The Moronic Inferno Part 8

In one of his many chapters on wife-swapping, Mr Talese explains that 'body pleasure' is 'wholesome' and 'therapeutic', it contributes to everyone's 'welfare and personal growth', leading to 'a healthier, more s.e.x-affirmative and open society'. As Barbara Williamson sleeps with David in one chalet bedroom, and John Williamson sleeps with Carol next door, Barbara feels that she and her husband are sharing 'a gift of loving trust', in Mr Talese's ghastly phrase. Having slept with David again at dawn, Barbara makes breakfast, and is 'greeted in the living room by her husband's approving smile and kiss'.

Pleasure is good, Mr Talese believes, and guilt is bad; the idea is to have a lot of pleasure without feeling any guilt. It is indeed a n.o.ble dream. Mr Talese's hero in this department is Hugh Hefner, who claims a sizeable chunk of his book. Talese really has to hand it to Hef, and writes of him throughout with envious admiration. Here, after all, is a man who spends the leisure of his mature years being ma.s.saged by 'four or five' robotic Playmates of the Month on his circular $15,000 bed, constantly monitored by an Ampex television camera designed to produce 'instantaneous and delayed transmissions' on the wall screen above. Meanwhile, outside the Jacuzzi-infested mansion the 'sprawling green lawns' recede over 'gently rolling hills'.

Mr Talese raptly follows Hefner's seduction of a Texan beauty called Karen Christy, who was lured up to Chicago by one of Playboy's roving talent scouts. Hef, with his infectious enthusiasm and love of 'variety and spice', successfully chats Karen up on their first night and installs her as court favourite. Hefner goes on to give Karen a diamond watch, a white mink coat, a silver fox jacket, a diamond c.o.c.ktail ring, a Matisse painting, a Persian cat, a white Mark IV Lfncoln, 'a beautiful metallic reproduction of the Playboy cover on which she was featured', and a nightly Mazola party on his circular bed. Mr Talese has this to say about the effect on Karen's personality: 'she remained essentially the same country girl she had been on the day of her arrival from Texas.' How extraordinary, if true. But the thought leads nowhere. Karen is a cliche, after all, for Hefner and for Talese.

In his final chapters Mr Talese records that at one point during his decade of energetic fieldwork, his wife suffered a 'negative reaction' to all the publicity he was getting: she left him. At this juncture (page 543) you might expect a suspicion of doubt, or of judgment, to intrude. Perhaps 'body pleasure' can't be sanitised; perhaps s.e.x is as contingent as most aspects of life are. But Mr Talese went out to dinner and an interview with New York magazine. Two days later Mrs Talese came home. Lucky man. Thy Neighbour's Wife might have had some edge to it if she had stayed away.

Observer 1980

Double Jeopardy: Making Sense or aids

Witness this ba.n.a.l and quotidian incident. And then consider the ways in which it might affect all our lives.

A young man is walking home to his flat in Camden Town. In appearance he is, as they say, a 'Castro clone', modelled on the all-gay Castro Street area of San Francisco (where they have gay groceries, gay policemen, gay banks): short hair, regulation moustache, denim shirt and jeans, running shoes. In his path are two young women. They have their standard equipment too: lit cigarettes, tabloids under the arm, a push-chair apiece. As the young man pa.s.ses the girls (and these are tough girls), they decide to say something. A year ago they might have contented themselves with 'f.u.c.king queen!' or 'f.u.c.king queer!' or 'f.u.c.king poof!' But this year they have something new to say (remember those tabloids). It is: 'f.u.c.king AiDS-carrierP The young man walks on. End of incident. Now, let us imagine that the accusation is unfounded. The young man gets back to his flat. He feels shaken-up, he feels hurt, in every sense. He wonders if he is an AIDS-carrier: conceivably (and he has done his reading too), he might be asymptomatic HTLV3-infected! He is At Risk, after all, and the symptoms are so d.a.m.nably vague: fevers, chills, swollen glands, diarrhoea, dry cough, breathlessness. That bad night last week - was it a tummy upset, or was it Death? The young man has been considering whether to go down to Hammersmith and take the antibody test. He now decides against it. How can he safeguard his job, his flat? He feels no consensus of decency out there. Meanwhile the stress of the incident and the anxieties it has awakened are, infinitesimally, running him down, making inroads on his defences, weakening him for another kind of attack.

