The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America (8 page)

There are several wishful misapprehensions on offer here: that a 'creative individual' can't be evil; that writers, too, are outsiders, unheeded prophets; that life is a prison in the first place, and that the incorrigible criminal is forged only by contact with the criminal system, a system which gives distress to all well-informed Americans. Which comes first: the Beast, or the man in its Belly?

There have been rumours that it wasn't Mailer and Co. who sprang Abbott from jail: it was the Feds. After a violent strike-beating operation in Marion Penitentiary in April 1980, a broken Abbott co-operated widi the prison authorities. Informers don't live long in the Pen, so it may have been a handy coincidence when Mailer's letters testified that the snitch happened to be a genius too.

In an article commissioned and rejected by the
New York Times
Abbott claimed that 'the Press has helped the Government to make it finally impossible for me to survive in prison'. In the piece, Abbott presents himself as the classic Kierkegaardian poet-martyr, transforming pain into music. To Mailer he is a victim, an existential hero. The sympathies of the public, of tabloid America, are rightly with the murdered boy — who was also, apparently (as if this case needs any more irony), a writer of promise.

Up there on the stand Abbott seemed tremulous, distracted, half-way between laughter and teats. His reactions to the prosecutor's questions fizzed with indignation, with terrible impatience. It is said that the State-raised convict fears society as intensely as the ordinary man fears prison. Jack Abbott looks as if he has never seen much difference between the two.

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Postscript
It is absolutely consistent that Mailer should have presided over the publication, in 1985, of the most exhaustive character assassination in the history of letters:
Mailer: His Life and Times,
by Peter Manso. And it is ironical that the only episode in which Mailer fails to gratify rock-bottom expectation is die episode involving Jack Henry Abbott.

The first thing to be said about
In the Belly of the Beast
is that it isn't any good. It isn't any good. One can then add that it is also the work of a thoroughly, obviously and understandably psychotic mind: as such, it is a manifesto for recidivism. Its author, plainly, could never hope to abjure violence. Abbott is quoted in
Mailer,
from his prison cell, and it is pitiable to read the confused and terrified ramblings of the man Mailer called 'an intellectual, a radical, a potential leader'. You can hear paranoia snickering and wincing behind every word.

During the trial Mailer admitted that he had 'blood on his hands'. Yet he never expressed sympathy for the murdered boy or his family. Why not? Why not? The omission was conspicuous, and was meant to be; it is thus doubly inexpiable. But however this may be, the Abbott episode is clearly full of misery for Mailer; and it was, at least, a human folly as much as an ideological one. There is no echo here of the sinister idiocies to be found in Mailer's introduction to
In the Belly of the Beast.
He should have listened to his wife Norris (who, after the release, had the time and will to give Abbott a fraction of the human contact he needed). This is Norris Mailer:

I hadn't wanted any part of it. My attitude to Norman's involvement all along had been, 'You wrote the book about Gilmore — didn't you learn anything? It's not gonna work, these guys don't change.' Norman is the eternal optimist and said, 'It'll be fine, this guy's different, blah blah blah'...

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Anthony Powell stabs Lady Violet — near-fatally. William Golding risks a trigamy scandal by divorcing his fourth wife, marrying and divorcing his fifth, and then marrying his sixth in the space of a week. Arrested for drunkenness, Malcolm Bradbury 'takes out' one policeman but is blackjacked by a second, earning himself fifteen stitches. A.N. Wilson goes five rounds with drinking-buddy Frank Bruno.

None of this sounds terribly likely, does it? In British literary circles, what one might loosely call 'bad behaviour' is normally the preserve of Celtic micrometeorites like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, who burn brightly and briefly, and very soon rejoin the cosmic dust. But in the United States, provided you are Norman Mailer, it seems that you can act like a maniac for forty years — and survive, prosper and multiply, and write the books.' The work is what it is: sublime, ridiculous, always interesting. But the deeds — the human works — are a monotonous disgrace.

This 7oo-pager is an oral biography, or better say a verbal one. Peter Manso provides no links, no introduction; after his epic mar-shallings of the tapes and transcriptions, he was presumably hard pressed to manage the acknowledgments and the dedication. Even in America the book has been sniffed at as a by-blow of the new barbarism, but I think there is an appropriate madness in Manso's method. What's so great about the literary biography anyway?
Mailer
intercuts about 150 voices: family, friends, peers, onlookers, enemies. It is deeply discordant, naggingly graphic and atrociously indiscreet. No living writer, you'd have thought, could have more to lose by such an exposure. But then, programmatic self-destruction has always been the keynote of Mailer's life and times.

