The Moronic Inferno Part 6

After lunch we walked back to the Vonneguts' house on the East Side of mid-town. We pa.s.sed the mailbox where, on three separate occasions, Vonnegut had palely loitered in the early morning to retrieve letters written the night before - letters of denunciation, sent to hostile reviewers. 'I don't know what the law is in England,' he said, 'but over here the letters are still your property, and the mailman has to give them back.'

He laughed his wheezy, spluttering laugh. Vonnegut has chainsmoked powerful Pall Malls for forty-five years. He has given up twice. The first time, he blew up to eighteen stone. His second attempt, though, worked like a charm. He felt fine; he was 'enormously happy and proud'. The only trouble was that no one could bear being near him. 'I had stopped writing. I had also gone insane. So I started smoking again.' He is s.h.a.ggy, candid, rea.s.suring. The big suede shoes on his big American feet are ponderous and pigeon-toed. His blazer is epically stained.

Like its proprietor, the Vonnegut town house stands tall and thin. The furnishings are anonymously handsome. In the bas.e.m.e.nt, Jill runs her business; on the top floor, Kurt runs his. Up there he proceeds with his post-Slaughterhouse fiction - vague, wandering parables of American futility, full of nursery games (Breakfast of Champions contained dozens of childish drawings; Deadeye d.i.c.k is dotted with cookbook recipes), full of shrugs, twitches and repet.i.tions, full of catchphrases, adages, baby-talk. So it goes. Poo-tee-weet? Peace. Skeedee wah. Bodey oh doh. And so on. And on and on - Until 1969, Vonnegut was in his own words 'a trafficker in climaxes and thrills and characterisation and wonderful dialogue and suspense and confrontations'. Now he is - what, exactly? The later Vonnegut novels are deserts, punctuated by the odd paradisal oasis. These good moments are, simply, reversions to his earlier manner, which is why it is more fun to re-read an old Vonnegut novel than it is to tackle a new one. I switched on the tape-recorder and backed myself into the Big Question. Of all the writers I have met, Vonnegut gives off the mildest p.r.i.c.kle of amour propre. But no writer likes to be asked if he has lost his way.

He heard me out with a few 'Mm-hms' and said: 'American literary careers are very short. I had very low expectations. I always thought, if I could ever get something down about Dresden, that would be it. After Slaughterhouse-Five I'd already done much more than I ever expected to do with my life. Now, since I don't have to do anything any more, I've gotten more personal, freer to be idiosyncratic. It's like the history of jazz: musicians reach the point where they play the G.o.dd.a.m.n things with the mouthpiece upside down and stuff the tube with toilet paper and f.u.c.k around and make all the crazy sounds they can.'

An honest and accurate answer. I wondered out loud whether a sense of futility had anything to do with it, with the rejection of melody, phrasing, structure, control, with the rejection of art.

'There was Dresden,' said Vonnegut, 'a beautiful city full of museums and zoos - man at his greatest. And when we came up, the city was gone ... The raid didn't shorten the war by half a second, didn't weaken a German defence or attack anywhere, didn't free a single person from a death camp. Only one person benefited.'

'And who was that?'

'Me. I got several dollars for each person killed. Imagine.'

Observer 1983

Gloria Steinem and the Feminist Utopia

Gloria Steinem is the most eloquent and persuasive feminist in America. She is also the most rea.s.suring - i.e. the least frightening, from a male point of view. There are two clear reasons for this. Here is one reason: So what would happen if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate and women could not? ... Men would brag about how long and how much - Street guys would invent slang ('He's a three-pad man') and 'give fives' on the corner with some exchange like, 'Man, you lookin' good!' 'Yeah, man, I'm on the rag!'

The humour is not only humour (rare enough in these parts): its satirical accuracy is enlivened by affection. The second reason for her wide appeal can be glimpsed in the photograph on the back cover. (She looks nice, and friendly, and feminine.) In the sort of Utopia which Gloria Steinem seriously envisages, neither of these considerations would carry much weight. But we aren't there yet.

I sat waiting for Ms Steinem in the midtown offices of Ms., the magazine that she co-founded in 1972.. Launched on a shoestring and a wave of female dedication, Ms. now has a circulation of 450,000, financing the Ms. Foundation which, in turn, acts as a clearing-house for feminist issues (not rape hotlines and conflict-resolution meetings so much as monetary aid for various programmes and projects). The magazine hires about fifty people, three of whom are men. Ms Steinem's a.s.sistant, Ms Hornaday, brought me some coffee, and we chatted away. The atmosphere is purposeful, high-morale, sisterly. Pleasant though I found it, I was also aware of my otherness, my testosterone, among all this female calm.

Two blocks north, Forty-Second Street was crackling through its daily grind of sin and stupor, of go-go, triple-X and hard core. Forty-Second Street wouldn't last forty seconds in Ms Steinem's Utopia. p.o.r.nography is the pressing feminist topic of 1984 and I had been reading up on the protest literature, finding much good sense and justified outrage - also the faint glare of paranoia. 'Men love death - In male culture, slow murder is the heart of Eros' - Andrea Dworkin, and her murderous high-style. Even the commonsensical Ms Steinem believes that p.o.r.nography is the 'propaganda' of 'anti-woman warfare', sensing conspiracy rather than mere weakness and chaotic venality. In the hot-and-cold hostilities between the s.e.xes, there is still plenty of paranoia on either side.

