Reading for My Life Read online

  I’m inclined to believe him. I’m not a buff anymore; the assassination hurt my head. Maybe there was a second gunman on the grassy knoll. Maybe Ruby owed money and a favor to the Mob. Certainly the shadow world is full of rogues. We read about the novels they have written every day in the funny papers.

  DeLillo, though, is an agnostic about reality itself. With its command of the facts and the fantasies, its slide-rule convergence, its cantatas and its hyperspace, Libra is plausible. But it’s also art, the peculiar art he’s been perfecting since the antihero of Americana abandoned the Vietnam War on television in New York for another war in the American interior. Since, in End Zone, football became a metaphor for Armageddon. Since, in Great Jones Street, a grotesque rock ’n’ roll amalgam of Jagger and Dylan hid out in the East Village from the thought police and from the terror he had himself sown in “the erotic dreams of the republic.” Since, in Ratner’s Star, the superstitions of astrophysics were deployed in a galaxy of time running out and space exploding. In Players, terrorists want to blow up the Stock Exchange, with some deracinated Yuppie help. In Running Dog, secret agents, pornographers, Buddhists, and Hitler all end up in Dallas. In The Names, a “risk analyst” for a company insuring multinational corporations against accidents of history goes to Athens, Ankara, and Beirut, to find out that he really works for the CIA, in the service of “new kinds of death.” In White Noise, Nazis make a comeback in middleamerica in the cognitive dissonance at the heart of the consumer culture, where our universities are indistinguishable from our shopping malls, and we lie to ourselves in euphemisms on the TV set and in our dreams, and one of the ex-wives of a professor of Hitler Studies is a part-time spook: “She reviewed fiction for the CIA, mainly long serious novels with coded structures.”

  At the end of these DeLillo novels, there was nothing left but relative densities of language. He was limbering up for the big dread.

  With the White Knight gone, there’s no coherence, no community, no faith, no accountability, merely hum. In a faithless culture, death is the ultimate kick. In a random cosmos (those accidental stars, that coincidental static), we need a new black magic, “a theology of secrets.” Against anarchism, nihilism, and terrorism, why not an occult of the intelligence agency, the latest in Gnostic heresies? Against alienation: paranoia. Against meaninglessness: conspiracy. It’s all modernist mirrors: disinformation and counterintelligence. Beckett, Borges, and Nabokov; Conrad, Kafka, and The Wasteland… poor Fyodor: crime without punishment.

  Oswald, of course, was the Underground Man. The deepest of covers is lunacy.

  In Asia and the Middle East, in Latin America and in Dallas, They are writing our novel, our metafiction, and they are insane.

  AIDS Is Everywhere

  ASK GAYS, OF course, about AIDS coverage in the mainstream media, and they are outraged. Where are stories about the on-again-off-again federal funding of medical research depending on how scared the straights are this week? Or about an individual’s right to privacy versus the profit motive of the insurance companies? Or about alternative medications, macrobiotic diets, bureaucratic hostility, exile in Mexico, the grotesque overpricing of AZT, and the ethics of placebo testing of people who’ve been sentenced to death? But nobody listens to victims; victims are prejudiced.

  Instead, like Yang and Yin, or Punch and Judy, or Alphonse and Gaston, we get Newsweek and Cosmopolitan. Cosmo told us in January: “There is almost no danger of contracting AIDS through ordinary sexual intercourse.” Newsweek, that bully pulpit for Masters and Johnson, begged to differ in a March 21 cover story: “AIDS is breaking out. The AIDS virus is now running rampant in the heterosexual community.”

  These are evil buffooneries, like the People cover story, also in March, on “AIDS and the Single Woman,” with photos of twenty-one women, three black and one Hispanic, as if it didn’t matter that female AIDS victims are 70 percent black and Hispanic. Perhaps People could do a similar job on Ethiopia, flying in a Concorde full of Parisian models to illustrate “Famine and Miss Goodbar.”

  But the media are how we think out loud about our plague years, and the cognitive dissonance is killing us. What Cosmo published was a sort of Pamper: protective packaging for the sore-at-heart who’re straight, white, and middle class. “Penile penetration of a well-lubricated vagina” is still safe, so long as you stick to the missionary position, at least in places where Cosmo’s likely to be read. While heterosexuals in Africa do have an AIDS problem, Cosmo explains it’s because “many men in Africa take their women in a brutal way….”

