He heard me out with a few ‘Mm-hms’ and said: ‘American literary careers are very short. I had very low expectations. I always thought, if I could ever get something down about Dresden, that would be it. After Slaughterhouse-Five I’d already done much more than I ever expected to do with my life. Now, since I don’t have to do anything any more, I’ve gotten more personal, freer to be idiosyncratic. It’s like the history of jazz: musicians reach the point where they play the goddamn things with the mouthpiece upside down and stuff the tube with toilet paper and fuck around and make all the crazy sounds they can.’
An honest and accurate answer. I wondered out loud whether a sense of futility had anything to do with it, with the rejection of melody, phrasing, structure, control, with the rejection of art.
‘There was Dresden,’ said Vonnegut, ‘a beautiful city full of museums and zoos — man at his greatest. And when we came up, the city was gone … The raid didn’t shorten the war by half a second, didn’t weaken a German defence or attack anywhere, didn’t free a single person from a death camp. Only one person benefited.’
‘And who was that?’
‘Me. I got several dollars for each person killed. Imagine.’
Observer 1983
Gloria Steinem and the Feminist Utopia
Gloria Steinem is the most eloquent and persuasive feminist in America. She is also the most reassuring — i.e. the least frightening, from a male point of view. There are two clear reasons for this. Here is one reason:
So what would happen if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate and women could not? … Men would brag about how long and how much — Street guys would invent slang (‘He’s a three-pad man’) and ‘give fives’ on the corner with some exchange like, ‘Man, you lookin’ good!’ ‘Yeah, man, I’m on the rag!’
The humour is not only humour (rare enough in these parts): its satirical accuracy is enlivened by affection. The second reason for her wide appeal can be glimpsed in the photograph on the back cover. (She looks nice, and friendly, and feminine.) In the sort of Utopia which Gloria Steinem seriously envisages, neither of these considerations would carry much weight. But we aren’t there yet.
I sat waiting for Ms Steinem in the midtown offices of Ms., the magazine that she co-founded in 1972.. Launched on a shoestring and a wave of female dedication, Ms. now has a circulation of 450,000, financing the Ms. Foundation which, in turn, acts as a clearing-house for feminist issues (not rape hotlines and conflict-resolution meetings so much as monetary aid for various programmes and projects). The magazine hires about fifty people, three of whom are men. Ms Steinem’s assistant, Ms Hornaday, brought me some coffee, and we chatted away. The atmosphere is purposeful, high-morale, sisterly. Pleasant though I found it, I was also aware of my otherness, my testosterone, among all this female calm.
Two blocks north, Forty-Second Street was crackling through its daily grind of sin and stupor, of go-go, triple-X and hard core. Forty-Second Street wouldn’t last forty seconds in Ms Steinem’s Utopia. Pornography is the pressing feminist topic of 1984 and I had been reading up on the protest literature, finding much good sense and justified outrage — also the faint glare of paranoia. ‘Men love death — In male culture, slow murder is the heart of Eros’ — Andrea Dworkin, and her murderous high-style. Even the commonsensical Ms Steinem believes that pornography is the ‘propaganda’ of ‘anti-woman warfare’, sensing conspiracy rather than mere weakness and chaotic venality. In the hot-and-cold hostilities between the sexes, there is still plenty of paranoia on either side.
Ms Steinem emerged from her conference, and we all got ready to leave. Our destination was Suffolk County Community College in Long Island, where Gloria would address the students — the kind of trip she makes once or twice a week. Photographs had not prepared me for Ms Steinem’s height and slenderness; her face, too, seemed unexpectedly shrewd and angular beneath the broad, rimless glasses (which she seldom removes). The long hair is expertly layered, the long fingers expertly manicured. Fifty this year, Ms Steinem is unashamedly glamorous: it is a pampered look, a Park Avenue look. Out on the street, a chauffeur-driven limousine mysteriously appeared, and in we climbed.