Culture Vultures

...chuckled Bragg...

...This was one of the more sympathetic responses from Fleet Street...

...Just as acquiring a British au pair has a certain social cachet in America, so does acquiring a British auteur: the former finds herself, for a mere pittance of $139 per Martin Amis and a British nanny think alike...

...Sitting across the table from the old bore, even Amis must have wondered if there wasn't something to be said for a culture that declines to take great writers seriously...

...Amis's dental vanity was seen as proof of how pathetically Americanized he'd become and, with hindsight, as a preparatory step towards his move to New York, where he could churn out The Bridgework ofMadison County or Flossed Horizon like the rest of the gleaming hacks flashing their pearly whites on Oprah...

...For Di fans, I ought to explain that the show has a small footnote in Royal history as part of the lovey-dovey exchanges between Charles and Camilla on the Camillagate tapes: "It's like that Melvyn Bragg program," Mrs...

...04 The American Spectator • December 1997 55...

...like aspiring actress Louise, aspiring screenwriter Martin dreams of making it big in Hollywood—though, in fairness, he already has a screen credit: he rewrote the rewrite, before his rewrite was, in turn, rewritten by some other rewrite man, for Saturn Three (1980—you remember, it's the one with Kirk Douglas and Farrah Fawcett, about the space station with the robot who goes berserk...

...Parker Bowles whimpered orgasmically to her Prince...

...Amis is svelte and tanned, Miss Woodward is pudgy and sallow, though both seem to be in a perpetual sulk...

...Blair to reassure him that he'd be staying on, it's the fellows who most eagerly awaited "F--k-Off Friday" who now can't wait to f-- k off...

...Leave your conscience at the tone...

...Like Gore Vidal and the back of his head, New York is the city we know from above, the glittering skyline we've seen from a thousand crane shots, from the opening titles of Wall Street, as the hordes of commuters spill out from the buses and subways and up into their towers, reaching for the sky as Sinatra sings "Fly Me to the Moon...

...he certainly hadn't intended to cast aspersions on the size of Gore's celebrity...

...Equally traditionally, this announcement is immediately followed by a 15-point poll leap for Labour You can't blame Andrew: a left-wing dramatist is someone who writes left-wing drama, but a right-wing dramatist is someone successful enough to worry about marginal rates of income tax-98 percent under the last Labour government...

...Otherwise, the general scorn vindicated Amis's second reason for wanting to move to New York: that everyone in London is so utterly beastly to him...

...A lot of movies and television in rather small parts...

...In enormous parts...

...But, putting his teeth aside, Amis's British critics have a point...

...Bragg hastily explained that he'd meant that it's only the people in small parts who are filmed from behind...

...Amis has said he misses Thatcher, pines for the days of the Falklands War, finds Britain too provincial, and reckons that no novelist can survive in a culture where the most dramatic event of the past fifteen years was the "poll tax riots"— a few inner-city disturbances against increased municipal taxes...

...Amis was rather wearily moaning about the price of fame—not a good sign in someone about to move to New York...

...As the assorted prostitutes, performance artists, transsexuals, and HIV-positive drug addicts sing in Rent, the favorite rock opera of Killer Brit "nanny" Louise Woodward: "You're living in A-meri-ca...

...Both Amis and Rushdie voted for New Labour, but, after a few brief months in liberated London, both are itching to be on their way...

...You know, 'Start the Week.'...I can't start my week without you...

...And, in trying to figure out what all those cringe-makingly mawkish wall-to-wall grief-junkies were actually grieving for, I think the answer is: themselves...

...He got a taste of it the other morning when he was on Melvyn Bragg's BBC radio show "Start the Week...

...Naturally, being far more famous than Amis, Gore did...

...Down at the other end of the spectrum, if you want a pithy summation of the British arts establishment's position on the last eighteen years, try Adrian Mitchell's Love Songs of World War III...

...In his heart of hearts, Amis can't possibly relish getting sucked into such a po-faced crowd...

...For eighteen long, lonely years, Amis and Rushdie were in the forefront of the liberation struggle against Thatcherism, leading the battle from the ramparts of every BBC talk show...

...like her, he's heard the siren song of the West...

...At the end of the mil-len-ni-um...

...Amis has been mocked not just for his novels and his girlfriends but even for his teeth...

...While Andrew Lloyd Webber personally called Mr...

...T oby Young, one of the hordes of British journalists in New York who ekes out a living by cranking out columns for the folks back in dear old Blighty explaining what such exotic American innovations as a "latte" are, fretted for the author's soul if he were so foolish as to transport himself to a city where they take writers seriously...

...starriest supporters...

...Night after night, there he was, on some BBC sofa or other, sitting alongside his pal Amis, as the host commiserated on the author's inability "to lead a normal life...

...I don't wish to exaggerate the similarities...

...the latter finds himself, for a mere pittance of $1.39 million per book contract, forced to work late into the night, slaving away, polishing and honing anecdotes about Princess Di for the amusement of Harold Evans's dinner guests...

...That great day came —and how—to io Downing Street on Friday, May 2, when John Major hurriedly packed his bags and Tony Blair moved in...

...To escape "middle-class boredom," he's moving to what he calls the city of the twenty-first century, New York—"land of my dreams and mylonging," as Amis's hero John Self says in Money...