'Do things that frighten you' is one of Norman's pet maxims. Needless to say, in real life, doing things that frighten you tends to involve doing things that frighten other people. For some reason or other, Mailer spent the years between 1950 and 1980 in a tireless quest for a fistfight. He liked his dirty-talking, hell-cat women to have fights too, teaching them how and egging them on. 'Drinking runs through this whole story,' as one of his wives remarks, 'drinking, drinking, drinking.' 'I am an American
dissident,"
Mailer has been claiming for more than thirty years. But 'I am an American
drunk'
sounds nearer the mark.

Half-way through most evenings, Mailer would be 'snorting and weaving', insulting his friends, goading strangers. He picked his pals with care, and so there were usually a few ex-boxers, criminals and aspiring tough-guys or psychopaths on hand to engage with him in ritual arm-wrestling, elbow-digging and head-banging bouts. Having walked his two poodles one night in New York, Mailer returned home 'on cloud nine', 'in ecstasy', with his left eye 'almost out of his head'. He had got into a fight, he told his wife, because a couple of sailors 'accused my dog of being queer'. According to the doctor, it was 'a hell of a beating he took'. But 'Stormin' Norman' was unrepentant. 'Nobody's going to call my dog a queer,' he growled.

Irving Howe once said that Mailer risked becoming 'a hostage to the temper of his times'. But he was a willing hostage, and in fact he normally behaved more like a terrorist. 'For I wish to attempt an entrance', wrote Mailer in 1959, with typical pomp, 'into the mysteries of murder, suicide, incest, orgy, orgasm and Time.' He was referring to his work rather than his life, but the two activities (like bar-room brawlers) were hard to keep apart.

The book is strewn with vicious confrontations, drunken couplings, ostentatious suicide bids, cruel human manipulations, incessant violence — and incessant cant. It is like a distillation of every Sixties hysteria, every radical-chic inanity. A girl's drink is spiked with LSD. On a brief homoeopathic fad, Mailer refuses to let his baby daughter have her shots. While Mailer was directing his third cinematic 'happening' (and flop),
Maidsfone,
there were 'people by the dozens, running around, chasing each other, fighting, fucking, acting insane'; 'the violence ... was so thick you could feel it'. Sure enough, 'all of a sudden there's kids screeching, Beverly [wife 4] screaming, and blood.' This is a common background noise in
Mailer:
screaming children.

Of course, everyone was at it, in that convulsive bad-behaviour festival that beset America after the war. Often the urge to scandalise a non-existent bourgeoisie took a more benevolent form. One of the funniest passages in the book describes a cocktail party on Cape Cod given by the distinguished belles-lettrist Dwight Macdonald. 'We got out of the car,' says Mailer's second wife, Adele, and there was everyone standing around nude. All these intellectuals, the whole bunch. It was just so cute. Norman and I looked at each other and shrugged and took off our clothes. No, I think Norman left his shorts on.

Let's be thankful for small mercies. If I go to a literary party this summer, I shall certainly pause to count my blessings.

The knifing of Adele — known as The Trouble — stands as the pivotal incident of the book: as Mailer's sociopathic epiphany. In 1960 Mailer threw a party in New York as 'an unofficial kick-off" for his mayoralty campaign (the campaign was perforce abandoned thereafter; and it was a decade later that Mailer made a slightly more serious attempt to become the Ken Livingstone of New York). Intending a creative confrontation between the city's haves and have-nots, Mailer invited the local bigwigs and machine politicians together with a rabble of punks and pimps — the disenfranchised whom Mailer hoped to represent. Predictably, none of the haves showed up. The have-nots, however, had no prior engagements.

Mailer had
already
got a few fights under his belt by the time the party collapsed and he staggered, bloody-lipped, into the kitchen and
reached for
the knife. Adele had apparently been baiting him all night; she had been fooling around with a woman 'in the John'; she was 'definitely' heard to remark that Mailer 'wasn't as good a writer as Dostoevsky'. Or perhaps she simply called his poodle a queer. Later, friends were considering whether to go in 'with a baseball bat' to rescue Mailer's daughter. 'He had this marvellous rationale', muses a friend, about art and life — and he actually did it, he lived it. And it wasn't just something he did half-ass. It almost killed him — or actually Adele...

There is a fair bit to be said on the credit side. And, after all, better writers have behaved worse. There is manifest charm, strong loyalty, an absence of snobbery, the novelist's gift of finding interest everywhere (even in bores and boredom), the enviable — if not admirable — shamelessness, and above all the selective but delightfully strident honesty. In a letter:

I've decided that at bottom I'm just a sadist, and no damn good for any woman. The reason - I can beat them up. Only with men do I
act decently cause I'm scared they'll whop me,
isn't human nature depressing?

