The Moronic Inferno Part 5

When Reagan's speech was over (and before anyone could get away) Jerry Falwell eased himself up on to the stage. Jerry's job was to complement Robison's brimstone with the other side of the Evangelical hard-sell: the cajoling demand for money. There wasn't much ooh-h awing now, as grim stewards pa.s.sed out envelopes and plastic buckets to the mult.i.tude, which had already paid $25 apiece to get in. Falwell wanted a thousand people to 'pledge' $100 each, to help tab the Dallas experiment; he then coaxed and nagged some smaller contributions out of the audience for various circulars and devotional knick-knacks. 'One hundred dollars! This is a tax-deductible gift... Stand up all those who have pledged one hundred dollars. Or more.'

Money is the two-way traffic of the religious TV industry: money is taken from the viewers in the form of sacramental contributions; money is 'returned' to them in the form of celestial jackpots. The tax-free status of American religions (including the Californian cults) is constantly a.s.sailed. But all challenges are repulsed by the First Amendment - and by the age-old a.n.a.logy between sectarian compet.i.tion and free enterprise. Furthermore, Americans don't feel the same way about money as we feel about it. They are not embarra.s.sable on the subject. Money is its own vindication; money is its own just cause.

By no means all of the uplift shows are consciously political. Some electronic preachers do nothing more sinister with their millions than aggrandise themselves and their sanctuaries. Oral Roberts (yes, Oral Roberts), whose programme is centred on mere semi-hysterical folksiness, is going ahead with a $200-million City of Faith in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Robert Schuller, who has a drive-in ministry one exit past Disneyland in Southern California, is building a twenty-two-acre Shopping Centre for Jesus Christ, featuring an all-gla.s.s Crystal Cathedral.

Styles vary. Some preachers tout health instead of money, which in America often means the same thing. Gene Profeta, who looks like Frankie Vaughan at the London Palladium, stands surrounded by the remnants of slum families who have found togetherness again with the Lord. 'Yeah, Gene, since I been praying and everything, I ain't had no seizures.' Gene grabs the mike: 'Oh praise Jesus.' Dr W.V. Grant's televisual pantheon looks like a field hospital at Gettysburg. Grant interrupts a spiritual to solace a crippled negro. 'The name's Jim, right?' 'Yeah.' 'You don't know me, do you, Jim?' 'No.' 'Jim, how long you been crippled up like that? Long time?' 'Yeah.' 'Jim, I want you to throw down these crutches and walk!' 'Okay.' Jim gets lithely to his feet, without looking pleased or grateful or even mildly surprised, and troops morosely up the aisle. 'Oh, hallelujah, praise that Lord!' sings Brother Grant. 'The Lord has healed him!' At this point, you begin to wonder Who crippled him. But Grant does not tarry with points of theodicy; he has his sales pitch to make.

Pat Robertson, chairman of the Christian Broadcasting Network, the great Sanctimoney genius of Portsmouth, Virginia, goes one further: he heals and rewards his flock over the airwaves. In the miracle-facility section of his show, the kneeling Robertson is granted visions of various recoveries, reunions and windfalls throughout the land. Robertson describes the miracles, and people ring in to claim them. His poorer viewers send him their rent cheques and disability allowances - because the gamble works better 'if you give out of your need'. Like all the TV preachers, Robertson also does big business in what the trade calls 'the pretty-pretties': sacred key-rings, beatified pen-clips and whatnot. CBN takes in over $1 million a week.

Robert Schuller's line typifies the logic of the holy sting, and he articulates it with all the unction of sweet reason. Gently waving his arms about and baring his practised false smile, Schuller explains that 'the major decision' in his life was 't.i.thing' - 'or the giving of 10 per cent of one's income back to the Church". This of course means the giving of 10 per cent of one's income back to Robert Schuller. 'And it turned me into a very good business manager,' he adds, without a blush. 'If you can't live on the 90 per cent, you couldn't live on the 100 per cent. No way - ' And, in return, 'G.o.d will give you management skills.'

Schuller's show is ent.i.tled, candidly enough, Hour of Power. Of course, there is nothing peculiarly American, or peculiarly Western, about the religious emphasis on material reward. Present-day Hinduism, for example, is very largely structured on the principle of worldly success. However, the Midas tradition in Ame'rican worship has little to do with modern laxity. It shocked de Tocqueville in 1831. A century later it effloresced in a host of how-to books on harmonial and self-bettering themes, under a thin shine of gnosticism: Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, Norman Vincent Peale's Power of Positive Thinking, Billy Graham's Peace with G.o.d. What could be more American, in its way, than a version of Christ as the eternal miracle-worker and faith-healer - bringer of salubrity and cash, here and now?

The Rev. Jerry Falwell is the most powerful, most convincing, most committed - and the least vulgar - of all the electronic Evangelicals. He is without the messianic stridency of James Robison (with his talk of 'prophets' and 'new Jeremiahs'), and without the frank hucksterism of Pat Robertson. Falwell will last when the others are too bored, frightened or mad to continue usefully on the political wing. And if you ask him about his colonial mansion in Lynchburg, Virginia, his private aeroplane and airport, his tax-avoiding loans within his corporation, his bodyguards and gofers, he will tell you that material wealth is 'G.o.d's way of blessing people who put Him first'.

'I known Jerry Falwell since he was knee-high to a duck,' said the old Lynchburger in the bar (which took some finding). 'Knew his daddy too, biggest bootlegger ever hit this state. I seen Jerry Falwell so drunk he couldn't stand up - thirty years back, must be. But don't you trash Jerry now, you hear? Bet he earns more money than you ever will.'

