The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America

by Martin Amis

  'Norman,' a friend said to him at the time. 'You're a writer. You shouldn't be doing all this.' 'You're wrong,' said Mailer. 'This is exactly what I should be doing.’

  American success has been doubly unkind to him. Never timid, Mailer accepted his fate — and proceeded to do his growing up in public. 'I was on the edge of many things', he wrote later, 'and I had more than a bit of violence in me.’

  Earlier that winter I had gone to see Mailer on the $i-million-doilar set of Ragtime, Miles Forman's rambling film version of the Doctorow novel. Turn-of-the-century New York had been re-created on an acre of Shepperton mud. Nattily dressed, his wig prinked, Mailer was playing the role of the architect Stanford White, and Norris, appropriately, was playing his wife. In the scene they were shooting that morning, White was to make his entrance into Madison Square Garden (whose facade had been reconstructed for the occasion), there to be shot in the head by an enraged cuckold.

  The interior murder scene had already been filmed. In the car on the way back to the studios that day, and later over lunch, Mailer elaborated on his existential anxieties about his 'symbolic death' on the screen. 'They put wires, charges and blood packs in my hair. Unpleasant, but that didn't bother me so much as the idea of enacting my death. Then John Lennon was shot, two days before we did the scene. After that I knew which death was for real.’

  'Okay, Norman!' the megaphone had bawled on the set that morning. 'Let's do it again!' For the seventh time the jalopy pulled up at the steps of Madison Square Garden. Mr and Mrs White pushed through the waiting newsmen while antique cameras flared and fizzed. Norman got to say his lines. It was the Mailers' last scene on the film, and the mood was genial. When the final take was finished, Forman shouted out: 'Okay! Let's hear it for Norman!' Norman smiled and nodded at the applause of the crew, pleased, braced, unembarrassable to the last.

  During the sixties Mailer directed and starred in three films of his own, Wild 90, Outside the Law, and Maidstone, in which he pretends to be, respectively, a mafioso, a cop and a film director. All three were disasters, and much of the money lost was Mailer's own. But still, he hardly needed the big screen by this point: he was doing most of his acting in real life.

  So began the years of the Performing Self. Why write it when you can live it? The author was no longer a craven figure hunched over his desk: the Author was a Hero, an Event, a Spectacle.

  In the autumn of 1960 Mailer threw a party with his second wife Adele Morales, a Peruvian painter. 'She's an Indian, primitive and elemental,' he liked to boast. Things got a little too elemental that night on the Upper West Side. After several fistfights, and in a frenzy of alcoholic paranoia, Mailer forcibly divided his guests into two opposing groups, those for and against him. Towards dawn he stabbed Adele, nearly fatally. In a subsequent poem which I have been unable to trace, Mailer wrote that 'So long as you use a knife/There's some love left,' or words to that effect. Cheering for Adele, who anyway didn't press charges.

  'Fuck you! Fuck you all!' was how Mailer opened his speeches when he campaigned for Mayor of New York in 1969. 'No more traffic.' No more bullshit!' It was Mailer's dream to make New York City the fifty-first State in the Union; he wanted the city divided into autonomous units, 'some based on free love'. In The Presidential Papers (1963) Mailer had proposed the following 'existential legislation": states wishing to retain capital punishment should do so by means of public gladiatorial games; cancer researchers should be executed in this way 'if they failed to make progress after two years'. Today Mailer will look you in the eye and say, 'I was sure I was going to win.' John Lindsay won. Mailer came nowhere.

  'It seems that people want my ideas,' Mailer had said bewilderedly in mid-campaign. Mailer's ideas: they were coming in a torrent by now. The essays 'Reflections on Hip', 'The White Negro' and 'The Existential Hero' are the keys to how Mailer was regarding himself in those days. Attracted by Hemingway's idea of 'the Good' ('what makes me feel good is the Good') and Lawrence's idea of 'blood' (ditto), Mailer cobbled together a philosophy grounded on drugs and jazz, mighty orgasms, frequent fistfights, and doing what he liked all the time. This credo resembles the usual rag-bag of Sixties sophistries, but it was imbued with Mailer's own kind of extremism.