  This is anthropological and racist nonsense, but typical of a Cosmo Yuppie worldview, the view from the Cloud Club of the Chrysler Building or the Grill Room of the Four Seasons or the bold type in Liz Smith’s gossip column, from which you can’t see either Africa or America’s own Third World, right here in the very city where Helen Gurley Brown discovered sex. If AIDS in California is 91 percent a gay disease, and in Texas 96 percent, in New York City it’s the leading cause of death for women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four. Twenty-six percent of them contracted the virus from infected men, not infected needles. The number of children with AIDS increased 50 percent in the past year. Ninety percent of these AIDS children are black or Latino. If Cosmo saw them, Cosmo would have to think about the ghetto.

  After such fiddling, maybe Rome deserves to burn. And Newsweek will be there, pouring on oil. (“Not since Hitler’s diaries…” said one incredulous staffer at the magazine.) According to Masters, Johnson, and Kolodny in Newsweek, 3 million Americans are AIDS-infected, which is double what we’re told by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control; and 200,000 of these victims are non-drug-using heterosexuals, seven times the CDC estimate. AIDS is everywhere—in the bedroom, the brothel, the blood bank, not to mention French-kissing and maybe even dental floss.

  The M&J survey sample of 800 drug-free heteros about which Newsweek huffed and puffed and blew its own horn was, of course, preposterous— a self-selected batch of volunteers, arbitrarily confined to four cities, with no follow-up interviews of HIV-positives, and no accounting for the tendency of people to lie about high-risk hanky-panky. Compared to the meticulous testing of millions of blood bank donors and military personnel, M&J might as well have spent a morning polling the first 800 names in the Gurley Brown Rolodex. All this was pointed out to devastating effect by Michael Fumento, an AIDS analyst for the feds, in the New Republic on April 4.

  And what are we to make of a Wall Street Journal report that Masters and Johnson, before mongering these fears, had been refused the five-hundred-thousand dollars they asked for from the American Foundation for AIDS Research to develop an anti-AIDS spermicidal jelly? Such information has nowhere to go except into a deep depression. A reader of “Dear Abby” writes of an ad in the mail for “a disposable, specially treated paper towelette that will destroy the AIDS virus [on] public toilet seats, telephones, restaurant tables, silverware, and doorknobs.” My own Board of Education passes out fifty thousand pairs of rubber gloves to protect teachers from their students. Local cops wore these gloves to break up a demonstration of gays at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. (The gays hooted: “Your gloves don’t match your boots!”) Newsweek must have sold a lot of copies.

  Maybe we’d prefer not hearing anything more at all about AIDS. Retina-eating cytomegalovirus and lung-choking Pneumocystis carinii and organ-rotting Kaposi’s sarcoma: yucky. Hemophilia, anal abrasions, genital herpes, trichomoniasis, and nonoxynol-9: gross. Any causal relationship between poverty, prostitution, drugs, and disease ought not to be contemplated except by bleeding hearts whose secret mantra is the “s”-word: socialism! That we are as a nation ghettoized by race and sexual preference is an unacceptable injury to the self-esteem. (Isn’t it against an amendment, or something?) No wonder we’re hysterical, from denial or paranoia, depending on the magazine that’s messing with our minds.

  Unfortunately, what we think we know about AIDS will determine social policies that touch us everywhere we liv
e—the government and public health; medicine and the Hippocratic oath; civil liberties and mandatory testing; immigration; the Church and gays, the bishops and condoms; network TV and commercials for contraceptives; how we collect blood, administer prisons, license marriages, apply for insurance, educate our children, and look into our mirror. Fear and loathing have already made a comeback in a country that was kinky to begin with about its private parts.

  (Across the Atlantic, fear of AIDS, hatred of gays, and the usual Thatcherite contempt for civil liberties have metastasized into Clause 28 of the Local Government Bill, passed by both Houses of Parliament, forbidding the use of public funds in any way to “promote homosexuality.” So much, then, for seeing a play like Breaking the Code in a state-subsidized theater, or borrowing a book by Jean Genet from the village library, or looking at David Hockney at the Tate.)

  And what we think we know is determined entirely by the information environment, a killer buzz of the Cosmos and the Newsweeks. It’s as if they’re screaming at us from transistors in the cavities of our teeth, and they don’t care if they’re telling the truth or not. We haven’t the tuners and amplifiers to steer through this static, no historical bifocals for a close reading of the facts, no previous experience nor any guru to help us feel our way. As perhaps never before, we are dependent on the conscienceless, retina-eating media for all the weather in our heads, while friends die. What this amounts to is a Kaposi’s sarcoma of the epistemology: a shameful unknowingness, a crime.

