The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America (25 page)

As for 1985, it took more than non-yellow journalism to ease society through to the next stage in its understanding, its confrontation with
aids.
It took Rock Hudson, a figure with the necessary TV-and-tabloid constituency, someone whose face we had known all our lives. People are now infinitesimally more receptive to the truth, and this is a start. But it will be a long and wretched road.

The room at the Quality Inn was large and cheap, with thermal drapes and barebacked plugs. All it lacked was quality. But I stood at the very centre of what Saul Bellow has called 'the contempt center of the USA'; and the view was enthralling.

From my window I could see a Christian Science church that looked like a hydroelectric plant, the corncobs of two vertical parking lots, a stilted Marina Bank and the limousine glass of IBM Plaza, the El train, a slow roller-coaster, churning round the bend. Just over the crest stood the abandoned University of Chicago building, a charred, black-stoned old scraper, its golden turret like the crown of a tooth. Just below lay Sheldon's, prominently offering 'Art Material —
for the artist in everyone'.
On the telephone I arranged to meet the Nobel Laureate in the Chicago Arts Club at one o'clock. He would be identifiable, he cheerfully informed me, 'by certain signs of decay'.

I felt more than averagely nervous at the prospect of tackling this particular Great American Writer. I wondered why. After all, I've done quite a few of these guys by now. I knew that Bellow was no manipulator, eccentric or vaudevillian. He wouldn't be poleaxed by a hangover, as was Truman Capote. He wouldn't open proceedings with a het-taunting joke, as did Gore Vidal ('Oh to be in England', drawled Gore, 'now that England's here'). He wouldn't be a model of diffidence and sweet reason, as Norman Mailer had been, then later denounce me as 'a wimp' on British TV. Joseph Heller was all brawny and jovial self-absorption. Kurt Vonnegut was delightfully dreamy — a natural man, but a natural crackpot too.

Saul Bellow, I suspected, would speak in the voice I knew from the novels: funny, fluent and profound. A bit worrying, that. This business of writing about writers is more ambivalent than the end-product normally admits. As a fan and a reader, you want your hero to be genuinely inspirational. As a journalist, you hope for lunacy, spite, deplorable indiscretions, a full-scale nervous breakdown in mid-interview. And, as a human, you yearn for the birth of a flattering friendship. All very shaming, I thought, as I crossed the dun Chicago River, my eyes streaming in the mineral wind.

One final complication: whereas the claims of his contemporaries remain more or less unresolved, Saul Bellow really is a great American writer. I think that in a sense he is the writer that the twentieth century has been waiting for. The present phase of Western literature is inescapably one of 'higher autobiography', intensely self-inspecting. The phase began with the spittle of Con-íessionalism but has steadied and persisted. No more stories: the author is increasingly committed to the private being. With all sorts of awkwardnesses and rough edges and extraordinary expansions, supremely well-equipped, erudite and humorous, Bellow has made his own experience resonate more memorably than any living writer. And yet he is also the first to come out the other side of this process, hugely strengthened to contemplate the given world.

Our meeting took place in the fourth week of October 1983. The previous Sunday 230 US marines had died in the Beirut suicide bombing. The Grenadan intervention was in its second day. It was crisis week — but every week is crisis week. Arguing in wide concentric loops, Bellow needed no prompting.

The adventure in Grenada, he said, was an opportunist PR exercise, designed to atone for, or divert attention from, the disaster in Lebanon. Reagan was helplessly wedged between specialist advice and public opinion. 'Experts' simply act in accordance with the prevailing standards of their profession. You get no morality from them: 'all you get is - "But everyone else does it.'" After settling - post-war Europe, America was pleased with her new responsibilities and felt she had marvellously matured. 'Not global policeman so much as Little Mary Fixit.' The US shows a persistent determination to 'angelise' herself. No moral ideas; instead, a conviction of her own purity. Pro-good, anti-bad, and right by definition.

Public opinion is in the hands of the media-managers: in other words, it is in the hands of TV, which is 'ugly, ignorant, self-righteous and terrifyingly influential'. This week the television screen throngs with bereaved families, each granted (and fully embracing) its sixty seconds of prime-time crack-up. A mother weeps over a framed photograph: 'My baby. Where is my baby?' A father wrings his hands: 'I say to him, Louie - don't go! Don't go!' By the end of the week the news shows will feature the obliging hysterics of the 'rescued' medical students from Grenada. Meanwhile, the American CO explains: 'We were not micro-managing Grenada intelligencewise until about that time-frame.’