The two young mothers have also done themselves a bit of no good. By the time those babies are as old as their parents, aids will probably have shrugged off its h.o.m.os.e.xual a.s.sociations (its origins may well be heteros.e.xual anyway, but let that pa.s.s for now) and will be established in all areas of society. By then, aids could be the most common cause of disease-related death in young people, not just in young men - a status it already enjoys in New York and San Francisco. The young mothers have also done their bit to impede any early control of the epidemic, because such an effort will depend on an atmosphere of unwonted candour and trust. Incidentally, since the cost of caring for aids patients may reach 200 million annually by 1989, they have also helped deplete the health services on which their children will rely.

Finally let us re-run the incident and imagine that the accusation - the taunt - is true. The young man returns to his flat - and doesn't leave it for several days. As one of the large pool of 'AIDS-Related Complex' and 'Lesser aids' sufferers, his illnesses come and go in cycles, depending on natural resilience and general morale. Now they all begin again: the miseries of recurrence. This is the unique double bind of aids. The virus attacks the immune system, which (it appears) must be weakened enough to receive it; symptoms and prognosis invisibly interact; the sicker you are the sicker you get ... Those words on the street. Sticks and stones, perhaps. But, with aids, words too can break your bones.

Everywhere you look you see the double bind, the double jeopardy. In America - land of the profit-making casualty ward, home of the taxi-metered ambulance - the bipart.i.te attack a.s.sumes its most heartless form. Growing ever weaker, the sick man faces medical bills that average $75,000 and have been known to reach half a million. The medical-insurance system is a shambles of pedantry and expedience. Some policies are soon exhausted; insurance companies often renege, claiming 'prior conditions'; if you lose your job you might lose your cover; and with the two-year waiting period to establish eligibility, 80 per cent of aids patients do not survive to draw their first cheque.

'What happens, usually, is a process of spend-down,' said Mark Senak of the aids Resource Centre.

'Spend-down?' I asked. I sat in Senak's chambers in downtown Manhattan. He is one of many young lawyers active on the AIDS-relief front. AIDS-sufferers need lawyers: to defend themselves against employers and landlords (in America, as in England, you can legally discriminate against h.o.m.os.e.xuals but not against the disabled); to transfer a.s.sets, to wrangle with insurance companies, to formulate declarations of bankruptcy. Lawyers like Senak have drafted wills for young men barely out of college. Wills, bills, audits, lawsuits - all that extra worry, boredom and threat.

Spend-down turns out to be one of those cutely hyphenated nightmares of American life. Briefly, it means that you spend everything you have before qualifying for Medicaid. Until recently there were further complications. One aids patient was suffering from a rare opportunistic disease called cryptosporidiosis, normally found only in calves. He applied for social security, and was told that he couldn't have the money. Why? Because he couldn't have the disease.

Duly pauperised by spend-down, all spent out, the patient becomes eligible for a bed in one of the city hospitals. Here he will encounter the suspicion and contempt that America traditionally accords to its poor. There is no out-patient care, no intermediate care. He is not legally dischargeable unless he has a home to go to. And aids sufferers often do not know if they have a home to go to. You might return to find your remaining possessions stacked outside the door of your apartment. The locks might have been changed - by your landlord, or by your lover.

'What we have', said Senak, 'are diseased bag-persons living on the street. No one will house them. No one will feed them.' Senak's personal project is an accommodation centre for sufferers, on the San Francisco model. But the ruinous cost of real estate is only one of the difficulties. The risk categories for aids form a heterogeneous group, colloquially known as 'the 5-H club': haemophiliacs, Haitians, h.o.m.os.e.xuals, hookers and heroin-addicts (these last two frequently overlapping). How do you house a haemophiliac stockbroker with a Puerto Rican junkie? One of the reasons why aids is seen as a scourge of the h.o.m.os.e.xual community is that there is a h.o.m.os.e.xual community, however divided.

'I think we've made progress, in changing general att.i.tudes, since the panic began in 1983. Tonight I'm going to see someone in hospital. A year ago I would have had to stop off and buy him some food. The hospital staff wouldn't take in his tray. But they do now.'

