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

by Martin Amis

  These proclamations, of which there are many, are usefully collected in Robert Scheer’s terrifying book, With Enough Shovels (1982). Controversial at the time, the Administration’s early recklessness is now largely forgotten, or put down to youthful exuberance on Reagan’s part (talk of ‘winnability’, ‘prevailing’, and so on). The same hazing or tinting has happened over INF. Editorials in respectable newspapers now say that Gorbachev has at last ‘come round’ to Reagan’s original proposal. But the original proposal was aimed at Gorbachev’s predecessors, and was disingenuous, offered on the basis of a confidence that it would never be taken up. The new deployments in Europe were militarily insignificant, intended only as a demonstration of political will. Meanwhile Reagan has appointed career enemies of arms control to the key positions in arms control, denounced the USSR as an evil empire, and entrained the biggest military build-up, or spend-up, in world history.

  Despite retrospective claims that SDI was a belated response to a clear Soviet lead (‘the SDI gap’), the President’s Star Wars speech of March 1983 caused consternation in all but a small section of the US strategic community. Reagan presented SDI as a way of escaping deterrence: protection of the people from nuclear weapons. Almost immediately Reagan’s experts assured him that this was unachievable. So SDI was retouted as a way of enhancing deterrence: protection of nuclear weapons from nuclear weapons.

  Somehow the notion survived this humiliating volte face. Indeed, the original goal subliminally lingers as the true justification of its compromised offspring. In June 1986 Reagan was still talking enticingly of ‘a shield that could protect us from nuclear missiles just as a roof protects a family from rain’. ‘Don’t you want to be protected from nuclear missiles?’ George Shultz asked a TV interviewer, not in 1983, not in 1986, but the other day. When Nixon came to power he vowed to find a cure for cancer. Billions were spent. Reagan has vowed to find a cure for nuclear weapons. He certainly isn’t interested in preventive medicine. At best, he seems to be offering us an orgy of surgery; at worst, efficient corpse-disposal.

  Among the many anomalies in the 1983 speech was Reagan’s claim that SDI would ‘pave the way’ for significant arms-control. In fact SDI precludes significant arms-control. While in power Reagan has foreclosed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and broken out of SALT II; SDI would dish the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the Outer Space Treaty and, most crucially, the ABM Treaty. And that would be that. When the USSR contravenes a treaty, it is called a violation; when the US does it, it is called an Initiative. Alun Chalfont, in his miserable new book, Defence of the Realm, contents himself with calling SDI ‘an entirely new approach’.

  SDI points in the other direction: it points towards a sign saying MORE. It points up, into space, a new and boundless arena. Lord Chalfont is unworried about the militarization of space because, he says, space is ‘already’ militarized. This is like ceasing to worry about ozone-depletion because the ozone is ‘already’ depleted. Changing the word defeats the cavil, which is why the Soviets refer to the weaponization of space. Many of these weapons would be lightspeed and, like all weapons, would have offensive capabilities. Warning periods would be so reduced that human beings might well be excluded altogether from the ‘decision loop’. One fails to be reassured by this, even when the human being in question is Ronald Reagan.

  There is a hole in deterrence theory, a hole so vast and unsightly that it seems tasteless to point it out. If the nuclear moment ever approached, there would never be any point in going second. Both sides would be massively primed to pre-empt, and SDI would simply add to that pressure. Useless against a first strike (and useless against bombers and cruise missiles), the space shield might yet absorb a ragged retaliation. The Soviets would fear this, and would act on their fear. SDI doesn’t enhance deterrence. It just widens the hole. It enhances pre-emption.

  The President’s idea sounded good, and sounded simple, for about ten minutes. Then it stopped sounding simple. Then it stopped sounding simple, and it stopped sounding good. How has it survived and what is its attraction? Jon Connell, in his cogent study, The New Maginot Line, argues that a kind of frontier technophilia accounts for its hold on the American people. In Star Wars in a Nuclear World Lord Zuckerman cites the subjection of ‘the laws of physics … to political attitudes and a historical belief in the controllability of scientific breakthroughs’. And William Broad in Star Warriors shows us the weaponeers themselves: dreamy, lopsided idiot-savants, inspired by competitiveness, personal ambition, schoolyard anti-communism and bachelor esprit de corps. Here the SDI agenda takes its crassest form: pauperize the USSR; win the race, and win the war.

