What followed was three years of silence. It was an all very relative silence, though, as he seemed to be seldom out of the newspapers, partying at Annabel’s, holidaying in Elton John’s Riviera villa with his newest boyfriend in tow (to his great credit, he never sought to conceal his homosexuality: the famous first sentence of Dark Jade was the brave and noble ‘I have always pitied any man who wasn’t gay’), firing off regular broadsides in the Guardian at the increasingly repressive policies of the Blair government. Then, when his peers were just beginning to forget that there had once been more to him than the playboy polemicist, there appeared – precisely, out of the blue – the book that was to transform his life and propel it to its premature and horrible end, Out of a Clear Blue Sky.
So much has been written about that book, even the most motivated of readers may well believe that this is one stepping-stone which can be leapt over. Yet I repeat: to comprehend what followed, and what follows in this memoir, we really must immerse ourselves twice in the same river.
The first surprise (of so many!) of Out of a Clear Blue Sky was that it wasn’t a novel at all but a loosely organised collection of essays, rambling, discursive and more than somewhat repetitious. The next surprise, considering its title and, in retrospect, its unfortunate jacket illustration – the much-reproduced snapshot of the second hijacked aircraft, United Airlines Flight 175, about to smash into the World Trade Center like a motor-powered model plane remote-controlled by a mischief-making brat – was that only one essay in the book, the last, dealt directly with the September 11 atrocity. And the third, for which his hitherto hazy left-leaning politics had not prepared us, was the sheer ferocity of his anti-Americanism, not only George Bush’s America but America tout court. ‘Once a millennial dream of generosity, tolerance and energy,’ he wrote, ‘Whitman’s rich and multifarious “continent of glories”, rugged, rowdy, aphrodisiac, wild, elastic and irresistible, it has become a poisonous carnival of bottomless bathos populated by millions of nice, ordinary, gee-shucks freaks and crackpots.’ Oddly, the one popular American artefact he owned to having a lingering fondness for was Coca-Cola, drinking three or four bottles of the stuff – never cans – every day of his life.
Since even I would find it tedious reiterating the book’s contents in their entirety, I shall limit myself here to reminding the reader of a few of its polemical high spots.
The opening essay, on popular culture, was drolly headlined ‘Say Goodnight, Gracie’, the regular envoi of the old Burns and Allen TV show.§ Slavorigin had always been a passionate cinéphile and had, in his journalism, expressed admiration for the work of Welles, Kazan, Kubrick and kindred neo-baroque American filmmakers.¶ In ‘Say Goodnight, Gracie’, by contrast, he flayed the entire mainstream Hollywood cinema as it is currently constituted, a ‘terminally infantilist’ cinema whose products he likened to greasy Big Macs – ‘and the so-called “indies” are Little Macs leavened with a few limp lettuce leaves’. Well, why not, that’s fair comment, and there are probably many of us ready to meet him halfway. But consider this: ‘If you have ever had the chance to watch those German films which were made during World War II by directors of real reputation – G. W. Pabst’s Paracelsus, to take a single example – you will know how hard it is to pass judgment on their strictly cinematic qualities, less on account of the embodied element, restrained but pervasive, of propaganda than because we cannot help reminding ourselves that the actors who appear in them were themselves Nazis, or else Nazi fellow-travellers, or else moral morons prepared, for the sole furtherance of their careers, to collaborate with the unspeakable. So it is today with the contemporary American cinema. How is one to evaluate a new film when all one sees on the screen, leering obscenely into the auditorium, are the neo-Nazoid faces of Hollywood’s current crop of performers, faces as putrid as faeces [oh, come on!], corroded by their very Americanness as an alcoholic’s by a lifetime’s intake of gin?’ Or this, of one cultish director in particular, whom I dare not name, since Slavorigin himself, had he not later had more parlous tribulations to contend with, would without doubt have been hauled into court on a charge of defamation of character: ‘X is an asshole and his movies resemble what oozes from assholes. They leave skid marks on the screen.’
