The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (Vintage International)

by Martin Amis

  * This point may need spelling out. ‘The fatal influence’, writes Fowler in Modern English Usage, ‘is the advice given to young writers never to use the same word twice in a sentence …’ Such writers are ‘first terrorised by a misunderstood taboo, next fascinated by a newly discovered ingenuity, & finally addicted to an incurable vice …’ You can almost hear Professor Donald’s cluck of satisfaction as he follows ‘seemed to support’ with ‘appeared to back’. As Fowler says, in such sentences ‘the writer, far from carelessly repeating a word in a different application, has carefully not repeated it in a similar application; the effect is to set readers wondering what the significance of the change is, only to conclude disappointedly that there is none.’ Fowler then goes on to fulfil ‘the main object of this article’: ‘to nauseate by accumulation of instances’.

  The World and I

  The End of Nature by Bill McKibben

  The Green Movement needs a holy book. So does Viking Penguin. So do I. So do we all. Our need survives The End of Nature, in which Bill McKibben fails to fulfil the rolling prophecies of his publicity kit. The book is honest, decent, salutary; also largely unresonant. Also callow, and painfully stretched. Perhaps one ought to be easier to please than usual, when the subject is the death of everything. But we are not yet reduced to scattered shouts of Help and Whoah and (above all) Christ.

  Or not quite yet. This was meant to be the era of post-historical man. The species was just about to finish mastering the wilderness when it transpired, with sinister synchrony, that the wilderness had turned into a toilet. Although Mr McKibben knows about time-scales, he isn’t much good at evoking their significance (‘It always shocks me when I realize that 2010 is now as close as 1970 – closer than the break-up of the Beatles’). It is certainly hard for human beings to grasp that in a single century their planet has aged four-and-a-half billennia. This atrocious coup de vieux has effectively rearranged the four dimensions. The frontier we face is no longer spatial. It is temporal.

  The holy book we mentioned would, of course, be a Bad News Bible. By now, most of us have a notion of the gloomier scenarios and models and loops and kick-ins. We have an image of this kind of future (shaped by the set-dressers of Blade Runner and RoboCop): wearing welder’s goggles, and studded with skin cancer, the average Eskimo will spend all winter under the mosquito nets, playing host to successive bouts of malaria, ringworm, encephalitis and dengue fever. It was to allay such fears that Donald Hodel, Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, urged Americans to counter ozone-depletion with the wider purchase of sunglasses and baseball caps. Clearly it will take a new kind of effort to imagine – let alone deal with – the grosser synergies that are now in view. A further 2 billion tonnes of carbon await release in the threatened forests; if ocean temperatures rise, then a further ten trillion tonnes of methane await release in the polar tundras. Mr McKibben discusses these matters with all due caution – indeed, with sober distaste. He is trustworthy; he doesn’t want nature to be over quicker, just to give his book more punch.

  Besides, his main point is that nature is already over, or that its meaning, at least, has been irreversibly transformed. Nature isn’t ‘out there’ any more, because out there is just like in here. Without wanting to, without meaning to, we have altered the chemical composition of the planet. The Arctic penguin, the Saharan wind, the Patagonian mountain creek: all now bear man’s taint. We rightly regard this disaster as our own unpremeditated crime, and tend to account for it in terms of profligacy, rapacity, and foul habits (‘binge’ is the word Mr McKibben keeps using). Some things we do are dirtier and more wasteful than other things we do; but it is difficult to work up much indignation about paddy fields and farting cattle (both of which produce methane). In fact we are incapable of any real antipathy towards our own worst enemy: human numbers. We look up from the campfire, alarmed by the growling and slavering, the splitting branches. And the enemy is no longer ‘nature’. The enemy is us – ourselves.

  If it’s broken, how, then, do we get nature fixed? Do we Do More, or do we Do Less? Aggressive solutions include various kinds of atmospheric hose-downs and paint-jobs, with infra-red lasers and fleets of jumbo jets. If you want to increase the earth’s reflectivity, for instance, why not coat the oceans with a layer of white styrofoam chips? Do-More takes on a Promethean dimension when we look at biotechnology or gene-splicing, which might give us ‘elite’ or designer forests, not to mention designer lamb-chops and designer chickens (minus wings, tails and heads). Mr McKibben, naturally, wants to Do Less. He is additionally prepared to Buy Less and to Drive Less. ‘We screwed it up,’ as he says, not untypically; but perhaps it isn’t too late ‘to clean up our collective act’. He counsels humility, childlessness, a tremulous pantheism. He just wants us all to cool off.

