The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America (4 page)

'The name's Tony, isn't it?' he croaked.

'No. Martin,' I said, trying to make Martin sound quite like Tony.

'Oh, Martin. Yes, of course.' He wrote on the blank page for a very long time.

Ten minutes later I stood smoking a cigarette on fiery First Avenue. I got the book out of my bag and turned to the first page, where it said, in an exemplarily rickety hand:

for Martin

I tried!

and you were so patient Truman Capote

198

That '198' wasn't his apartment number: it was a shot at the date. I walked on, hoping that little Truman would get well soon.

*
*
*

Postscript
Truman never did. He died six years later, to the month. I liked him, and with hindsight I now find my bedside manner somewhat callous — but there it is. Appropriately doctored, the piece was used elsewhere as an obituary. However, I should like to add, in belated tribute, a brief review of the posthumous
Conversations with Capote
'by' Lawrence Grobel, which follows.

Two unrelated points. Why do American writers tend to hate each other — hatreds which often extend to litigation (Vidal v. Capote; Lillian Hellman v. Mary McCarthy, an especially vicious attempt at financial persecution)? Perhaps one of the answers relates, as so much relates, to the
size
of America. In England writers mix pretty well: they have a generally middle-class, generally liberal unanimity. In America writers are naturally far flung (Alabama, Washington, Chicago, New England); to come together, they have to traverse great distances; it isn't surprising, when they meet, that they seem so strange to one another.

The second point concerns
In Cold Blood
and the business of the 'non-fiction fiction*. In the
Conversations,
while incidentally rubbishing Mailer's
The Executioner's Song,
Capote repeats his contention that the non-fiction fiction is, or can be, at least as 'imaginative' as the non non-fiction fiction: i.e., the novel. Now it is true that Capote (and Mailer) expends a good deal of imagination and artistry in the non-fiction form. What is missing, though, is moral imagination, moral artistry. The facts cannot be arranged to give them moral point. When the reading experience is over, you are left, simply, with murder — and with the human messiness and futility that attends all death.

*
*
*

Jackie Kennedy? 'I hate her.' John Updike? 'I hate him.' Jane Fonda: 'ucch, she's a throw-up number.' Joyce Carol Oates: 'she's the most loathsome creature in America. She's so... oooogh!' As for Georgia O'Keeffe, 'I wouldn't pay twenty-five cents to spit on a painting [of hers]. And I think she's a horrible person, too.' While gentle, twinkly old Robert Frost is 'an evil, selfish bastard, an egomaniacal, double-crossing sadist*. In such a
galère,
literary comrades are doing pretty well if they are merely 'ghastly' (Thomas Pynchon), 'unreadable’

(Bernard Malamud), 'boring' and 'fraudulent' (Donald Barthelme), or 'unbelievably bad' (Gore Vidal).

Truman Capote lived the life of the American novelist in condensed and accelerated form. By the age of eight he was a writer, by the age of twelve he was a drunk, by the age of sixteen he was a celebrity, by the age of forty he was a multimillionaire, and by the .age of fifty-nine he was dead. All the excess, solipsism, enmity, paranoia and ambition of American letters was crammed into those years — and, glancingly, into these pages. One would expect
Conversations with Capote
to provide some scandalous entertainment; but the book, semi-accidentally, goes one further and gives us an endearing portrait of the man.

Called 'the Interviewer's Interviewer' by
Playboy
magazine (his frequent employer), Lawrence Grobel is disciplined, persistent, thorough, and stupid. He is not quite as stupid as James A. Michener, who contributes a wonderfully galumphing foreword, but he is not nearly as smart as Truman Capote. Thus Grobel is thoroughly insensitive to Capote's standard interviewing persona, which is that of the Tease. Frowning now at his tape-recorder, now at his list of questions, Grobel unsmilingly processes the wanton bitchiness and boastfulness that Capote tosses out at him.

There is hidden comedy here, in the narrative links. Grobel is always telephoning, pestering, suddenly flying in from Los Angeles; with some awe and cautious affection, yet quite without self-consciousness or
pudeur,
he repeatedly nags Capote into yet another session with the Sony. And there is pathos too, for by now Capote often has to drag himself from the sickbed to cope with the Californian wretch.