Ms Steinem emerged from her conference, and we all got ready to leave. Our destination was Suffolk County Community College in Long Island, where Gloria would address the students - the kind of trip she makes once or twice a week. Photographs had not prepared me for Ms Steinem's height and slenderness; her face, too, seemed unexpectedly shrewd and angular beneath the broad, rimless gla.s.ses (which she seldom removes). The long hair is expertly layered, the long fingers expertly manicured. Fifty this year, Ms Steinem is unashamedly glamorous: it is a pampered look, a Park Avenue look. Out on the street, a chauffeur-driven limousine mysteriously appeared, and in we climbed.

Now I knew from a half-digested reading of her collected journalism that Ms Steinem was a crystallised and not an accidental feminist. One of the book's many successes is the way it doc.u.ments the slow politicisation of a contented and prospering individual. After a hard, poor and painful childhood in Toledo (much of it spent caring single-handedly for a crushed, confused mother), and after a spell in show business as a dancer, Gloria pursued a thriving career as a New York journalist. It was the usual freelancing pot-pourri; pieces on stockings, fashion, Truman Capote, John Lennon, Vidal Sa.s.soon. As early as 1963 she wrote the cla.s.sic expose, 'I was a Playboy Bunny'. Despite various 'no broads' ground rules, Ms Steinem started working on the campaign trail, both as a journalist and an aide - to George McGovern. This soon led her into the civil rights movement; she found herself writing about migrant workers, Puerto Rican radicals, Martin Luther King. Then, in 1969, it happened: Ms Steinem 'got' feminism - and realised she had had it all along. The experience 'changed my life', she writes. 'It will never be the same.'

Encased by the limousine, and also by a sense of comfortable male irony, I kicked off by asking Ms Steinem whether the movement was now undergoing a phase of retraction or redefinition. Hadn't Nora Ephron recently joked that the only thing feminism had given women was the privilege of going dutch? Hadn't Susan Brownmiller confessed that while she would never remove the hair on her legs, she had started dyeing it (this being the centrist or SDP stance on the leg-hair issue)? Weren't women finding that going out to work and joining the 'pink-collar ghetto' only doubled their hardships, since they were obliged to moonlight with the Hoover? What about Germaine Greer's sudden championship of motherhood, chast.i.ty and coitus interruptus?

'Well, I don't know anyone who's into coitus interruptus,' said Ms Steinem, and gave her musical laugh. She then proceeded (pretty gently, it now seems) to put my argument in its place. This was the first lesson of the day: to challenge feminism, in America, in 1984, is to disqualify yourself as a moral contender. It is the equivalent of espousing a return to slavery. One of Ms Steinem's dialectical techniques is that of role-reversal; she puts the (white male) reader in a different racial or s.e.xual circ.u.mstance - then asks how he likes it. And this is more than a trick of argument. It speaks for a pa.s.sionate identification with the fate of the American black. Feminism in England lacks that dimension, just as England lacks a history of racial guilt. The second lesson of the day took a little longer to learn. Reasonable and unmenacing though Ms Steinem's logic sounds, it contains the core of something quite revolutionary, indeed millennial.

The previous or 'reformist' school of feminists, she explained, 'wanted a piece of the existing pie. We want to bake a new one.' The more radical view centres on the home - 'on families, not the "family", which has become a codeword for reactionary power-groups'. When Ms Steinem talks of 'democratic parenthood' she has more in mind than a bit of male nappy-changing. If the rearing of children were undertaken equally then the intractable stereotypes of Male and Female would finally begin to fade. No longer would a child perceive femininity in terms of warmth, care, devotion, and masculinity in terms of energy, action and business elsewhere. 'We grow up dividing our natures because of the way we're raised.' And this is her Children's Crusade in another sense, because 's.e.x roles', she believes, 'are in the anthropological, long-term view a primary cause ot violence. Any peace movement without that kind of challenge to violence - well, it's like putting a Band-Aid on a cancer.'

Then what? If, as she says, 'the s.e.x or race of an individual is one of 20,000 elements that go into making up an individual person', the proliferation of human types would be ceaseless. s.e.xually 'there would be thousands of ways to be', rather than the existing three or four. 'There would be no average. Sameness would be done away with.'

'And so,' I said, with my last ironic breath, 'there might be an enclave in your Utopia where the Victorian marriage still thrived.'

'It's possible,' said Ms Steinem doubtfully. 'But they'd be living that way through choice.'

Up on stage in the Arts Theatre at the Community College, Ms Steinem suavely delivered her stump speech, 'Equality: The Future of Humankind'. The audience, like the inst.i.tution, was modest enough - a mere five or six hundred people, compared to the rock-concert-sized crowds she has attracted elsewhere. Once a painfully nervous speaker, she now performs with brisk panache. She marches up to the mike, returning the applause of the audience. 'Friends,' she begins. There are laughs ('We now have words like s.e.xual hara.s.sment and battered women. A few years ago they were just called life'), but no cheap jokes. Maximum clarity and suasion are what she is after. 'Yes,' you keep thinking, 'that's true. That's right.'

After the speech, the applause, the questions ('I'm a homemaker, or a uh "domestic engineer" ...'),! drank a lot of coffee and smoked a lot of cigarettes with Eddie, our young, black chauffeur. I asked him if he worked for the Ms. Foundation, and he revealed, hesitantly (though it's no great secret), that he worked for Ms Steinem's 'friend', a high-level but low-profile company lawyer. Ms Steinem, like most eminent feminists, is unmarried and childless. The nature-nurture axis, one gathers, takes quite a wobble when you have kids of your own - but then Steinem's Utopia is many generations away. 'I've driven Gloria out to speak at places three or four times now,' said Eddie. 'It's going to happen a lot more times, I can tell. I'm looking forward to it. I like to hear her speak.'

