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

by Martin Amis

  Manners change too, though, and Andy is better placed, and better equipped, to reflect the general retreat, the increasing social distrust, of his final decade. In 1977 he can say of a woman dress designer: ‘She acts like a businesswoman – she doesn’t take much coke in the day.’ But by 1987 it isn’t just Andy who is drinking Perrier water and then curling up with a quarter of a Valium. AIDS makes its first appearance halfway through the book, in February 1982, where it is called ‘gay cancer’ (in contradistinction to ‘regular cancer’). By June 1985 it is referred to as ‘you-know-what’. The diaries show very clearly how the transcendentalism of the counterculture eventually turned in on the self, on the human body. Andy, already a fervent hypochondriac (he was shot in 1968 by a woman who had once appeared in one of his underground movies), shuffles on from beauty classes and pedicure into nutrition, collagen, shiatsu treatments, crystals, kinesiology and other desperate quackeries. By December 1986, AIDS itself is weirdly called ‘the magic disease’.

  It would be hard work, and a waste of energy, to do much disapproving of Andy Warhol. He doesn’t take himself seriously enough for that – or for anything else. It is worth remarking that at no point does he say anything interesting (or even non-ridiculous) about art. He’ll mention having ‘a good art idea’ or attending ‘an art party’; he’ll mention that ‘art is big now’. ‘We talked art,’ he says, and the reader leans forward attentively, into this: ‘Thomas told the story of the Picasso he bought from Paulette Goddard, it cost $60,000 and he brought it to one of the Picasso kids and they said it was a fake, and he said Paulette gave him a hard time, that she was “difficult,” but she did give him his money back.’

  It’s all on that level. Andy’s agent tells him ‘not to take the wrinkles out too much on these old people’. There is a conference about Dolly Parton’s beauty mark: is it in or out? ‘I’d taken it out and they want it in, so I called Rupert [Smith, Andy’s silk-screener] and told him it was in again.’ Pia Zadora wants a painting and she’ll ‘take it with her if it fits into her husband’s jet, so they were measuring it’. For the rest, it’s desultory reports on how much his Marlons and Marilyns and Lizzes and Elvises are currently fetching. The Warholian apotheosis is duly reached when Andy does a commission for Campbell’s soup. It troubles him –‘Me standing there twenty years later and still with a Campbell’s soup thing’ – but he doesn’t quite appreciate the asymmetry. Once the artist urging us to re-examine the ordinary, Warhol is now the commercial portraitist celebrating the vendible. ‘And for all the work and publicity, I should’ve charged them like $250,000.’

  Plainly, Andy was funny about money. Throughout the diaries he dutifully records the cost of everything – everything claimable, anyway. These bracketed price-tags look odd at first – on page I: ‘phone call for directions (phone $.10)’ – but we soon get used to them. Andy’s crab soap cost $6, and his bulletproof vest cost $270. ‘She said Matt didn’t relate to her (dinner $600 including tip).’ Drank and talked and looked out of the window ($180).’ Money has a habit of making people seem lopsided. Andy pays for Grace Jones’s dinner, despite the wad of hundreds she produces. And yet: ‘Went to church and while I was kneeling and praying for money a shopping-bag lady came in and asked me for some. She asked for $5 and then upped it to $10. It was like Viva. I gave her a nickel.’ Well, it could have been worse. It could have said: ‘I gave her a nickel ($.05).’

  Warhol was a fame snob, a looks snob, a weight snob, a height snob and an age snob. But he got older, and iller, and was obliged to wander the biological desert of middle-aged gaydom. Childish himself, he became a frustrated parent. His chaste crushes never seemed to work out: ‘Looking back now, I guess I wasn’t seeing what I didn’t want to see. Again. Does it ever end? Do you ever get smart?’ Towards the close, the invitations dry up, the photographers pass him by, the calls go unreturned. ‘I like ugly people. I do. And anyway, ugly people are just as hard to get as pretty people – they don’t want you, either.’