Most of Lynchburg, Virginia, resembles an outsize drive-in shopping-mall. If you ask, with some desperation, to be taken to the centre of town, you end up in a different shopping-mall called Main Street. Moving around on foot, you feel vulnerable and isolated, like the next-to-go in The Amityville Horror. The township was founded by Colonel Charles Lynch - the man who got so memorably carried away when dealing out rough justice to loyalists after the American Revolution. It has a population of sixty-odd thousand, nearly a third of which owes allegiance to the Thomas Road Baptist Church, Jerry Falwell's home ministry.

Lynchburg is Jerryburg now, more or less. Falwell runs his Old-Time Gospel Hour from here, and his fund-raising computers glisten in the redbrick buildings behind the strapping new church. He also runs a children's academy, a Bible inst.i.tute, a correspondence school, a seminary, and Liberty Baptist College itself, where 'leaders are trained for the generation to come, learning good character traits and how to become good moms and pops'.

Accompanied by Perry, a honey-toned young blonde from Falwell 's PR department, I went up to Liberty Mountain to inspect the campus. 'Are you saved?' Perry asked me early on. I had grown used to fielding this kind of question over the past week. 'Well, not exactly,' I began. Perry was saved all right. 'I felt the Lord coming into my heart with - such love..." Perry had been born again at the age of four, good going even for these parts.

Liberty Baptist College is a Southern-fried crag lined with bungalow-style lecture halls, the students' living-quarters situated further up the hill. No smoking, no drinking, no swearing. The fresh-faced pupils stroll peacefully from cla.s.s to cla.s.s, or sit reading their Bibles, or chat by the c.o.ke machines. Not all die courses are theological - though I a.s.sumed that a lecture on, say, sociology would consist of an hour-long denunciation of die subject. Perry herself had majored here in psychology. 'How do they teach Freud?' I asked. 'Well, you take Freud, and see where he disagreed with the Bible,' said Perry. 'I mean, sometimes they agree. But we all know the Bible got there first.'

Thomas Road Baptist Church is more like a cinema than a place of worship, with its scalloped stalls sloping downwards to the stage, and the TV cameras wedged into the balcony. I mingled un.o.btrusively (I hoped) with the 4,000 Lynchburg faithful; I had Perry's say-so on this, but still felt uneasy about the imposture... There was a busy, socialising air: clumps of gossiping girls, all with a new dollar-bill on their laps for the collection bowl, and fondly watched by the big-chinned boys further back. Everyone opened their much-thumbed, much-underscored Bibles. It was 7 p.m. The two-hour service began.

This was an untelevised service, and so more down-home and gone-fishing in style dian FalwelPs standard performance. We memorised a verse from the Book of Psalms, slyly invited by a Falwell sidekick to insert the names of Carter and Reagan wherever we thought it appropriate: 'G.o.d is the judge: he putteth down one and setteth up the other.' We heard a spiritual from an Isley-Brothers-style trio (among the few dark faces in the house) and a squawky ballad from five local sisters on violin. Falwell preached with avuncular cheer - don't listen to the media, G.o.d loves you, my little wife, on Judgment Day we'll all be bigshots, sometimes you're up, sometimes you're down. Doubters filed up and then filed back, all born again again. Then Falwell asked us to join in little groups of two and three, and pray together, out loud.

Until that moment I had been performing a nervous, if quite pa.s.sive, imitation of a devout Virginian. When people jotted down apophthegms, I took notes; when they sang hymns, I mimed along; when they prayed for salvation, I prayed for a Winston King Size and a large gin and tonic. But suddenly the young man on my left, who had kindly shared his Bible with me during the readings, turned to me and said, 'You wanna pray together?' - and I, for some reason, said, 'Surely'.

We hunkered down, hands on brows. 'You wanna go first?' he asked. 'No. You go first.' And as he stuttered on about the Lord helping America in its hour of etc., etc., I thought of the strapping young champions of Christ a!I about me, and of my own blasphemous intrusion. In five minutes, I thought, you'll be dangling from the rafters - and quite right too. The voice beside me trailed off with some remarks about Sue-Ann's rheumatism and Joe-Bob's mortgage; I turned to see his bashful, expectant face. In rocky Virginian I babbled out something about our people in Tehran and the torment they must feel in their hour of etc., etc. My prayermate wished he had thought of this too. We squeezed our frowning foreheads and nodded together for a very long time.

Falwell is innocuous in his home pulpit, smiling, sensible, protective: he understands the American spiritual yearning, which is the yearning to belong. But my first reaction when I met and talked to him, back in Dallas, was a momentary squeeze of fear. With his people milling about him in the futuristic foyer of the Hyatt Regency Hotel, he reminded me of the standard villain of recent American fiction and film: the corporation man.

Jerry Falwell (born in 1933; born again in 1956) is six foot and then some, with the squashy-nosed face of the friendly policeman. He wore a suit of some incredibly plush and heavy material (taffeta? theatre curtains? old surplices?), adorned with a small gold brooch in the characters of Jesus Christ, the terminal t stretched into a cross. (The same thing happens to the T in vote on his supporters' banners.) A huge aide brought us coffee. We began.