'Oh bad!' as one Bellow hero puts it - 'Very bad!' President Reagan, TV-tested, is the latest face in 'a long gallery of dumb-bells'. As another Bellow hero remarks: 'Today's psychiatrists would not be shocked. Asked whom they love best, their patients reply in increasing numbers, "My dog." At this rate, a dog in the White House becomes a real possibility.’

So far as Bellow is concerned, however, the 'crisis' is general and omnipresent. 'For the first time in history', he wrote in his analytical memoir To
Jerusalem and Back,
'the human species as a whole has gone into politics — What is going on will not let us alone. Neither the facts nor the deformations." The result is interminable 'event-glamour', 'crisis-chatter'. That word
crisis
is part of the crisis. The crises are part of the crisis. And you can't see the crisis for the crises.

Mr Bellow was identifiable, in the anteroom of the Arts Club, not by certain signs of decay but by his dapper, compact figure and by his expression — one of courteous vigilance. I clutched a copy of
The Dean's December,
Bellow's latest novel, which I was re-rereading. 'As you see,' he said, when we filed into the dining-room, 'it's not an arts club at all.' Indeed, this snazzy private restaurant was one of the many examples 1 encountered of Chicago's flirtatious or parodic attitude to high culture. 'There's a Braque, a de Kooning, a Matisse drawing. But it's just a lunch club for elegant housewives.’

Bellow is sixty-eight. His hair is white and peripheral but the eyes are still the colour of expensive snuff. Generous yet combative, the mouth is low-slung, combining with the arched brows to give his face an animated roundness. In repose the face is squarer, harder. He looks like an omniscient tortoise. According to
Humboldt's Gift,
America is proud of what it does to its writers, the way it breaks and bedevils them, rendering them deluded or drunken or dead by their own hands. To overpower its tender spirits makes America feel tough. Careers are generally short. Over here, writers aren't meant to be as sane as Bellow persists in being, or as determined to have his say, in full.

He once told a prospective biographer (who wrote a whole book on his failure to write a book on Bellow): 'What can you reveal about me that I haven't already revealed about myself?' In the novels Bellow's surrogates have their vanities and blind spots (Herzog is 'not kind', Sammler was 'never especially kind'), their brainstorms and dizzy spells. Sanity, like freedom, like American democracy — he suggests — is a fragile and perhaps temporary condition. It is clear from his books, his history, his face, that Bellow has weathered considerable turbulence. As soon as you start scrutinising a writer's life (however monumental or exemplary its achievements may be), that life quickly takes on a human shape — only human, all too human.

Apart from the ingratiation, the danger of becoming a cultural functionary, the extra mail ('suddenly even more people think that what I want to do is read their manuscripts'), Bellow is appalled by the 'micro-inspection' to which Nobel Prizewinners are subject. 'One is asked to bare one's scars to the crowd, like Coriolanus.' Well, it is all in the novels, at one remove or another, for the not-so-idly curious. There you will find a moral autodidact, slowly crystallised and moving steadily now to 'the completion of his reality".

Which is? 'Ignorance of death is destroying us,' Bellow has said. 'Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything.' A well-lived life leaves you on 'sober decent terms with death'; if you are a writer, though, it leaves you more than that.
The Dean's December
inaugurates Bellow's 'late' period but
Mr Sammler's Planet
prefigured it — old Sammler, with his 'farewell detachment', his 'earth-departure-objectivity': 'the luxury of non-intimidation by doom'. Bellow looks set to enjoy a Yeatsian old age. Just let him finish.

Chicago — 'huge, filthy, brilliant and mean' — is hardly a hermit's cot, yet in a sense Bellow belongs to the reclusive or spectral tradition of Frost, Salinger and Pynchon. The philistinism, the 'hardboiled-dom' of the place provides the sort of insulation which an American writer sheds at his peril. 'The main thing about Chicago is that it's not New York. There are no writers to talk to in New York, only celebrities on exhibit.' His determination to stand aloof (especially from the youth-worshipping campus-fever of the Sixties) has moved certain pundits to label him as a reactionary. Was it fastidiousness or vocational sense that had kept him out of public debate?

