Reliable Essays (26 page)

So the boys are smoothing the road to the inevitable. Only Sir Run Run had the cheek to say that if a new regime asked him to make a Socialist movie he would run-run for cover. Actually it is hard to see why he should be worried: his movies would be readily adaptable to Marxist–Leninist ideological content. Just make the bad guys the capitalists and the good guys could start kicking again straight away.

The Dragon Lady’s VC-10 screamed out of Kai Tak like a fighter and banked steeply towards India. All RAF transport aircraft have the passenger seats facing backwards, so the British Media, once again confined to the rear of the aircraft, could see where they had been. Laden down with electronic devices and paper kites for the children, they were too tired to sleep. So was the Dragon Lady, but she had no choice. Soon it would be the Conservative Party Conference. It was time for another transformation. The cabin lights went out to denote that she had retired. Her mind stirred in the darkness, putting away China and putting on Britain, forgetting Zhao Ziang and remembering Francis Pym. She was turning herself back into a Party Leader. While she dreamed and the Media drank, I looked back through the window along the Road of Silk, the ancient trade route which brought Marco Polo to Cathay and the Land of Prester John, and which was already old when Chinese lacquer boxes were on sale in the markets of Imperial Rome.

As you might have gathered, I loved China. But Westerners have always loved China. In the last century they drugged her, stripped her naked, tied her hands above her head, and loved her as they pleased. We were lucky that a revolution was all that happened. If we are luckier still, the current bunch of Chinese gerontocrats will be smoothly replaced by a generation of intellectuals who were so appalled at the Cultural Revolution that they are now less frightened by democracy than by despotism. If that happens, the Chinese revolution might manage what the Soviet version so obviously can’t – to civilize itself. Here, as in every other aspect of Chinese life, tradition is a comfort. China knew totalitarianism two hundred years before Christ, when the mad First Emperor of the Ch’in obliterated all memory of the ancient glory of Chou, burned the classical texts and put to death anybody caught reading the
Book of Songs
. But he unified the tribes, and on that strong base rose the majestic dynasty of Han, on whose era the Chinese of today still pride themselves, as will the Chinese of tomorrow.

In Delhi Mrs Thatcher had breakfast with Mrs Gandhi: a hen session. In Bahrain she shook hands with a sheik. At 34,000 feet over Europe she invited the Media forward for a drink. God knows what she thought of us: prominent in the front row of the scrum were at least two journalists who had been blotto since Peking. As for what we thought of her, the answer is not easy. Some had their prejudices confirmed. None thought less of her. I still wouldn’t vote for her, because I favour the Third Way, the Way of Tao, in which the universal principle is made manifest through the interlocking forms of David Steel and Roy Jenkins.

But I had grown to admire her. She is what she is, and not another thing, and on such issues it is better to be crassly straight than subtly devious. Perhaps being haunted by the Falklands, where for want of a nail she was obliged to send many young men to their deaths, in the matter of Hong Kong she seemed determined to be well prepared. The business touches me personally, because on Hong Kong Island, in the war cemetery at Sai Wan Bay, my father has lain since 1945, cut down at the age of thirty-three because the British did not know how to avoid a war in the Pacific. If firm talk and a steely glance can stop that happening again, Mrs Thatcher is ideal casting. She deserves credit for her iron guts, even if you think her brains are made of the same stuff.

While thinking all this I was searching the cabin. He wasn’t there. Finally I wangled an invitation to the flight deck. He wasn’t there either. Powie was not at the controls. She had got away from him at last. As the VC-10 dived towards Heathrow the wings suddenly shone like water gardens. After ten days and a dozen countries it was raining for the first time. The Han dragons could control the rain but ours must have been too tired. She had just enough energy for the last transformation, into the mother of her children. Mr and Mrs Thatcher stepped down to embrace their son Mark, who had driven all the way from town without getting lost once.