  The weird blend of utopianism and sordid mugwumpery is best expressed in the person of the President. Reagan likes his idea, partly because it is the only idea he has ever had, but also because it chimes with his belief in the superiority of the American people and the American system. Nuclear capitalism must always prevail over nuclear communism. His is a Presidency during which almost anything might have happened. The thoroughness of the President’s collapse – and the aspirations of the President’s wife – have given us the INF deal. But the more important legacy is SDI.

  It is a millennial notion, the ‘dream’ or ‘vision’ which has become the loyalty test of the Reagan administration. It is millennial in several senses, literally so in that it is timed for the year 2000, and more blearily in that it accords with Reagan’s belief in the apocalypses of Revelation and Ezekiel. It also supposes that only the evil will perish, and only the good will prevail.

  Here is a millennial valediction. What happens to the nuclear missiles once they are ‘taken out’ by SDI’s lasers, smart rockets and death rays? Some will fall back to earth, some will go nuclear, some will explode ‘conventionally’, dispersing their plutonium into the atmosphere. The gunpowder for nuclear weapons, plutonium, is found, not in nature, but at the toilet end of nuclear reactors. It remains lethally toxic for 250 millennia, or 2,500 centuries, or a quarter of a million years. Technology, if there is anything left of it, will be obliged to mop up that problem too. Some kind of space shield, perhaps.*

  Observer January 1988

  * Both the Democrats and the Republicans support SDI (or NMD – National Missile Defense – as it is currently known), the Democrats reluctantly, the Republicans enthusiastically. In fact America is stuck with the thing; and the explanation for this is eerily post-modernist, and eerily Reaganish. It has become politically impossible to tell the American people that they aren’t going to get something which (the polls disconcertingly reveal) they believe they already have … Victory in the Cold War was part of Reagan’s legacy, but you couldn’t really say that it was part of his achievement. The reckless aggression of his first term moderated into the diplomatic ‘hardball’ of his second. His policies perhaps hastened the Soviet disintegration by a year or two. And you could argue that his preparedness to think radically about nuclear weapons arose from a genuine revulsion – hence his eager response to Gorbachev’s ‘zero option’. But maybe the revulsion was supplied by Nancy Reagan, the failed actress who (we are now learning) ruled the world from 1980 to 1988.

  What’s Your Favourite?

  The Best of Forum edited by Albert Z. Freedman

  Since The Best of Forum is a collection of essays and correspondence rather than a specialist monograph the reviewer’s task is largely one of enumeration, of alerting readers to their particular areas of interest. In the commissioned articles, frigidity, impotence, premature ejaculation, the tumescent properties of vitamin E, the perils of the high clitoris, vasectomy, sex in one’s twilight years, masturbatory techniques – all get a decent airing from Forum’s sexologists. Vaginal orgasms are denounced for the shabby myths they are; the male is advised to delay entry (which women should always supervise) until the female climax is imminent; never be ashamed to confide in your partner about unusual desires, fantasies, needs. The contributors regularly lapse into a tone of oily Togetherness (‘Why don�
�t you try my “one night of love treatment”?’) and are inclined to establish their anthropological credentials by off-hand references to such things as ‘ancient fertility rites’, but on the whole they seem tolerably empirical and unanxious.

  Among the more recondite articles are: ‘Penile Dimensions – What Women Really Think’ (they think they like them big); ‘Thank You For Having It’, notes towards organizing a sex-party, which makes ‘it’ sound both clinical and unsalubrious (you scatter the floor with mattresses and ‘essentials like Vaseline’); and ‘Orgy, Porgy, Puddin’ and Pie’ by jenny Groupie Fabian, which makes it sound pure hell (Miss Fabian, for one, ‘needs a lot of love around’). Readers are asked also to complete a quiz called ‘How Sexy Can You Get?’; your reviewer got fairly sexy, but was ticked off by Dr Martin Shepherd for being insufficiently bisexual. Indeed, utter, unquestioning catholicity appears to be the key to almost every problem. If it stirs, the suggestion is, you ought to want to go to bed with it.