That same week in New York a TV crew - battle-scarred conquistadores, veterans of wars, revolutions, terrorist sieges - walked off a set rather than affix a microphone to an AiDS-sufferer's clothing. No one has ever caught aids through casual contact. After four years of handling patientsVfood, laundry, bed-pans, drips and bandages, no health worker has yet succ.u.mbed. You cannot say this often enough. But how often will you have to say it? In the end one cannot avoid the conclusion that aids unites certain human themes - h.o.m.os.e.xuality, s.e.xual disease, and death - about which society actively resists enlightenment. These are things that we are unwilling to address or think about. We don't want to understand them. We would rather fear them.

In New York, everyone on the public wing refers to aids patients as PWAs: persons with aids. 'Why?' I asked a young administrator at the aids Medical Foundation. 'It's to avoid any suggestion of victim, sufferer, and so on.' 'Why?' I asked again. They are victims; they are sufferers. But the answer is of course 'political', New York being the most politicised city on earth. New York, where even supermarkets and greasy-spoons have their 'policies'; where all action seems to result from pressure, and never from a sane initiative.

Other euphemisms in this sphere include 's.e.xual preference' ('orientation* being considered 'judgmental'), 's.e.xually active' (some go further and talk of 'distributive' as opposed to 'focal' s.e.x) and 'intravenous substance-abuser' (as if a junkie is going to feel much cheered or enn.o.bled by this description). Over here, handicapped people are merely 'challenged', and the 'exceptional' child is the child with brain damage. It is a very American dishonesty - antiseptic spray from the verbal-sanitation department. Having named a painful reality (the belief seems to be), you also dispatch it; you get it off your desk.

In 1983 the total federal budget for the aids crisis was $2,8 million; in 1984 it was $61 million. But this was all grant-hound money, n.o.bel-race money: not a cent had been allocated to the treatment of patients. During the time of my stay in New York (this was late March 1985), the old tightrope-artist Mayor Koch came across with a $6.5 million package. He was responding to countless protests and pet.i.tions; more important (according to many observers), he was responding to the fact that 1985 is election year. The truth is that the New York record on aids compares woefully with that of San Francisco, which has long been a coordinated network of treatment and educational services, everything from bereavement-counselling to meals-on-wheels. San Francisco has also taken the controversial step of closing the gay bathhouses, by order of the health authorities. The Village Voice claimed that Koch has always been terrified of any a.s.sociation, pro or anti, with the gay cause. Remember the slogan: 'Vote for Cuomo, Not the h.o.m.o'? Koch quickly denounced this 'slander' as 'vile' and 'outrageous' - also 'irrelevant'. His confusions are plain enough; but so are those of the gay population, which remains as brittle and fragmented as any other stratum in this volatile city, the city of the omni-partisan.

In New York you will find every permutation of human response to the aids crisis. The bathhouses are still open here, and commercialised gay s.e.x is still big business. Many gays see any move to limit their activity as an attack on the civil-rights front, an attempt to isolate, to 'pathologise'. More extreme are the 'disco dummies' who, even after contracting aids themselves, maintain or actually increase their s.e.xual output. You hear talk of 'medical scenarios' in the bathhouses; you hear talk of sado-m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic routines featuring aids as the ultimate 's.e.x death'; you hear talk of just about everything. The heteros.e.xual community has reacted more predictably: the National Gay Task Force estimates incidents of violent hara.s.sment at about a thousand a month.

Throughout the history of s.e.xual disease, injunctions to enforce celibacy or monogamy have never had the slightest effect. Then again, the stakes have never been so high. It is quite clear from statistics on routine complaints like gonorrhoea (down 50 per cent in some studies) that s.e.xual activity has drastically decreased. Plainly a lot of thought, and lively improvisation, has already gone into this matter. Strategies include libido-suppressors and vitamin combinations, stress-reduction seminars, 'j.e.r.k.-.o.f.f. circles and closed groups of 'clear' gays. There are even Orgiasts Anonymous services, where a sponsor 'talks you down' from an urge to visit the bathhouse. Such expedients may seem bizarre to the straight world. But that is because the straight world expects the gay man to follow its own s.e.xual master-mould. And he doesn't. h.o.m.os.e.xuality isn't a version of heteros.e.xuality. It is something else again.

The consoling idea or the quietly monogamous gay couple is an indolent and sentimental myth. With a large number of exceptions, and all sorts of varieties of degree, it just isn't like that. Friendship, companionship, fellowship - these are paramount; but pairing-and-bonding on the wedlock model is our own dated fiction. Gay lovers seldom maintain any s.e.xual interest in each other for more than a year or two. The relationship may remain 'focal', may well be lifelong, yet the s.e.x soon reverts to the 'distributive'.