October, 1982: previously included in
Flying Visits
, 1984

Postscript

The first part of this two-part Postcard was the biggest single technical trick I ever pulled off as a journalist, not so much in the manner of its writing as in the way I filed the copy. To get it home in time I had to phone it in. There were no mobiles in 1982, and the hotel phones in Beijing went not much further than the front desk. International calls had to be made at the post office, for cash on the nail. From my fellow journalists, in return for sterling, IOUs and hasty promises, I raised a small mountain of Chinese money and spent the lot on a call to London that would have been at least an hour and a half long even if it had been uninterrupted. It was interrupted every fifteen minutes by something going wrong with the system, probably a diesel generator in the basement. To get the connection restored I had repeatedly to rejoin the queue and threaten the nice girl behind the desk. The gleam of her incipient tears is with me still. But the pony express got through, mainly because of the
Observer’
s copy taker at the other end. In those days the copy takers were fine-point grammarians: they all knew how to sort out solecisms, maintain the integrity of your subordinate clauses, and punctuate accurately just from the inflection of your voice, although my copy taker might have been unique in knowing something about Chinese porcelain as well. The whole piece got into the paper without a single misprint. The second part I was able to write at leisure in Hong Kong and on the plane back to London – by hand, in an exercise book, the only item of advanced technology I ever carried. If the modem had existed, and I had known how to work it, the whole job would have been a lot easier, but I don’t think it would have turned out any better. Making those little marks on paper was the heart of the thrill, and still is. The rattle of plastic keys reminds me of a squadron of butterflies failing to fight their way out of a paper bag.

2001

‘She was a fruitcake,’ Tony Curtis once told an interviewer on BBC television, and there can’t be much doubt that she was. Apart from conceding that the camera was desperately in love with her, professional judgements of Marilyn Monroe’s attributes rarely go much further. It would be strange if they did: there’s work to be done, and a girl blessed with equivalent magic might happen along any time – might even not be a fruitcake. Amateur judgements, on the other hand, are free to flourish. Norman Mailer’s new book,
Marilyn
, is just such a one.

Even if its narrative were not so blatantly, and self-admittedly, cobbled together from facts already available in other biographies, the Mailer
Marilyn
would still be an amateur piece of work. Its considerable strength lies in that limitation. As far as talent goes, Marilyn Monroe was so minimally gifted as to be almost unemployable, and anyone who holds to the opinion that she was a great natural comic identifies himself immediately as a dunce. For purposes best known to his creative demon, Mailer planes forward on the myth of her enormous talent like a drunken surfer. Not for the first time, he gets further by going with the flow than he ever could have done by cavilling. Thinking of her as a genius, he can call her drawbacks virtues, and so deal – unimpeded by scepticism – with the vital mystery of her presence.

Mailer’s adoration is as amateurish as an autograph hunter’s. But because of it we are once again, and this time ideally, reminded of his extraordinary receptivity. That the book should be an embarrassing and embarrassed rush-job is somehow suitable. The author being who he is, the book might as well be conceived in the most chaotic possible circumstances. The subject is, after all, one of the best possible focal points for his chaotic view of life. There is nothing detached or calculating about that view. It is hot-eyed, errant, unhinged. Writhing along past a gallery of yummy photographs, the text reads as the loopiest message yet from the Mailer who scared Sonny Listen with thought waves, made the medical breakthrough which identified cancer as the thwarted psyche’s revenge, and first rumbled birth control as the hidden cause of pregnancy. And yet
Marilyn
is one of Mailer’s most interesting things. Easy to punish, it is hard to admire – like its subject. But admire it we must – like its subject. The childishness of the whole project succeeds in emitting a power that temporarily calls adulthood into question: The Big Book of the Mad Girl. Consuming it at a long gulp, the reader ponders over and over again Mailer’s copiously fruitful aptitude for submission. Mailer is right to trust his own foolishness, wherever it leads: even if the resulting analysis of contemporary America impresses us as less diagnostic than symptomatic.