Eddie went on to say that it had taken only three months of Gloria's example to convert him to the cause. 'Me and my wife, we had a talk. Now I do my bit in the home. When she goes out - I used to make her take the kids with her. Now she can leave them with me. She can do what she likes. It's better, for her, for me. I never knew my father, and it's too late now. I don't want to make the same mistake. I like to be with my children. Watching them grow.'

Well, by this stage I was on the verge of calling my friend in London - to tell her that it would all be different from now on. While Ms Steinem held court in the corner, I strolled round the common room among the dissolving crowd. A noticeboard advertised some forthcoming attractions: Frisbee Tournament, Human Potential Fra-Sority. The average age of the American college student is now twenty-seven, and I marvelled at their variety - not least the variety of the student body: some as thin and tightly-c.o.c.ked as whippets, some like walking haystacks, with all the intervening shapes and sizes fully represented. As soon as you leave New York you see how monstrously various, how humanly balkanised, America really is. And yet in Steinemland - home of the Polymorphous Perverse - such diversity would not be remarkable, and would certainly not be amusing. A sense of humour is a risky thing to have out here, in the big mix, where mere oddity is no cause for laughter. Do all these people actually have a human potential? Don't we need the norms? How much variety can a society contain? How much can it stand?

Feminism is a salutary challenge to one's a.s.sumptions - including your a.s.sumptions about feminism. I wonder, though, how much it has to offer as an all-informing idea. And is the racial a.n.a.logy, so often claimed, really fully earned? Busy systematisers, with a thing called 'Women's Studies' to erect, the feminists have systematised an ideology, a history, an enemy. Yet surely there has been a good deal of collusion, and dumb human accident, on both sides. Adjustments in thought are necessary, but some of the reparations look alarmingly steep.

Ms Steinem has a literary gift - her prose is swift and sure - yet this is not quite the same thing as a gift for literature. Inevitably her artistic values are now ideologically determined, for the greater good, as is her view of language itself. She is against all idioms that are 'divisive' or 'judgmental', so it's birth names for 'maiden names', back salary for 'alimony', preo.r.g.a.s.mic for 'frigid'. 'Peace on Earth, Good Will to People' is the sort of 'rewrite' she recommends. And at this point I have to ask myself: would I want to be a writer in the feminist Utopia? Would anybody? People might be happier or less anxious under such a tactful populism, but one wonders about the kinds of personality they would knock up for themselves. The result might simply strengthen the American how-to culture, the general thirst for ready-made or second-hand lives.

We returned to the limousine and headed back for Manhattan. Gloria talked of her forthcoming visit to England, her intention to visit the Greenham Women and 'to seek political asylum' here if Ronald Reagan, 'a smiling fascist', won a second term. The frequency of her smile at first suggests, not falsity, but settled habit; after a time, though, it suggests a real superabundance of warmth - also energy and self-belief. Here is a woman riding the crest of conviction, of achievement. 'Look!' she said with a triumphant laugh (this was one of her daily rewards). 'There are people working signs on the road ahead.'

Observer 1984

William Burroughs: The Bad Bits

Like many novelists whose modernity we indulge, William Burroughs is essentially a writer of 'good bits'. These good bits don't work out or add up to anything; they have nothing to do with the no-good bits: and they needn't be in the particular books they happen to be in. Most of Burroughs is trash, and lazily obsessive trash too - you could chuck it all out and not diminish what status he has as a writer. But the good bits are good. Reading him is like staring for a week at a featureless sky; every few hours a bird will come into view or, if you're lucky, an aeroplane might climb past, but things remain meaningless and monotone. Then, without warning (and not for long, and for no coherent reason, and almost always in The Naked Lunch), something happens: abruptly the clouds grow warlike, and the air is full of portents.

The good bits are so fortuitous, indeed (mere reflexes of a large and callous talent), and the no-good bits so monolithic, that the critic's role is properly reduced to one of helpless quotation. Here is a good bit; this is another good bit; take, for example, this good bit. Eric Mottram, however, in his adoring and humourless new study, "William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need, swallows Burroughs whole: every section of jaded agitprop, every page of trite a.s.sertion and denatured rhetoric, every abstract noun finds an honoured place in the inter-disciplinarian's filing-system. John Fletcher, general editor of this Critical Appraisals series, says that to qualify for inclusion writers need to be 'demonstrably "masterly" in the sense of having made a real impact on the contemporary arts' (I think he must mean 'modern-masterly'). Mr Mottram, anyway, has unsmilingly accepted the brief. His book is, in effect, about the bad bits.

Here are two of the funnier insensitivities ensured by this approach. There is, by common consent, a great deal about drugs in Burroughs's four main novels (or 'tetralogy', as they are here typically dignified). Many of his characters are junkies, they talk about junk a lot, their senses - in common with Burroughs's prose - are peeled by junk: on junk, says Burroughs, 'familiar objects seem to stir with a writhing furtive life'. From Mr Mottram's Delphic lectern, though, 'the junk world is the image of the whole world as a structure of addiction and controls'. Well, this is the radical falsification line of the Beat school, and fair enough in its way. But evaluative criticism of Burroughs (and all criticism of living authors should be evaluative) would be far better off with the unglam-orous premise that Burroughs was just a junkie himself, that he got lost for a long time in the junk world, and that it is in this reality that his imagination - and his style - has been conclusively formed. An index of Mr Mottram's futile reverence is that he seldom refers to Burroughs as 'being dependent on' drugs, or 'taking' drugs, or even 'using' drugs. What Burroughs does is 'experiment' with them. (At one point Mr Mottram pictures Burroughs 'experimenting' with alcohol. I hereby confess that, during his longer chapters, I conducted a few experiments with the stuff myself.) Burroughs's militant h.o.m.os.e.xuality, also, is seen as yet another suave literary device. Mr Burroughs doesn't really like women: one feels safe in this observation, since he has gone on record with the vow that he would kill every woman alive if he could. Although this is not in itself a criticism of his writing, it is certainly a clue to it. But here is Mottram, in a biographical stroll-in: Burroughs returned to the academy to study psychology ... Then he went to Mexico (where he accidentally killed his wife with a revolver), and on a GI grant, studied native dialects and was able to obtain drugs with comparative absence of legal restriction.