Gay men routinely achieve feats of promiscuity that the most fanatical womaniser could only whistle at. In the heteros.e.xual world you might encounter the odd champion satyromaniac who - doing nothing else, all his life - acc.u.mulates perhaps a thousand conquests. On some fringes of the gay world (where a man might average ninety 'contacts' a month) you could reach this total in less than a year. In the right club or bathhouse, you could have s.e.x with half a dozen different men without once exchanging a word.

However this may be, the median number of s.e.xual partners for gay American aids patients is over eleven hundred. The exponential leap is easily explained. Most obviously, both actors in the s.e.xual drama have the same role; they are both hunters, and can dispense with the usual preliminaries and rea.s.surances (try taking someone to the opera ninety times a week). Also the gay man, more often than not, is making up for lost time. Throughout his youth he has felt excluded, unstable - illegal; even as an adult much of his daily life is spent incognito, in imitation of a mainstream citizen; but at night he joins an extraverted and hedonistic brotherhood. You could cite genetic factors too. Just as the gay woman seems to exemplify the usual feminine imperatives (monogamy, inconspi-cuousness, site-tenacity), so the gay man, in equally intense, redoubled form, does as his DNA tells him: he is mobile, aggressive and disseminatory.

There is certainly a political dimension also, as many gay leaders claim. In America, h.o.m.os.e.xuality is illegal in twenty-three states plus the District of Columbia. In England we have the consenting-adults package: no s.e.x until you are twenty-one, no 'public' s.e.x in clubs and bars, and no group-s.e.x whatever (even troilism is indictable). Despite much hara.s.sment and entrapment, these provisos are quite clearly unenforceable. Naturally, then, there is defiance involved, and celebration of the gains already made. Some gay activists even argue that the s.e.xual liberation has worked as an opiate, deflecting the movement from progress of a more tangible kind.

'For fifteen years, we all had a party.' It was a time of dazzling freedoms and self-discoveries. In their new world, the distinctions of cla.s.s, race, money and privilege were all triumphantly erased. Of course there were the expected perils and boredoms of any long party - the occupational hazard known as feeling 'gayed out'. How many more times (the gay man would wonder) will I wake up to hear myself saying, 'Well, Clint/Skip/Didier/Luigi/Piotr/asim, what brings you to our fair land?' But the great mix was, on the whole, a vivid and innocuous adventure, one that seemed to redress many past confusions. 'It was so good', as I was told many times, 'that you couldn't help thinking how it was going to end.'

There has been understandable resistance to the idea that aids is 'caused' by promiscuity. 'Life-styles don't kill people - germs do', says the New York pamphlet (perhaps a conscious echo of the National Rifle a.s.sociation's maxim, 'Guns don't kill people -people do'). One vein of paranoia extends to the view that the epidemic was initiated by the CIA as a form of biological warfare. Certainly the profile of the high-risk groups - the j-H club - is politically effaced. As Larry Kramer, the author of one of five plays about aids recently staged in Manhattan, has pointed out: 'The lowliest of streetsweeper a.s.sociations has twenty-five lobbyists in Washington, and we [14 million Americans] have one part-timer.' If the aids virus had chosen, say, real-estate agents or young mothers for attack, then the medical and social context would now look very different. Yet aids has chosen h.o.m.os.e.xual men. The proportion will certainly decrease (and the African epidemic has shown no s.e.xual preference at all), but so far it has remained fairly steady at around 70 per cent.

Throughout the past decade, in New York, gay men were oppressed by an escalating series of health hazards. To begin with, crabs, gonorrhoea and syphilis, the ancient enemies. Then herpes, then cytomegalovirus, then gay-bowel syndrome, then hepat.i.tis B. All venereal diseases compromise the immune system. And so, crucially, does s.e.m.e.n. The v.a.g.i.n.a is evolutionarily designed to deactivate the antigens in s.e.m.e.n, the foreign elements which stimulate the production of antibodies. The r.e.c.t.u.m does the opposite: it is designed to withdraw water from faeces, and so efficiently absorbs antigenic matter through the rectal walls. At each reception the immune system goes on red alert. Ironically, it too becomes paranoid. Repeated reception, repeated infection and repeated trauma prolong the crisis until the cells lose the capacity to correct their own over-corrections. The a.n.a.logy is as much with cervical cancer as with standard s.e.xual disease. Again, the double bind. It seems that there is a 'natural' - i.e. viciously arbitrary - limit to trauma, to bodily invasion.