  Of course, the correspondence – The Forum Adviser and The Forum itself – is the heart of the magazine; here (we think) are all those nonagenarian transvestites, undersized hampton-flashers, manacle-and-dungeon artists. A young mother finds that her sex life has come to depend on breast-feeding sessions with her – practically teenage – son (the fact that you feed him whilst naked and masturbate yourself’, reasons the editorial answer, ‘clearly has nothing to do with his dietary requirements’). An exhibitionist finds erection only when displaying himself to Arabs (I would expose myself to almost any African delivery man who came to my flat’). One couple experience respiratory difficulties during soixante-neuf (triumphantly resolved by the purchase of a nose snorkel). Parents wonder how best to get their children masturbating early and with an adequately varied repertoire of techniques (Johnny, if I catch you not masturbating in lots of different ways …’). Admittedly these letters form the lunatic fringe; most of the correspondents are pathetically ignorant and dislocatingly naive: the pages are full of ponderous trouncings of non-prejudices, sarcastic recapitulations of imagined traumas, brave stands taken against such doctrinaire phenomena as repression and loneliness.

  ‘How do you go about thanking a magazine for saving your marriage without sounding maudlin?’ writes M.W., Newton, Massachusetts. An excellent question. Naturally, all readers of the New Statesman could afford to browse through these pages with a comfortable sense of irony. But if the letters are genuine – and despite their formula of tell-tale case-history plus guileless self-revelation some of them probably are – we would have to admit, along with Dr Albert Ellis, that Forum’s ‘direct, no-holds-barred approach, together with its blatant lack of coy prurience, gives it a public power that is exceptionally potent’. Naturally enough, too, the liberated society tends towards its own brand of triteness, a tendency which this book ably enshrines.

  New Statesman September 1973

  Making Love: An Erotic Odyssey by Richard Rhodes

  Sex, I gather, is a pretty popular topic; but ‘hardly anyone’, notes Richard Rhodes in the preface to Making Love: An Erotic Odyssey, ‘has come forward to write about it intimately except behind the mask of fiction’. Certainly his bibliography is sufficiently thin to shore up this view. But there must be a good reason why no one is coming forward to write about it, because everyone is coming forward to talk about it. A widespread fear of writing a book like Making Love would perhaps be reason enough.

  ‘Fiction is fine,’ Mr Rhodes goes on, ‘but using fiction as a disguise makes both the uniqueness of intimate experience and its common humanity easy to dispute.’ This argument turns out to be spectacularly mistaken. When fiction works, the individual and the universal are frictionlessly combined. In real life, sex demotes individuality, leaving us only with the usual sorry quiddity of various personal fetishes and taboos. What Mr Rhodes gives us, in any event, is a cataract of embarrassment. Making Love is a hot book, right enough; but the heat is all in the armpits.

  So we begin with virginity loss, and the hick scholarship boy from Yale tiptoeing forth to the local brothel. This is all very ‘tenderly’ told. But because it is ‘fact’ happened’), Mr Rhodes permits himself the kind of clichés that even the most worthless novelist would impatiently discard: ‘My heart started pounding. I was avid. I was also terrified … Gussie’s body was a woman’s body, generous and real … I lay on the bed filled with happiness, one with the universe … It was springtime. I jumped into the air and clicked my heels.’ The prostitute, Gussie, we are astonished to learn, was golden-hearted (or she was with him: maybe she was rather sharper with the elderly drunks who made up most of her clientele). But Gussie ‘really’ was a cliché. So what is Mr Rhodes to do – except go ahead and give us the cliché?

  Next, masturbation, homosexual experiments at school, plus some deeply unshocked stuff about bestiality. But when it came to girls, ‘I froze with panic,’ Mr Rhodes writes, adding, for clarification, the striking simile, ‘like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck’. Along the way he bungles several good chances, and now grieves for these near-misses: ‘That’s the loss I mean: of persons each a species, each unique, of gatherings of selves in my arms intoxicating me with essence.’ As so often when Mr Rhodes gets grateful and reverent, you have to read the sentence twice, even though you didn’t want to read it once.