That parenthesis is all she rates. Similarly - and to take only the most spectacular example - Burroughs's obtrusive interest in the s.e.xual hanging of young boys (o.r.g.a.s.m to be synchronised with the pathetic voiding at the moment of death) is duly accorded the status of a 'symbol', a symbol, in this case, of 'critical anarchism'. So it is, though not in the sense intended. At no point will Mr Mottram admit a human value. He does not answer to any of the G.o.ds we answer ro: he sits up late at night, listening for the knock of The Semiologic Police.

Burroughs's princ.i.p.al 'theme' - in that he goes on about it more than he goes on about anything else - is 'control', social, s.e.xual and political. Mr Mottram annotates this theme with some rigour (his book has good bits too), and he does draw haphazard attention to the things that make Burroughs worth looking at: his great scenes of interrogation and manipulation, the desolate evil of his wound-down cities and inert, vicious bureaucracies, that sense of wasted and pre-doomed humanity which animates his best writing. What Mr Mottram never addresses himself to, however, is the question of artistic control, of the artist's control of his material and his talent. Control is not something one grafts on to natural ability: it is part of that ability. Burroughs has vacated the control tower, if indeed he ever went up there. No living writer has so perfidiously denied his own gifts - most of which are, incidentally, comic and exuberant rather than admonitory and bleak. It may be his just reward, then, to be studied by people who don't find him funny.

New Statesman 1977

Steven Spielberg: Boyish Wonder

Steven Spielberg's films have grossed approximately $1,500 million. He is thirty-four, and well on his way to becoming the most effective popular artist of all time... What's he got? How do you do it? Can I have some?

'Super-intensity' is Spielberg's word for what he comes up with on the screen. His films beam down on an emotion and then subject it to two hours of muscular t.i.tillation. In Jaws ($410 million) the emotion was terror; in Close Encounters ($150 million) it was wonder; in Raiders of the Lost Ark ($310 million) it was exhilaration; in Poltergeist ($480 million and climbing) it was anxiety; and now in E.T. - which looks set to outdo them all - it is love.

Towards the end of E.T., barely able to support my own grief and bewilderment, I turned and looked down the aisle at my fellow sufferers: executive, black dude, j.a.panese businessman, punk, hippie, mother, teenager, child. Each face was a mask of tears. Staggering out, through a tundra of sodden hankies, I felt drained, p.o.o.ped, squeezed dry; I felt as though I had lived out a year-long love affair - complete with desire and despair, pa.s.sion and prostration - in the s.p.a.ce of izo minutes. And we weren't crying.for the little extra-terrestrial, nor for little Elliott, nor for little Gertie. We were crying for our lost selves. This is the primal genius of Spielberg, and E.T. is the clearest demonstration of his universality. By now a billion Earthlings have seen his films. They have only one thing in common. They have all, at some stage, been children.

It is pretty irresistible to look for Spielberg's 'secret' in the very blandness of his suburban origins - a peripatetic but untroubled childhood spent mostly in the south-west. As I entered his offices in Warner Boulevard, Burbank Studios, I wondered if he had ever really left the chain-line, ranch-style embryos of his youth. The Spielberg bungalow resembles a dormitory cottage or beach-house - sliding windows, palm-strewn backyard. The only outre touch is an adjacent office door marked twilight zone accounting: perhaps it is into this fiscal warp that the millions are eventually fed, pa.s.sing on to a plane beyond time and substance ...

Within, all is feminine good humour. Spielberg has always surrounded himself with women - surrogate aunts, mothers, kid sisters. These gently wise-cracking ladies give you coffee and idly shoot the breeze as you wait to see the great man. That girl might be a secretary; this girl might be an executive producer, sitting on a few million of her own. Suddenly a tousled, shrugging figure lopes into the ante-room. You a.s.sume he has come to fix the c.o.ke-dispenser. But no. It is Mr Spielberg.

His demeanour is uncoordinated, itchy, boyish: five foot nine or so, 150 pounds, baggy T-shirt, jeans, running-shoes. The beard, in particular, looks like a stick-on afterthought, a bid for adulthood and anonymity. Early photographs show the shaven Spielberg as craggy and distinctive; with the beard, he could be anyone. 'Some people look at the ground when they walk,' he said later. 'Others look straight ahead. I always look upward, at the sky. This means that when you walk into things, you don't cut your forehead, you cut your chin. I've had plenty of cuts on my chin.' Perhaps this explains the beard. Perhaps this explains the whole phenomenon.

Spielberg sank on to a sofa in his gadget-crammed den, a wide, low room whose walls bear the usual mementoes of movie artwork and framed magazine covers. 'I had three younger sisters,' he began. 'I was isolated, left alone with my thoughts. I imagined the very best things that could happen and the very worst, simply to relieve the tedium. The most frightening thing, the most uplifting thing.' He stared round the room, seemingly fl.u.s.tered by the obligation to explain himself for the thousandth time - weighed down, indeed, by the burden of all these mega-hits, these blockbusters and smasher-oos. 'I was the weird, skinny kid with the acne. I was a wimp.'

