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 Clöe 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 Metfíeld, 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.
British critics tend to regard the American predilection for Big Novels as a vulgar neurosis — like the American predilection for big cars or big hamburgers. Oh God, we think: here comes another sweating, free-dreaming maniac with another thousand-pager; here comes another Big Mac. First, Dos Passos produced the Great American Novel; now they all want one. Yet in a sense every ambitious American novelist is genuinely trying to write a novel called USA. Perhaps this isn’t just a foible; perhaps it is an inescapable response to America – twentieth-century America, racially mixed and mobile, twenty-four hour, endless, extreme, superabundantly various. American novels are big all right, but partly because America is big too.
You need plenty of nerve, ink and energy to do justice to the place, and no one has made greater efforts than Saul Bellow. His latest novel, The Dean’s December, has caused some puzzlement in its country of origin, and one can see why. Far more sombre and less exuberant than its major predecessors, it has every appearance of being an ‘engaged’ novel, a mature novel, a statement, a warning; Bellow himself has gone on record, perhaps incautiously, as stressing the difficulty people will have in ‘shrugging this one off. In 1976 Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, praised by the Swedes ‘for human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture’. T.S. Eliot said that the Nobel was like an invitation to one’s own funeral: no beneficiary of the prize had ever gone on to write anything good, ft may be coincidence (as opposed to an onset of Delphic delusion), but Bellow’s first post-Nobel novel transmits all the strenuousness of a juggernaut changing gear. The vision has widened but also become narrower; most noticeably, the fluid musicality of Bellow’s epics — the laughter, the didactic generosity, the beguiling switches of register — has disciplined itself, in the interests of literary form. This, it seems to me, is what Late Bellow is going to be like. It is all very interesting.