Actually the whole book glows with the pale fire of illness, and one suspects that not a day of Capote's life was uncoloured by it. 'This small brilliant man', as Grobel dubs him, had everything in the American package — everything except brutish good health. His medical chart is dotted with seizures, addictions, dryouts; and yet the malaise sounds habitual and pervasive, as if Capote drank and drugged chiefly to assuage pain. Towards the end, his life appeared to be a bleak alternation between major surgery and Lawrence Grobel. One admires Capote the more for giving such a spirited account of himself.

Serious literary questions are raised, by Capote, and left hanging there by Grobel. This isn't surprising, because the
Playboy
interviewer shows no differentiation of interest, whether the subject is John Updike or Jackie Kennedy. Presumably a fuller treatment of the life and work is on the way. Let us leave Capote, for now, in one of his more triumphant moments, displaying a characteristic mix of fearlessness, spite, and, no doubt, self-flattering embellishment:

I was sitting there with Tennessee. And this woman came over to [our] table ... and she pulled up her shirt and handed me an eyebrow pencil. And she said, 'I want you to autograph my navel' ... So I wrote my name: T-R-U-M-A-N C-A-P-O-T-E. Right round her navel, like a clock ... Her husband was in a rage. He was drunk as all get-out ... He looked at me with this infinite hatred, handed me the eyebrow pencil, unzipped his fly, and hauled out his equipment ... Everybody was looking. And he said, 'Since you're autographing everything, how'd you like to autograph
this?
There was a pause ... and I said, 'Well, I don't know if I can autograph it, but perhaps I could initial it.’

Taller
1978 and
Observer
1985

Philip Roth has just completed a trilogy — the Zuckerman books — and we will come to that in due course. Looking back, though, we see that Roth's previous nine novels arrange themselves in trilogies too — or they do if you nudge them. To begin with we have the three apprentice works:
Goodbye, Columbus
and
Letting Go,
which survey the waking novelist's immediate experience, and
When She Was Good,
which steps self-consciously outside it. Next we have that lip-smacking threesome of frisky Menippean satires,
Our Gang, The Breast
and
The Great American Novel,
where Roth took a manic holiday from his normally sober preoccupations — namely Jewish family life, heartbreak in the Humanities, and the impossibility of getting on with women. Flanking the satires are
Portnoy's Complaint
(1969) and My
Life as a Man
(1974), obsessively personal accounts of emotional failure and collapse, followed by
The Professor of Desire,
which rounds off the trio. Like its weepy, ball-broken hero, David Kepesh,
Desire
is an oddly helpless, melancholy and apathetic continuation of Roth's protracted self-scrutiny; having long been adept at turning his life into literature, Roth here lets life just wash all over him. The new persona is the prostrate man, limping from psychiatrist's couch to psychiatrist's couch, from bed to bed, and from bad to worse.

Roth's women. There are three kinds of them, too, and each novel in the trilogy gives emphasis to a different type (I think we had better call it the 'My Life' trilogy. But stay, gentile reader: mere Jewishness is seen as ever less central to the Roth predicament, and is given only incidental treatment here). The first kind of girl is the Girl Who Will Do Anything. And not many girls, it seems, will Do that.
Portnoy's Complaint
inspected this type most closely, in the person of The Monkey, the hero's reckless companion, and also, even more enjoyably, through comic fantasy — the world of swinish, gloating sexuality opened up by Thereal McCoy, Portnoy's dirty-talking, cupcake-nippled phantasm. She reappears as Sharon Shatsky in My
Life as a Man
and, one book later, as Birgitta, a daring and predatory Scandinavian with whom Kepesh has a tremulous European jaunt. The good thing about these girls is that you can do whatever the hell you like to them in bed. The bad thing is that you wish they wouldn't let you. While the girls are unfrightened by their own waywardness, the Roth man always is — in the end, anyway. There is something deeply unladylike, also, in the ease with which they get on with their own desires.

The Roth man is not as frightened of the first type of Roth woman as he is of the second type of Roth woman, whom he nonetheless tends to marry. This type is the Ball-Breaker, and her starkest representative in the trilogy is Maureen in My
Life as a Man
(her prototype, though one brilliantly transposed in social context, was Lucy in
When She Was Good).
The Ball-Breaker's mission is to ensnare, flatten and stomp on the Roth man; when she has got him impotent, enervated and wondering if he is a homosexual, she has got him where she wants him. The Ball-Breaker makes a cleverly varied guest-appearance in
The Professor of Desire
as Helen Kepesh, where added stress is given to her vanity, aimlessness, alcoholism, her grandiose fantasies and her wasted intelligence and beauty. You have to look rather harder for the Ball-Breaker in
Portnoy.
The Monkey is a handful all right, but she lacks the Ball-Breaker's destructive energy and deluded self-belief. Who is it, then, who stands over the hero with a knife, who lets him glimpse her menstrual blood, who in some sense 'marries' him with ineluct-ably horrendous results? Why, Sophie Portnoy, the Jewish Mother — whose hips, Portnoy can't help noticing, even towards the end of the novel, 'aren't bad ...’