Doggedly I began to rehea.r.s.e the obvious liberal objections to his platform, mentioning that he had called the Equal Rights Amendment 'a vicious attack on the monogamous Christian home*. 'That's right,' he said blandly. 'I don't believe in equal rights for women. I believe in superior rights for women.' (This is consistent enough: Falwell has always wanted to kick women upstairs.) 'You know, the Women's Lib movement? Many of them are lesbians, you know. They're failures - probably married a man who didn't treat them like a human being,' he added, completing the machocentric circle.

'If you were President,' I said, eliciting a brief smirk, 'how would you stop people being h.o.m.os.e.xual?"

'Oh, they've got to live, have jobs, same as anybody else. We don't want any Khomeini thing here. It's the sin not the sinner we revile. It's anti-family. When G.o.d created the first family in that Garden, he created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, 'Besides, I want influence, not power. But I want global influence. We can't buy more airtime in America, no way. But we'll start buying it worldwide. South America, Europe, Asia ...'

His aides signalled. I asked my final question.

'Yes, sir, every word, quite literally, from Genesis to Revelations, which says there will soon be nuclear holy war over Jerusalem, after which Russia will be a fourth-rate power and Israel will astonish the world. Nice talking to you. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a radio show to attend.'

Easy prey, perhaps. British liberals enjoy being alarmed by commotion on the American Right; we also tend to indulge our vulgar delight in American vulgarity. I don't think the Evangelicals will soon be running the country. Although they have made an appeal to something old and fierce in the native character, it will take years to develop this into any kind of consensus. The movement const.i.tutes a genuine revolution from below, however, and will have to be heeded. To dismiss the beliefs of the Evangelicals is to disdain the intimate thoughts of ordinary people.

Nor is their critique of American society contemptible in itself. One of Falwell's TV specials is called America, You're Too Young To Die. It shows leathery gays necking in Times Square, s.e.x-aid emporia, child p.o.r.nography, aborted foetuses in soiled hospital trays. A predictably alarmist collage, certainly. But some of us who have been born only once find plenty that is cheerless here, and fail to buy the 'humanist package' entire.

'AH the ills from which America suffers can be traced back to the teaching of evolution,' wrote William Bryan in 1914. 'It would be better to destroy every other book ever written, and save just the first three verses of Genesis.' The anti-intellectual content in Evangelical feeling is, by definition, a source of pride to its leaders. But it will either ruin or deform the movement eventually. No book but the Bible; Genesis or Darwin, one or the other. This is why the movement will have to be contested. This is why the movement is so wide-open, so abjectly vulnerable, to authoritarian thought.

Observer 1980

Vidal v. Falwell

'I usually start with a prayer. But instead I'll start with the latest Nancy Reagan joke.' The perpetrator of this careful irreverence was Mr Gore Vidal; its setting - Lynchburg, Virginia, the Rev. Jerry Falwell's home town and HQ, the capital of the New Right. 'Actually,' drawled Vidal, an old-Virginian aristo himself, 'it's the capital of the Old Right. If there's anything a Virginian hates to be called, it's new.'

i was one of those curious, fixing moments in the swirling American scene. Gore Vidal, lifelong excoriator of the political circus, is once again donning his tutu for the high trapeze: later this year, he hopes to replace California's S.I. Hayakawa in the US Senate. Vidal has often said that any American who is prepared to run for President should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so. Yet he confessed over dinner (or, rather, over a Virginian meat tea, before his speech) that he is intending to go the whole way. And so, last Monday night, Vidal strolled st.u.r.dily up to the lectern at Lynchburg College and gave his annual State of the Union address, his mocking echo of the Presidential bulletin of the previous week. But this is no longer Vidal's lecture-circuit, after-dinner oration: it is his stump speech, and it is sweepingly, piercingly radical.

Meanwhile, across town, Jerry Falwell lurked brooding behind the walls of his $300,000 house. Jerry's house is a Doric mansion, but it lies in the wrong end of town: 'among the cracker boxes', in the local parlance. For all his Hugh-Hefner trappings, Jerry remains a rockbottom gra.s.s-roots figure, regarded as riff-raff even by pet.i.t-bourgeois Lynchburgers. (Jerry minds about this; Vidal's new-Virginian remark was meant to sting.) Asked along that night by the local anti-Falwell group, which arranged Vidal's talk, Jerry had silently declined. Perhaps he was watching the first episode in a new soap-opera about a video evangelist, called - with an appropriate glance at Pay TV - Pray TV. Or perhaps, like everyone else in America, he was monitoring the depravities of Charles and Sebastian, in Brideshead Revisited.

Against this varied opposition, Vidal still attracted a full house. After a few preliminary jokes and jabs (enough to make a few heavy citizens walk from the hall shaking their heads), he kicked off with the proposition that America was run by a single-party system. The party happened to have two factions - Democrats and Republicans. 'It's supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X versus Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.'

Ever since the Bust of 1919, Vidal pursued, the US had been in thrall to the notion that 'war is good for business'. Open or covert, hot or cold, war had been waged for the past fifty years; and now Reagan, 'in the bright springtime of his senility', was busy arranging the next war with Nicaragua, say, or El Salvador ('I lie awake at night worrying about the hordes of El Salvadorans pouring across our border in Greyhound buses'). Reagan's $1 trillion five-year defence budget could result only 'in nuclear war or bankruptcy - one or the other'. The CIA, he claimed, was now as active and ubiquitous as the KGB.