  The End of Nature has been compared to Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth, which is certainly the set text on the nuclear question. But the two books have little in common apart from the necessary immodesty of their titles. To put it simply, Mr McKibben lacks weight of voice. Speaking on behalf of all human life, Schell attained a pristine impersonality, whereas Mr McKibben (or shall I call him Bill?) is throughout a puzzled and guileless presence: his thumbprints and inkspots, his false starts and rethinks, are visible in the margin of every page. Bill is always biking and hiking (though not always grammatically: ‘A forty-minute hike brings the dog and I to the top of the hill’),* always swimming and paddling; he exults in ‘the rippling muscular joy’ of his body and is pleased too by his nice house in the Adirondacks with its many eco-conscious features, including a fax machine that ‘makes for graceful, environmentally sound communication’. Bill’s over-intimate admission that he and his wife ‘try very hard not to think about how much we’d like a baby’ prompts two contradictory thoughts. First, that it will take many generations, and many babies, before people evolve into not wanting them. And secondly that the future would clearly be the better for Bill’s descendants. We wouldn’t be in this fix, if we were all a bit more like Bill.

  These pages read well enough, so long as Mr McKibben is sticking to his dignified summaries of the not very numerous books and reports he has read on the subject. The trouble begins when he gets personal, or thoughtful, or restless, and starts livening things up with his jokes and his hearty colloquialisms (‘big deal’, ‘deep down and nitty gritty’, ‘Whew!’). It may also be that the appropriate language is unavailable, or unavailable for now. There is something obsolescent and accusatory about the nature-ramble literature that Mr McKibben likes quoting from: fragrant, charming, russet, gilded, harmonious, clear, sweet, healthy. On the other hand, what can you do with stressed and putrescible and biomass crashes, with feedback and dieback, with ips and thrips. In The Fate of the Earth Schell had a murderous – or suicidal – mentality to oppose, with its institutions, its jargon, its pedantry and euphemism. He had the bang, whereas Mr McKibben is stuck with the whimper. He must deal with the slow accretions of human folly, human weakness, human accident.

  One cannot determine how much Schell contributed to the revolution in consciousness that is certainly underway with regard to nuclear weapons. If you want to choose a single saviour, or prophet, then you would probably be on firmer ground with Mikhail Gorbachev. The Green Movement still lacks a bible, but Gorbachev may also serve here as an inadvertent figurehead. He declared that the global Emperor of Deterrence wore no clothes. The Emperor is nude now. And at last we have the leisure to contemplate the condition of his skin.

  Independent on Sunday February 1990

  * It is chastening to see this rank genteelism in print (I recently saw it twice in the space of a week, from the pens of Eric Jacobs and Julie Burchill), because it means the editors and sub-editors don’t know about it either. And it’s really very simple: just take out the ‘So-and-so and’ bit, and your ear will do it for you. Bill wouldn’t write ‘A forty-minute hike brings I to the top of the hill’, now would he?

  Elvis and Andy: US Malesr />
  Elvis We Love You Tender by Dee Presley, Billy, Rick and David Stanley, as told to Martin Torgoff

  ‘What happened, El?’ said Vernon Presley to his son, one day in 1956. Elvis was twenty-one at the time, and a multimillionaire. ‘The last thing I can remember is I was working in a can factory and you were driving a truck.’ Elvis laughed. ‘I don’t know what it is,’ he later told a reporter. ‘I just fell into it, really.’

  What happened was this. The Presleys were Depression-shoved nomads from the deep rural South. Elvis’s uncle, Vester Presley, was a teenager before he owned his first pair of shoes. Looking for work, the family straggled into Memphis. Elvis was a half-employed slum spiv when he did his first audition. He recorded the rockabilly classic ‘That’s All Right, Mama’ – and suddenly the tenement Okies found themselves in Graceland, a Doric mansion at the far end of Elvis Presley Boulevard.

  It was during Elvis’s much-publicized stint of military service in Germany that the present writers came into the story. Dee Stanley was the wife of a morose sergeant stationed in Bad Nauheim. On a bored impulse Dee gave El a call, to offer him some Southern hospitality. They arranged to meet for coffee. As it happened, Elvis was on manoeuvres; but Dee was greeted and squired by the courtly, personable and recently widowed Vernon … On her return to the US, Dee got a divorce and ensconced herself at Graceland, with her three small sons, Billy, Rick and David.

