The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America

by Martin Amis

  'Right, give me some gossip,' Vidal demanded, producing wine as I recuperated after the walk.

  Vidal is on record as saying that he always perks up at news of catastrophe among his friends. And, as I did my best with tales of professional failure, neurosis and marital collapse, a new intensity began to invade his features. In a curious way, despite his ameliorist image, you feel that he wishes everything were worse than it is — America, the modern marriage, the trials of his friends. It would be neater that way, and more fun to think about. He has removed pain from his own life, or narrowed it down to manageable areas; and it is one thing he cannot convincingly re-create in his fiction. But his deeply competitive nature is still reassured to know that there is plenty of pain about.

  I have never met an American so English in his irony. No issue is serious enough for him to resist its satirical possibilities, a habit that reinforces his stirring pessimism about the way the world is changing. 'As cheerful as a leper-bell,' was how Simon Raven described his prognosis, a verdict which Vidal prizes. But the phrase misses his grisly relish or human folly, the sense you get that his world-view is obedient to a personal rhetoric, a private enjoyment of the badness of things.

  * * *

  Postscript In agreeing to the interview Mr Vidal had armed himself with the stipulation that he would be able to see and check the piece before it was published. There was nothing sinister in this: naturally he wouldn't attempt to trim my opinions. Nevertheless I had the ticklish task of calling on Vidal at the Connaught in London and sitting there in his room while he inspected the galleys. In the first paragraph he changed 'homosexual' to 'pansexual'. A little later he said, in his grandest voice, 'Now if you print that I shall most certainly sue,' and deleted a chance scurrility with a stroke of his pen. ('As one gets older', Vidal has remarked, 'litigation replaces sex.') Thereafter he merely did a bit of gardening, corrected some misquotations ('No, that's not my style at all'), and inserted a new joke or two ('If you take that out, I'll give you this'). We haggled over a number of points; there were no real cruces. Occasionally, as he read on, he gave a reluctant laugh. 'Mm,* he concluded. 'A bit thin on the work.’

  This was perfectly true. I had read Myra and Myron (with difficulty), some of Williwaw, half of The City and the Pillar and most of Julian; I had also spent three weeks reading three chapters of Burr. I cannot get through Vida!'s fiction. The books are too long. Life is too short. In the interests of balance I append a piece about VidaPs essays, where I am a little older and a little more forthright.

  May I also take the opportunity here to pit Vidal's account of his fight with Mailer against Mailer's account of his fight with Vidal? Needless to say, at no point do they tally. When I asked Mailer for his version, he nodded, squared his shoulders, and spoke with solemn deliberation.

  'Vidal had written things about me. I had resolved that the next time I saw him, I was going to hit him. You understand? The next time I saw him was at Lally's. I walked up and banged him over the head with a glass — a heavy cocktail glass. He looked very scared. I asked him to come outside. Then his little friend started in on me.

  "All right," I said. "Come on. I'll take out the two of yous." They stayed where they were. I walked away.”

  Perhaps, towards the end, I am guilty of importing the accents of De Niro's Jake la Motta; but that was it, in substance. One day I must triangulate the story with the version of an impartial onlooker, if any such exist. Whom to believe, though? In my experience of fights and fighting, it is invariably the aggressor who keeps getting everything wrong.

  * * *

  Gore Vidal is probably the cleverest book-reviewer in the world. This needn't sound like faint praise, even to someone as exhaustively lauded as Mr Vidal. He is too clever to write effective Hollywood screenplays, too clever to be an effective politician (he flunked in the senatorial primaries in 1981), too clever, really, to be an effective novelist. Essays are what he is good at: you can't be too clever for them.

  Vidal is the unchallengeable master of the droll stroll. Rightly indulged by his editors, who give their star performer all the rope he wants, Vidal saunters at his leisure through the books tendered for review, with many a delightful diversion, racy short-cut, startling turn of speed. He is learned, funny and exceptionally clear-sighted. Even his blindspots are illuminating.

  Roughly half the essays in Pink Triangle and Yellow Star are literary, half socio-political. When writing about the real world, Vidal sounds like the only grown-up in America — indeed, his tone is that of a superevolved stellar sage gazing down on the globe in pitying hilarity. There are two reasons for this. First, Vidal was born into the governing classes, and has never regarded them with anything but profound suspicion. In 1940, following the death of the virtuous Senator William Borah ('the lion of Idaho'), a large stash was found in his safety deposit box, causing uneasy speculation. Vidal approached his grandfather, Senator Gore, and asked him who had paid Borah off: 'The Nazis,' came the reply. To keep us out of the war.' This is traumatic news, even now. Vidal must have been fifteen at the time. It is easy to see how such disclosures would have shaped and hardened his thinking.