Without too much chapter and verse, Vidal switched from the question of global policing to that of domestic enforcement. He estimated that 50 per cent of all police work was taken up with 'victimless crime'. Why do we meekly accept that our private lives should be run by Washington? If people want to kill themselves with drink, drugs, or indeed bullets, then that is their business; ditto with restraints on s.e.xual morality. Released from their patrols of parlour and bedroom, the police would be free to combat the crimes that really etc., etc.

All this may have surprised - and delighted and scandalised - the gathered Lynchburgers; but it was hardly news to anyone who had read Vidal in the New York Review or Esquire over the years. Indeed, there is practically nothing in his stump speech that isn't to be found in his Collected Essays, 1952-1972. But now Vidal moved on to tax reform, acknowledging the help of certain 'advisers', and we began to get a glimpse of a possible platform.

'To govern', Vidal had written ten years ago in Homage to Daniel Shays, 'is to choose how the revenue from taxes is to be spent.' Nowadays, though, the question is not how to cut the cake but how to bake it. Vidal's new recipe is simple and direct: lay off the poor, and squeeze the corporations. He further suggested that the corporations would include the electronic ministries of the airwaves, and their tax-exempt revenues. By this means alone, $ioo billion would be raised, 'enough to service the national debt'.

That was as near as Vidal came to a direct attack on Falwell, and it was taken up again in the question-and-answer period after the talk. Goaded by a journalist in the front row, Vidal confessed that he had always thought of Falwell as 'the banker for the Lord'. Was there anything to be said for Falwell? 'Well,' said Vidal weightily, and paused. 'I like his choir. I like his fat little smile ...'

Poor Jerry. Everyone seems to be getting at him recently, even on his home turf. Eighteen months ago, when I saw Falwell in Dallas, the video pastor had given off a steady glow of beatific antic.i.p.ation. His awakening of the born-again community, through TV and computer mailing, would surely swing the election for Reagan's 'dream platform'. The silent majority had solidified into the Moral Majority: 'family issues' would soon be catapulted into the forefront of political life.

It came to pa.s.s. But then what happened? Within weeks of his victory, Reagan stopped returning Jerry's calls. The President, it seemed, had gone cool on the treasured issues of abortion, h.o.m.os.e.xuality, welfare cutbacks and the teachings of Genesis. Recently Jerry was obliged to join in the orchestrated howls of betrayal and neglect at a New Right rally in Washington. Reagan, said the Conservative bigwigs (Howard Phillips, Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie), had 'the right gut-instincts, the right rhetoric', but had sold out to pragmatism by opting for 'experience' in his advisers (instead of the inexperience of Falwell, Weyrich et al.). Some people, you may think, are never satisfied. The New Right had hoped to celebrate Roosevelt's centenary with the dismantling of the New Deal. Such a position, as Reagan knew, has no support whatever among the American people. In fifty years the only proponent of the Old Deal has been Barry Goldwater, who carried half-a-dozen States in 1964.

In Dallas, Falwell confessed to expectations not only of national power but of global influence. The dream had looked so bright, so fresh. A year later he was back in Lynchburg, cranking out The Old-Time Gospel Hour. And now here was Gore Vidal - an atheist, a Darwinian, an intellectual, and a f.a.ggot - goosing Jerry in his own front yard.

Vidal's address, or history lesson, was given at Lynchburg College, one of the few local establishments of secular education. Falwell himself shepherds a whole string of fundamentalist inst.i.tutions, from kindergarten schools to postgraduate colleges. His pride is Liberty Baptist College, perched on a dusty tor called Liberty Mountain, just across town.

Up on Liberty Mountain, you get education FalwelPs way. The brochure for LBC is a doc.u.ment of some interest. Its photograph of the school's business department, for instance, is in fact a cropped snap of a downtown bank; the chapel featured in the brochure also happens to belong to a school several miles away. LBC rules forbid 'hip-hugging pants-suits', 'personal displays of affection', and sideburns that extend lower than 'the bottom of the earlobe". The history and biology teachers are under the impression that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old. There have been Falwell-related book-burnings, as chapters of Moral Majority lead search-and-destroy missions into local libraries: Daffy Duck, Slaughterhouse-Five and Fifty True Tales of Terror have all been scorched at Fahrenheit 451. The LBC motto is Knowledge Aflame.

Falwell does not rest from his holy mission, which is to raise lots of money. Jerry's sanctuary is the Thomas Road Baptist Church, known locally as 'Jerry Co.'; in its forum, which resembles that of the Empire, Leicester Square, parishioners can help themselves to prayer letters on the open racks. These letters are part of the Faith Partner kit which Jerry will sell you if you pay - or 'pledge' - $20 a month. The kit includes a Bible, a concordance, and a badge of a baby's foot, tastefully scaled to viable-foetus size. You send in your Faith Partner Prayer Request, and fellow parishioners take them home to pray over.

A glance through the requests is as good a way as any of getting the flavour of FalwelPs pitch. 'This is a lonely time for me, Jerry ... wife scheduled for surgery ... husband an alcoholic - business reverses ... I also need a car ... no savings - zero ... please accept $5 a widow's mite ...' Jerry will accept the $5 by the way, but the widow will be demoted on the prayer roster. Mere poverty is no excuse: pay-prayers are supposed to work better if you can't afford them. Pledge now, live later. Falwell regularly claims that he swung the 1980 election for Ronald Reagan. No one disputes that the 5 to 7 per cent push provided by the mobilisation of the quietist proletariat had a lot to do with the Republican landslide. It is also axiomatic that Falwell's influence (and his multi-million dollar business) comes down to one thing: the influence of television.

