Martin Amis - The Moronic Inferno & Other Visits to America

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE MORONIC INFERNO

Martin Amis was born in Oxford on 15 August 1949. He was educated in Britain, Spain and the USA, attending over thirteen schools and then a series of crammers in London and Brighton. He gained a formal First in English at Exeter College, Oxford. He has been an editorial assistant on The Times Literary Supplement and was Literary Editor of the New Statesman from 1977 until 1979. He then worked as a Special Writer on the Observer and now contributes regularly to the Independent on Sunday. He is also the author of Einstein's Monsters, a collection of stories about the nuclear age, and his novels are The Rachel Papers, which won the 1974 Somerset Maugham Award, Dead Babies, Success, Other People: A Mystery Story, Money, London Fields and Time's Arrow.

His novels have won widespread acclaim: writing about Success, Blake Morrison in The Times Literary Supplement said, 'The narrative economy and manipulation of sympathy make this Martin Amis's most assured work so far. The presentation of city life in its sadness is forceful in itself, but what is especially impressive is that all the detail counts in the overall design'; J. G. Ballard called Other People 'Powerful and obsessive ... a metaphysical thriller. Kafka reshot in the style of Psycho', and the Sunday Times thought it 'dazzling... obligatory reading'. Reviewing Einstein's Monsters in the London Evening Standard, John Walsh wrote, 'The writing remains as vivid as ever, full of risky, throw-away conceits and perfectly cadenced terms of description.' London Fields was praised in the Sunday Telegraph as 'The most ambitious Amis to date, the most compassionate, and the most chilling... [his] voice has been the most original and distinctive of British fiction writers in the 1980s' while the Guardian wrote of Time's Arrow. 'Amis's profound book adds a new and terrifying dimension to the Shakespearean tragic conception of time being "out of joint".

MARTIN AMIS

The Moronic Inferno

and Other Visits to America

PENGUIN BOOKS

Copyright Martin Amis, 1986

To Christopher, Eleni and Alexander

Introduction and Acknowledgments

On a couple of occasions I have been asked to write a book about America; and I must have spent at least four or five minutes contemplating this monstrous enterprise. America is more like a world than a country: you could as well write a book about people, or about life. Then, years later, as I was up-ending my desk drawers to prepare a selection of occasional journalism (and this book is offered with all generic humility), I found that I had already written a book about America unpremeditated, accidental, and in instalments. Of the hundreds of thousands of words I seem to have written for newspapers and magazines in the last fifteen years, about half of them seem to be about America. I hope these disparate pieces add up to something. I know you can approach America only if you come at her from at least a dozen different directions.

The academic year 195960 I spent as a ten-year-old resident of Princeton, New Jersey. I was the only boy in the school the only male in the entire city - who wore shorts. Soon 1 had long trousers, a crew cut, and a bike with fat whitewalls and an electric horn. I ate Thanksgiving turkey. I wore a horrible mask on Hallowe'en. America excited and frightened me, and has continued to do so. Since that time I have spent at least another year there, on assignment. My mother lived in America for years, and many of my expatriate friends live in America now. My wife is American. Our infant son is half-American. I feel fractionally American myself.

Oh, no doubt I should have worked harder, made the book more representative, more systematic, et cetera. It remains, however, a collection of peripatetic journalism, and includes pieces where the travel is only mental. I have added links and postscripts; I have wedged pieces together; I have rewritten bits that were too obviously wrong, careless or bad. I should have worked harder, but it was quite hard work getting all this stuff together (photocopying back numbers of journals can be a real struggle, what with the weight of the bound volumes and that Xerox flap tangling you up and getting in the way). And it was hard work writing it all in the first place. Journalists have two ways of expending energy: in preparation and in performance. Some exhaust themselves in securing the right contacts, the intimate audits, the disclosures. I am no good at any of that. I skimp it, and so everything has to happen on the typewriter. I find journalism only marginally easier than fiction, and book-reviewing slightly harder. The thousand-word book review seems to me far more clearly an art form (however minor) than any of the excursions of the New Journalism, some of which are as long as Middlemarch.

All these pieces were written left-handed. They were written, that is to say, not for my own satisfaction but for particular editors of particular journals at particular times and at particular lengths. The hack and the whore have much in common: late nights, venal gregariousness, social drinking, a desire to please, simulated liveliness, dissimulated exhaustion you keep on having to do it when you don't feel like it. (Perhaps this bond accounts for the hypocritical burnish of the vice-entrapment story, where in the end the reporter always makes his excuses and staggers off nobly into the night.) Insidious but necessary is the whorish knack a journalist must develop of suiting his pitch to the particular client. Luckily it all seems to be done subliminally. You write like this for the London Review of Books, and you write like that for the Sunday Telegraph Magazine. You can swear here but you can't swear there. (I have greatly enjoyed debowdlerising these pieces and restoring cuts, some of which, as in the Brian De Palma profile, approached about 80 per cent of the whole.) The novelist has a very firm conception of the Ideal Reader. It is himself, though strangely altered older, perhaps, or younger. With journalism the entire transaction is much woollier: every stage in the experience seems to involve a lot of people.

I got the phrase 'the moronic inferno', and much else, from Saul Bellow, who informs me that be got it from Wyndham Lewis. Needless to say, the moronic inferno is not a peculiarly American condition. It is global and perhaps eternal. It is also, of course, primarily a metaphor, a metaphor for human infamy: mass, gross, ever-distracting human infamy. One of the many things I do not understand about Americans is this: what is it like to be a citizen of a superpower, to maintain democratically the means of planetary extinction? I wonder how this contributes to the dreamlife of America, a dreamlife that is so deep and troubled. As I was collating The Moronic Inferno (in August 1985, during the Hiroshima remembrances), I was struck by a disquieting thought. Perhaps the title phrase is more resonant, and more prescient, than I imagined. It exactly describes a possible future, one in which the moronic inferno will cease to be a metaphor and will become a reality: the only reality.

I am particularly grateful to The Observer, under whose auspices, in effect, this book was written; I am also indebted to the New Statesman, the Sunday Telegraph Magazine, the London Review of Books, Tatler and Vanity Fair. Throughout I have been exceptionally lucky in my editors and colleagues, and here salute them, in roughly chronological order: Terence Kilmartin, Arthur Crook, John Gross, Claire Tomalin, Anthony Howard, Julian Barnes, Deirdre Lyndon, Donald Trelford, Miriam Gross, Trevor Grove, Karl Miller and Tina Brown. Special thanks are due also to Ian Hamilton and to Cle Peploe.

The Moronic Inferno

Iggy Blaikie, Kayo Obermark, Sam Zincowicz, Kotzie Kreindl, Clara Spohr, Teodoro Valdepenas, Clem Tambow, Rinaldo Can-labile, Tennie Pontritter, Lucas Asphalter, Murphy Verviger, Wharton Horricker ... The way a writer names his characters provides a good index to the way he sees the world to his reality-level, his responsiveness to the accidental humour and freakish poetry of life. Thomas Pynchon uses names like Oedipa Maas and Pig Bodine (where the effect is slangy, jivey, cartoonish); at the other end of the scale, John Braine offers us Tom Metfeld, Jack Royston, Jane Framsby (can these people really exist, in our minds or anywhere else, with such leadenly humdrum, such dead names?). Saul Bellow's inventions are Dickensian in their resonance and relish. But they also have a dialectical point to make.