  The second and closely related reason for Vidal's bracing hauteur is that Vidal is incorrigibly anti-American. My, is Gore unpatriotic!

  No pomaded Hanoverian swaggerer could have such natural contempt for that coarse and greedy colony. Writing about the Framing of the First Constitution, Vidal does not accept 'the view that a consortium of intellectual giants met in Philadelphia in order to answer once and for all the vexing questions of how men are to be governed'. He finds, rather, that their 'general tone is that of a meeting of the trust department of Sullivan and Cromwell'. In another essay Vidal resolutely fails to distinguish between American polity and the workings of the Chase Manhattan Bank: bureaucrats are 'tellers', voters are 'depositors'; and when Banksman Nixon goes to Peking or Moscow, he goes 'in search of new accounts'. As for the judiciary, and the moral code it enforces, Vidal claims that the prisons throng 'with people who get drunk, take dope, gamble, have sex in a way that is not approved by the holy book of a Bronze Age nomad tribe as reinterpreted by a group of world-weary Greeks in the first centuries of the last millennium' — i.e. the Bible (or 'the Babble', as many of its adherents seem to call it). How true or 'helpful' all this is remains unclear. But the gleeful iconoclasm has the conviction of satirical truth.

  Vidal's flag-scragging extends from public life through literary questions to social mores. In 'the land of the tin ear', where 'stupidity ... is deeply revered', where humourlessness is endemic ('what other culture could have produced Hemingway and not seen the joke?'), cultural conspiracies flourish unchecked. 'Americans will never accept any literature that does not plainly support ... a powerful and bigoted middle class', a state of affairs institutionalised by the universities, which are themselves torpid bureaucracies of preferment and tenure. Among the bigotries of this powerful middle class is a deep and mindless 'homophobia', the American establishment being militantly heterosexual. Vidal has written about this before, of course, but never quite so virulently. 'In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexualists wore pink triangles' — hence the book's title. The moral stakes could hardly be raised any higher; Vidal's tic nerveux has developed into an obsession, a crusade, and the effect on his writing is everywhere apparent.

  In the opening essay, on Scott Fitzgerald's Notebooks, we learn that Fitzgerald makes 'rather too many nervous references to fairies and pansies'. In the second, on Edmund Wilson, we learn that Wilson's notebooks, too, 'are filled with innumerable references to 'fairies that range from derisive to nervous'. What does 'nervous' mean here exactly? Does it mean that Fitzgerald and Wilson are 'nervous' about being fairies themselves? Yes, because Vidal has always believed that heterosexuals got that way purely through the conditioning of that powerful middle class. The third essay, on Isherwood's Christopher and his Kind, ends with a plangent clarion call: 'one can only hope that
thanks to Christopher's life and work, his true kind will increase even as they refuse, so wisely, to multiply'. A few pages earlier Vidal has called Isherwood 'the best prose writer in English*. This is a meaningless tribute anyway, but by now the nervous hets among Vidal's readers will be wondering whether the verdict is really a literary one. It sounds like a manic-depressive overpraising Sylvia Plath, a postmaster general making excessive claims for Trollope, a midget going ape for Pope.

  Vidal expands his platform. The ruling classes fear the gays because they aren't as easily dominated by the hen-pecked, ball-broken straights with their nagging wives and grasping children. Everyone — oh, happy day — is potentially bisexual. This is a terrific plus because 'we have more babies than we know what to do with'. Finally, and clinchingly, 'the family is an economic, not a biological, unit'. Actually, of course, the family is both: how could a parent-child relationship not be biological? But what the family mainly is is a unit, willy-nilly. To disapprove of this fact is as futile as disapproving of oxygen or bipedalism.

  Besides, the whole line sounds rather — American, does it not, tending to reduce argument to a babble of interested personalities, an exchange of stricture and veto, with money as the bottom line? Well, if Vidal sounds unusually shrill, 'there is a good deal to be shrill about'. He sees his freedoms as being under particular threat, and maybe he is right. More likely, the stand just happens to suit his antic pessimism. 'Real stupidity does excite me,' he once said. America is the perfect rumpus-room for this witty invigilator. Meanwhile it should be stressed that the new book is a peach. It will give everyone many hours of nervous pleasure.