  On the Beat at Ms.

  WHEN THE MINERAL Dukakis and the vegetable Bush are nominated in Atlanta and New Orleans, I won’t be there. I haven’t been to a political convention since Chicago, 1968, which spoiled me forever for jihads and the circus. After Wagner’s Ring, who needs Gilbert and Sullivan? But there will be lots of other people looking on in 1988 who weren’t invited twenty years ago, and that’s terrific.

  In Chicago in 1968 I was half of a two-person team from the New Statesman. My job was to report from the slaughterhouse floor. I’d sleep each night with the California delegation in the LaSalle Hotel. I’d wake each dawn to a phone call from a frantic editor who was positive—in London!—that Teddy Camelot was closing fast. I’d lurch each afternoon by chartered bus through barbed-wire checkpoints to a security frisk at the International Amphitheater, after which I’d find the press gallery already preempted by Mayor Daley’s municipal goons. That was the Old Politics.

  The New Politics was on the streets, where the New Statesman sent Nora Sayre. On the streets were 12,000 paranoid Chicago cops, 6,000 National Guardsmen, 1,000 agents of the FBI, and another 7,000 federal troops, including units of the 101st Airborne. Against such law and order agitated fewer than 4,000 dissidents, one in six an undercover Fed. Sayre and I would rendezvous to telex at the Hilton, with tear gas in our eyes. My convention was merely literary, as in Marat/Sade: The Persecution and Assassination of the Democratic Party as performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Chicago. Sayre—down there in the middle of the magic and the blood, the cop paranoia, the Yippie freak-out, and the Castroite delusional systems of the New Left Pugachevs—got all the history.

  Her report of it was brilliant. It was also (almost) singular. Except for Sayre, and Mary McGrory from the Washington Star, and Jill Krementz taking combat photographs, women didn’t report Chicago. Without wanting to, I saw Norman Mailer for Harper’s, Brock Brower for Life, Jean Genet and William Burroughs for Esquire, and Teddy White for God. The New York Times sent Harrison Salisbury, Tony Lukas, and Tom Wicker. The Washington Post sent Nick von Hoffman. Wilfrid Sheed, Garry Wills, and Terry Southern scribbled madly. Dan Rather and Mike Wallace were roughed up on the convention floor, and John Chancellor was arrested, and Walter Cronkite told the nation, “I want to pack my bags and get out of this city.”

  But it seems not to have occurred to a single important editor to solicit the opinion of a single female writer. The, ah, women’s magazines ignored the show. Ms. didn’t exist. Gloria Steinem was in Chicago, but working for McGovern. Betty Friedan was likewise there, but so was Ann Landers, neither on assignment. Elinor Langer was on the streets, but wouldn’t write about it until 1973 in Working Papers. Who might have been asked?

  Well, in 1968, Joan Didion had already written about the Black Panthers; Francine du Plessix Gray, about the Catholic Left; and Elizabeth Hardwick, about the march on Selma and the murder of Martin Luther King. Susan Sontag had already been to Vietnam, and so had Mary McCarthy. If McCarthy, why not Lillian Hellman? And if Hellman, why not Diana Trilling? Or Grace Paley, a veteran peace groupie? For some old-fashioned radical politics, Jessica Mitford would have been fun, with Ayn Rand for a reactionary rebuttal. M.F.K. Fisher was already an expert on Nixon’s Whittier, and Pauline Kael had trafficked with Trotskyites in Berkeley, and Joyce Carol Oates was writing a novel about race riots in Detroit, and if any of this seems farfetched, ask yourself what Jean Genet was doing in Chicago?

  It would have been easy, it didn’t happen, but never again. The left in 1968, in spite of Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, was as male chauvinist as the rest of the nation. (See Stokely Carmichael’s infamous diktat, “The only position for women in the Movement is prone.”) But times changed with the Redstockings Manifesto and Marge Piercy’s “The Grand Coolie Damn” in 1969, and Robin Morgan’s “Goodbye to All That” in a feminized Rat in 1970, after which came Ms.