'As the age of television progresses, the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception.' This prescient remark was made by Gore Vidal, covering the Republican Convention of 1968. Actually, nowadays the Reagans are not just the rule: they are the President. Ten years later, Vidal said in an interview: 'I am perfect for television. And that's all a President has to be these days.' Vidal is a more solid and dependable" figure now than he was five years ago (greyer in the temples, heavier in the back); but whether his telly-flair will take him far is open to question. He will need to get his smile fixed, for one thing: it is twitchy, furtive, full of childish malevolence. 'Above all, a politician must not sound clever or wise or proud,' he has said. But that is exactly how Vidal sounds. Unpatriotic Gore: this has always been the key to his invigorating contempt.

What can Vidal achieve in the new babel of the airwaves, while staying recognisably himself? It has never been clearer that the trend of American politics is one of attrition, tr.i.m.m.i.n.g and compromise. In times of recession, everyone huddles towards the neutral warmth of the centre. Reagan is learning this - if 'learning' is quite the word we want. Falwell and the New Right are learning it too. Gore Vidal, more than anyone, surely, has known it all along.

Observer 1982

Joseph h.e.l.ler, Giantslayer

A good t.i.tle isn't exactly a seal of approval, but a bad one will seriously detract from a novel's aura. Interestingly a 'brilliant' t.i.tle, like Hangover Square or Ballad of the Sad Cafe, is almost a guarantor of very minor work. It appears that the cla.s.sic t.i.tles give substance to an idea that, when it comes, seems to have been there all along: Pride and Prejudice, Hard Times, A Portrait of the Artist as a "Young Man, Lolita. To risk a Hollywood intonation, Joseph h.e.l.ler's t.i.tles vary in quality, and in some sense gauge the quality of the books they give a name to.

The catchy and catching Catch-22 put its finger on a central modern absurdity, and the catchphrase pa.s.sed straight into the language. Even more weighty and haunting, in my view, is Something Happened, a novel whose refrain is one of unlocatable loss ('something did happen to me somewhere that robbed me of confidence and courage'), a novel where nothing happens until the end, the fateful accident presaged by a random cry in the street: 'Something happened!' With Good as Gold the h.e.l.ler stamp starts to smudge: Bruce Gold is the cheerfully venal hero, and all novels that pun on a character's name tend to seem, well, a bit Sharpe-ish, like Blott on the Landscape. It has to be said, too, that G.o.d Knows sounds particularly flat and perfunctory; it sounds like a G.o.d-awful movie starring some grinning octogenarian. Perhaps 'G.o.d's Wounds' might have been better (for the novel is dark); and no doubt the obvious contender, 'The Book of David', was disqualified by E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel.

At first, G.o.d Knows reads like G.o.d's gift to readers. All novelists in every book are looking for a voice - the right voice in the right place at the right time - and h.e.l.ler, at first, seems to have found the perfect, the consummate medium. Here he gives us the deathbed memoir of King David ('I've got the best story in the Bible. Where's the compet.i.tion?'), filtered without apology or embarra.s.sment through the modern, urban, decadent and paranoid consciousness of Joseph h.e.l.ler. While the comic possibilities are infinite, they are not the only possibilities on view, h.e.l.ler being a comic writer whose chief interest is pain. David, at seventy, fading, receding, seems the true instrument for h.e.l.ler's brand of envenomed elegy. 'The older I get, the less interest I take in my children and, for that matter, in everyone and everything else.' Or, in a more familiar cadence: 'I get up with the f.u.c.king cricket.'

With a justified smirk h.e.l.ler furtively maps out his fictional island. And what riches are there, what streams and melons and ores. David agrees that it was odd of G.o.d to choose the Jews - but why didn't He give them anything? He gave them bread without scarcity and that's all that He gave us, along with a complicated set of restrictive dietary laws that have not made life easier. To the goyim He gives bacon, sweet pork, juicy sirloin, and rare prime ribs of beef. To us He gives a pastrami__Some Promised Land.

The honey was there, but the milk we brought in with our goats. To people in California, G.o.d gives a magnificent coastline, a movie industry, and Beverly Hills. To us He gives sand. To Cannes He gives a plush film festival. We get the PLO.

Each joke is earned, prepared for and exquisitely timed. When the prose rolls along in its high old style, we brace ourselves for the deflation. Here is the effect, in miniature: 'And the anger of Moses was kindled and he demanded of the Lord: "G.o.d d.a.m.n it, where am I supposed to get the flesh to feed them?'" The interfolding of the ancestral voice with the voice of blasphemous modernity provides the main technical business of the novel. And, for a while, h.e.l.ler has it pat.

The favourite targets are lined up against the wall: s.e.x, cruelty, Jewishness, and universal injustice (for which G.o.d is a handy embodiment). 'Like c.u.n.n.i.l.i.n.g.u.s, tending sheep is dark and lonely work; but someone has to do it* - where the first two elements are ordinary enough, and the third is pure genius. 'Are you crazy?'

David asks his new mistress Abis.h.a.g. 'I'm a married man! I don't want Michal, Abigail, Ahinoam, Maccah, Haggith, Abital, or Eglah to find out about us.' David's trials are universal: 'Evil would rise up against me in my own house. So what? This was an eventuality taken for granted by every Jewish parent.' But he is also a man of his times: 'When my lovely daughter Tamar-was raped by her half-brother Annon, I was upset, naturally. Mainly, though, I was annoyed.' After all, as he points out later, 'She's only a girl'.