One of the most formidable and endearing voices running through this book is that of Fanny ('my kids are tops') Mailer, Norman's 86-year-oId-mother. 'I couldn't understand why he hadn't gotten the Nobel Prize.' 'Why he picked Adele I never could understand.' 'If Norman would stop marrying these women who make him do these terrible things.' Fanny named her 'really lovely baby' Nachum Malech Mailer, 'Nachum' becoming Norman, while 'Malech' ('king' in Hebrew) became Kingsley. 'He was our king', 'a little god'. '"He's going to be a great man." I knew that. Absolutely.' Fanny never waivered, and all his life Norman had plenty of collaborators in building the mansion of his self-esteem.

His name is Norman Mailer, king of kings: look on his works, ye Mighty, and — what? Despair? Burst out laughing? In secure retrospect, Mailer's life and times seem mostly ridiculous: incorrigibly ridiculous. Some observers talk of his 'great huge ambition', his 'great grace and correctitude'; others just lick their wounds. A devout immoralist, he always veered between the superhuman and the subhuman, between Menenhetet I and Gary Gilmore. Like America, he went too far in all directions, and only towards the end, perhaps — with no more drink and 'no more stunts', dedicated to his work and to a non-combatant sixth wife — has he struck a human balance. As for the past, nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away.

Observer
1981,1982 and 1985

The only road-accidents in Palm Beach take place between pedestrians. And you can see them happening a mile off. The mottled, golf-trousered oldsters square up to each other on pavement and zebra, and head forward, inexorably, like slow-motion stock-cars or distressed supertankers. (Everyone is pretty sleek and rounded in Palm Beach — unlike New York, where people's faces are as thin as credit cards.) Then it happens. Oof!... The old-timers rebound and stagger on. 'Hey!' 'This is a sidewalk, honey.' 'Oh yeah? How'd you like that!’

Meanwhile the tamed gas-guzzlers toil in line along the seafront strip, hearse-like limousines, roadsters with their haunches and biceps — Toronadoes, Thunderbirds, Cutlasses. But these gas-guzzlers are on the wagon. The limit is between 25 and 35 m.p.h., and people drive even slower than that. There are never any accidents, no alarms of any kind. A flat tire on a Mercedes will bring out the squad cars, helicopters, state troopers. The only people who need to get anywhere fast are behind the wheels of the Emergency Service Units, which specialise in heart attacks and are the most efficient and advanced in the world. Everyone else cruises in meandering, Sunday-sightseeing style. The speedometer on my gurgling 1981 Mustang stopped at 85, like a Mini. Energy is being conserved. But for what?

Your psychic clock needs time to adjust to Palm Beach, to the sun, the wealth, the safety and the pool fatigue. For the first forty-eight hours 1 felt 1 was going to be spontaneously arrested by the police for having such a relaxing time.'... But Officer - what's the charge?’

'You're too relaxed. Way too relaxed.' The truth was, of course, that I wasn't nearly relaxed enough. I sprawled nervously by my personal swimming-pool, dozed jumpily on my baronial bed, idled edgily into town at the wheel of my sparkling car ...

There is no sign of any work going on here. There is no sign of anyone who hasn't got lots of money. The only black faces you see, you see through glass: trimming the borders, washing the dishes, or licking your windscreen. There is no litter, there is no crime; a snatched purse in the shopping mall would cause headlines, statewide man-hunts. There is only one kind of activity in Palm Beach: leisure.

Palm Beach proper, the strip of land between Lake Worth and the Atlantic Ocean, is the most expensive piece of real estate in America, out-tabbing Martha's Vineyard or Beverly Hills. People talk obsessively about real estate — partly, I suppose, because it is an informal way of talking obsessively about money. 'And I mean those are top prices. And I mean top. Top. Top.' 'Then I raised the money at 140 per cent of the asking price. Don't you love it?' In one of the main shopping streets in Palm Beach there is a plush-looking office called Creative Realtors. Perhaps there is even a course at Miami University in creative realting.

I visited an average middle-income Palm Beach home and was shown round by its droll and hospitable owner. From the point of view of ostentation — well, the house had a monogrammed marble driveway, and went on from there. Additional features included a telephonic computer system (if you dial a certain number in the study, the drapes draw shut in the bedroom), weather control in the jungly courtyard, visual and aural monitoring of the sculpture-infested grounds. In the garage is a custom-built $90,000 Clenet ('I have some Rouses out there too, and they ain't bad'). In the Mae-West bathroom art jereboams of Madame Rochas and Paco Rabanne. The lawn is like astroturf, the carpets like bubble-baths. Never in my life have I seen such clogged, stifling luxury.

