A cute little wimp called Tony
Humphrey Carpenter
THE MORONIC INFERNO AND OTHER VISITS TO AMERICA by Martin Antis Cape, £9.95 Anthony Powell stabs Lady Violet and nearly kills her. William Golding nearly commits trigamy — he divorces his fourth wife, marries and divorces his fifth, and marries his sixth, all within the space of a week. Malcolm Bradbury is arrested for drunkenness, hits a policeman, is black- Jacked by another cop, and requires 15 stitches. A. N. Wilson gets into a five- round fight with a drinking companion. This is Martin Amis's fantasy about what the British literary establishment would be like if it aped the American. The Moronic Inferno consists largely of interviews with American writers, most of whom have done some of these things, or something pretty near them. Amis wonders why. Why do American writers hate each other? Why do they hit each other? Why do they drink so much?
Historically, one supposes, the whole thing began in Paris in the Twenties, when Hemingway punched anyone who hap- pened to be within reach of his café table, and Scott Fitzgerald was always passing out on the bar stool. But Amis's book sug- gests that this sort of behaviour is an inevit- able consequence of modern American life. America, for Amis, is a place where murder happens every minute on every street (see his essay on The Killings in Atlanta, a seemingly inexplicable and end- less series of child murders), so that writers are bound to write about it. Hence books like In Cold Blood and The Executioner's Song. And is it surprising that murder- writing writers should sometimes go in for murderous behaviour themselves? So we have Norman Mailer stabbing one of his wives at a party and bashing Gore Vidal at another. Meanwhile murderers become bestselling writers; a man named Abbott, twice a killer, gets adulatory reviews for his memoirs (introduced of course by Mailer). And it is columnists like Amis himself who move in for the final kill, haunting the homes of ailing pen-pushers to give the knife its last twist with their merciless ques- tions. Amis catches Truman Capote vir- tually on his deathbed: 'Following a final, convulsive series of nose-blowings and bark-like sneezes, Truman tiptoed back into the room and lowered himself gingerly on to his cot. Poor Truman.'
Amis rather seems to approve of the whole situation. Not that The Moronic In- ferno comes to much explicit judgment on the American scene, which isn't surprising, because it isn't really a book but a cobbling-together of newspaper and maga- zine pieces written by Amis in recent years. But quite apart from that, one has the im- pression that he doesn't want to pass judgment. He's enjoying himself too much, being sent on these nice freebies, and why not? So he is content to stop being Amis-the-merciless-young-novelist, author of Money and other savage attacks on modern urban folly, and to become a nice young chap from the Observer, or the Tat- ler, or Vanity Fair, terribly concerned not to upset poor old Mailer or poor old Capote or poor old Kurt Vonnegut or poor endlessly-young Vidal. He has to steel him- self to ask the really nasty questions. To a Norman Mailer who is clearly falling apart by the minute: ' "Have you mellowed," I asked cautiously, "or what?" ' And to a trashy film director who kept him waiting for a week in New York: 'It's kind of you to give me your time.'
Indeed throughout the book Amis seems to be undergoing some sort of identity cri- sis. His interviewees are far from certain what to make of him; Gore Vidal calls him `a cute little thing', but Mailer thinks him merely 'a wimp'. Even his name seems to be in doubt. Truman Capote, asked by young Martin to inscribe a book, says doubtfully: 'The name's Tony, isn't it?' At an Evangelical congress he is seen wearing a press badge 'that identified me as "Marty Amis" ', and he is found praying aloud in a fake Virginia accent, so as to avoid detec- tion as an interloper. Later, he weeps buckets at the film E.T. and says what a terribly nice guy Stephen Spielberg is. Surely this is not our fearsome Martin? When Claus Von Billow, the man who is indicted almost weekly on charges of murdering his wife, tells him amiably 'I admire your writing . . I admire your father's writing too', one wonders if he thinks he is talking to Auberon Waugh. It is all enormous fun — well, most of it; the old pieces from the London Review of Books are rather heavy going — and I hope one day Martin Amis will write a proper book on America and not just get his old press cuttings together. Mean- while one gets a lot of pleasure pursuing him through the circles of this particular inferno. And maybe the British and Amer- ican literary heels are not so different after all. One notices that Norman Mailer's mid- dle name is Kingsley.
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