The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America (15 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

The favourite targets are lined up against the wall: sex, cruelty, Jewishness, and universal injustice (for which God is a handy embodiment). 'Like cunnilingus, tending sheep is dark and lonely work; but someone has to do it* — where the first two elements are ordinary enough, and the third is pure genius. 'Are you crazy?’

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

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

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

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

No reader should be asked to witness an author's private grap-plings with his thesaurus. Comic effervescence having been stilled, Heller is left alone with his material — i.e., oft-told yarns from the Holy Book. He churns on through the chaff long after the inspiration has been ground to dust. The
donnée
of
God Knows
must have seemed as lithe and deft as the young David with his sling; the finished book looks more like 'the big bastard' Goliath, brawny, apoplectic, and easily toppled.

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

Observer
1984

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Observer
1983