The next essay, ‘The Statistics of American Stupidity’, was even more of a shocker. In it Slavorigin presented his readers with a childish if seductive proof that a statistical majority of Americans must indeed be as stupid as many non-Americans have always believed them to be.
‘The first thing we should note,’ he argued, ‘is that in 2004 George Bush won his second Presidential election (against Senator John Kerry) by approximately 50.7% to 49.3% of all votes cast. Let us simplify these percentages by rounding them out to 50/50%, from which it follows, if we observe equally that only 60% of the eligible electorate cast a vote, that 30% of the country’s adult population voted for Bush. If, then, we agree, as surely we do, that one definition of stupidity is satisfaction at the prospect of George Bush regaining the White House despite his uniquely calamitous first term of office, then we can already state without fear of contradiction that 30% of Americans are stupid. Now let us consider that 40% of the population which did not trouble to vote in the 2004 election and assume, for the sake of the argument, the likelihood of their being divided equally for and against Bush. Clearly, by the same token, the 20% of non-voters who would have voted for him are also stupid – as are, however, the other 20% who, notwithstanding the overwhelmingly damning evidence of that first term, were too dopey or too dozy to assist in driving the idiot of the global village out of office. 30% plus 20% plus 20% equals 70%. More Americans are stupid than not. QED.’ (Is the percentage any the less among Brits? I seriously doubt it.)
In the third essay, ‘Buddy, Can You Spare a Paradigm?’, he developed this theme of American stupidity, along with ‘its physically externalised symptom and symbol, ballooning American obesity’, by linking it to what he termed the country’s ‘creeping mediaevalisation’ in matters of religion and patriotism, two terms which, for so fundamentalist a national mindset, had become ‘virtual synonyms’. Let me dip in at random: ‘Were Rip Van Winkle to awaken today after a century of slumber, or even only a decade, he would be amazed to discover that the United States had meanwhile known an intellectual regression inversely commensurate with its technological progress.’ And: ‘For Americans the Star-Spangled Banner is not merely the national flag, it is the True Cross.’ And: ‘For the Bush administration the Geneva Conventions are just that, a set of conventions.’ And: ‘Yes, admittedly, they [the American people] are warm, friendly, polite, hospitable to strangers and kind to animals, none of which, alas, prevents most of them from being also just plain dumb.’
Since the next six essays were written in the same scattershot vein, the reader will appreciate my letting them pass without extended editorial comment. But to give you the gist of it: Slavorigin systematically excoriated the pernicious despotism of American foreign policy; the lawlessness of the political-military establishment, particularly in relation to its endeavours, by the illegal erasure of damning videotapes, to cover up the pet CIA technique of ‘waterboarding’ political prisoners; the sweeping aside of numberless international treaties; the ineradicable rottenness of the Republican majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives as well as the equally ineradicable pusillanimity of the Democratic opposition; the kangaroo court of Guantánamo Bay and swinish hazing rituals of Abu Ghraib; the widespread wiretapping of telephones and interception of email messages; the neo-terroristic methodology of the entertainment industry (‘in the America of the twenty-first century,’ he wrote in one of the book’s more reckless passages, ‘pleasure has come to serve the same function as terror in Nazi Germany’, before going on to describe Disneyland as ‘that Belsen of fun’); the latent chauvinism of the nation’s intellectual elite as reflected in the many book, play and film titles to which the adjective ‘American’ is appended as a talismanic all-purpose prefix (American Gigolo, American Psycho, Harold Bloom’s ‘classic’ Emerson and the Making of the American Mind – ‘Who the Christ cares! Explain Emerson to us, yes please, Bloom, but spare us your ponderous burblings on the American Mind, whatever that is’); the religion of business and the business of religion (‘As P. T. Barnum might have said, there’s one born-again every minute’); the ubiquity of lawyers and liars; and so much more besides.