  The effect of these musings on his fiction became apparent in An American Dream (1964), a novel which Mailer composed in eight monthly instalments for Esquire. The unprepossessing hero, Rojack, is prefigured in the early fragment 'The Time of Her Time', in which the stud hero, who refers to his organ as 'the avenger', finally brings his girl to her first orgasm by whispering in her ear (after sodomy) the words, 'You dirty little Jew.' 'That whipped her over' all right.

  An American Dream takes this kind of thing a stage further. In brutal summary, Rojack murders his wife, sodomises the German maid, outwits the police, and impregnates the Wasp princess, having beaten up her super-hip black boyfriend. This is the novel's critical redemptive moment, as Rojack feasts on his blonde:

  — and I said sure to the voice in me, and felt love fly in like some great winged bird, some beating of wings at my back, and felt her will dissolve into tears, and some great sorrow like roses drowned in the salt of the sea came flooding from her womb and ...

  In the Evelyn Waugh Letters Mailer is briefly described as 'an American pornographer'. For this book, the description holds. It is the prose of a man in a transport, not of sexual excitement so much as the tizzy of false artistry.

  Nothing that Mailer writes is without interest, or without a good deal of negligent brilliance, but Why Are We In Vietnam? (1967) walks pretty close to the line. Heavily influenced by William Burroughs, the book consists of zoo pages of disc-jockey jive-talk, loosely recounting a hunting expedition and a macho initiation test. A failure at the time, the novel now seems no more than a marooned topicality. Mailer reached the end of something here. And he has written no fiction for fifteen years.

  Like President Carter's favourite poet, James Dickie, who is reputed to go around the place muttering 'Oh I'm so big. I'm so damned big', Mailer has always seen the novel as a challenge to his masculinity. He refers constantly to the author's 'size', 'vastness', 'stature'. When he writes of writing, his metaphors are always competitive, sexual or military. In Cannibals and Christians (1966) Mailer salutes the novel as 'the Great Bitch in one's life'. Assessing the work of some contemporaries 'who have slept with the Bitch', Mailer accuses them all of toadyism, timidity and insufficient 'breadth' or 'weight' — or 'size'. 'You don't catch the Bitch that way, buster,' he tells William Styron, 'you got to bring more than a trombone to her boudoir.' The piece ends: 'Can those infantrymen of the arts, the novelists, take us ... into the palace of the Bitch where the real secrets are stored?' In other words: can Norman?

  For the last fifteen years Mailer has been the most sought-after journalist in America. Following his masterpieces of superheated reportage, The Armies of the Night (1968) and Of a Fire on the Moon (1969), he has played fast and loose with his reputation, and the quality of his work has declined. In 1973 he wrote the notorious Marilyn, surviving a plagiarism suit (settled out of court) and the stink emanating from his claim that Monroe was bumped off by Jack and Bobbie Kennedy. In 1975 he wrote The Fight, an extended waffle on the Ali-Frazier match. Then came The Executioner's Song.

  A matter of weeks before the book appeared, Mailer persuaded his publishers to package the Gilmore story as a novel, or rather a 'true-life novel', along the lines of Truman Capote's 'non-fiction novel', In Cold Blood. After the 'factoid' squabble over Marilyn, the fictoid squabble over The Executioner's Song seemed like opportunism disguised as impatience with genre. In fact, the first 300 pages of the book show irreproachable artistry in their re-creation of the locales and loners of middle America; but then Mailer lets the story run away with him, and his reliance on transcripts, tapes and reports finally dishes its artistic claims. Once again, the fatal yearning for monumentality: Norman keeps overplaying his hand with the Great Bitch.

  'I don't know, maybe it wa
s too long,' he now admits. 'Since I started needing all this money,' he says, and in such a way that you know he has said it before, 'I've written twice as many books as I should have done, and maybe they've only been half as good as they should have been.’

  Mailer is a well-liked figure among the New York literati: there is much protective affection for the loud-mouth and tantrum-specialist whom they have indulged for so long. 'Oh, I like Norman,' was the typical response of one Madison Avenue publisher. 'I mean, I wouldn't want to room with him next year ... but he's good to have around.' It seems that every MA in Manhattan has his Mailer story: 'Then he smashed this window ... Then he loafed this guy ... Then he grabbed this bottle ... ' But he is spoken of with the reverence customarily accorded to people who live harder than most of us do.