  Sunday Telegraph 1977 and Observer I982

  Too Much Monkey Business: The New Evangelical Right

  'I call it Mickey Mouse mentality,' proclaimed Judge Braswell Deen, referring to the theories of Charles Darwin: 'monkey mythology methodology monopoly, mysterious musings and mundane dreams of all this monkey business!' The audience of 15,000 — most of them Baptists, Methodists, charismatics, fundamentalists, pentecostalists and journalists — applauded and whooped.

  Elsewhere in the Reunion Arena, Dallas, Texas, a frowning Ronald Reagan told a press conference that he had 'a great many questions about evolution'. 'I believe schools should be even-handed on the issue,' he added. This was a nervous moment for gaffe-dreading Ronnie, in the week of Taiwan. And, sure enough, here was another howler jumping out of his mouth. But who cared? Perhaps this particular gaffe would win him 50 million votes.

  Meanwhile, wearing a press badge that identified me as 'Marty Amis', I strolled the Reunion Arena concourses, sampling the pro-family propaganda on offer there. New in Dallas, I returned to the hotel restaurant and ate The American Way (hamburger and cottage cheese), plus an Elite Pastry. Beside my plate lay a stack of pamphlets. What was going on around here?

  Some of the leaflets were simply illiterate hate-sheets; others were glossy and well produced. Why A Bankrupt America? explains how the Trilateral Commission is helping 'Russia Enslave the World!' When You Were Formed In Secret tells of the miracle of birth and the 'homicide of abortion'. The Family Issues Voting Index helps you to sort 'the good guys from the bad guys' ('The bad guys need our prayers. The good guys need our votes'). Is Humanism Molesting Your Child? urges you to 'examine your child's library for immoral, anti-family, and anti-American contents'. Your Five Duties As A Christian Citizen are as follows: Pray, Register, Become Informed, Help Elect Godly People, and Vote... Then I found the pamphlet I was looking for.

  Today the evolution controversy seems as remote as the Homeric era to inteHectuals in the East,' wrote the historian Richard Hofstad-ter in i?6z. But elsewhere there are still many Americans who, in the words of William Bryan, prosecutor at the Scopes trial of 192.5, are 'more interested in the Rock of Ages than the age of rocks'.

  Are Evolutionary Scientists Like Three Blind Mice? is the pamphlet's title. And, yes, apparently they are. Because evolution is 'a vicious lie!' There follows a sarcastic resume of the atheist argument, with the clincher: 'question: if god had to do all the work ANYWAY WHY DID HE STRETCH IT OUT OVER MILLIONS OF YEARS? SURELY THEY DON'T THINK GOD WAS TOO WEAK TO CREATE EVERYTHING in 6 days!' The last page carries special offers of anti-evolution T-shirts ($6.95) and creationist bumper-stickers (40 cents). I finished my meal and returned to the National Affairs Briefing at the Reunion Arena to hear Reagan — Reagan, and his new champions, the electronic ministers of the air.

  This is a good deal more serious than it may at first sound. The mobilisation of the Evangelical Right could influence the outcome of the 1980 presidential election and determine that of 1984 — though many of the new evangelists claim that a free 1984 election will not take place unless their man gets in this time. Their man, naturally, is the Republican nominee: the movement claims to be non-partisan, but it is about as neutral as Nancy Reagan. (Ironically, Nancy is the chief Evangelical reservation about Ronnie, who is a divorcee. According to them, the Reagans have been living in adultery for nearly thirty years.) By informing their congregations about the 'pro-family' issues, by setting up vote-registration booths in their aisles, the Evangelicals have already ousted left-wing incumbents in mid-term elections, have thwarted pro-homosexual and women's-rights legislation in key states, and have played a part in the shaping of the Republican platform. And these are early days.

  Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter and John Anderson are all 'born-again' Christians. They are not alone. One in three Americans takes the lesson of Nicodemus in John 3: 'unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God'. Reaching back to the Great Awakening of the early eighteenth century, the Evangelical faith is the most proletarian and anti-intellectual of the many mansions of American religion. It rests on a personal experience of the Saviour; it is Manichaean and eschatological; for all its hatred and rejection of modernity, it maintains that the Earth is only 6,ooo years old.

