The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America (17 page)

'And who was that?’

'Me. I got several dollars for each person killed. Imagine.’

Observer
1983

Gloria Steinem is the most eloquent and persuasive feminist in America. She is also the most reassuring — i.e. the least frightening, from a male point of view. There are two clear reasons for this. Here is one reason:

So what would happen if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate and women could not? ... Men would brag about how long and how much — Street guys would invent slang ('He's a three-pad man') and 'give fives' on the corner with some exchange like, 'Man, you lookin'
good!'
'Yeah, man, I'm on the rag!’

The humour is not only humour (rare enough in these parts): its satirical accuracy is enlivened by affection. The second reason for her wide appeal can be glimpsed in the photograph on the back cover. (She looks nice, and friendly, and feminine.) In the sort of Utopia which Gloria Steinem seriously envisages, neither of these considerations would carry much weight. But we aren't there yet.

I sat waiting for Ms Steinem in the midtown offices of Ms., the magazine that she co-founded in 1972.. Launched on a shoestring and a wave of female dedication, Ms. now has a circulation of 450,000, financing the Ms. Foundation which, in turn, acts as a clearing-house for feminist issues (not rape hotlines and conflict-resolution meetings so much as monetary aid for various programmes and projects). The magazine hires about fifty people, three of whom are men. Ms Steinem's assistant, Ms Hornaday, brought me some coffee, and we chatted away. The atmosphere is purposeful, high-morale, sisterly. Pleasant though I found it, I was also aware of my otherness, my testosterone, among all this female calm.

Two blocks north, Forty-Second Street was crackling through its daily grind of sin and stupor, of go-go, triple-X and hard core. Forty-Second Street wouldn't last forty seconds in Ms Steinem's Utopia. Pornography is the pressing feminist topic of 1984 and I had been reading up on the protest literature, finding much good sense and justified outrage — also the faint glare of paranoia. 'Men love death — In male culture, slow murder is the heart of Eros' — Andrea Dworkin, and her murderous high-style. Even the commonsensical Ms Steinem believes that pornography is the 'propaganda' of 'anti-woman warfare', sensing conspiracy rather than mere weakness and chaotic venality. In the hot-and-cold hostilities between the sexes, there is still plenty of paranoia on either side.

Ms Steinem emerged from her conference, and we all got ready to leave. Our destination was Suffolk County Community College in Long Island, where Gloria would address the students — the kind of trip she makes once or twice a week. Photographs had not prepared me for Ms Steinem's height and slenderness; her face, too, seemed unexpectedly shrewd and angular beneath the broad, rimless glasses (which she seldom removes). The long hair is expertly layered, the long fingers expertly manicured. Fifty this year, Ms Steinem is unashamedly glamorous: it is a pampered look, a Park Avenue look. Out on the street, a chauffeur-driven limousine mysteriously appeared, and in we climbed.

Now I knew from a half-digested reading of her collected journalism that Ms Steinem was a crystallised and not an accidental feminist. One of the book's many successes is the way it documents the slow politicisation of a contented and prospering individual. After a hard, poor and painful childhood in Toledo (much of it spent caring single-handedly for a crushed, confused mother), and after a spell in show business as a dancer, Gloria pursued a thriving career as a New York journalist. It was the usual freelancing pot-pourri; pieces on stockings, fashion, Truman Capote, John Lennon, Vidal Sassoon. As early as 1963 she wrote the classic expose, 'I was a Playboy Bunny'. Despite various 'no broads' ground rules, Ms Steinem started working on the campaign trail, both as a journalist and an aide — to George McGovern. This soon led her into the civil rights movement; she found herself writing about migrant workers, Puerto Rican radicals, Martin Luther King. Then, in 1969, it happened: Ms Steinem 'got' feminism - and realised she had had it all along. The experience 'changed my life', she writes. 'It will never be the same.’

Encased by the limousine, and also by a sense of comfortable male irony, I kicked off by asking Ms Steinem whether the movement was now undergoing a phase of retraction or redefinition. Hadn't Nora Ephron recently joked that the only thing feminism had given women was the privilege of going dutch? Hadn't Susan Brownmiller confessed that while she would never remove the hair on her legs, she had started dyeing it (this being the centrist or SDP stance on the leg-hair issue)? Weren't women finding that going out to work and joining the 'pink-collar ghetto' only doubled their hardships, since they were obliged to moonlight with the Hoover? What about Germaine Greer's sudden championship of motherhood, chastity and coitus interruptus?

'Well, I don't know anyone who's into coitus interruptus,' said Ms Steinem, and gave her musical laugh. She then proceeded (pretty gently, it now seems) to put my argument in its place. This was the first lesson of the day: to challenge feminism, in America, in 1984, is to disqualify yourself as a moral contender. It is the equivalent of espousing a return to slavery. One of Ms Steinem's dialectical techniques is that of role-reversal; she puts the (white male) reader in a different racial or sexual circumstance — then asks how
he
likes it. And this is more than a trick of argument. It speaks for a passionate identification with the fate of the American black. Feminism in England lacks that dimension, just as England lacks a history of racial guilt. The second lesson of the day took a little longer to learn. Reasonable and unmenacing though Ms Steinem's logic sounds, it contains the core of something quite revolutionary, indeed millennial.

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

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