His mother Leah has confirmed that Steven 'was not a cuddly child'. Evidently he kept a flock of parakeets flapping around wild in his room. Leah never liked birds, and only reached a hand through the door once a week to grope for the laundry bag. She didn't go in there for years. Steven also kept an 8mm camera. According to his sister Anne, big brother would systematically 'dole out punishment'

while forcing the three girls to partic.i.p.ate in his home movies. This technique is well-tried in Hollywood: it is known as directing.

Spielberg's films deal in h.e.l.ls and heavens. Against the bullying and bedevilled tike, we can set the adolescent dreamer, the boy who tenderly nursed his apocalyptic hopes. One night, when he was six, Steven was woken by his father and bundled into the car. He was driven to a nearby field, where hundreds of suburbanites stood staring in wonder (this is probably the most dominant image in his films). The night sky was full of portents. 'My father was a computer scientist,' said Spielberg. 'He gave me a technical explanation of what was happening. "These meteors are s.p.a.ce debris attracted by the gravitational..." But I didn't want to hear that. I wanted to think of them as falling stars.'

All his life Spielberg has believed in things: vengeful ten-yard sharks, whooping ghosts, beautiful beings from other worlds. 'Comics and TV always portrayed aliens as malevolent. I never believed that. If they had the technology to get here, they could only be benign ... I know they're out there.' The conviction, and desire, lead in a straight line from Firelight (one of his SF home movies) to the consummation of E.T. 'Just before I made Close Encounters I went outside one night, looked up at the sky and started crying. I thought I was falling apart.'

In Poltergeist, a suburban family is terrorised by demons that emerge from the household television set. When Spielberg describes the film as 'my revenge on TV', he isn't referring to his own apprenticeship on the small-screen networks. 'TV was my third parent.' His father used to barricade and b.o.o.bytrap the set, leaving a strand of hair on the aperture, to keep tabs on Steven's illegal viewing. 'I always found the hair, memorised its position, and replaced it when I was through.'

Rather to the alarm of his girlfriend, Kathleen Carey, Spielberg still soaks up a great deal of nightly trivia. 'All I see is junk,' she says, 'but he looks for ideas.' It is clear from the annuals and pot-boilers on his office shelves that Spielberg is no bookworm (this is Hollywood after all, where high culture means an after-dinner game of Botticelli). TV is popular art: Spielberg is a popular artist who has outstripped but not outgrown the medium that shaped him. Like Disney - and, more remotely, like d.i.c.kens - his approach is entirely non-intellectual, heading straight for the heart, the spine, the guts.

All right, conceded Spielberg, shirting up a gear in his own defence. 'I do not paint in the strong browns and greens of Francis [Coppola], or in Marty's [Martin Scorsese's] sombre greys and whites. Francis makes films about power and loyalty; Marty makes films about paranoia and rage. I use primary colours, pastel colours. But these colours make strange squiggles when they run together on the palette ... I'm coming out of my pyrotechnic stage now. I'm going in for close-ups. Maybe I will move on to explore the darker side of my make-up.'

The line of thought is interrupted, as telephones ring and doors swing open. During the interview Spielberg has been attentive enough in his restless way, but some sort of minor crisis is rumbling through the office. His youthful co-producer, Kathleen Kennedy, peers into the room. 'What's happening?' Spielberg asks. 'No, Steven, you don't even want to hear about this.' But Steven does. The row has something to do with a music-publishing spin-off. Later, as I prepared to leave, I could hear Spielberg coping with his stacked calls. 'I'd rather dump the song than get involved in a political war... We think it'll go to number one, which is good ... This has to be solved, and not tomorrow. Two hours.' He doesn't sound like a dreamy kid any more. He sounds like Daryl Zanuck with a bit of a hangover.

Spielberg's career has on occasion resembled that of the old-time Hollywood moguls - and it will do so again, perhaps much more closely. His induction into the studios wasn't quite a case of 'Kid, I'm going to give you a break', but it had its cla.s.sic aspects. At eighteen, the weird, skinny kid more or less abandoned his studies at California State College and started hanging round the Universal lot. He was thrown off a Hitchc.o.c.k set; John Ca.s.savetes gave him some unofficial tuition. He raised $10,000 and made a twenty-minute film called Amblin'. (His office now bears the nostalgic logo, Amblin' Productions - though these days Sprintin' would be nearer the mark.) On the basis of this modest short, which was designed to show that he could do the simple things, Spielberg became the youngest director to be signed up by a major studio, and was set to work in television.

The full apprenticeship was never served out. Spielberg made episodes of Columbo, The Name of the Game and The Psychiatrist. He made TV specials. One of these was called Duel. It was pure Spielberg, and showed just how quickly the tiro found his line. A faceless suburbanite makes a business trip by car; he is inexplicably menaced by a steam truck whose driver is never seen. By the end of the seventy-five-minute film, the truck is as monstrous, blind and elemental as anything out of Poltergeist or Jaws. Released in Europe as a feature, Duel made its money back thirty times over. Spielberg was shifted up into the real league. After an inconclusive sortie on The Sugarland Express (a chase movie whose only Spielbergian ingredient was its concern with a mother's forcible separation from her child - a recurring crux), the twenty-five-year-old went on to make Jaws. The rest is history: box-office history.