  It is always possible that Mailer's best work is yet to come. Age is currently doing a good job on his infinite variety. Although his writing in the Fifties seemed prescient, Mailer's ideas solidified in the Sixties, despite his attempts to get interested in ecology, graffiti, the Yippies, and what not. He seems well-poised to make some sort of reconciliation with his own limits. Money worries constrain him now; but eventually the wives will remarry, and the kids will all grow up. Then the Avenger might get his piece of the Great American Bitch — or, in language more appropriate to his years, Mailer might write the novels that are in him.

  * * *

  In the Belly of the Beast, the book that sprang Jack Henry Abbott from jail, played a key part in putting him back inside. All last week, the State Supreme Court had the carnival atmosphere which New York reserves for its celebrity murder trials. Through a gauntlet of camera lights and superfat security guards strolled writers Jean Malaquais and Norman Mailer. Among the intent voyeurs of the public gallery sat filmstars Susan Sarandon and Christopher Walken. Already there was speculation about the film of the book of the trial of the life.

  '"It's like cutting hot butter, no resistance at all,'" quoted the prosecutor. '"They always whisper one thing at the end: 'Please'. You leave him in the blood, staring with dead eyes." Did you write that?' Abbott — a jittery figure, terribly thin, a man clearly in a state of intense and permanent confusion about what the world is making of him — gave one of his rare, murky grins. 'It's good, isn't it?' he said.

  At the end of the day's hearing, a turbulent press conference was held by Mr Mailer. He said that he hoped Abbott wouldn't get too long a sentence for his latest murder. 'Culture is worth a little risk,' he said. 'Otherwise you have a Fascistic society. I am willing to gamble with certair. elements in society to save this man's talent.' Mailer is willing. But does society feel the same way?

  One thing seems clear: the Jack Abbott story will run and run. 'It is a tragedy all around,' Mailer had said. But it is a farce too, an American rodeo of inverted cal!ousness and pretension. Could this happen anywhere else? The world looks on fascinated, rubbing its eyes.

  Now thirty-eight, Abbott has been in prison since he was twelve. He was released at eighteen and promptly readmitted for theft. Three years later he murdered a fellow inmate — 'in combat', according to his book. At one point he escaped, robbed a few banks and was recaptured within a month. Abbott is what they call 'State raised'. Eight years ago Abbott started writing letters to Jerzy Kozinski, a correspondence that ended, for the novelist, in alarm and repulsion. 'So stay away, Abbott,' read Kozinski's last letter. 'You have killed a man already — you won't kill a man in me.’

  In 1977 Abbott tried his luck with Norman Mailer, then at work on The Executioner's Song. Instantly Mailer felt 'all the awe one knows before a phenomenon'. Extracts from Abbott's letters appeared in the New York Review of Books. Mailer was joined by other literary figures in championing Abbott's cause in submissions to the Utah Board of Correction. Abbott's letters were edited down and Random House made plans to publish. Abbott was duly paroled and established in a halfway house in the Bowery, where he braced himself for literary fame.

  It could be argued that literary fame, in New York, has been more than a match for the equilibrium of Norman Mailer. So God knows what it did to Jack Abbott, a man who had spent half his adult life in solitary confinement. With Mailer, Abbott preceded Dudley Moore on the TV show 'Good Morning, America'. He was photographed by Jill Krementz (Mrs Kurt Vonnegut). He was toasted and praised at literary dinner parties. Then the reviews started to appear: 'One of the most important books of our age__a stunning and original writer__Conrad-like lyrical beauty... awesome, brilliant, perversely ingenuous; its impact is indelible'.

  That last gobbet is from the New York Times Book Review. Twelve hours before the paper hit the stands, however, Abbott had allegedly stabbed a man to death and was on the run. It has emerged at the trial that throughout his few weeks of freedom Abbott was in a highly volatile state — failing, in other words, to adjust to society. Asked to extinguish a cigarette in a museum, he reportedly flicked his butt in the guard's face. Told in a department store that it would take ten days to complete an alteration, Abbott started upending clothes displays, looking for scissors to do the job himself. Everyday vexations: but it was a routine spat of this kind that led Abbott to stab a waiter at an all-night cafe.