  His most thoroughly sympathetic moments come in his dealings with animals. Even here he is habitually wounded and touchy: ‘I took all my old bread to the park and tried to give it to the birds but they didn’t come around and I just hated them for that.’ Or with his dachshunds, Amos and Archie: when he returns home from work on a rainy day and finds that one of them has wet his bed, ‘I beat him up. Amos.’ Or, most appropriately, most comically, most hopelessly, when the Walt Disney film crew arrives and asks him who his favourite Disney character is, ‘and I said, “Minnie Mouse, because she can get me close to Mickey.” ’

  New York Times Book Review June 1989

  Bad Dreams

  Blundering into Disaster: Surviving the First Century of the Nuclear Age by Robert McNamara

  Our experience of World Wars is in a sense exhaustive, but our experience of how they get started is confined to just the two models – Sarajevo and Munich, critical accident and unappeasable psychosis. On a planet that now sports over 50,000 nuclear weapons, pure accident and pure psychosis are improbable contenders for the initiation of World War III; as the title of Robert McNamara’s book suggests, it will more likely be some kind of mixture. The only thing that could precipitate general nuclear attack would be the fear of general nuclear attack. You would never go first unless the enemy looked like going first; and, in a crisis, he would look like going first, and so would you. Mrs Thatcher has dismissed the idea of a nuclear-free world as ‘a dangerous dream’. In fact this would exactly and evocatively describe the status quo.

  It should be said early on that this book contains almost nothing new. It feels weighty, yet such authority as it has derives, not from McNamara’s writing, but from his former eminence as Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson. Two-thirds of the way through, the book fragments into Appendices plus Glossary, Notes, Acknowledgments and Index. The information in the apparatus you can get elsewhere. More surprisingly, the information in the body of the book you can get elsewhere too, pretty much. It is not what is said; it is who is saying it.

  Certainly this isn’t the book for lovers of the power anecdote and the geopolitical indiscretion. McNamara takes us behind the scenes, but in brisk and formal style, as if conducting a coach-party tour of the Pentagon. True, we glimpse, or overhear, a fuddled Johnson summoned to the Hot Line: ‘Goddam it, Bob, what is the problem?’ (the problem was the Middle East, June 1967). True, we still stroll with McNamara to his car on ‘that beautiful fall evening’ (27 October, 1962: Cuba) when he feared he ‘might never live to see another Saturday night’. The third nuclear crisis, Berlin in 1961 – the third occasion when nuclear war came close without anyone wanting it to – flits by in a colourless page and a half. No stand-offs in the Oval Office. No white-knuckle scenes in the (aptly named) Situation Room.

  The remaining ‘insider’ stuff is carefully rigidified for the record, with McNamara emerging with dignity and steady credit. ‘At that point I said to the President …’ Two hundred words of impeccable McNamara grammar are then followed by: The President seized on this proposal as a way out of a very difficult position.’ Or: ‘I opposed the Air Force’s recommendation. Kennedy accepted my judgment.’ In 1962 the journalist Stewart Alsop asked McNamara to comment on CIA evidence that the Russians were hardening their missile sites. ‘Stew,’ drawls Bob (it is the book’s one split-second of intimacy), ‘I never comment on information relating to the CIA. But let me say this: if the Soviets are hardening their missile sites, thank God.’ Several congressmen promptly demanded McNamara’s resignation. They didn’t realize, as he did, that deterrence requires a complementary element of reassurance. In office, Bob blundered a bit himself; but he was quick to intuit some unfamiliar nuclear realities.

  What was prescient then, however, is now common ground: and the book isn’t very much more than a respectable primer. Some of the emphases are new, or newish. One is grateful for his remarks on what has been called American ‘angelization’, or willed unblameability. According to Caspar
Weinberger, the Russians ‘know perfectly well that we will never launch a first strike on the Soviet Union’. How do they know this? Is it because, as Reagan once claimed, ‘we have more regard for human life than those monsters do’? It is the current Administration’s belief, writes McNamara, ‘that the Soviets can trust us. At the same time, however, a prime justification for SDI has been that we can’t trust them.’ Michael McGwire’s point about ‘cognitive dissonance’ is relevant here. Reagan and Gorbachev may make some friendly overtures, but both happen to be packing several dozen tons of TNT for each ‘enemy’ citizen. You might as well expect a lasting concord between Godzilla and the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

  In his valedictory pages McNamara offers Minimum Deterrence as a path through the next half-century. Five hundred each: any fewer, and successful cheating will tip the balance. Well, that is still the equivalent of 30,000 Hiroshimas, plus perhaps a million Chernobyls. A little later he is obliged to ‘recognise that major changes in nuclear strategy are unlikely until they receive broad support from the American people and from the other members of Nato’. In other words, what is needed is a revolution in consciousness. While instinct tells us that the revolution will have to come from below, contributions from above retain a peculiar value. McNamara joins a distinguished list of senior politicians, strategists and soldiers who have woken from the dangerous dream. With them, the revolution seems to be one not of consciousness so much as conscience. The dream only ends when the career ends. Robert Jay Lifton has called this syndrome ‘retirement wisdom’.