  Elvis, We Love You Tender is their story, cobbled together twenty years on with the excitable help of journalist Martin Torgoff. Elvis’s entourage was divided into TCBers and TLCers: those who Took Care of Business and those who gave Tender Loving Care when the exhausted menfolk returned from the road. One way or another, then, the Stanleys were seldom far from Elvis’s side. In many respects their book is a sorry effort – coarse, sentimental and lurchingly written. But the vulgarity of its idiom provides some inadvertent literary interest, and the memoir is far too damaging to all concerned for one to doubt its authenticity.

  ‘Elvis was an enigma,’ writes Torgoff, ‘a walking, breathing paradox.’ Oh no he wasn’t. Indeed, in the circumstances it is hard to imagine a character of more supercharged banality. Elvis was a talented hick destroyed by success: what else is new? All that distinguished him was the full-blooded alacrity of his submission to drugs, women, money and megalomania, and the ease with which these excesses co-existed with his natural taste for spiritual conceit and grandiose Confederate machismo.

  First, the women. During his early days on the road, Elvis ‘decided to see how many chicks he could bang just for the hell of it’. He liked women who were ‘classically feminine’, didn’t drink or talk too much, and had ‘that unbeatable combo of beautiful, rounded ass and long tapered leg’. These women were called ‘foxes’ – ‘quality women’ as opposed to ‘dogs’. ‘No dogs around the Boss’ was a TCB rule. Some foxes were easier to catch than others; but then El would ‘slap a Mercedes or a home on them and …’ (His youthful wife Priscilla, incidentally, tired of Elvis’s infidelities and ran off with one of his karate instructors.) There was, however, ‘nothing kinky’ about the King. ‘Elvis’, says Rick, ‘was very proper.’

  Similarly, Elvis was never a ‘casual’ user of drugs, and despised hippie concoctions like marijuana and LSD. He drank hardly at all. ‘My head tells me I need a pill,’ he would inform one of the captive quacks who tended him. Anything that came from a prescription seemed scientifically sanctified to Elvis. The uppers and downers he took souped up his bodyclock and probably contributed to the heart failure that caused his death. He tried drying out on numerous occasions; but minor TCBers would smuggle ‘medication’ into his room. ‘They’d get stuff for it, you know, cars.’

  On the road, Elvis carried a minimum of two guns on him at all times. He occasionally threatened fellow motorists with these if they honked or yelled at him too much. He enjoyed shooting up TV sets and hotel chandeliers. Never back down from a fight, he told his step-brothers, or else ‘you’re gonna feel like shit for the rest of your life’. ‘A man has got to be a man,’ he explained. Elvis elaborated tellingly on this theme in his song ‘US Male’: ‘Mess with my woman, and you’re messin’ with the US Male. That’s M-A-L-E, son, that’s me.’

  Meanwhile, Elvis would regularly repair to the quiet and elegance of Graceland. Here, all was matriarchal propriety: mild rough-housing with the boys, teetotal barbecues by the pool, communal prayers and a terrifying variety and intensity of familial emotion. Here, too, Elvis pursued his interest in religion and fringe parapsychology. He believed himself to be blessed with psychic powers; his entourage apparently spent many a tedious hour pretending that Elvis could read their minds. He was ‘really into miracles’. Elvis pondered on the afterlife, entertaining tasteless reveries of his coming reunion with his dead twin and much-lamented mother. But he still lived the life, in a thickening mist of drugs and boredom. There was the usual eighteen-year-old in his bed on the last morning, as Elvis lay dying in the bathroom next door. ‘My baby is gone. My baby, Dee,’ said Vernon.

  This is Rick’s version of ‘the paradox’: ‘He was a true believer who made his own rules so that his beliefs could blend with the way he lived his life.’ Handy, that. ‘Elvis was Elvis,’ Torgoff concurs. ‘He was just the King!’ Does this remind you of anything? The world-view of a child-in-arms, for instance, a couple of weeks before the primal scream? Everyone who ever met Elvis, it seems, is currently writing a book about him, from his numerologist to his under-gardener. Elvis, We Love You Tender will not be the least lurid, but it will probably be by far the warmest – vivid testimony to the hysteria that the King still manages to inspire.