...For a novelist in search of a literary landscape, that's a pretty glum prospect...

...Alas, once they're over here, both the neophyte child-carer and fashionable novelist all too easily fall prey to exploitation in the fleshpots of the great Republic...

...54 December 1997 The American Spectator week, forced to work late into the night, slaving away, cleaning and polishing...

...A decade ago, at London's National Theatre, the soi-disant poet gleefully cajoled his middle-class audience into singing along with "F-- k-Off Friday," a spirited number about the ravages of unemployment under the Thatcher terror which nevertheless concluded on an optimistic note: "I can't wait for that great day when / F-- k-Off Friday comes to Number Ten...

...Admittedly, this was before the late Ayatollah Khomeini put a bounty on his head and demonstrated the rather more extravagant reach of superior police states...

...For Amis, as for Louise Woodward, America — or, at any rate, the few bits they've heard of, like Manhattan and Hollywood—is the landscape of the imagination...

...The fact that she was there at all was discordant, a poignant symbol of a season of panic and flight...

...In this cross-cultural exchange, the Americans are victims, too: as events in Massachusetts proved, if you're looking for bargain-basement child-care, you're better off with a 1yyear-old Filipino who's been taking care of her twelve younger brothers and sisters since she was four than with a sullen, surly Brit who wants to be out at Rent every night...

...A century ago, London was the place...

...London never ceases to be amazed at the way its favorite figures of fun—from Amis and Rushdie to Tina Brown and Fergie — manage to get taken seriously in New York...

...That's true...

...Anyway, the other week, they were starting the week with both Amis and Gore Vidal, who these days is even queenlier than Tina Brown...

...But, like young Louise, middle-aged Martin feels constricted by the dreary provincialism of life in England...

...Did Gore see himself from the outside, too...

...Come, now," Gore retorted, huffily...

...I even dream about myself," he purred, "and I can see the back of my head...

...The biggest event in Britain in the last fifteen years wasn't the poll tax riots but the death of the Princess of Wales...

...For Amis and Rushdie and Louise Woodward, stuck in low-rise Britain, you can understand the pull...

...To Rushdie, Britain was a "police state" and Mrs...

...If Martin Amis moves to New York, he is guaranteed to become even more pompous and vain than he is already," sighed Toby, anxiously...

...Not only was the Princess's death a terrible tragedy, it was a ghastly social faux pas...

...The British, as anyone who's seen Austin Powers will know, are famously indifferent to teeth...

...Like some star-struck hick, he's taking his tap-shoes and heading for the big town: start spreading the news, he's leaving today, he wants to be a part of it...

...Thatcher was "Mrs...

...In late summer, the Paris of the rich and the titled simply closes down," she wrote...

...Amis wasn't quite right...

...Likewise, many of those Manhattan patrons of British novelists would be better off with an obscure magical realist from Latin America than a languid poseur who's only there on the off-chance of meeting Norman Mailer...

...It meant, he said, that he was obliged to perform as this character called "Martin Amis" all the time...

...You see yourself from the outside...

...This is the post-modern condition," he said...

...Since then the new prime minister has achieved approval ratings of (according to one poll) 94 percent...

...Paris in August...

...A couple of years ago, he was roundly abused in the press for getting rid of his long-suffering British agent and publisher, signing on with some high-profile New York shark (Andrew "The Jackal" Wylie), and auctioning his new novel off to the highest bidder because he needed a huge advance to pay for the expensive dental work he'd had done...

...Britain's celebrity culture is subtly different from America's: the only point to celebrities is as objects of derision...

...In October, the novelists Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie both declared that they're coming to live in New York...

...If, like many Britons, you're wondering who on earth those churlishly ungrateful 6 percent holdouts are, the answer would seem to be that they're some of the left's MARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic ofthe Spectator of London...

...The world of ponderous solemnity waiting to engulf the two was summed up by Tina's queenlier-than-thou farewell to the Princess of Wales in the New Yorker: "When the news came of her death, my first thoughts were of place and time—of the wrongness of any royal princess, even a divorced one, contriving to be in that place at that time...

...But who wants to walk in Dickens's, or Conan Doyle's, footsteps...

...One can never underestimate the allure of the New World for the impressionable Briton...

...Many of us found this an even kinkier aid to romance than the Prince's desire to be reincarnated as a tampon...

...Melvyn Bragg, the host, turned this one over to Vidal...

...S till, in the end, his dilemma is honest enough...

...The Iranian fatwa forced Rushdie into hiding—though, in a unique variation on traditional witness protection programs, he was the first man in history forced into hiding out on television arts shows...

...They knew that Diana was Britain's last world-class celebrity and that, when ABC and CBS and NBC and CNN and all the rest dismantled their cameras and sent their star anchors home after the funeral, they wouldn't be back...

...The chance to live in A-me-ri-ca at the end of the mil-len-ni-um is not one to be passed up, though you'd have thought the fate of Miss Woodward at the hands of a Massachusetts jury might have given Amis pause...

...Only people who've done a lot of movies and television know what the back of their head looks like," he explained...

...CULTURE VULTURES by Mark Steyn Coming to America A ccording to time-honored tradition, shortly before every British election, Andrew Lloyd Webber announces that, in the event of a Labour victory, he'd have to consider leaving the country...

...Torture...