After Close Encounters, however, Spielberg's career did take a salutary wobble with the chaotic Second World War satire, 1941. Characteristically in a way, the movie was a megaflop - a s...o...b..lling fiasco. By now it has laboriously recouped its $30 million budget, yet Spielberg still shows a surprising touchiness about his only brush with failure: 'I haven't read a review of that movie to this day - I just flew into it and forgot to read the script. It taught me that creative compromise is more challenging than the blank cheque-book. And it taught me that I'm not funny when I'm just being funny. There has to be a dramatic context."

In all his major films, that context has not varied. It places ordinary people, of average resources, in situations of extraordinary crisis. How would you shape up to a shark? Would you enter that cathedral-organ of a mothership and journey to the heavens, never to return? Accordingly, as the strength of his bargaining position has increased, Spielberg has been less and less inclined to use star actors in his films. One scans the cast-lists of Poltergeist and E.T. in search of a vaguely familiar name. Craig T. Nelson? Dee Williams? Peter Coyote? These are useful performers, but they are not headliners, and never will be.

Coppola, for instance, has another way of ducking the star system. Look at the constellation that was formed by G.o.dfather I alone: Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, James Caan, Al Pacino. Spielberg uses a more radical technique for avoiding the big salaries and big egos that always accompany the big names. He casts his actors for their anti-charismatic qualities. 'The play's the thing,' says Spielberg. 'In every movie I have made, the movie is the star.' He is the first director with the nerve to capitalise on something very obvious: audiences are composed of ordinary people.

After his 1941 debacle, Spielberg brought himself violently to heel with Raiders of the Lost Ark, and this perhaps explains why it is the most anonymous of his major films. (It was the most personally profitable too, before E.T.: Spielberg and producer George Lucas simply offered the studios distribution rights - in other words, they kept it all.) With Raiders, Spielberg completed a movie under budget and within schedule for the first time, and has not erred since. A perfectionist and non-delegator, a galvanised handyman on the set, he worked loo-hour weeks to keep the production under tight control. 'Raiders was popcorn,' he admits, 'but great popcorn.' It also brought him to the end of something. It marked the apotheosis of Spielberg the pyrotechnician.

Up until this point in his career it was just about possible to regard Spielberg as merely a brilliant hack. Flitting from studio to studio, he was the lucky mercenary, the big-budget boy with a flair for astronomical profits. Poltergeist and, far more centrally, E.T. put such dismissals quietly out of their misery. The time had come to acknowledge that Spielberg was unique.

Spielberg produced and co-wrote Poltergeist but leased the direction out to Tobe Hooper, the horror-buff and gore-bandit who gave us The Texas Chainsaw Ma.s.sacre. Like the bygone nabobs of the Forties and Fifties Spielberg had hired his director and yet was unwilling to relinquish his original conception. Later, he ran apologetic ads in the trade-papers, saluting Hooper's contribution. As it turned out, Hooper's contribution was all too palpable. The film's ambitions were in any case pretty limited. 'I started out', says Spielberg, 'just to scare the be-Jesus out of anybody who dared to walk into the theatre.' The film is more than that - and exploits the mother-and-lost-child theme with harrowing relish. But Spielberg's humour and clarity are in the end barely visible through the miasma of Hooper's Gothic-graphic mediocrity.

E.T. is something else again. It is all Spielberg, essential Spielberg, and far and away his most personal film. 'Throughout, E.T. was conceived by me as a love story - the love between a ten-year-old boy and a nine-hundred-year-old alien. In a way I was terrified. I didn't think I was ready to make this movie - I had never taken my shirt off in public before. But I think the result is a very intimate, seductive meeting of minds.'

Intimacy is certainly the keynote of E.T. Using a predominantly female production team, Spielberg effectively re-created the tremulous warmth of his own childhood: a ranch-style suburban home, full of women and kids, with Spielberg the dreaming nucleus of the action. His well-attested empathy with children is tied to a precise understanding of how they have changed since he was a boy. 'The years of childhood have been subject to a kind of inflation. At sixteen, I was the equivalent of a ten-year-old today.' In the movie, the kids have a wised-up naivete, a callow, TV-fed sophistication. Reared on video games and Spielberg movies, with their s.p.a.ce-Invader T-shirts, robot toys and electronic gizmos, they are in a way exhaustively well-prepared for the intrusion of the supernatural, the superevolved.

Despite his new-deal self-discipline, Spielberg decided to 'wing' E.T., to play it by ear and instinct. (He brought the movie in on the nail anyway, at $10 million.) 'If you over-rehea.r.s.e kids, you risk a bad case of the cutes. We shot E.T. chronologically, with plenty of improvisation. I let the kids feel their way into the scenes. An extraordinary atmosphere developed on the set.' E.T. is, after all, only an elaborate special effect (costing $1.5 million - 'Brando would cost three times that,' as Spielberg points out); but 'a very intense relationship' developed between E.T. and his young co-star, Henry Thomas. 'The emotion of the last scene was genuine. The final days of shooting were the saddest I've ever experienced on a film set.' Little Henry agrees, and still pines for his vanished friend. 'E.T. was a person,' he insists.

Later, while scoring the film, Spielberg's regular composer John Williams shied away from what he considered to be an over-ripe modulation on the sound-track. 'It's shameless,' said Williams: 'will we get away with it?' 'Movies are shameless,' was Spielberg's reply. E.T. is shameless all right, but there is nothing meretricious about it. Its purity is Utopian, and quite unfakeable.

