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Authors: Martin Amis
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was 'a silly little country boy' who just happened to be able 'to sing like a nigger', the 'acne-spotted self-pity' of his early songs making a strong appeal to 'the hysterically self-pitying mood of millions of teenagers'.
Nursing dreams of becoming a new Valentino, Elvis's real ambition was to become a movie star. Soon 'the biggest putz in the history of film-making' was well established as 'one of the ugliest and most repulsive presences on the American screen'. When this bubble burst, he settled for the Vegas routine. The audience was ideal, consisting of 'a couple thousand middle-aged people sated with food and drink'.
Personally Elvis was always 'a momma's boy', a bully, a coward and a fool. His career as 'pervert', 'voyeur 1 , 'masturbator', and so forth, was predictable as early as 1956, when Goldman pictures him 'thrusting his fat tongue into the mouth of a backstage groupie'. Finally, the 'freak', the 'pig junkie', completes his 'deterioration into homicidal madness'.
It quickly becomes clear — does it not? — that Goldman isn't to be trusted. In his palpable eagerness to explode the Presley Myth, he has erected an anti-myth to replace it — which, in turn, is already being whittled away at by transatlantic commentators. It may indeed be the case that Elvis was no more than a horrible, and horribly uncomplicated, embodiment of American Success; but Elvis leaves us none the wiser.
In biography, displays of such inordinate aggression leave one wondering about the personal problems of the author rather than the subject. I read Elf is under the impression that Goldman was a surly young iconoclast of the Rolling Stone school of New Journalism. On the back flap I am confronted by a middle-aged chipmunk who used to be Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia. As should by now be evident, the book is a prodigy of bad writing, excitable, sarcastic and barely literate. It is also as exploitative as the exploiters whom Goldman reviles, and no more tasteful than a Presley pants-suit.
Observer 1981
Diana Trilling at Claremont Avenue
In New York, Diana Trilling is regarded with die suspicious awe customarily reserved for the city's senior literary ladies. Whenever I announced my intention of going along to interview her, people looked at me with trepidation, a new respect, a certain holy dread. I felt I was about to enter the lion's den — or the den of the literary lioness, which is often just as dangerous.
I had tangled with Mrs Trilling before, more than ten years ago, and had my own reasons for fearing her well-known asperity. Mr and Mrs Lionel Trilling were on a visit to London at the time, and, knowing of my admiration for Mr Trilling's work, a common friend had arranged a meeting: tea at the Connaught, the London hotel where all distinguished Americans seem to put up. I remember Lionel as milky-haired, laconic and serene; I remember Diana as dark, foxy and fierce. At one point I made an incautious remark, illiberal in tendency — an undergraduate remark. Mrs Trilling cracked her teacup into its saucer and said: 'Do you really mean that? Then what are we doing here? Why are we sitting here having tea with this person?’
Diana Trilling lives in Claremont Avenue, near Columbia University, where her husband taught: he was the first Jew to gain tenure there, incredible as that now seems. American cities appear to have a habit of surrounding their seats of learning with slums. In the foreword to her first collection of articles, Claremont Essays (1964), Mrs Trilling wrote about the exact sense of urban positioning that Columbia affords. The community is perched on its grassy hill, a fortress of intellection, with boiling Harlem just down the slope.
On the telephone Mrs Trilling had given me carefully, indeed grimly detailed instructions for the subway. One false move, I gathered, and I would find myself clambering out of a manhole on Duke Ellington Boulevard. In the end I took a cab — through
Nursing dreams of becoming a new Valentino, Elvis's real ambition was to become a movie star. Soon 'the biggest putz in the history of film-making' was well established as 'one of the ugliest and most repulsive presences on the American screen'. When this bubble burst, he settled for the Vegas routine. The audience was ideal, consisting of 'a couple thousand middle-aged people sated with food and drink'.
Personally Elvis was always 'a momma's boy', a bully, a coward and a fool. His career as 'pervert', 'voyeur 1 , 'masturbator', and so forth, was predictable as early as 1956, when Goldman pictures him 'thrusting his fat tongue into the mouth of a backstage groupie'. Finally, the 'freak', the 'pig junkie', completes his 'deterioration into homicidal madness'.
It quickly becomes clear — does it not? — that Goldman isn't to be trusted. In his palpable eagerness to explode the Presley Myth, he has erected an anti-myth to replace it — which, in turn, is already being whittled away at by transatlantic commentators. It may indeed be the case that Elvis was no more than a horrible, and horribly uncomplicated, embodiment of American Success; but Elvis leaves us none the wiser.
In biography, displays of such inordinate aggression leave one wondering about the personal problems of the author rather than the subject. I read Elf is under the impression that Goldman was a surly young iconoclast of the Rolling Stone school of New Journalism. On the back flap I am confronted by a middle-aged chipmunk who used to be Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia. As should by now be evident, the book is a prodigy of bad writing, excitable, sarcastic and barely literate. It is also as exploitative as the exploiters whom Goldman reviles, and no more tasteful than a Presley pants-suit.
Observer 1981
Diana Trilling at Claremont Avenue
In New York, Diana Trilling is regarded with die suspicious awe customarily reserved for the city's senior literary ladies. Whenever I announced my intention of going along to interview her, people looked at me with trepidation, a new respect, a certain holy dread. I felt I was about to enter the lion's den — or the den of the literary lioness, which is often just as dangerous.
I had tangled with Mrs Trilling before, more than ten years ago, and had my own reasons for fearing her well-known asperity. Mr and Mrs Lionel Trilling were on a visit to London at the time, and, knowing of my admiration for Mr Trilling's work, a common friend had arranged a meeting: tea at the Connaught, the London hotel where all distinguished Americans seem to put up. I remember Lionel as milky-haired, laconic and serene; I remember Diana as dark, foxy and fierce. At one point I made an incautious remark, illiberal in tendency — an undergraduate remark. Mrs Trilling cracked her teacup into its saucer and said: 'Do you really mean that? Then what are we doing here? Why are we sitting here having tea with this person?’
Diana Trilling lives in Claremont Avenue, near Columbia University, where her husband taught: he was the first Jew to gain tenure there, incredible as that now seems. American cities appear to have a habit of surrounding their seats of learning with slums. In the foreword to her first collection of articles, Claremont Essays (1964), Mrs Trilling wrote about the exact sense of urban positioning that Columbia affords. The community is perched on its grassy hill, a fortress of intellection, with boiling Harlem just down the slope.
On the telephone Mrs Trilling had given me carefully, indeed grimly detailed instructions for the subway. One false move, I gathered, and I would find myself clambering out of a manhole on Duke Ellington Boulevard. In the end I took a cab — through
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