  Observer August 1980

  The Andy Warhol Diaries edited by Pat Hackett

  Despite their virtuoso triviality, their naïve snobbery, and their incredible length, the diaries of Andy Warhol are not without a certain charm. Of course, they aren’t even diaries; they are the ‘Collected Cassettes’ or the ‘Collected Wiretaps’. On most mornings Andy Warhol called his former secretary, Pat Hackett, and rambled on for a while about what he did the day before. She made ‘extensive notes’, she explains, and typed them up ‘while Andy’s intonations were fresh in my mind’. So that’s what we are looking at here: 800 pages – half a million words – of Andy’s intonations.

  But it works, somehow. ‘Peter Boyle and his new I think wife were there.’ ‘Princess Marina of I guess Greece came to lunch.’ ‘Nell took her clothes sort of off.’ ‘Raymond [is] out there posing for David Hockney – Raymond takes planes just to go pose.’ Ms Hackett’s editing, one feels, is affectionate and scrupulous, yet correctly unprotective. And after a while you start to trust the voice – Andy’s voice, this wavering mumble, this ruined slur. It would seem that The Andy Warhol Diaries thrives on the banal; for in the daily grind of citizenship and dwindling mortality, the nobody and the somebody are one.

  Meanwhile, here comes everybody – or at least everybody who is somebody. ‘We went over to Studio 54 and just everybody was there.’ ‘You go to places where people are sort of nobodies.’ ‘Everybody was somebody … just everybody came after the awards. Faye Dunaway and Raquel Welch and just everybody.’ But who is everybody? Or who is everybody else? Everybody is Loulou de la Falaise and Monique Van Vooren and Issey Miyake, Peppo Vanini and Yoyo Bischofberger, Sao Schlumberger and Suzie Frankfurt and Rocky Converse, Alice Ghostley, Dawn Mello and Way Bandy and Esme, Viva, Ultra and Tinkerbelle and Teri Toye, Dianne Brill, Billy Name, Joe Papp, Bo Polk, Jim Dine, Marc Rich, Nick Love and John Sex.

  Similarly Andy went everyplace, or everyplace that was anyplace – or not even. He goes to the opening of an escalator at Bergdorf Goodman, to Regine’s for Julio Iglesias’s birthday, to an icecream-shop unveiling in Palm Beach, to Tavern on the Green for a ‘thing’ (this is a word that Andy has a lot of time for) to announce that Don King is taking over the management of the Jacksons, to the Waldorf-Astoria for the Barbie Doll bash, someplace else to judge a Madonna-lookalike playoff
and someplace else to judge a naked-breast contest. It strains you to imagine the kind of invitation Andy might turn down. To the refurbishment of a fire exit at the Chase Manhattan Bank? To early heats of a wet-leotard competition in Long Island City? Some days, of course, nothing much happens. ‘Had to go close on the building and we had to drink some champagne with the people’, for instance, listlessly accounts for Oct. 19, 1981. Or take this eventful interlude in September 1980: ‘I tried to watch TV but nothing good was on.’ Ah, such striving. If you try, you can make Andy’s life sound almost ghoulishly varied: ‘I had tickets … to the rock kid who ate the heads off bats’; ‘Lewis Allen came down with the dummy-makers who’re making a robot of me for his play.’ But really every day was the same old round. Occasionally he stayed in and dyed his eyebrows, or read the memoirs of some old movie queen, or met with success in front of the television (The Thorn Birds or I Love Lucy; this is the man who saw Grease II three times in one week). And every now and then a mention in the news media proves to be as good, or as bad, as the real thing: ‘There was a party at the Statue of Liberty, but I’d already read publicity of me going to it so I felt it was done already.’

  During the years covered by the diaries (from 1976 until Warhol’s death in 1987), the planet was spinning, as it always spins, but Andy’s self-absorption remained immovable. Events of world-historical significance are simply given a quick sentence here and there, before being engulfed by the usual gossip and grumbling. This isn’t to say that Andy remains untouched by current affairs. The 1986 American raid on Libya seriously disrupts a live television show he’s doing. The Achille Lauro hijacking in 1985 causes concern, because now ‘everybody will be watching The Love Boat … with my episode on it’. The fall of the Shah of Iran spells a lost commission (‘At dinner the Iranians told me that when I paint the Shah to go easy on the eye shadow and lipstick’). For Andy, as for Bellow’s Citrine, history is a nightmare during which he is trying to get a good night’s rest: ‘Some creep asked us what I thought about the torture in Iran and Paulette said, “Listen, Valerian Rybar is torturing me here in New York.” He’s still decorating her apartment, she was complaining that it’s been a year.’