'Girl-crazy Samson was a natural pushover for Philistine t.w.a.t', but David deplores intermarriage; his first wife is, of course, a Jewish Princess, and she talks like one too. To win Michal's hand, he must pay her father Saul the bride-price of 100 Philistine foreskins. 'It takes six strong Israelites, we figured, to circ.u.mcise one live Philistine. The job turned easier after I finally got used to the idea of killing the Philistines first.' He tells his men 'to bring back the whole p.r.i.c.k' and, sure enough, bring back the whole p.r.i.c.k becomes the battle-cry of the campaign - Not to everybody's taste, one has to admit; but I was one happy reviewer until page seventy or so (a fifth of the way through), at which point the novel curls up and dies.

Something happened. G.o.d knows what. Initially one a.s.sumes that the joke has simply run its course, and that the novel is maintained only by the inertia of its ambition. But in fact the joke, the promise, is boundlessly strong: it is the ambition that fails and retracts. Significantly, the two thematic counterweights to the main action - G.o.d and the present day - fade without trace into the vast and sandy background. 'G.o.d and I had a pretty good relationship', muses David, 'until he killed the kid.' And indeed G.o.d was a lively presence, a nasty piece of work ('the Lord, of course, is not a shepherd, not mine or anyone else's'), a divine underwriter of the nihilism we first glimpsed in Catch-22. To the question 'Why me?" He jovially answers, 'Why not?' As David says, 'Go figure Him out'. David never does. Between him and his maker there is only silence, which is poignant, and biblical; but it doesn't fill the pages.

What does fill the pages? Writing that transcends mere repet.i.tion and aspires to outright tautology. Here's an accelerated foretaste: 'lugubrious dirge', 'pensive reverie', 'vacillating perplexity', 'seditious uprising', 'domineering viragos', 'henpecking shrews', 'sullen grievance and simmering fury', 'gloating taunts and malignant insults', 'loathed me incessantly with an animosity that was unappeasable', 'tantrums of petulance and tempestuous discharges of irrational antipathies'. The units of spluttering cliche sometimes achieve paragraph-status. They get bigger and bigger - and say less and less.

No reader should be asked to witness an author's private grap-plings with his thesaurus. Comic effervescence having been stilled, h.e.l.ler is left alone with his material - i.e., oft-told yarns from the Holy Book. He churns on through the chaff long after the inspiration has been ground to dust. The donnee of G.o.d Knows must have seemed as lithe and deft as the young David with his sling; the finished book looks more like 'the big b.a.s.t.a.r.d' Goliath, brawny, apoplectic, and easily toppled.

The unedifying truth is that Joseph h.e.l.ler, like all the best athletes, needs a manager, a coach. It is common knowledge that he had one (his editor at Knopf) until part-way through Good as Gold, when h.e.l.ler switched houses. Several New York publishers are owned by hamburger chains; so far as this writer is concerned, Simon and Schuster is simply the House of the Whopper. Is G.o.d Knows without jewels? Does a bull have t.i.ts? Of course not: the unforgiving genius still flares, and the book is worth the price of admission for the first few pages alone. In at least two senses, though, h.e.l.ler's novels simply refuse to get better.

Observer 1984

Newspeak at Vanity Fair

In these days of cultural Balkanisation, one would expect a new American magazine to have a pretty firm fix on its potential market. A journal targeted at the gourmet jogger, say, or a forum for Buddhist computer experts, or simply a David Soul or John Travolta monthly. Encouraged by its recent successes with Gentlemen's Quarterly (aimed at the foppish young male) and Self (aimed at the careerist young female), Conde Nast is now launching a general-interest magazine aimed - at whom? According to the handouts and brochures, the new magazine is aimed at fickle readers of the New Yorker, Atlantic, Rolling Stone and the New York Review of Books. Architectural Digest, Smithsonian and Town and Country are also cited as possible compet.i.tors; so are Vogue, GEO and Sports Ill.u.s.trated. Trying to capitalise on their obvious confusion, the promoters are calling it 'a "fun" magazine for the very, very highbrow'.

Its name is Vanity Fair and, yes, it is a resuscitaton of the spangled original, the ur-glossy that served cafe society from 1914 to 1936. Vanity Fair in its prequel form is now being cried up as a Parna.s.sus of glamour and distinction. But then all long-lived magazines sound glamorous in precis. Edmund Wilson, Dorothy Parker, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Colette, Cocteau and Houdini contributed to Vanity Fair. Yet Cosmopolitan and Penthouse will eventually be able to produce an equally impressive backlist. Famous people do tend to work for magazines. We forget that there must have been many issues of Vanity Fair in which the star writer was Philboyd Studge.

Still, the old VF was strong on the visual side too, with its popularisation of European painters and graphic artists, and its photographic features by Edward Steichen and Man Ray. It served a self-conscious elite, and with such glittering insensitivity that the death of the magazine now looks very like a suicide. After the Crash of '2.9, and well into the Thirties, VF was all parties and peppermint creams, even as its readership was turning into a pauperised diaspora. It seems only appropriate that in a 193 z photo feature 'handsome Mr Hitler' was presented as the personification of 'Hope'.