  ‘That’s the way you can have a winner,’ said George Bush in 1980, gamely best-casing it on nuclear war. ‘I find such comments incomprehensible,’ says McNamara, ‘as one who has confronted the possibility of nuclear exchanges.’ These last words evoke a different book, one that McNamara hasn’t produced here. Probably that kind of book could never be written by someone who has wielded that kind of power. The exclusion would seem to be mutual, with nuclear politics always stifling the human voice. This is why we listen to Gorbachev (who regards the nuclear situation as fundamentally puerile). with such bafflement. And perhaps we shouldn’t be asking the question: is he sincere? Perhaps we should be asking the question: is he historically inevitable?

  Observer June 1987

  Blessed Assurance: At Home with the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas by A.G. Mojtabai

  A.G. Mojtabai’s subject is ‘the intersection of nuclear reality and religious vision’; and she isn’t referring to papal encyclicals, pastoral letters, or the gentle activism of troubled divines. She is referring to American fundamentalism, to those Born Again Christians who have the nuclear holocaust firmly fixed in their calendars and anticipate it with the hottest zeal. ‘Go understand people’ is what Americans say when they can’t understand people. Miss Mojtabai, at any rate, has given it a try.

  She has gone to Amarillo, Texas, a panhandle railhead town, a place of flash floods, dust-devils and polar winds. Amarillo has known boom and bust, and now clings to a hard-won prosperity. About 25 per cent of the local economy depends on Pantex, the final assembly plant of all American nuclear weapons. The arms race would therefore seem to be ‘good for business’, ‘good for Amarillo’. Pantex also qualifies Amarillo as ‘a class 1, 2 and 3 target’ for Soviet missiles, and makes it a likely spot for nuclear accident, terrorist attack, and so on (in addition, Amarillo is now being teed up for a nuclear-waste ‘facility’). Pantex’s motto: Pantexan: We believe that peaceful coexistence is best maintained by being Too Tough to Tackle.

  ‘AMARILLO’, says the sign on the way into town: ‘WE LIKE WHO WE ARE’. One suspects that people who like who they are, and like saying that they like who they are, are soon going to be saying that they don’t like who you are. But after a while the town opens up to Miss Mojtabai, with her gently persistent interrogations, her uncensorious female presence (and her novelist’s eye and ear). It opens up, like any American town, with generosity, candour, vigorous community esprit. The place teems with bake sales and kiddie clubs; on Sunday mornings ‘joy buses’ ferry the children to church. Why, Pantex itself has blood drives, car pools, educational grants for employees, and a fine record on the hiring of non-whites.

  ‘In Naples,’ says a local, ‘they don’t worry about Vesuvius. They’re used to it.’ Instead of ‘worrying’, Amarilloans simply find themselves leading lives of fantastic contradiction. Pantex official Jack Thompson, who coaches Little League and helps out at Kids Inc., breaks off from an hour of ‘honey-dos’ (chores for the wife) to tell Miss Mojtabai about Soviet infiltration in America’s nurseries (infants with fake passports). Judy Mamou, ex-hooker, now an evangelist, gives an interesting slant to the Red/dead axis: ‘If you’re Red, you are dead.’ A dead Red is just dead, whereas a dead Judy Mamou would simply ‘go home’ and ‘be in heaven with the Lord’. Royce Elms, a preacher at Jubilee Tabernacle, has the end of time pencilled in for 1988, but carries life insurance – ‘in case the Lord tarries’. Royce’s morning sermons, or matinees, are about ‘success principles’, as laid down by the Bible (‘God don’t sponsor no flops’); in the evenings it’s Armageddon – the Tribulation, the Second Coming, the Rapture.