You can ask around Los Angeles - around the smoggy pool-sides, the oak and formica rumpus-rooms, the squeaky-clean bars and restaurants - in search of damaging gossip about Steven Spielberg, and come away sorely disappointed. There isn't any. No, he does not 'do' ten grand's worth of cocaine a day. No, he does not consort with heavily-set young men. In this capital of ambition, trivia and perversity, you hear only mild or neutral things about Spielberg, spiced with many examples of his generosity and diffidence.

He has walked out with starlets, notably Amy Irving. He blows a lot of money on gadgets, computers, video games. He owns a mansion, a beach-house; he has just spent $4 million on a four-acre hillock in Bel Air. He seldom goes to parties: 'When I do go, I'm the guy in the corner eating all the dip.' Spielberg, it appears, is a pretty regular guy. Apart from his genius, his technique, his energy, his millions, his burgeoning empire (rivalling Coppola's Zeotrope and Lucas's Marin County co-operative), he sometimes seems almost ordinary.

Towards the end of the interview, I asked him why he had never dealt with 'adult relationships', with s.e.x, in his movies. After all, he de-eroticised Indiana Jones in Raiders, who was originally conceived as a playboy, and he excised the adultery from Jaws (the s.e.x-interest in the novel Spielberg attributes to 'bad editorial advice'; actually the culprit was bad writing - but this is California). For the first time Spielberg grew indignant. 'I think I have an incredibly erotic imagination. It's one of my ambitions to make everyone in an 8oo-seat theatre come at the same time.' Well, we'll have to wait until he has completed Raiders II, E.T. II, and, possibly, Star Wars IV, as well as the host of minor projects he is currently supervising. But if Spielberg does for s.e.x what he has done for dread and yearning, then he can expect a prompt visit from the Vice Squad.

'I just make the kind of films that I would like to see.' This flat remark explains a great deal. Film-makers today - with their target boys and marketing men - tie themselves up in knots trying to divine the LCD among the American public. The rule is: no one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the audience. Spielberg doesn't need to do this because in a sense he is there already, uncynically. As an artist, Spielberg is a mirror, not a lamp. His line to the common heart is so direct that he unmans you with the frailty of your own defences, and the transparency of your most intimate fears and hopes.

Observer 1982

John Updike: Rabbitland and Bechville

John Updike's 'Rabbit' novels are fattening into a sequence - a wahooing, down-home barn dance to the music of time. Rabbit, Run (1960) gave us Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom's disastrous early marriage, Rabbit Redux (1971) his chaotic experiments with adulthood. Rabbit is Rich, the latest but not the last in the line, traces with appalled affection the contours of Rabbit's maturity: it is about middle-aged spread, physical, mental and (above all) material.

Rabbit has never looked a less likely hero for an American epic. Equipped with a troublesome family and a prosperous car showroom, Rabbit is meant to seem provincial and vulgar even by the unexacting standards of suburban Pennsylvania. His reading consists of Consumer Reports and the odd newspaper - 'mostly human-interest stories, like where the Shah is heading next and how sick he really is'. His mind is a jabbering mess of possessions, prejudice and p.o.r.nography. But then Rabbit is an extreme middle-American, a voluble and foul-mouthed representative of the silent majority.

The time is 1979 - the time of petrol shortages, the Three Mile Island radiation leak, the hostage crisis, the invasion of Afghanistan. Like its predecessors, the novel is crammed with allusive topicalities; in a few years' time it will probably read like a Ben Jonson comedy. Rabbit, however, is quick to reinterpret global events in the light of furtive self-interest. Will the Iranian revolution give a boost to his precious-metal investments? Is OPEC going to louse up his car-dealership?

The previous Rabbit books had their share of incident - deaths, desertions - but Rabbit is rich now, and largely protected from contingencies. His life, he feels, has devolved to an 'inner dwindling'. The reader is bound to feel a bit like this too, since the novel's structure is not linear so much as quotidian or seasonal. Updike toys with plot and incident, then flirtatiously retreats. Rabbit's son pushes his pregnant wife down the stairs! But she is fine, and so is baby. The leggy blonde at the showroom might be Rabbit's long-lost daughter! But she isn't, and that's that. In the end, the most dramatic events in the book centre on things like car dents, mortgage rates and gold futures.

If Rabbit is Rich has a central theme - and it is by no means clear that it wants or needs one - it has to do with the one-directional nature of life: life, always heading towards death. Not surprisingly, Updike injects a little low-church churchiness here. 'I always felt I was very innocent, actually,' says Rabbit's fat, busted ex-mistress. 'We all are, Ruth,' consoles Rabbit. A few pages later we read: 'Like what souls must feel when they awaken in a baby's body so far from Heaven: not only scared so they cry but guilty, guilty.' It is a fruitful confusion: We Are All Not Guilty, though we keep on thinking we must be. Rabbit, of course, is only lightly touched by this knowledge. He swans on down the long slide, clumsy, lax and brutish, but vaguely trying.

The technical difficulty posed by Rabbit is a familiar and fascinating one. How to see the world through the eyes of the occluded, the myopic, the wilfully blind? At its best the narrative is a rollicking comedy of ironic omission, as author and reader collude in their enjoyment of Rabbit's pitiable constriction. Conversely - and this is the difficult part - the empty corners and hollow s.p.a.ces of the story fill with pathos, the more poignant for being unremarked.

Not remarking on things, however, isn't one of Updike's strengths. There is just no stopping him remarking on things. The Rabbit books are not first-person but localised third-person: Updike's voice can therefore flit freely in and out of Rabbit's hick musings. A certain nervousness about this device perhaps explains the two derisory sorties into the consciousness of Rabbit Jr. More seriously, in his desire to keep the emotional content topped up, Updike repeatedly lapses into winsome editorials, as if to fill the spiritual gaps. 'Her blurred dark eyes gaze beyond him into time.... love floods clumsily the hesitant s.p.a.ce - saying, in a voice tears have stained ...'