  In Atlanta and New Orleans, you’ll see Ellen Goodman for the Boston Globe and Molly Ivins for the Dallas Times Herald, as well as Sayre for Grand Street and Jane O’Reilly for Spy. For the New York Times expect Felicity Barringer, Maureen Dowd, Julie Johnson, Judith Miller, Joyce Purnick, Robin Toner, and, of course, their national editor, Soma Golden. CBS is sending Betsy Aaron, Diane Sawyer, Susan Spencer, Lesley Stahl, and Kathleen Sullivan. For ABC, watch for Cokie Roberts; for CNN, Mary Alice Williams…. We ought, for once, to be pleased with ourselves.

  Nan Robertson’s Getting Better

  JOHN CHEEVER SOBERED up in time to write one last short novel, Oh What a Lovely Paradise It Seems, in which the protagonist finds himself in a parish-house:

  …one of those places where the rummage sale would be held and the nativity play would be performed. He looked into the faces of forty men and women who were listening to a speaker at a podium. He was at once struck by his incompetence at judging the gathering. Not even in times of war, with which he was familiar, not even in the evacuation of burning cities had he seen so mixed a gathering. It was a group, he thought, in which there was nowhere the force of selection.

  John Berryman didn’t make it, killing himself before finishing Recovery, his novel of alcoholism. Saul Bellow remembers forcing a window at Berryman’s house to find him facedown, rigid, diagonal on a double bed. “These efforts are wasted,” said the poet; “We are unregenerate.” But Bellow also remembers the poem “Surprise Me,” in which the poet prayed for the “blessing gratuitous… on some ordinary day.”

  The blessing gratuitous on some ordinary day is what 2 million members of Alcoholics Anonymous seek in the parish-house or rectory, between rummage sales, in an underground network of church basements like the caves of the early Christians, in hospitals, union halls, bookshops, health clubs, high school cafeterias, the YMCA, the Friends Meeting House, a synagogue, the American Legion and the McGraw-Hill Building and the Port Authority. They’ve been selected by their disease. Their passion is sobriety. Two-thirds of them survive, and not by magic.

  Nan Robertson, a veteran New York Times reporter, is herself a recovering alcoholic. She hit bottom after the death of a cherished husband. With AA’s support she not only survived a nearly fatal attack of toxic shock syndrome, but wrote a magazine account of it that won her a Pulitzer Prize. She cheerfully admits she could not have done so alone. Getting Better is written, splendidly, in gratitude. Its lifesaving business is to celebrate and “demystify” her weave of steadfast friends.

  Not a weird Druidic cult, nor penal colony, lynching bee, pop-psych seminar,
convention of Jesus freaks, or fallout shelter for twitchy bums on their way to cirrhotic seizure, AA is everybody you’ve ever met, trying in small groups to help each other through the night. To qualify for membership, all you have to do is to want to stop drinking. In this amazing democracy, with more than its fair share of awful coffee and blue cigarette smoke, people tell stories. These many stories—of joblessness and paranoia, of smashed automobiles and nights in jail, of wife-beating and child abuse, of hallucinations and attempted suicide, of waste and pain and disconnection and the end of love—are really one: of the lost child in a black forest of bad chemicals.

  AA began with an exchange of stories, in Akron, Ohio, in May 1935, between two drunks on whom the medical profession and the clergy had given up. Dr. Bob Smith, a local surgeon, and Bill Wilson, a visiting stock market “securities investigator,” told each other the worst about themselves. Ever since, it’s been an AA slogan that “you are only as sick as your secrets.” AA slogans, like “One Day at a Time,” “Keep It Simple, Stupid” and “It Works If You Work It,” always strike the stranger as being, if not downright loony, at least a lot of baby talk. So, too, do the “12 Steps” seem to strangers as comically mystifying as “The Emerald Table” of the alchemist Hermes Trismegistus. We’re too smart at first to grasp the practicality of the slogans, and to appreciate the terrifying simplicity of the Steps: be honest; change yourself; help others.) After these Founding Fathers were done with the First Meeting, they went into the world to talk to others like them, often dragging them out of hospital beds to do so.

  Of the two, Bill W. is the more appealing, a Christmas tree of gaudy flaws. He’d go on sober to partake of spiritualism, niacin by megadose, Bishop Sheen, and LSD; to enjoy too much his crumbs at the tables of the Rockefellers; to drop names and, compulsively, to womanize. He was never sure himself whether his famous “conversion experience” was the sight of God in a blaze of “indescribably white light” or merely a “hot flash” of toxic psychosis. He lingered a decade too long as leader of an organization opposed on principle to any sort of hierarch, but when he died, in 1971, AA’d grown from two men in Akron to 475,000 men and women in eighty-nine countries.