The third type of Roth woman does not scare the Roth man. Instead, she is scared by him. She is the tender realist, methodical, protective, self-abnegating. She is not a Dickensian Little Woman; on the contrary, she is a Big Woman, with a determined if precarious working relationship with reality. Despite her past bruises and hurts, she sees things the way things really are, and longs to rescue the Roth man for the sane world: she is, above all,
unpsychotic.
The Pumpkin and The Pilgrim shared the role of the Big Woman in
Portnoy,
Susan played her in
My Life,
and in
Desire
she edges into centre-stage as Claire, with whom the crippled Roth man, at the end of his tether, played out by all that sex and spite, tries to rebuild his life. The great hitch about the Big Woman, though — and now we see Roth's anxieties turning full circle — is that they will not
quite
do Anything. And this tiny omission is enough to allow sexual boredom to nip giggling through the bedroom door; suddenly, a lifetime of depleted possibilities is on view. 'Anything', as usual, is symbolised by enthusiastic fellatio (or perhaps it just
is
enthusiastic fellatio). Claire will do fellatio, but she won't... you know, do it' enthusiastically. This is all it takes. Some people are never satisfied.

Well, never being satisfied is Roth's great theme. I wish I had 5op for every time the phrase 'on good terms with pleasure' is wistfully summoned in the 'My Life' trilogy. For pleasure and the Roth man are incompatible: they just do not get along, they just cannot work it out, they just get on each other's nerves. In
Portnoy
the condition was seen as a subject for black satire (the hero's desires harshly ridiculing his highmindedness), in My
Life
as a subject for tragic farce (the hero's highmindedness proscribing his desires); in the last book, however, the condition is seen as too disabling to be a subject for anything but itself. This is not only no joke, Roth seems to be saying, it is no novel either, nor anything else that has a shape: it is simply how it is. One feels both relieved and surprised when Roth expresses it so poignantly (in a projected introduction to a course of lectures which Claire calls 'Desire 341'):

I am devoted to fiction, and I assure you that in time I will tell you whatever I may know about it, but in truth nothing lives in me like my life.

Paradoxically, too, Roth seems in this novel to have moved
beyond
autobiography. He no longer looks at life with the selective eye of the novelist: he looks at his own past with the fastidious frown of the literary critic, grading, evaluating, trying to separate the serious from the unserious. (I have always wondered why Roth's 'bookish-ness' relies on translated works — Chekhov, Gogol, Kafka, Dostoevsky — for its points of reference. I suspect that Roth now regards novels as how-to books about life, and he prefers to get their tips on living without the distractions and evasions of a responsive verbal surface.)

And what a sorrily half-tone world seeps through the self-immersion.
The Professor of Desire
is by far the most exotic in its locations of all Roth's novels — the East and West coasts, London, France, Italy, Prague, Hong Kong — and yet the changing landscapes remain blissfully unobserved (a derisory 'Sorry, Yank, 'e seems a bit sleepy tonight', for instance, is the extent to which Roth captures the texture of life in our own country). 'The whole damn thing could have taken place in Cincinnati!' says Kepesh after his Far East debacle — and indeed it could have done. My
Life as a Man
contains a good, sharp section in which the narrator focuses his eyes on the year of 1968 and realises just how much has happened while he's been asleep inside himself. Not even this release — or injection of balance — is available to Kepesh: he is lost in a truly lugubrious solipsism, a mere patball of the neuroses which stride unchallenged through his psyche. Accordingly, all ironic distance has gone; nothing separates author and narrator; Roth sees no more than Kepesh sees.

How else has the world changed? It is quieter and flatter than it used to be, and there is no delight in it. Roth's novelistic ear, arguably his greatest gift as a writer, has evidently been well cauliflowered by recent events: only the Jewish-American characters retain their own voices, while everyone else joins the stilted and lachrymose debate on the hero's despair. Even the expository prose has lost its relish, settling for a droll, automatic elegance: it is full of ugly chimes ('my father intends, by the very intensity ...', 'ending the term's work with three masterworks', etc.) and back-to-the-drawing-board formulations ('my year as a visiting fellow in erotic daredevilry', 'she is not only stunning-looking, she is also real', etc.). Some of the book's aridities may be an attempt to create a reflection of despair, but the zestlessness does sometimes read like a failure of professional sincerity, or nerve.