My host was a businessman from the North who had settled in Palm Beach. On arrival, he did not attempt to join the 'most exclusive' club in town. There would have been no point: he is a Jew. He did try to join the club next door. He was willing to pay his dues ($10,000 a year), and could prove, as all hopefuls must, that he had given over a million dollars to charity. He couldn't get in there either. His wife hired a press secretary, and the couple began to appear in the
Palm Beach Daily News, or
The Shiny Sheet' as it is known. Eventually they were accepted by Palm Beach cafe society. Like all provincial elites, the Palm Beach
beau monde
is both baffling and uninteresting, an enigma that you don't particularly want to solve. Names are mentioned with reverence, irony or contempt. Some have an old-style Confederate ring; others sound ersatz European. Appropriately for America, the only monikers with an aristocratic tang are brand-names - perfumes, cars, domestic appliances. There are occasional scandals. The loo-paper heiress has run off with the bra-strap boss! The deodorant queen has divorced the bath-salt giant! Large parties are thrown under the cover of charity. You buy your own drinks and the money goes to a disadvantaged minority group, or to combat a fashionable disease. I formed the impression that most of the entertaining consists of small but opulent pool-side dinner-parties, in which each hosting couple tries to out-Gatsby the other with the vintage of their wines, the poundage of their steaks, the antiquity of their tableware, the multitudinousness of their servants. But there are other big dates on the calendar too.

'The drama of diamonds!... Yes, diamonds
are
a girl's best friend ... This exquisite necklace! A unison of noble gems. Yours for a mere — $250,000!’

This was the seasonal Gucci party, given at the Gucci arcade and fronted by Gucci himself (or, rather, by 'Doctor Aldo Gucci' himself. 'Doctor': don't you love it?). Gucci himself is a resplendently handsome maniac with operatic manners and impossible English. 'Let us give thanks that God has forgiven this evening,' and so on. Swanky girls and jinking pretty-boys modelled the Doc's latest creations. Gucci then repaired to the minstrels' gallery and, with a tambourine in one hand and a microphone in the other, actually
mimed
to the songs being played by the sedative pop group behind him.

Meanwhile I mingled with the clotted cream of Palm Beach. The old men — these tuxed gods and molten robots, with silver-studded dress shirts and metallic hair, all doing fine, alt in
great shape.
'How are you, Buck?' 'Good, Dale. You?' Tm good, Buck. I'm good.' And the women, still going strong, prinked, snipped, tucked, capped, patched, pinched, rinsed, lopped, pruned, pared, but still going strong, and intending to be around for a very long time.

The average age in Palm Beach is fifty-seven. According to popular belief — i.e. according to the famous Alan Whicker documentary a few years ago — the Beach is peopled entirely by widows with faces like snake-skin handbags, the menfolk having checked out with the lifelong effort of establishing themselves on this golden mile. 'That Alvin Whicker there. You're not going to write something like that,' I was told on several occasions. No, I said, I wasn't. I saw little of this — or rather I saw other things also.

'Do you do coke?' someone asked me at a cattle-baron's hoedown (dress: Western) at the Palm Beach Polo and Country Club. (How
do
you
do
coke? At Miami airport I happened to notice a íîustered-looking Bruce Forsyth, standing in front of an ad that read: 'Do A Daquiri'. As I write this sentence, I am doing a cigarette.) There were plenty of young things at the hoedown, lots of little Bo Dereks and Farrah Fawcetts bobbing to the Okey band, and squired by many a six-gunned young dude. You hear tell of the usual hang-gliding, water-skiing, scuba-diving, Cessna-flying, polo-playing, drug-and-discoing young rabble that traditionally adorn such pleasure spots, their activities indulged by their parents and winked at by the police. The rich have children, just like everybody else.

Driving inland from Palm Beach, you are immediately confronted by the booming chaos of middle America. On the bridge into West Palm (a community founded for the servants and amenity operators of the Beach itself), there are morose old black men fishing for scrod over the rails. Within seconds you are in drive-in, shopping-mall land. Beef n'Booze, Seven Eleven, X-Rated Movies, Totally Nude Encounter Sessions, Jack's Bike World, Eats — 24 Hrs. Developments are rearing up everywhere, condominiums, conurbations, the bleak toytowns formed by mobile homes. Drive a little further and you are in the redneck swampland of Wellington and Loxahatchee. Anything, you feel, could happen here — crocodiles slithering across the dirt roads, good ole boys staring and snickering at your out-of-county plates ...

Drop me down anywhere in America and I'll tell you where I am: in America. I soon turned round and headed back to the Beach, where you feel old and safe. I longed to be on the patio of my villa, and to hear my maid calling out protectively to ask if I wanted my tea. She deals with everything, with the tradesmen and delivery boys who zoom round to cater to my whims and to fix all the labour-saving appliances. She does all the washing-up and laundry. My shirts never had it so good. Out in the sun I read a little poem by Von Humboldt Fleischer which perfectly answered my mood:

Mice hide when hawks are high; Hawks shy from airplanes; Planes dread the ack-ack-ack; Each one fears somebody. Only the heedless lions Under the Booloo tree Snooze in each other's arms After their lunch of blood — I call that living good.’

By now my psychic clock was attuned to Palm Beach, I felt completely at home among the old American lions.

Tatler
1979