  The mise-en-scéne for the end of the world is not Hieronymus Bosch so much as Walt Disney. Just before the destruction of the planet by (nuclear) fire, the Rapture occurs. Believers become astronauts, whisked up to heaven at 186,000 miles per second. On Earth, life goes on as usual for a while, though you will notice that the more devout members of the community are, rather ominously, no longer around. The Antichrist soon comes to power, via a United World Church, or a cartel of corporations, or possibly the EEC.

  Nuclear Tribulation follows. After seven years Christ returns and defeats Satan in the Battle of Armageddon near the hill of Megiddo in Israel. On top of sores, seas of blood, fire, darkness, drought and unclean spirits, we get the seventh vial of wrath, ‘poured out into the air’ – nuclear fallout, perhaps. Then a further sifting of unbelievers and the binding up of Satan, who, one thousand years later, stages his final doomed revolt. Then a new heaven and a new earth.

  For most of its length Blessed Assurance reads like an analysis of the richest, the most elaborate brew of credulity that human beings have yet concocted. Along the way, though, the phenomenon starts to look more familiar. It looks like religion. An implausible quest for implausible solace, outlandish suffering set against outlandish reward, a way of thinking (or emoting) about the unthinkable. Here, religion has adapted to the nuclear reality. As a result it looks preposterous. But everything that adapts to the nuclear reality is going to look preposterous – or ugly, or insane, or just preternaturally trivial.

  Miss Mojtabai suffers, in her vivid exploration, from an embarrassment of riches, or an embarrassment of embarrassment. She takes no pleasure in gloating over human stupidity; and the wistful gloom of her conclusion feels accurate. After all, in this maelstrom of terror and desire the only things with any objective reality are the weapons – the weapons, and the holy book of a Bronze Age nomad tribe. Consider these two quotes:

  1 I have read the Book of Revelations and, yes, I believe the world is going to end – by an act of God, I hope – but every day I think that time is running out.

  2 You know, I turn back to [the] ancient prophets in the Old Testament and the signs foretelling Armageddon, and I find myself wondering if – if we’re the generation that’s going to see that come about.

  It would, I suppose, be neither here nor there if these remarks came from some summoner or pardoner, some Chaucerian huckster, some morons’ pin-up or vaudevillian vicar of the Born Again circuit. But the first speaker is US Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. And the second is Ronald Reagan.

  Observer January 1987

  With Enough Shovels by Robert Scheer; Defence of the Realm by Alun Chalfont; The New Maginot Line by Jon Connell; Star Wars in a Nuclear World by Lord Zuckerman; Star Warriors by William Broad

  The best time to deal with a nuclear missi
le is when it is on the ground and subject to negotiation – or, more generally, to diplomacy. The worst time to deal with a nuclear missile is when it is heading towards you at four miles a second. In the latter case, there is likely to be only one winner: the nuclear missile. But the error of SDI, or Star Wars, is far deeper than that. It presupposes a situation of unique desperation and catastrophic failure, one in which everyone has already ‘lost’. It presupposes nuclear war. ‘Well, things do go wrong,’ the layman will say with a shrug. But this thing isn’t like other things. For the first time in history, human beings have come up with something that may eliminate all second chances, something that therefore must never go wrong.

  It is possible to read a very great deal of pro-SDI literature without encountering anything whatever to be said for SDI (or for the literature). Turning to the literature of the other side, one’s sceptical murmur becomes a roar of disbelief. SDI-admirers allow that space defence would be the most complicated and expensive venture ever undertaken. But even if it could be achieved at a single snap of the President’s fingers it wouldn’t be worth having. It remains a bad idea because that is what it is: a bad idea. That SDI has gained such momentum is a mystery more exotic than the workings of the X-ray laser or the particle-beam weapon, a mystery to which we shall gingerly return. First, the context.

  Ronald Reagan campaigned and came to power as a nuclear jingo. Denounced by the far right (after INF: the long-sought deal on intermediate nuclear forces) as ‘a useful idiot’ of the USSR, Reagan was unquestionably for many years a useful idiot of the far right. His apparat, and his Vice-President, talked with ghoulish freedom about ‘winning’ or ‘prevailing’ in a protracted nuclear war: ‘It would be a terrible mess, but it wouldn’t be unmanageable’; ‘Nuclear war is a destructive thing, but still in large part a physics problem.’