USA'. (One reflects that Bellow has been very lucky with his home town: a great city, vast, bloody, hugely mercantile, and not trodden flat by writers.) In these pieces Corde submitted to an atrocious anger: 'he gave up his cover, ran out, swung wild at everyone'. The articles examine Chicago's 'underclass', the disposable populations of the criminal poor. Born into slums, jails and hospitals, the Morlock sub-race is permitted — even expected — to destroy itself with violence, lead-poisoning and junk. In Bucharest, with its 'strict zero-blue and simple ice', 'the trees made their tree gestures, but human beings were faced by the organised prevention of everything that came natural'. Chicago is repeatedly described as a jungle populated exclusively by rats. In Bucharest, the city rodents have been 'rolled flat by trucks and cars'; they are 'as two-dimensional as weather vanes', just like everything else. In Bucharest, a communist dog barks in the street, 'a protest against the limits of dog experience (for God's sake, open the universe a little more!)'. In Chicago, a capitalist Great Danç wallows at his own birthday party, showered with 'ribboned presents' and 'congratulatory telegrams': 'the animal came nudging and sighing. What to do with all this animal nature, seemed to be the burden of the dog's groans.’

The Rumanian ordeal continues. During the frigid Christmas, Corde and Minna preside over Valeria's obsequies. Tottering relatives in fake fur coats join the Cordes at the suburban crematorium. Feeling himself 'crawling between heaven and earth', Corde descends from the fiery crematorium into the deep-frozen crypt, 'the extremes of heat and cold splitting him like an ax'. It is a memorable scene, conspicuously intense, the emotional crisis of the book. And here, the slowly solidifying 'thesis novel' - so carefully and subtly arrived at - is abandoned, rejected, put aside.
The Dean's
December
ceases its inspection of East and West, the vying perversions of humanity, and goes on to bigger things.

The heroes of Saul Bellow's major novels are intellectuals; they are also (if you follow me) heroes, which makes Bellow doubly remarkable. In thumbnail terms, the original protagonists of literature were gods; later, they were demigods; later still, they were kings, generals, fabulous lovers, at once superhuman, human and all too human; eventually they turned into ordinary people. The twentieth century has been called an ironic age, as opposed to a heroic, tragic or romantic one; even realism, rock-bottom realism, is felt to be a bit grand for the twentieth century. Nowadays, our protagonists are a good deal lower down the human scale than their creators: they are anti-heroes, non-heroes, sub-heroes.

Not so with Bellow. His heroes are well tricked out with faults, neuroses, spots of commonness: but not a jot of Bellow's intellectuality is withheld from their meditations. They represent the author at the full pitch of cerebral endeavour, with the simple proviso that they are themselves non-creative — they are thinkers, teachers,
readers.
This careful positioning allows Bellow to write in a style fit for heroes: the High Style. To evolve an exalted voice appropriate to the twentieth century has been the self-imposed challenge of his work. It began with
The Adventures of Augie March
(1953), at times very shakily: for all its marvels,
Augie March,
like
Henderson the Rain King,
often resembles a lecture on destiny fed through a thesaurus of low-life patois.
Herzog
erred on the side of private gloom,
Humboldt
on the side of sunny ebullience (with stupendous but lopsided gains for the reader).
Mr Sammler's Planet
(1970) came nearest to finding the perfect pitch, and it is the Bellow novel which
The Dean's December
most clearly echoes.

The High Style is not a high style just for the hell of it: there are responsibilities involved. The High Style attempts to speak for the whole of mankind, with suasion, to remind us of what we once knew and have since forgotten or stopped trying to regrasp. 'It was especially important', Corde reflects, 'to think what a human being really was. What wise contemporaries had to say about this amounted to very little.' The Bellow hero lays himself open to the world, at considerable psychological cost. Mr Sammler is 'a delicate recording instrument'; Herzog is 'a prisoner of perception, a compulsory witness'. All that can be done with these perceptions, these data, is to transform them into — into what? Humboldt suffered from 'the longing for passionate speech'. Corde, like Sammler, aches to deliver his 'inspired recitation'. It is the desire to speak, to warn — to
move,
above all.

Albert Corde is 'an image man', 'a hungry observer'. He has a 'radar-dish face', for ever picking up signals 'from all over the universe'.

He looked out, noticing. What a man he was for noticing! Continually attentive to his surroundings. As if he had been sent down to
mind
the outer world, on a mission of observation and notation. The object of which was? To link up? To classify? To penetrate?

Corde has 'the restless ecstasy' common to Bellow's heroes — a global version of Henderson's 7
want, I want, I want.
He suffers from 'vividness fits', 'storms of convulsive clear consciousness', 'objectivity intoxicated'. And it wasn't just two, three, five chosen deaths being painted thickly, terribly, convulsively inside him, all over his guts, liver, heart... but a large picture of cities, crowds, peoples, an apocalypse...

Up to now the Bellow hero has always kept these convulsions to himself. They provide the substance of his meditations and, at most, they give the spur to some climactic effort of passionate utterance — to a friend, a girl, anyone who will listen. But Corde, like the book built round him, has gone public. The key to his self-exposure, and self-injury, is his journalistic outpouring on Chicago, which might almost be seen as a pre-emptive strike for the novel itself. Corde's articles are reckless, irresponsible: but their main presumption, as Dewey Spangler gloatingly points out, is that they are full of 'poetry'. They constitute an act of romantic regression and are an embarrassment to everyone, Corde included.

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