  On to the mysteries of the female orgasm. Mr Rhodes, who won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Making of the Atomic Bomb, has so far presented himself as such a picture of sexual health that you start wishing the book had been written by someone more interestingly screwed-up – like a coprophagic pig farmer or a sadomasochistic funeral director. Despite the corny chauvinism inherent in his imagery, or his catchphrases (‘fleshy as a ripe plum’, ‘fingers in the same pie’, ‘climbed aboard’, ‘bucked like a mustang’), Mr Rhodes keeps letting us know how strenuously P.C. he is. ‘I valued my partners first and foremost as persons’, for example. Or, ‘I respect women and treat them accordingly.’ Or, ‘I’ve never found it easy to use people.’ Needless to say, these clear-eyed avowals sound tremendously unrelaxed. The reader girds himself for confession, or confession of a kind, because (sexily) one’s sexual truth is always furtive, always obscure, by definition. That’s why it’s sexy.

  We duly arrive at the moment that, in bed, is sometimes broached with the question ‘What’s your favourite?’ Here it is: the revelation of peculiarity. And at this point, strangely, Making Love takes on some inadvertent interest. If the first half of the book reminds you of nothing so much as a primitively autobiographical novel (Portnoy’s Complaint shorn of all talent), then the second half resembles the much tricksier fiction of the ‘give-away’ dramatic monologue and the unreliable narrator. This is genuinely paradoxical. Unsuccessfully striving to be honest, to reveal, Mr Rhodes is at last being revealing – but without knowing it.

  The author, it transpires, is a sex-on-the-brain merchant, an erotic obsessive of a more or less manageable order. He says he has written a book about sex because he wants to help and share, and so on, but a more convincing reason may be that he finds it very hard to think about anything else. We get a nineteen-page hint along these lines when Mr Rhodes describes, in incredible detail, his near-daily practice of masturbating to pornography. There he is, grimly assembling the Vaseline, the videos and the ‘remote’. ‘I spread the doubled bedsheet over the couch where I’ll sit – I’ll be working, I’ll sweat.’ Working? Well, yes. For soon, in these pages, Mr Rhodes becomes a part-time toiler in the sex-therapy business, ghostwriting a book called ESO (subtitles: ‘The New Promise of Pleasure for Couples in Love’ and ‘How You and Your Lover Can Give Each Other Hours of Extended Sexual Orgasm’) and acquiring the foolish and mischievous belief that ‘sex is a skill like any other’.

  Up until now Mr Rhodes has come across as something of a sweetheart in the sack, fanatically obliging and empathetic. The book’s last and longest chapter chronicles his relationship with his current
partner, ‘G—–’, in the customary peeled-eyeball close-up. Their love life, embarrassingly good from the outset, reaches successive heights of rapture as they worship at the shrine of the Extended Orgasm. By this stage their sex sessions (‘we showered for ESO training, the “sensual focus massage with verbal feedback” ’) are beginning to sound like some new form of transcendental traction. And one idly assumes that the undercharacterized G—– must be into it too.

  Not so. Three pages from the end of the book we have G—– haggardly confessing that she doesn’t want fourteen orgasms per afternoon. Mr Rhodes responds with rage (I’ve never been angrier in my life’) before predictably – though very hurriedly – calming himself down for the book’s upbeat last paragraphs. ‘You can’t have all … Not all but enough, writes Leonard Shengold’, whoever he may be. In conclusion Mr Rhodes perfunctorily attributes his own insidious sexual coerciveness to the abuse he suffered as a child.

  He might have done better to attribute it to the how- to culture of which, in this reviewer’s opinion, he remains a fuddled plaything, throughout the book. It is evident in his sprucely non judgmental jargon: women who don’t have orgasms are ‘preorgasmic’; boy–boy sex in a no-girls environment is ‘situational homosexuality’; taking a mistress becomes ‘opening [a] marriage’ – a marriage for whose foreseeable doom Mr Rhodes prepares himself by reading a book called Uncoupling. It is also evident, of course, in the way he tries to turn G—– into a G-spot, and in the misery of all ‘ecstasy programmes’ and go-for-it self-improvement manuals and no-problem personal-growth booklets, among which, if anywhere, Making Love confusedly and disconsolately belongs.