There are two lines of thought. One is the single-factor or new-virus theory. This has always been more acceptable to the gay population because it pa.s.ses no verdict and necessitates no change. The second theory is multi-factorial, the theory of immune-overload, which was immediately perceived in America as 'judgmental', suggesting also that the visitation of aids was not a bolt from the blue but a process or a journey. The virus - a retrovirus of a type found only in animals - has been cautiously identified. Yet it seems clear that the two theories are not mutually exclusive; indeed, they go hand in hand.

The secret may lie in an uncertainty principle, in the balance or potentia between two factors: the strength of the virus and the weakness of the host. A damaged immune system is susceptible to the aids virus, which then destroys that system, so inviting opportunistic infection. Some epidemiologists believe that aids is an ancient and world-wide disease of poverty (ineradicable by medicine alone), given pa.s.sage into society at large through the incubation chambers of the bathhouses. In a sense, perhaps aids itself is opportunistic. This is the double jeopardy.

The Gay Men's Health Crisis Centre is just off rugged Eighth Avenue; but the offices are neat, modern, positively bijou. Up on the bulletin board is a list of the day's meetings: Volunteer Moral Committee, Care Partner Group One. There are bottle-gla.s.s part.i.tions, basketed plants. I asked for the AIDS-information kit and was given a hefty dossier of facts and figures, dos and don'ts, posters and leaflets. The soft-voiced, tiptoeing advisers talk to the worried supplicants, like waiters in a gentle gay restaurant. 'Win With Us', says the slogan on the donation tin. 'We're Winning', says a pamphlet, ' ... Together. We're winning ... Through Respect'.

There are buddy programs, therapy groups, crisis counsellors, PR men. 'Our community keeps on fighting. Keeps on caring. Keeps on loving.' Here they are coping in the American way.

The British equivalent of GMHC, the Terence Higgins Trust, is at first as unwelcoming as its address: Block E, Room 10, number 38, on a street inaccurately called Mount Pleasant, near the Gray's Inn Road. Once you have blundered about a bit in this old warehouse, you enter the tiny, b.u.mf-crammed office of THT. As the outpost in a revolution of consciousness and the epicentre in the fight against a latent epidemic, the premises are not immediately rea.s.suring. But funds, private and public, are gathering, and Tony Whitehead, Chair of the Trust, is clearly exceptionally able and sympathetic. Until a year ago he was running the entire operation from his own flat. This is the English way: under-financed, under-organised, genially yet resolutely philanthropic.

Lessons have been well taken from the American experience. There are buddy-systems here too, and they are needed: the personal complications are often drastic. aids, with its usual double thrust, attacks the brain and nervous system of the hugely stressed patient, bringing about violent personality changes. The epidemic has so far followed the American graph, though the curve is unlikely to be as steep. The bathhouses and s.e.x clubs of Manhattan are simply illegal here; and our new generation of junkies tend to sniff the stuff rather than mainline it. Even so there could be 10,000 cases by the end of the decade. And the THT will itself be the size of a hospital.

The DHSS withstood a lot of criticism, here and in America, when it took on powers to detain and quarantine aids sufferers. John Patten, the junior Health Minister, was quick to dismiss any fears of official panic or overkill. 'Good G.o.d, the last thing we want to do is start rounding people up." The new ruling has been invoked only once: in Portsmouth, where a distracted aids patient was haemor-rhaging in the street. Patten is addressing his task in discreet and avuncular fashion; he seemed quite unaware of gay s.e.xual realities (believing, for instance, that 'fisting' was some form of spanking); but it is not the British way to look too closely at these matters, nor to sanitise them with the jargon of toleration. We shall all muddle through. One thing we do have (for the time being anyway): we have the National Health.

Meanwhile, everything has changed. Being gay - which Americans call a life-choice, and which we might perhaps call a destiny - is a different proposition now. But so is the other route, as aids becomes a part of the heteros.e.xual experience. The liberation of coitus, the rutting revolution, has probably entered its last phase. When the danger is ultimate, then every risk is ultimate also. It is over.