The brains, money and expertise behind the new VF are intensely aware of the reasons for the death of its predecessor. In fact, they are intensely aware of everything. The minutes of the VF 'Sales Call' - or marketing think-in - are full of beguiling bizspeak. The media-planning director is Doyle Dane Bernbach. Noreen Palardy, a.s.sociate media director of Kenyon and Eckhardt, Inc., is also at the table. 'Let's take a peek. I've taken stats of selected pieces... Right now I'd like to turn this over to Joe... Thank you, John__A good question, Jay ...' They are rightly convinced that a jitter-bugging supercla.s.s no longer exists; but they firmly believe in the existence of a new elite out there somewhere, and longing to be tapped. These are the 'meritocrats', the 'integrateds'. 'We're not aiming for a demographic; we're aiming for a psychographic,' stresses VF publisher Joseph E. Corr.

Here is Corr's vision of the dream couple - from the VF targeting point of view, of course. He is a 'group product director', an outdoorsman, a hunter, a pianist with musical tastes ranging 'from Bach to the B-52s'. She is a market-research director (but who isn't?), a marathon runner, 'an accomplished photographer who's had some things printed'. He and She are, alike, 'achievers, thinkers'. If such terrifying people exist - and if they have any spare time to read it, or even buy it - then VF is the magazine for them.

One wonders, though, whether the marketing bigwigs are waffling about VF or simply waffling about marketing. The editor of the magazine is an encouragingly unlikely figure whom the media are already fingering as a frontman booked for early departure. He is Richard Locke, trim, fortyish, an ex-deputy editor of the New York Times Book Review. He is not a sculptor, hang-glider and corporate lawyer. He is merely a solidly literary personage, as are many of his senior staff.

The VF PR-men don't really know what to say about Mr Locke. But they say it anyway. 'In his 12 years [at NYTBR] he contributed better than 60 literary essays and reviews... Richard is president of the National Book Critics Circle__To say that there's excitement going on at 350 Madison Avenue is an understatement.' A rough equivalent of the Locke appointment would be the elevation of, say, Hermione Lee to the editorship of the Sunday Times. It would be interesting - but why should it set the pulses racing in the managerial offices of New Printing House Square?

In America, magazines have taken the place of national newspapers; they have also established themselves (by virtue, perhaps, of the country's relative cla.s.slessness) as arbiters of cultural etiquette. The success of any general-interest magazine depends on an accidental nimbus of authority, a lucky aura. It is, in every sense, the business of the targeting gurus and marketing mentors to deny or pooh-pooh this fact. The first issue of Vanity Fair will contain the Gabriel Garcia Marquez novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold in its entirety. Richard Locke wants the magazine to be 'a playground for writers' - literary, critical, political, satirical. He wants it to be full of good things; he hopes it acquires that lucky aura. Enmeshed in their spools, charts, print-outs and psychographics, the media-men are hoping this too. In other words, they are simply waiting and seeing, just like the rest of us.

Observer 1983

Kurt Vonnegut: After the Slaughterhouse

Inveterately regressive, ever the playful infantilist, Kurt Vonnegut recently shuffled his career into a report card, signed it, and tacked it to his study wall. The report was chronological, grading his work from A to D. This is what it looked like: Player Piano A The Sirens of t.i.tan A Mother Night A Cat's Cradle A+ G.o.d Bless You, Mr Rosewater A Slaughterhouse-Five A+ Breakfast of Champions C Slapstick D Jailbird A The burden of the report seems clear enough: Kurt started confidently, went from strength to strength for a good long spell, then pa.s.sed into a trough of la.s.situde and uncertainty, but now shows signs of rallying.

The graph charted by the American literary establishment - viewed by Vonnegut as, at best, a flock of cuecard-readers, at worst a squad of jailers, torturers and funeral directors - would be even starker, and much less auspicious. Their report would probably go something like this: B-, B, B-, A, A-, B-, B, D, C.

'Anyway, the card isn't quite up to date,' I said, half-way through lunch in a teeming trattoria on Second Avenue. Vonnegut is a mildly lionised regular here, but it was mid-December, and we took our chances among the parched and panting Christmas shoppers of New York. Our table seemed to be half-way between the lobby and the toilet. I wondered, protectively, whether we'd have done any better during Vonnegut's heyday; perhaps the head waiter hadn't liked Slapstick either. 'What about your new novel?' I asked. 'How would you grade Deadeye d.i.c.ky Vonnegut looked doubtful. 'I guess it's sort of a B-minus,' he said.

Even by American standards, Vonnegut's career represents an extreme case of critical revisionism and double-think. He is immensely popular, an unbudgeable bestseller, a cult hero and campus guru; all his books are in print; he is the most widely taught of contemporary American authors. On the other hand, his work has remarkably little currency among the card-carrying literati; his pacifistic, faux-naif philosophy' is regarded as hippyish and nugatory; he is the sort of writer, nowadays, whom Serious People are ashamed of ever having liked. Cute, coy, tricksy, mawkish - gee-whiz writing, comic-book stuff.

'It has been my experience with literary critics and academics in this country', he has written, 'that clarity looks a lot like laziness and ignorance and childishness and cheapness to them. Any idea which can be grasped immediately is for them, by definition, something they knew all the time.'

'I have to keep reminding myselP, he told me, 'that J wrote those early books. I wrote that. I wrote that. The only way I can regain credit for my early work is - to die.'