  As Abbott went on the run, his sponsors grew silent. Some suggested that they had wanted simply to encourage a writer rather than unleash a con — as if, wrote one commentator, 'the most they hoped for in writing to the parole board was to provide Abbott with an electric pencil sharpener'. The 'Right', in fact, had a field day. Radical chic, in hiding for over a decade, had taken a peep out of its burrow and been stomped on all over again. Abbott was recaptured, in Louisiana, and the circus resumed. Last Thursday, on his thirty-eighth birthday, Abbott was found guilty of first-degree manslaughter, not murder, a verdict which the family of the deceased regard as 'an outrage'. 'Happy birthday, Jack,' said one of the jurors.

  So what is one to make of this mess? First, the book, Belly, represents only a fraction of the original 300-odd letters. Even in its reduced form the book is grotesquely uneven, as well as aggressive and deluded, full of giveaways and triple-thinks.

  'I have read all but a very few of the world's classics, from prehistoric times up to this day.' Nourished by these bronto-texts, Abbott develops a primitive canvas of the outside world, entirely notional, tendentious and self-reflecting. It is a world-view based on nothing but books and (h must be said) psychosis. Reading Abbott, with his categorical stridency, his hollering italics, is like being drunkenly buttonholed by Colin Wilson's Outsider — all night, and with his finger jabbing at your chest. In a way the book is a precise and miserable testimony to the effects of lifelong isolation and terror. The real mystery is how it got confused with meaningful polemic, let alone with literature.

  It was Mailer, initially, who did the confusing. His introduction to the book (not to mention his other cavortings) would be shameful and ridiculous even if Abbott were now a well-established poet and humanitarian. In his introduction Mailer reaffirms that society should seek to cultivate the potential of its violent citizens. We shouldn't bother, he says, about the threat they pose 'to the suburbs'. What are the 'suburbs' doing in this argument? Abbott, anyway, posed his threat on Second Avenue and Fifth, and perhaps will again if Mailer's priorities are honoured.

  There are several wishful misapprehensions on offer here: that a 'creative individual' can't be evil; that writers, too, are outsiders, unheeded prophets; that life is a prison in the first place, and that the incorrigible criminal is forged only by contact with the criminal system, a system which gives distress to all well-informed Americans. Which comes first: the Beast, or the man in its Belly?

  There have been rumours that it wasn't Mailer and Co. who sprang Abbott from jail: it was the Feds. After a violent strike-beating operation in Marion Penitentiary in April 1980, a broken Abbott co-operated widi the prison authorities. Informers don't live long in the Pen, so it may have been a handy coincidence when Mailer's letters testified that the snitch happened to be a genius too.
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  In an article commissioned and rejected by the New York Times Abbott claimed that 'the Press has helped the Government to make it finally impossible for me to survive in prison'. In the piece, Abbott presents himself as the classic Kierkegaardian poet-martyr, transforming pain into music. To Mailer he is a victim, an existential hero. The sympathies of the public, of tabloid America, are rightly with the murdered boy — who was also, apparently (as if this case needs any more irony), a writer of promise.

  Up there on the stand Abbott seemed tremulous, distracted, half-way between laughter and teats. His reactions to the prosecutor's questions fizzed with indignation, with terrible impatience. It is said that the State-raised convict fears society as intensely as the ordinary man fears prison. Jack Abbott looks as if he has never seen much difference between the two.

  * * *

  Postscript It is absolutely consistent that Mailer should have presided over the publication, in 1985, of the most exhaustive character assassination in the history of letters: Mailer: His Life and Times, by Peter Manso. And it is ironical that the only episode in which Mailer fails to gratify rock-bottom expectation is die episode involving Jack Henry Abbott.

  The first thing to be said about In the Belly of the Beast is that it isn't any good. It isn't any good. One can then add that it is also the work of a thoroughly, obviously and understandably psychotic mind: as such, it is a manifesto for recidivism. Its author, plainly, could never hope to abjure violence. Abbott is quoted in Mailer, from his prison cell, and it is pitiable to read the confused and terrified ramblings of the man Mailer called 'an intellectual, a radical, a potential leader'. You can hear paranoia snickering and wincing behind every word.