'I now think I was probably wrong,' he said. 'Things are going down so fast, I think maybe I should have been involved all along. As for Vietnam, I went on record. But the war could be identified as an evil by Americans because it was packaged by television and was therefore comprehensible to an entertainment society. Other evils, money-mania, corruption, urban vileness — these are not package-able.' Out there in Chicago, as Bellow has written, lie 'many, many square miles of civil Passchendaele or Somme'.

What is the content of these data?

1. In Cabrini Green, the black housing project, a man butchers a hog in his apartment, and then throws the guts on the stairs. A woman slips and breaks her arm. In the ambulance 'she was smeared with pig's blood and shriller than the siren', 2. In 'ratshit Woodlawn' old people scavenge for food behind the supermarkets. The store guards try to keep them off lest they poison themselves with spoiled fish, and then sue. 3. A black youth leaves his car in the parking lot of the courthouse, where he attends a hearing on a rape charge. In the boot of his Pontiac lies a young housewife, kidnapped at gunpoint. Every few hours he takes her out and rapes her. Two days later he shoots her in a vacant lot and covers her body with trash. These horror stories, and many more, appear in
The Dean's December,
in which Bellow contrasts the super-licensed rat-jungle of Chicago with the 'penitentiary society' of Bucharest. Citing Rilke's wartime letters, the Dean observes that there is no effective language for the large-scale terrors; during such times 'the heart must hang in the dark', and wait. But there is a countervailing urge 'to send the soul out into society', 'to see at first hand the big manifestations of disorder and take a fresh reading from them'. The result is head-spin, heart-fever. And the conclusion he reaches is that America now has an 'underclass', lost populations expected, even encouraged, to dispose of themselves with junk, poison and Saturday-night specials.

I asked Bellow how he had assembled his litany of depradation. Did he trudge round the jails, the hospitals, the projects? The process is largely an imaginative one, but it is a process much simplified in classless, dollar-driven, magimixed Chicago. 'The corruption is everywhere. You can say this for Chicago — there's no hypocrisy problem here. There's no
need
for hypocrisy. Everyone's
proud
of being a bastard ... You just meet all these guys. You went to school with them. I used to play basketball with a Machine executioner. He lives out in Miami now. Quietly.’

Rather than dig up some of Bellow's more reliable academic pals, I went to see an old schoolfriend of his, a criminal lawyer whom I had better call Iggy. He was friendly. We were soon on first-name terms. 'You come all the way from
London
to talk with Saul?' he asked. Yes, it takes all sorts. Pushing seventy, pouchy, paunchy, yet still ignited with the American vigour, Iggy elegantly explained that there might be the odd 'telephonic interruption' from his clients — the fuddled rapists, bail-jumpers and drug-dealers he represented. At once there was a telephonic interruption. I looked round the file-heaped office. Lawyers Make It Stand Up In Court, said a sign. 'Will you
shut up
and listen?' said Iggy to his client.

Iggy and Saul studied at Tuley High. 'Ninety per cent of us came from illiterate immigrant families. They had a wonderful faculty corps there. At the last reunion dinner we had Saul come along. And you know? Of that 90 per cent, 90 per cent of them — no, 98 per cent — had made it. We'd all made it.’

Bellow had also told me about Tuley High. Fleeing the pogroms, his parents had left St Petersburg (he calls it 'Pettersburg') for Montreal in 1913. Bellow himself arrived two years later, the only child of four to be born on the far side of the Atlantic. (His writing, one reflects, has much of the candour, the adultness of the Russian voice.) In 1924 they moved to Chicago, to the slums of the Northwest Side. Bellow's father was an onion-dealer and part-time bootlegger.

'There was something oppressive', said Bellow, 'about being an alien, a hybrid — but then everyone was. You knew you were always going to have dirt under your fingernails, but this is a natural twentieth-century feeling. There was no bar to learning. And I wondered — by what right or title was I reading great books, while also discovering America: pool halls, ball parks. It was one of the worst slums in Chicago. By the time I was twelve, I had seen
everything.'
During the Depression the likes of Saul and Iggy lived off welfare hand-outs and municipal !OUs. 'But we came through,' Iggy affirmed. 'Even during that bad time we were full of energy and hope. We made it.’