The shaping experience of Vonnegut's life and art is easy to pinpoint. It occurred on February 13, 1945. On this night, Vonnegut survived the greatest single ma.s.sacre in the history of warfare, the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden. Over 135,000 people lost their lives (twice the toll of Hiroshima); and Dresden, the Florence of the Elbe, a city as beautiful, ornate - and militarily negligible - as the city of Oz, was obliterated. Vonnegut, a prisoner of war, a gangly private, was billeted in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a slaughterhouse - Schlachthof-funf. Slaughterhouse-Five is the t.i.tle of his most celebrated novel, the book that in turn reshaped his career and his life. Everything that he wrote before 1969 leads up to Slaughterhouse-Five; everything he has written since leads away from it.

In another sense Vonnegut was uniquely well placed to write about Dresden, about war, violence and waste, with maximum irony. He is a German-American. His parents were German-speakers; all eight of his great-grandparents were part of the Teutonic migration to the Midwest between 1820 and 1870, as he reveals in an unreadably ample genealogy in Palm Sunday (one of his two volumes of autobiographical meanderings). In the superb early novel Mother Night, this genetico-political accident - together with his peculiar charm and moral subtlety as a writer - empowered him to attempt the impossible: to write a funny book about n.a.z.ism. He succeeded. Hitler is a longstanding obsession, and duly plays his part in the new novel Deadeye d.i.c.k.

Vonnegut grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana - a cultural Nothingville, like Swindon or Stoke. The characters in his books come from nowhere: Ilium, Midtown, Midland City. Indianapolis, Vonnegut insists, remains the centre of his cultural universe: 'Not Rome, not Paris - Indianapolis.' In his fiction Vonnegut's most crucial imaginative habit is to gaze down at humanity as if from another world, fascinated by Earthling mores yet baffled by our convulsive quests for order, certainty and justice. 'This att.i.tude was a result of my studies in biochemistry [at Cornell], before the war and anthropology after the war [at Chicago]. I learned to see human culture as an artefact, which it is - vulnerable, precarious and probably futile.' His latest novel, Galapagos, concerns itself with Darwinism - 'our only alternative to conventional religion. It's all modern man has.'

Pre-Slaughterhouse, Vonnegut was loosely regarded as a science-fiction writer, a genre man. In fact only his first novel, Player Piano (1951), and a few short stories can be cla.s.sified as hard SF. His real mode has always been something dreamier, crazier, more didactic, nearer to Mark Twain than to Fred Pohl. The standard Vonnegut novel works as follows: a semi-fantastical plot (with outrageous vicissitudes and reversals), an attack on some barndoor-sized moral target (atomic warfare, economic inequities, loneliness) and, in between, round the edges, a delightfully weighted satire of ordinary, unreflecting, innocent America.

The early novels were taut, concise and sharply constructed. 'My first trade was newspapering,' said Vonnegut, typically down-home. 'You said as much as you could, as soon as you could, and then shut up.' The later novels, on the other hand... Well, I was enjoying our lunch, and decided to postpone discussion of the later novels. 'My public stance is not to take myself seriously,' he had remarked. 'I do that in order to be likeable. Vonnegut is likeable all right. But he takes himself seriously too. Of course he does.

During the Sixties Vonnegut was making 'a good middle-cla.s.s income' from journalism and from writing short stories 'for the slicks'; yet his responsibilities were considerable. Through a gruesome coincidence, which would sound implausible even in a Vonnegut plot outline, his sister and brother-in-law died within twenty-four hours of each other. He died in a New Jersey rail disaster; she died in hospital the following day, of cancer. Vonnegut and his first wife adopted the three orphaned children. They already had three of their own. Alice was Vonnegut's only sister. He still writes with her in mind. "'Alice would like this," I say to myself. "This would amuse Alice.'"

Alice, one gathers, was a little crazy. So was Vonnegut's mother, who eventually killed herself when the family was degentrified by the Crash of 1929. Like craziness, 'suicide is a legacy', says Vonnegut. 'As a problem-solving device, it's in the forefront of my mind all the time. It's like walking along the edge of a cliff. I'm in the country and the pump stops. What'll I do ? I know: I'll kill myself. The roof is leaking. What'll I do? I know: I'll blow my brains out.'

Finally, along came Slaughterhouse-Five, and everything changed. Vonnegut had been trying to write about Dresden ever since his return from the war. He had filled 5,000 pages and thrown them away. But the book, when it came, was a cunning novella, synthesising all the elements of Vonnegut's earlier work: fact, fantasy, ironic realism and comic SF. In my view, Slaughterhouse-Five will retain its status as a dazzling minor cla.s.sic, as will two or three of its predecessors. But quality alone can hardly explain its spectacular popularity.

Perhaps the answer is, in some sense, demographic. Although the Vietnam war changed the mood of America, it produced no fiction to articulate that change. As a result the protest movements seized on and adopted two Second World War novels as their own, novels that expressed the absurdist tenor of the modern revulsion. Those novels were Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse-Five: they became articles of faith as well as milestones of fiction. Slaughterhouse-converts looked back into the early work and found that the same chord was struck again and again. Vonnegut had secured his following.

He had also lost his first wife, Jane: 'It was a good marriage for a long time - and then it wasn't.' Jane Vonnegut 'got' religion; Kurt Vonnegut still had scepticism - as well as the strange new freedom of hemispheric adulation. He left Cape Cod and came to New York, setting up house with the well-known photographer Jill Krementz. By all accounts - and my own brief impressions tend to bear this out - Jill is the opposite of Jane, and.the opposite of Kurt too. She is glamorous, voluble and abrupt; and the Vonneguts are now talked of as a celebrity couple fairly active in society and fringe politics. When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life. The transformation is more or less inexorable.