In my struggle to assimilate Donald Trump – and as you see The Art of the Deal (1987), Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life (2007), and Crippled America (his campaign manifesto, released last November) are there on the table – I’ve found some guidance in two oddly undervalued hypotheses, namely ‘The Barry Manilow Law’ and ‘The Maggot Probability’.
Let’s begin with the Barry Manilow Law (promulgated by Clive James). When faced by the inexplicable popularity of this or that performer or operator, apply the Barry Manilow Law, which states: Everyone you know thinks Barry Manilow is absolutely terrible. But everyone you don’t know thinks he’s great. And bear in mind that the people you know are astronomically outnumbered by the people you don’t know…
As with Barry, so with Donald – but there’s an important difference. The Barry Manilow fans cannot increase my exposure to Barry Manilow, but the Donald Trump fans can certainly make me watch, hear, and otherwise attend to Donald Trump – maybe until February 2025 (when I’ll be well over seventy and, more to the point, he’ll be nearing eighty…).
If that happens then the Maggot Probability (formulated by Kingsley Amis) will come into play. It would work as follows: faced day after day by the senseless notions and actions of an elderly madcap, I won’t bother to parse and analyse. I’ll simply shrug and say to myself, It’s probably just the maggot, or alternatively, The maggot’s probably acting up. The maggot is the virus or bacterium – or actual grub, with antennae and maw – that devours an ageing brain; and the maggot acts up whenever it finds a patch of relatively healthy grey matter, and settles down to a square meal.
…I adopt this facetious tone more or less willy-nilly, because Trump’s candidacy is in itself a sick joke. It began as a business venture – an attempt to boost his tarnished brand (mineral water, neckties). Then someone like Steve Bannon told him that his only imaginable route to Pennsylvania Avenue lay in white supremacism. And Trump, perhaps recognising that whiteness (endorsed by maleness) was his only indisputable strength, limply acquiesced.
Next, having registered the stupendous welcome given to this approach, Trump began underscoring it with the moronic sincerity of violence – inciting his crowds to ‘beat the crap’ out of protestors, and openly thirsting for mass deportations and collective punishments (plus more torture and more police brutality)…Doing harm to the defenceless: it seems to be a recent enthusiasm, an urge awakened or unleashed by his political rise. And on the way he has discovered something about himself. He likes it. He is one of those people who finds violence exciting.
Which surprised me, I confess. In his memoir The Art of the Deal (heavily and cleverly ghosted by Tony Schwartz), Donald, then aged forty, comes across as a man instinctively averse to the rough-and-ready aspects of his trade (coercive rent-collections, coercive evictions, etc.), associating ‘that kind of thing’ with his rags-to-riches father, the gnarled and mottled Fred C. Trump; and while Fred was applying himself in the outer boroughs, the young Donald, his gaze on Manhattan, was tonily nourishing ‘loftier dreams and visions’. We therefore presume that Trump’s sudden liking for violence is just another corruption: violence vivifies his proximity to power.
Joe the Plumber never got anywhere. As against that, next month in Cleveland, Ohio, Don the Realtor will be anointed as the…But wait. I’ll return to Trump at the end of the section, if there’s time (as you know, tomorrow morning we’re off to England), and after that you’ll also be away for a while. So let’s get on. And we won’t be changing the subject. The subject will still be violence.
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What is the good of the novel, what does it do, what is it for?
On this question there are (as so often) two opposed schools of thought, in the present case the aesthetes versus the functionalists. The aesthetes would wearily and indeed pityingly explain that the novel serves no purpose whatever (it is just an artefact – nothing more). The functionalists see it as earnestly progressive in tendency: fiction is (or should be) involved in improving the human condition.
Well, the progressivists may indeed be wrong, I have always felt; but the aesthetes can’t possibly be right. We can, if we like, sophisticatedly agree that a certain kind of novel can be purposeless. But can a novelist be purposeless, be monotonously purposeless, for an entire adult lifetime? Can anybody?
It’s a matter of pressing interest, I find. What is the purpose of my average day?
If you’d asked me that five years ago, I would’ve equably cited John Dryden, who said that the purpose of literature is to give ‘instruction and delight’. That verdict goes back three centuries, and in my opinion has worn pretty well.*1
You hope to delight, and also to instruct. Instruct in a way that you hope will stimulate the reader’s mind, heart, and, yes, soul, and make the reader’s world fuller and richer. My ambition is summed up by a minor character in the late-period Bellow novel The Dean’s December: a stray dog, on the streets of Bucharest, whose compulsive barks seem to represent ‘a protest against the limits of dog experience (for God’s sake, open the universe a little more!)’.
And that’s what I would have answered in early 2011. Then I read Steven Pinker’s massive and authoritative The Better Angels of Our Nature, in which the author – a cognitive scientist, a psychologist, a linguist, and a master statistician – fully earns and justifies his subtitle, which is Why Violence Has Declined.
Violence has declined, has drastically declined. You frown; and on first hearing this I too frowned. Because it certainly doesn’t feel that way – partly explaining why Pinker’s book has yet to bring about a real shift in consciousness: his thesis and its conclusions are jarringly counterintuitive, and provoke much natural resistance. My nerve ends insist, as do yours, that the world, with its steady accumulation of weapons of