Not solely for the purpose of disarming criticism, Mailer calls his
Marilyn
a biography in novel form. The parent novel, we quickly guess, is
The Deer Park
, and we aren’t 75 pages into this new book before we find Charles Francis Eitel and Elena Esposito being referred to as if they were people living in our minds – which, of course, they are. The permanent party of
The Deer Park
(‘if desires were deeds, the history of the night would end in history’) is still running, and the atom bomb that lit the desert’s rim for Sergius O’Shaugnessy and Lulu Meyers flames just as bright. But by now Sergius is out from under cover: he’s Norman Mailer. And his beloved film star has been given a real name too: Marilyn Monroe. Which doesn’t necessarily make her any the less fictional. By claiming the right to launch vigorous imaginative patrols from a factual base, Mailer gives himself an easy out from the strictures of verisimilitude, especially when the facts are discovered to be contradictory. But Mailer’s fantasizing goes beyond expediency. Maurice Zolotow, poor pained scrivener, can sue Mailer all he likes, but neither he nor the quiescent Fred Lawrence Guiles will ever get his Marilyn back. Mailer’s Marilyn soars above the known data, an apocalyptic love-object no mundane pen-pusher could dream of reaching. Dante and Petrarch barely knew Beatrice and Laura. It didn’t slow them down. Mailer never met Marilyn at all. It gives him the inside track.

Critical fashion would have it that since
The Deer Park
reality has been busy turning itself into a novel. As Philip Roth said it must, the extremism of real events has ended up by leaving the creative imagination looking like an also-ran. A heroine in a 50s novel, Lulu was really a girl of the 40s – she had some measure of control over her life. Mailer now sees that the young Marilyn was the true 50s heroine – she had no control over her life whatsoever. In the declension from Lulu as Mailer then saw her to Marilyn as he sees her now, we can clearly observe what is involved in dispensing with the classical, shaping imagination and submitting one’s talent (well, Mailer’s talent) to the erratic forces of events. Marilyn, says Mailer, was every man’s love affair with America. He chooses to forget now that Sergius was in love with something altogether sharper, just as he chooses to forget that for many men Marilyn in fact represented most of the things that were to be feared about America. Worshipping a doll was an activity that often came into question at the time. Later on, it became a clever critical point to insist that the doll was gifted: she walks, she talks, she plays Anna Christie at the Actors’ Studio. Later still, the doll was canonized. By the time we get to this book, it is as though there had never been any doubt: the sickness of the 50s lay, not in overvaluing Marilyn Monroe, but in undervaluing her.

*

Marilyn, says Mailer, suggested sex might be as easy as ice cream. He chooses to forget that for many men at the time she suggested sex might have about the same nutritional value. The early photographs by André de Dienes – taken before her teeth were fixed but compensating by showing an invigorating flash of above the waistline of her denims – enshrine the essence of her snuggle-pie sexuality, which in the ensuing years was regularized, but never intensified, by successive applications of oomph and class. Adorable, dumb tomato, she was the best of the worst. As the imitators, and imitators of the imitators, were put into the field behind her, she attained the uniqueness of the paradigm, but that was the sum total of her originality as a sex-bomb. Any man in his right mind would have loved to have her. Mailer spends a good deal of the book trying to drum up what mystical significance he can out of that fact, without even once facing the possibility of that fact representing the
limitation
of her sexuality – the criticism of it, and the true centre of her tragedy. Her screen presence, the Factor X she possessed in the same quantity as Garbo, served mainly to potentiate the sweetness. The sweetness of the girl bride, the unwomanly woman, the
femme
absolutely not
fatale
.

Apart from increasing one’s suspicions that the English sentence is being executed in America, such a passage of rhetorical foolery raises the question of whether the person Mailer is trying to fool with it might not conceivably be himself. If ‘magnified mirror of ourselves’ means anything, it must include Mailer. Is Mailer ignorant of culture’s dimensions? The answer, one fears, being not that he is, but that he would like to be – so that he could write more books like
Marilyn
. As Mailer nuzzles up beside the shade of this poor kitten to whom so much happened but who could cause so little to happen, you can hear the purr of sheer abandon. He himself would like very much to be the man without values, expending his interpretative powers on whatever the world declared to be important. Exceptional people, Mailer says (these words are almost exactly his, only the grammar having been altered, to unveil the epigram), have a way of living with opposites in themselves that can be called schizophrenia only when it fails. The opposite in Mailer is the hick who actually falls for all that guff about screen queens, voodoo prize fighters, and wonder-boy presidents. But his way of living with it hasn’t yet quite failed. And somehow, it must be admitted, he seems to get further, see deeper, than those writers who haven’t got it to live with.