The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America (5 page)

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

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', 'voyeur
¹
, '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'.

It quickly becomes clear — does it not? — that Goldman isn't to be trusted. In his palpable eagerness to explode the Presley Myth, he has erected an anti-myth to replace it — which, in turn, is already being whittled away at by transatlantic commentators. It may indeed be the case that Elvis was no more than a horrible, and horribly uncomplicated, embodiment of American Success; but
Elvis
leaves us none the wiser.

In biography, displays of such inordinate aggression leave one wondering about the personal problems of the author rather than the subject. I read
Elf is
under the impression that Goldman was a surly young iconoclast of the
Rolling Stone
school of New Journalism. On the back flap I am confronted by a middle-aged chipmunk who used to be Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia. As should by now be evident, the book is a prodigy of bad writing, excitable, sarcastic and barely literate. It is also as exploitative as the exploiters whom Goldman reviles, and no more tasteful than a Presley pants-suit.

Observer 1981

In New York, Diana Trilling is regarded with die suspicious awe customarily reserved for the city's senior literary ladies. Whenever I announced my intention of going along to interview her, people looked at me with trepidation, a new respect, a certain holy dread. I felt I was about to enter the lion's den — or the den of the literary lioness, which is often just as dangerous.

I had tangled with Mrs Trilling before, more than ten years ago, and had my own reasons for fearing her well-known asperity. Mr and Mrs Lionel Trilling were on a visit to London at the time, and, knowing of my admiration for Mr Trilling's work, a common friend had arranged a meeting: tea at the Connaught, the London hotel where all distinguished Americans seem to put up. I remember Lionel as milky-haired, laconic and serene; I remember Diana as dark, foxy and fierce. At one point I made an incautious remark, illiberal in tendency — an undergraduate remark. Mrs Trilling cracked her teacup into its saucer and said: 'Do you really mean that? Then what are we doing here? Why are we sitting here having tea with this person?’

Diana Trilling lives in Claremont Avenue, near Columbia University, where her husband taught: he was the first Jew to gain tenure there, incredible as that now seems. American cities appear to have a habit of surrounding their seats of learning with slums. In the foreword to her first collection of articles,
Claremont Essays
(1964), Mrs Trilling wrote about the exact sense of urban positioning that Columbia affords. The community is perched on its grassy hill, a fortress of intellection, with boiling Harlem just down the slope.

On the telephone Mrs Trilling had given me carefully, indeed grimly detailed instructions for the subway. One false move, I gathered, and I would find myself clambering out of a manhole on Duke Ellington Boulevard. In the end I took a cab — through the Upper West Side, along bending Broadway for the lawless Nineties, and up into the beleaguered castle of the University, and Claremont Avenue, a wide clean street with the solid, civic feel of old New York. Punctual to the second, I warily pressed the bell. Now, perhaps, the real perils would begin.

Mrs Trilling received me in her ground-floor apartment. I liked her immediately — actually, I had liked her the first time — and knew , that I was going to enjoy the afternoon. However, I quickly re-identified the kind of unease that a woman like Diana Trilling is always liable to provoke. You have to
watch what you say
when she's around. I mean this in the best sense. Mrs Trilling is not touchy or snobbish or over-sensitive; she is just intellectually vigilant, snake-eyed. In her company you are obliged to move up a gear — you must weed out your lazier, sloppier thoughts (like the one that had briefly incensed her in the Connaught). No, she isn't the most soothing of companions; but you end up chastened and braced, and there is much laughter and enlightenment to be had on the way.

The life of the American intellectual is qualitatively different from its British equivalent. In America, intellectuals are public figures (whereas over here they are taken rather less seriously than ordinary citizens — at most, they are licensed loudmouths). The intellectual life therefore has a dimension of political responsibility; the crises of modern liberalism — the race question, McCarthyism, feminism, Vietnam, Israel - are magnified but also taken personally, vitally. Spats between writers are transformed, willy-nilly, into unshirkable crusades. The Trillings lived this life together and experienced all its triumphs and wounds. Lillian Hellman, Martha's Vineyard, 1952, 1968, Little Brown, UnAmerican Activities, the
New York Review
... it is a ceaseless, swirling litany. These hatchets may look pretty rusty to the outsider, but they will never be buried. And maybe the positions are more fiercely held now that they are held alone.

It is all the more unexpected, then, that Diana Trilling suddenly finds herself the author of a bestseîling book about a tabloid homicide. The murder of Herman Tarnower and the trial of his mistress Jean Harris electrified America in a way that (I suspect) will never be fully comprehensible to the British public. It is hard work trying to dream up a home-grown equivalent of the crime - as if, say, the headmistress of Roedean had done away with Jimmy Saville. Diana Trilling's original title, vetoed for legal reasons, was 'A Respectable Murder', which is doubly appropriate. To the public, the murder was all about class, and in America class tends to shade into race: Mrs Harris was a high-class Wasp, 'Hi' Tarnower a vulgar diet doc, a Jewish counter-jumper. And, as a rejected mistress, one spurned for a younger replacement, Mrs Harris's case seemed to dramatise the universal female fear. It wasn't just a respectable murder; it seemed, at first, almost to be a justifiable one.

But the most extraordinary thing about Mrs
Harris
is its energy. Not until later did I discover Mrs Trilling's true age: I had thought she was ten years younger, and even then I was astonished by the stamina that had gone into the book. Every day Mrs Trilling would drive out to the court-house (before the trial, also, she did a little investigative work in the Westchester suburbs, hampered by bad weather, lack of co-operation, and by her own reluctance to pry into other people's lives). After a day of scandal and/or back-breaking boredom in court, she would drive back to Claremont Avenue, and start to write. 'I was working fifteen hours a day for three-and-a-half months,' says Diana Trilling, who, it transpires, is now in her mid-seventies.

The energy of the book, however, is not only a matter of endurance. After its slowish start, Mrs
Harris
builds into an intricate compendium of wit, social grasp, clarity of thought and novelistic brio. Diana Trilling's essays and articles were never dull, but here she is revealed as a writer with an infallible eye for the interesting. And now it seems that we can look forward to an extended period of productivity — facilitated, perhaps, by the condition of widowhood. 'When Lionel was alive, we tended to do what he wanted to do. Now there's nothing else to do but work.' Literary widowhood often means a long spell of literary executorship, and Mrs Trilling has duly completed her editing of the twelve-volume
Uniform Edition of the Works of Lionel Trilling.
She is now engaged on a book about her early life. It is possible, too, that she has in some sense emerged from her husband s shadow, and feels a new freedom and confidence.

'Growing old is hard. Growing old alone is harder,' she said. 'You become more sensitive with your friends. You wonder whether you are being asked out because of pity. There is an increased dependence on routine. I won't leave the bed unmade in the morning. I won't stand by the refrigerator and eat a boiled egg. I
want
to, but I don't.' She talks of her husband without self-drama but with palpable regret. 'I feel the usual things ... I wish now that I had worshipped him a bit more.’

The apartment in Claremont Avenue is as elegant and well-preserved as its owner. Everywhere there are books, framed photographs, mementoes. 'The individual is best defined by his social geography,' wrote Diana Trilling in
We Must March My Darlings
(1977). Lionel Trilling wrote about society but normally only in relation to literature, or culture: he was also a critic with certain bold mytholo-gising tendencies, with a love for the exciting idea, the daring construct. 'Yes,' said Diana Trilling, with some self-deprecation, 'I was always the one more interested in the social side, in the here and now.' 'But there aren't many people like you,' I said cautiously. 'You're a clear thinker.' 'That's right. Too clear, perhaps,' said Mrs Trilling.

Observer 1982