  The latest surge in Evangelical activism is entirely new. Like so much else in America, it has to do with money, power and, above all, television. There are 36 wholly religious TV stations in America (and 1,300 radio stations). Jerry FalwelFs Old-Time Gospel Hour is seen on 374 stations nationwide, outstripping Dallas. Pat Robertson's daily devotional chat show has more viewers than Johnny Carson. The TV preachers turn over billions of tax-free dollars every year (Falwell alone raises more than a million dollars a week, $300,000 of which goes on buying more air-time). Their mailing lists are kept on guarded computer tapes. The electronic ministries have a combined congregation of 115 million people attending every week.

  The political wing of the movement has developed only in the last fifteen months. Its names are legion: Moral Majority Inc., Religious Roundtable, Christian Voice, Christian Voters' Victory Fund, Campus Crusade for Christ, Christians for Reagan - all loosely grouped under the pro-family banner. American religion has always been popular rather than hieratic in character, concerned not with theology but morality; and it has always, until now, been politically quietist, with low registration and a tendency to vote for the incumbent. The Evangelical message is plain — 'out of the pews and into the polls'. 'Not voting is a sin,' says Falwell: 'Repent of it.’

  'And the Lord turned to him and said, "My precious child, I never left you in your hours of trial. When you look back along the pathway of your life and see only one pair of footprints in the sand — why, that was when I carried you.'“

  This wasn't the ghost of the Rev. Billy Sunday: it was a close-to-tears Ronald Reagan, winding up his address to the 15,000 Evangelicals (10,000 pastors, 5,000 lay people) at the Reunion Arena in Dallas. Reagan is taking these people seriously all right: he has hired a Moral Majority operative to liaise with the horn-again community. 'Religious America is awakening, perhaps just in time,' said Reagan hopefully. He praised the freedom-fighters of Poland and their leader, the Pope — 'just the son of simple farm folk'. He tied himself up in knots trying to pronounce 'Sollsy Neetsin* and his friend, 'Archie Pelaygo'. He spoke of the dream of all true Amer
icans to attain 'that shining city on the hill'. But this was mild, hammy stuff compared to the kick-'em-down oratory of the electronic preachers.

  Reagan was preceded at the podium by Dr James Robison, the good-angel JR of the Dallas—Fort Worth metroplex, whose TV show reaches ten million people (and has twice been taken off the air for its anti-homosexual virulence). Robison is six foot three of US prime, with a sensual, predatory manner and the tumbling unstop-pability of the natural demagogue. He strode onstage to a rock star's welcome — a deafening wall of whistles and wolf-howls. A-men! Ooh-hah! Wah-who! Ee-haw!

  Robison brandished his Bible a good deal, and often seemed about to wrestle his lectern to the ground. His language was violent, even scabrous. He spoke, or hollered, about 'the cancerous visible sores' afflicting America, sores which Christians were obliged to 'fight'. Jesus was no sissy, no sir. 'You slap my cheek', said Robison, slapping his own cheek resoundingly, 'and I'll turn it. But you slap my wife or my children, boy, and I'll put you on the floor? (Dog-barks, coyote-calls. Why-haw! How-he!) 'Scientists', Robison believes, 'don't know what they're talking about.' The Bible, on the other hand, is 'more relevant than tomorrow's newspaper'. In his wind-up Robison advised 'the perverts to get back in the closet and not parade on Main Street!' Ow-wee! Who-how!

  Aaa-mien!__Reagan applauded. Back in Washington, Carter must have been wondering about the size of the pervert vote. Perverts for Carter — that's all he needs.

  When Reagan's speech was over (and before anyone could get away) Jerry Falwell eased himself up on to the stage. Jerry's job was to complement Robison's brimstone with the other side of the Evangelical hard-sell: the cajoling demand for money. There wasn't much ooh-h awing now, as grim stewards passed out envelopes and plastic buckets to the multitude, which had already paid $25 apiece to get in. Falwell wanted a thousand people to 'pledge' $100 each, to help tab the Dallas experiment; he then coaxed and nagged some smaller contributions out of the audience for various circulars and devotional knick-knacks. 'One hundred dollars! This is a tax-deductible gift... Stand up all those who have pledged one hundred dollars. Or more.’