Despite new genetic technologies, any cure or prevention is probably some way ahead. 'We have anti-virals which seem to inhibit the retrovirus which seems to have a linchpin role,' I was informed at the aids Medical Foundation in New York. 'Prospects are uncertain bordering on grim.' The vaccine for hepat.i.tis B took seventeen years.

But some hope can be rescued from the mess, the human disaster of aids. The disease will probably obey Darwinian rules and seek an evolutionarily stable strategy, becoming less virulent, non-fatal. The cure, when and if it comes, will revolutionise medicine. s.e.xual relations of all kinds will soften, and the emphasis will shift from performance, from s.e.xual muscle. Gay leaders prudently stress the need for trust, for confidentiality in the liaison between the various communities. In the short term, of course, they are absolutely right. But a better situation would clearly be one in which no confidentiality is necessary.

aids victims are in the forefront, at the very pinnacle of human suffering. Broadly speaking, they can do you no harm unless you elect to go to bed with them. We are in this together now. An opportunity presents itself. There is no good reason - only a lot of bad ones - why we shouldn't take it.

Observer 1985 * * *

Postscript This piece was written under unusual pressures. Early 1985 was the time when the British tabloids locked on to aids. Twice a week the headlines yelped of gay plagues and black deaths, blighted babies, panicking health workers, proposed quarantine, h.o.m.os.e.xual apartheid. I very much wanted not to add to the grief and vulnerability of the gay population, and I was greatly relieved when the piece went down well in that quarter, and also with the medical community.

Here is a minor, and personal, ill.u.s.tration of the ease with which one can get 'politicised' by such sensitive matters. A week after the aids piece appeared I was proudly reading a short story of mine, newly published though written months earlier. To my horror (and the shock was physical, dizzying, armpit-igniting) I saw that I - or my Jewish-American narrator - had used the word 'f.a.ggots'! The locution was right for the narrator and right for the story; but I shouldn't have used it. Not now, I thought. Already, after a few months, I have relapsed somewhat and would probably defend the original phrase (the story, after all, was set in 1980: pre-AIDS); but I won't forget the seizure of remorse when my eye fell on f.a.ggots, also began to understand the American tendency to euphemise with jargon, and its-misplaced homage to the power of the word.

Looking into aids taught me other things too. I had never read any medical literature before; and I am here to tell you, if you don't already know, that with or without aids there is a dictionary ten feet wide full of stuff that is just raring to screw you up. Secondly, I discovered I knew nothing whatever about h.o.m.os.e.xuality. Having learned a bit, I now find the condition, the fate, the destiny much more interesting, much more sympathetic - and much, much stranger. I had never registered the otherness. Nor, it seemed, had anyone else. The article caused a certain amount of unease and hesitation at the Observer, which, with the Guardian, is the most liberal and humanistic newspaper in Britain. Those traditions quickly prevailed and the piece appeared as planned, though with one or two changes and in an atmosphere of worry. I was obliged to amend 'f.u.c.king queer' to 'filthy queer' in the first paragraph; and I had to bowdlerise the description of how the r.e.c.t.u.m deals with bodily fluids. The first change was routine but the second change puzzled me at the time. Agreed, the r.e.c.t.u.m's job is not a particularly glamorous one; yet someone has to do it. Why this resistance to corporeal truth? Even in a near-impeccably enlightened inst.i.tution like the Observer I glimpsed a measure of the intransigence, the reluctance to know, felt by society at large.

Anyway, I thought I played the whole thing down. aids is more frightening and catastrophic than I chose - or was able - to suggest. But I have enough imagination, and enough health anxieties of my own, to guess at the feelings of the sufferer, lying in the sawdust of his defences, with nothing between him and the wind and the rain. Also, I believe aids will emerge as an evolutionary trauma, a tactical defeat for the species. s.e.x and death have never before been linked in this way, except by the poets. The ancient venereal diseases were fatal but late-acting: plenty of things could kill you before syphilis did. Perhaps the only remote a.n.a.logy is an exclusively feminine one: not cervical cancer, but childbirth. Now, with aids, the opportunities for human distrust are boundless.

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

Saul Bellow in Chicago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the content of these data?