Now what? Will the vision re-expand, as it seems to yearn to do, or will it squirm deeper into the tunnel of the self? Is Roth's subject the situation of the American writer (something that could do with a little analysis)? Or is Roth's subject identical to — entirely contiguous with — his life as a man?

*
*
*

It is an awkward and recent truth that most contemporary novelists are deeply influenced by their own lives, and not least by the amount of praise, fame and money their work attracts. A few unpierceable geniuses may smile at the thousandth rejection-slip, may yawn at that staggering cheque, but such things tend to affect the confidence — and the writing. This doesn't matter so much in England, where the boundaries between success and its opposite are often hard to establish. (J. Cowper Powys is the obvious example, a monument of neglect far more renowned for his obscurity than many of his rivals were famed for their fame.) Over in America, though, you can't help knowing where you stand.

In his inimitably wholehearted way, Roth has let success go to his head. Success arrived there in 1980, with a big suitcase, and hasn't moved out.
The Anatomy Lesson
may be the third and final instalment of the Zuckerman trilogy, but it is also Roth's second consecutive novel about what success is like. Such fixity! Though they all want it, in a way, writers tend to be mistrustful of the ridiculous accident of bestsellerdom. Trust Roth, then, to embrace it as his subject. Completing the self-beleaguerment, he has now written two autobiographical novels about the consequences of writing autobiographical novels. I may be wrong (perhaps I'm
very
old-fashioned), but the question appears to me to be: do we
need
this new kind of autobiographical novel? I mean, we seemed to begetting on pretty well without it.

Whereas a British work on literary success would be rather low on incident (do radio interview; have lunch with publisher; get boiler mended), it is true that the American version provides considerable drama... You become a millionaire. You are mobbed in the street. Pale 'loners' have your picture tacked to the dartboard. Gossip columnists pair you off with Liza Minelli. Your sexual confessions increase the sale of pantihose, nationwide. PR firms want your mother to star in their rollmop commercials. Bestsellerdom rips the hard covers off life, because 'everyone has read that book'. In Roth's quasi-fictional world, that book is called 'Carnovsky'. We know it as
Portnoy's Complaint,
and we've all read it too.

Starting with the premonitory novella
The Ghost Writer,
moving on through the fame-flurry of
Zuckerman Unbound,
Roth now confronts the aftermath of literary success. Despite the 'trilogy' tag, you often wonder whether they aren't simply three books running with the same hero: Roth's post
-Portnoy
alter egos are so uniform that you could argue for a full pentathlon, roping in
The Professor of Desire
and My
Life as a Man.
The Zuckerman novels, at any rate, have no plot and little patterning. The Anne Frank motif from
The Ghost Writer,
for instance, is briefly taken up in
Zuckerman Unbound,
yet nothing of the first book survives into the third — nothing, that is to say, of artistic centrality.

Zuckerman is there, Aunt Essie is there, but structure is not there. You get joists, braces, buttresses (a skipful of teachabilities): you don't get a house. The books have a shape, that of the case history. Although the author may feign weary contempt for any Roth-Zuckerman equations, it must be said that the novels read like
experience.
Experience reworked, displaced, mordantly heightened — but not distanced, and not transformed.

The Roth themes, or reiterations, are compelling enough, and they are intricately deployed. Nathan Zuckerman's disaffection with the writer's calling has now reached the point where he is blocked, drugged, drunk and practically bedridden, assailed by 'untreatable pain of unknown origin' which makes writing physically as well as mentally unendurable. His persecution at the hands of the Jewish establishment continues, though in more highbrow form. Rabbi Wapter from
The Ghost Writer
has evolved into Professor Milton Appel (a nasty
Commentary
type), whose more sophisticated disapproval takes the same basic line: the charge of self-loathing anti-Semitism, as evinced in that 'mocking, hate-filled bestseller' with its lewd satire on Jewish ideals, sentiments and terrors. This is particularly hard on Zuck, whose pre-'Carnovsky" image was one of crew-necked maturity and high seriousness. But his most stinging excruciations come from guilt, and from a transgression that lies much closer to home.