Free The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America by Martin Amis

brio. Diana Trilling's essays and articles were never dull, but here she is revealed as a writer with an infallible eye for the interesting. And now it seems that we can look forward to an extended period of productivity — facilitated, perhaps, by the condition of widowhood. 'When Lionel was alive, we tended to do what he wanted to do. Now there's nothing else to do but work.' Literary widowhood often means a long spell of literary executorship, and Mrs Trilling has duly completed her editing of the twelve-volume Uniform Edition of the Works of Lionel Trilling. She is now engaged on a book about her early life. It is possible, too, that she has in some sense emerged from her husband s shadow, and feels a new freedom and confidence.
    'Growing old is hard. Growing old alone is harder,' she said. 'You become more sensitive with your friends. You wonder whether you are being asked out because of pity. There is an increased dependence on routine. I won't leave the bed unmade in the morning. I won't stand by the refrigerator and eat a boiled egg. I want to, but I don't.' She talks of her husband without self-drama but with palpable regret. 'I feel the usual things ... I wish now that I had worshipped him a bit more.’
    The apartment in Claremont Avenue is as elegant and well-preserved as its owner. Everywhere there are books, framed photographs, mementoes. 'The individual is best defined by his social geography,' wrote Diana Trilling in We Must March My Darlings (1977). Lionel Trilling wrote about society but normally only in relation to literature, or culture: he was also a critic with certain bold mytholo-gising tendencies, with a love for the exciting idea, the daring construct. 'Yes,' said Diana Trilling, with some self-deprecation, 'I was always the one more interested in the social side, in the here and now.' 'But there aren't many people like you,' I said cautiously. 'You're a clear thinker.' 'That's right. Too clear, perhaps,' said Mrs Trilling.
    Observer 1982

Mailer: The Avenger and the Bitch
    The year was 1955. At thirty-two, Norman Mailer was the celebrated and reviled author of three novels, and a notorious brawler, sage and drunk. By his own admission, he was at this point arrogant, terrified, greedy, spoilt — and galvanised on marijuana.

    q. Do you feel that age will mould you into a high-priced please-the-public author?
    A. I doubt it, but I also know that exhaustion of the will can come to anyone.

    It would be tempting, here in 1981, to pounce on the young Mailer's stoned foreboding. His latest money-spinner, Of Women and Their Elegance, has taken a pummelling from the American press and is due for a torrid time of it over here. With its terrible title (that 'OP somehow guaranteeing the vulgarity of the enterprise), its irrelevant photographs and coffee-table packaging, the volume seems to boast its own vulnerability to attack. As you flap through its slippery pages, you find that it is Mailer's second book about Marilyn Monroe, and his third book running about the recently dead and their sex lives (its immediate predecessor was The Executioner's Song, the story of the murderer Gary Gilmore, who demanded death by firing squad in 1977). What happened to the man who has said — loud and often — that he hoped 'to dare a new art of the brave'? Clearly it is time for some revision of Mailer's American dream.
    Now, at fifty-seven, Mailer has accumulated six wives and eight (or maybe nine) children. He is obliged to earn over $400,000 a year to stay abreast of alimony and tuition fees. Last year his summer house was confiscated by the taxmen. He has received, and spent, a $635,000 advance on an unwritten novel. And he is still half a million dollars in debt.
    In his three-storey brownstone apartment in Brooklyn Heights, overlooking New York Harbor and the Dunhill lighters of Manhattan, Mailer perched on a stiff-backed chair, and told me to sit on the old velvet sofa. 'I can "t sit on a soft chair. I writhe around