Being a boor and a goon, Rabbit is on the whole a healthy influence on Updike's style; but Updike's style remains a difficulty. In every sense it const.i.tutes an embarra.s.sment of riches - alert, funny and sensuous, yet also garrulous, mawkish and cranky. Updike often seems wantonly, uncontrollably fertile, like a polygamous Mormon. His recent novel about Africa, The Coup, was praised as an astounding 'departure' from his usual beat; in fact, though, the very facility of the experiment gave grounds for alarm. Plainly, here is a writer who can do more or less as he likes. But what ought he to like?

Furnished with such gifts, a novelist's main challenge is one of self-contraception. A talent like Updike's will always tend towards the encyclopaedic. Rabbit is Rich is a big novel, and in some ways it would be churlish to wish it any thinner. It is never boring but it is frequently frustrating. You feel that a better-proportioned book is basking and snoozing deep beneath its covers, and that Updike never really tried to coax it out.

After Rabbit, Run came Rabbit Redux. After Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich. Now after Bech: A Book, we are offered Bech is Back. What next? Bech is Broke?

Actually Bech is in pretty good shape by the end of Bech is Back, financially at least. In the Rabbit books John Updike delivers a commentary on the unreflecting side of human nature (at a certain, unspecifiable distance from his own): this is what the unexamined life would be like: venality, fear, and the innocence born of knowing no better. Rabbits are the victims of whatever set of values gets to them first. They are the people whom you see every day and dismiss as junior aspirants, junior sufferers, unvexed by soul. But the Rabbit, like the Babbit, does have his inner life, his private culture, and Updike dissects it with tingling fascination.

Bech is the opposite, though equally remote from the real Updike: he is smart, learned, artistic, cosmopolitan, alienated, Jewish, single and promiscuous. Bech is a blocked writer, and this calls for a spectacular feat of authorial empathy, since Updike himself can hardly let a month go by without blurting out a new novel, short-story collection, book of poems, essay hold-all. If Rabbit is an alter ego, then Bech is a super ego. Or maybe he is just an alter id. Like Bech: A Book, Bech is Back concerns itself with the subsidiaries of authorship: it is about what writers get up to when they aren't writing. In Bech's case, not writing consumes his every waking hour, and yet his reputation grows as his powers decline. The Superoil Corporation sends him to the Caribbean to sign 28,500 copies of his elderly second novel at $1.50 a pop. Here, Bech's block reaches its cramped epiphany. 'He gazed deep into the negative perfection to which his career had been brought. He could not even write his own name.'

Bech is pestered by autograph hounds, Ph.D. students, women's inst.i.tutes. He is swept off on cultural exchanges (chapter t.i.tle: 'Bech Third-Worlds It'), during which he is lionised, bored, traduced and menaced (chapter coda: 'He vowed never to Third-World it again, unless someone asked him to'). Showing that mixture of awe, terror and grat.i.tude characteristic of famous, middle-aged American novelists, he is regularly seduced by briskly adoring co-eds, models and cultural stewardesses. But Bech's unfinished novel, Think Big, remains unfinished, even as his privileged gloom nears burnished completion.

At this point (half-way through the novel), Bech decides to marry his patient mistress, Bea, who has been hanging around ever since Bech: A Book (1970). Bea of course longs to be Bea Bech. An improbably bland divorcee with three kids, Bea wants to translate Bech to the Waspy suburbs of Westchester, to install him in a little hardwood study, and have him finish Think Big. Manhattan-based Bech has always refused to become a 'one-man ghetto' in yet another thriving outpost of bohunk America, but he submits to 'his plump suburban softy ... and vowed to marry her, to be safe'.

The prospect, for the reader, is enthralling. Bech, long mangled by citified cynicism, will now enter Rabbitland, with its safety, its squabbling, its marathon acquisitiveness. But the confrontation, when it happens, is a quiet one, and the book stays muted until Bech completes Think Big, escapes the idyll, and returns to Manhattan and his old ways. Rabbitland, quite rightly, is left to the Rabbits. It seems that the literary dystopia - even the gentle, suburban dystopia - is best evoked by the satisfied citizen, not by the brooding insurrectionary.

One's disappointment, however, inevitably seeps through into the rest of the novel. The book feels patched together, invisibly mended, as if travel notes and a shelved novella have been busily revamped. (In particular, the hara.s.sments of Think Big have only a lackadaisical bearing on those of Bech is Back.) The new novel is inferior to its predecessor and both Bechs bear the signs of authorial thrift.

Something needs to be added, in a tone of baffled admiration, about Mr Updike's prose. In common with all his post-Couples fiction, the new novel is 'beautifully written'. That phrase has of course been devalued - it now means little more than freedom from gross infelicity; but Updike's style is melodious, risky, detailed, funny and fresh. (An example, more or less at random: 'He flopped into a canvas chair and kept crossing and recrossing his legs, which were so short he seemed to Bech to be twiddling his thumbs.') This is so good,-you keep thinking; why isn't it the best? Such prose is never easily achieved, and yet Updike produces an awful lot of the stuff ... In the end, it reminds you of the best cinematography. Using talent and technique, lens and filter, the artist enjoys a weird infallibility, producing effects that are always rich, ravishing and suspiciously frictionless.

Observer 1982 and 1983

Joan Didion's Style