1. In Cabrini Green, the black housing project, a man butchers a hog in his apartment, and then throws the guts on the stairs. A woman slips and breaks her arm. In the ambulance 'she was smeared with pig's blood and shriller than the siren', 2. In 'rats.h.i.t Woodlawn' old people scavenge for food behind the supermarkets. The store guards try to keep them off lest they poison themselves with spoiled fish, and then sue. 3. A black youth leaves his car in the parking lot of the courthouse, where he attends a hearing on a rape charge. In the boot of his Pontiac lies a young housewife, kidnapped at gunpoint. Every few hours he takes her out and rapes her. Two days later he shoots her in a vacant lot and covers her body with trash. These horror stories, and many more, appear in The Dean's December, in which Bellow contrasts the super-licensed rat-jungle of Chicago with the 'penitentiary society' of Bucharest. Citing Rilke's wartime letters, the Dean observes that there is no effective language for the large-scale terrors; during such times 'the heart must hang in the dark', and wait. But there is a countervailing urge 'to send the soul out into society', 'to see at first hand the big manifestations of disorder and take a fresh reading from them'. The result is head-spin, heart-fever. And the conclusion he reaches is that America now has an 'undercla.s.s', lost populations expected, even encouraged, to dispose of themselves with junk, poison and Sat.u.r.day-night specials.

I asked Bellow how he had a.s.sembled his litany of depradation. Did he trudge round the jails, the hospitals, the projects? The process is largely an imaginative one, but it is a process much simplified in cla.s.sless, dollar-driven, magimixed Chicago. 'The corruption is everywhere. You can say this for Chicago - there's no hypocrisy problem here. There's no need for hypocrisy. Everyone's proud of being a b.a.s.t.a.r.d ... You just meet all these guys. You went to school with them. I used to play basketball with a Machine executioner. He lives out in Miami now. Quietly.'

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

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

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

'There was something oppressive', said Bellow, 'about being an alien, a hybrid - but then everyone was. You knew you were always going to have dirt under your fingernails, but this is a natural twentieth-century feeling. There was no bar to learning. And I wondered - by what right or t.i.tle was I reading great books, while also discovering America: pool halls, ball parks. It was one of the worst slums in Chicago. By the time I was twelve, I had seen everything.' During the Depression the likes of Saul and Iggy lived off welfare hand-outs and munic.i.p.al !OUs. 'But we came through,' Iggy affirmed. 'Even during that bad time we were full of energy and hope. We made it.'

I asked Iggy what he thought of Bellow's portrayal of Chicago chicanery. 'When it comes to corruption in Chicago', he said with deep satisfaction, 'Saul is a child. It's much much worse than he says.' Iggy ought to know. He was disbarred and jailed, after a lucrative misunderstanding, many years ago. 'In my opinion', he said, 'the best of Saul's t.i.tles is The Dangling Man [sic]. I have the first edition. Someone told me it's worth $400! When he dies it'll be worth even more. So I say to Saul, I say, "When you gonna die!"'

Has Iggy made it? His generation was among the most amibitious and resilient that America has ever produced. The slums of the Northwest Side still exist, but there aren't many bookish Russians and Czechs and Poles queueing on the library steps. They watch TV these days. And they're all just Americans now.

The next evening I met up with Bellow at the Cultural Center in the Old Library Building. Today's Activities', said the billboard wistfully: 'Chicago as a Literary City'. I had spent the day strolling round Chicago and wondering what literature or art or culture could seriously be expected to do about the place.

'The Dorm That Dripped Blood' announced the cinema sign. 'The Hounds of h.e.l.l dogs leaping up at you in 3d'. In the beanery thin old ladies in tracksuits serve enormous meals to the working people of Chicago, tribally gruff, hoa.r.s.e, one-lining. 'I switched from Ultrason to Coherent,' booms a diner. Does he mean corporations or cigarette brands? At the next table a young couple discuss a portly paperback. 'I'm getting into Kate now,' says the girl. 'Kate's gonna marry Greg. That's what I think. Or David. She's pregnint but she won't make a commitmint.'

I went to see the Impressionist collection at the Inst.i.tute of Art. It rivals that of the Jeu de Paume - but there is a tangible air of donation, patronage, social power, all the tax-exempt American money that goes into religion, opera, academic quangos, writing fellowships. A highschool teacher was telling her cla.s.s about seurats La Grande Jatte. 'It's set on a hot afternoon in Paris a century ago, long before air-conditioning. So what people used to do was, they...' A businessman stared at a Monet. 'First cla.s.s,' he decided, before moving on.

