The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America by Martin Amis Read Free Book Online

'to sign my copy of your book?’
    'Oh, certainly,' he said warmly. Rousing himself, Capote sat up in bed and began to fuss with his pen. He opened Music for Chameleons, and stared for several seconds at its blank first page. To my alarm, I realised that he had forgotten my name — if indeed he had ever known it. He sniffed, and looked up cautiously.
    'The name's Tony, isn't it?' he croaked.
    'No. Martin,' I said, trying to make Martin sound quite like Tony.
    'Oh, Martin. Yes, of course.' He wrote on the blank page for a very long time.
    Ten minutes later I stood smoking a cigarette on fiery First Avenue. I got the book out of my bag and turned to the first page, where it said, in an exemplarily rickety hand:

    for Martin
    I tried!
    and you were so patient Truman Capote
    198
    That '198' wasn't his apartment number: it was a shot at the date. I walked on, hoping that little Truman would get well soon.
    * * *
    Postscript Truman never did. He died six years later, to the month. I liked him, and with hindsight I now find my bedside manner somewhat callous — but there it is. Appropriately doctored, the piece was used elsewhere as an obituary. However, I should like to add, in belated tribute, a brief review of the posthumous Conversations with Capote 'by' Lawrence Grobel, which follows.
    Two unrelated points. Why do American writers tend to hate each other — hatreds which often extend to litigation (Vidal v. Capote; Lillian Hellman v. Mary McCarthy, an especially vicious attempt at financial persecution)? Perhaps one of the answers relates, as so much relates, to the size of America. In England writers mix pretty well: they have a generally middle-class, generally liberal unanimity. In America writers are naturally far flung (Alabama, Washington, Chicago, New England); to come together, they have to traverse great distances; it isn't surprising, when they meet, that they seem so strange to one another.
    The second point concerns In Cold Blood and the business of the 'non-fiction fiction*. In the Conversations, while incidentally rubbishing Mailer's The Executioner's Song, Capote repeats his contention that the non-fiction fiction is, or can be, at least as 'imaginative' as the non non-fiction fiction: i.e., the novel. Now it is true that Capote (and Mailer) expends a good deal of imagination and artistry in the non-fiction form. What is missing, though, is moral imagination, moral artistry. The facts cannot be arranged to give them moral point. When the reading experience is over, you are left, simply, with murder — and with the human messiness and futility that attends all death.
    * * *
    Jackie Kennedy? 'I hate her.' John Updike? 'I hate him.' Jane Fonda: 'ucch, she's a throw-up number.' Joyce Carol Oates: 'she's the most loathsome creature in America. She's so... oooogh!' As for Georgia O'Keeffe, 'I wouldn't pay twenty-five cents to spit on a painting [of hers]. And I think she's a horrible person, too.' While gentle, twinkly old Robert Frost is 'an evil, selfish bastard, an egomaniacal, double-crossing sadist*. In such a galère, literary comrades are doing pretty well if they are merely 'ghastly' (Thomas Pynchon), 'unreadable’
    (Bernard Malamud), 'boring' and 'fraudulent' (Donald Barthelme), or 'unbelievably bad' (Gore Vidal).
    Truman Capote lived the life of the American novelist in condensed and accelerated form. By the age of eight he was a writer, by the age of twelve he was a drunk, by the age of sixteen he was a celebrity, by the age of forty he was a multimillionaire, and by the .age of fifty-nine he was dead. All the excess, solipsism, enmity, paranoia and ambition of American letters was crammed into those years — and, glancingly, into these pages. One would expect Conversations with Capote to provide some scandalous entertainment; but the book, semi-accidentally, goes one further and gives us an endearing portrait of the man.
    Called 'the Interviewer's Interviewer' by Playboy magazine (his frequent