At the Cultural Center we sat and listened to Karl Schapiro as he read from his uncompleted autobiography. It was the same story: the young poet, working in a department store all day, reading and dreaming all night. When he grew up, he edited Poetry Chicago. Later there was a reception, with wine ('compliments of Nit & Wit magazine') and snacks ('supplied by Orange Products'). In his rusty checked suit Bellow resembled an appropriate cross between a distinguished man of letters and a retired gangster. I hung back as he greeted Schapiro, an old friend.

'Saul Bellow's here,' said a lady behind me. 'Where?' asked her companion. 'You're looking right at him ... Mm, give me a Sidney Sheldon or a Harold Robbins. I don't want to be taxed too much.' 'Me neither. Give me a Ken Follett.' 'Give me a Herman Wouk.'

Bellow came over. He talked about the library, how its stack had been relocated, how the Byzantine splendours of its staircase and dome were now no more than a sentimental husk. He used to come here daily as a boy, for his Aristotle, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Tolstoy. Then I said, 'I think I know how I want to end my piece - with the question, "What then must you do?" But there's no real answer, is there?'

The previous day Bellow had filled me in on what he called 'the American search for personal form'. Whitman said that poets would one day tell Americans how to be adults. 'But this is not an art society. It is a money society, a pleasure society.' Most Americans - 'in an amorphous state, demanding forms for themselves' - now regard novels as how-to books about life, or about life-style. The writer is no curer of souls; he is on the level of the etiquette page and advice to the lovelorn. The busiest sections of the Chicago bookstores, I noticed, were those marked 'Personal Growth'.

'One must go on. No. One must go further.' Aware of all the prescriptive dangers, Bellow'nonetheless believes that the time has come for serious (i.e. talented) writers to be serious, without losing lyricism or laughter. 'No more novels about adolescence, career problems, s.e.xual adventure, wounded ethnicity.' Why not address 'the mysterious circ.u.mstance of being', and say what it's like to be alive at this time, on this planet? Then you depend on a process of seepage. That is all you can really hope for.

'We are usually waiting', writes Bellow, 'for somebody to clear out and let us go on with the business of life (to cultivate the little obsessional garden).'

And I was relieved, in a way, to be off his case. I survived a vast and inedible fish platter and a near-mugging under the El as I walked back to the Quality Inn. Actually it was more like an aggressive demand for charity, only slightly sharper than its London equivalent. The black youth waved a train timetable in front of me and did a spiel about missing his stop. 'So are you gonna help me out? Have you got a dollar?' 'That depends,' I wanted to say. 'Have you got a gun?' But I walked past his tough stare, without paying my dues.

In the hotel lobby a small black boy sat waiting for his mother to come off shift. He read out loud from his book: 'Help. Help. I axed - I axed the man to help me out. I'm stuck in the mud. Help me out. I'd help you.'' Some days your life feels like a short story - or is it just the travel, and the preoccupation? This morning, even the black, bent, bald shoeshiner who slicked my boots with his fingers (he had his name on his breast, in capitals) was called art.

In my room I looked out The Dean's December and re-read the pa.s.sage about Toby Winthrop. Based on a real Chicagoan, Win-throp is a black ex-junkie and reformed Mob murderer who now runs a detoxification centre on the South Side. The Dean goes to see him: A dirty snow brocade over the empty lots, and black men keeping warm at oil-drum bonfires. He parked and got out of the car feeling the lack of almost everything you needed, humanly. Christ, the human curve had sunk down to base level, had gone beneath it ...Winthrop's office window was heavily covered in flowered drapes of pink and green. The body of this powerful man was significantly composed in the executive leather chair. If you had met him in the days when he was a paid executioner, if he had been waiting for you on a staircase, in an alley, you would never have escaped him. He would have killed you, easy ... Until now Winthrop had sat immobile, but now he turned and began to lower himself towards the floor. What was he doing? He was on his knees, his big arm stretched toward the floor, his fingers hooked upwards. You see what we have to do? Those people are down in the cesspool. We reach for them and try to get a hold. Hang on - hang on! They'll drown in the s.h.i.t if we can't pull 'em out ... they're marked out to be destroyed. Those are people meant to die, sir. That's what we are looking at.'

Many times in Bellow's novels we are reminded that 'being human' isn't the automatic condition of every human being. Like freedom or sanity, it is not a given but a gift, a talent, an accomplishment, an objective. In achieving it, some will need more time or thought or help. And, put that way, it doesn't sound too hard a lesson to learn.

Observer 1983