The first surprise (of so many!) of Out of a Clear Blue Sky was that it wasn’t a novel at all but a loosely organised collection of essays, rambling, discursive and more than somewhat repetitious. The next surprise, considering its title and, in retrospect, its unfortunate jacket illustration – the much-reproduced snapshot of the second hijacked aircraft, United Airlines Flight 175, about to smash into the World Trade Center like a motor-powered model plane remote-controlled by a mischief-making brat – was that only one essay in the book, the last, dealt directly with the September 11 atrocity. And the third, for which his hitherto hazy left-leaning politics had not prepared us, was the sheer ferocity of his anti-Americanism, not only George Bush’s America but America tout court. ‘Once a millennial dream of generosity, tolerance and energy,’ he wrote, ‘Whitman’s rich and multifarious “continent of glories”, rugged, rowdy, aphrodisiac, wild, elastic and irresistible, it has become a poisonous carnival of bottomless bathos populated by millions of nice, ordinary, gee-shucks freaks and crackpots.’ Oddly, the one popular American artefact he owned to having a lingering fondness for was Coca-Cola, drinking three or four bottles of the stuff – never cans – every day of his life.
Since even I would find it tedious reiterating the book’s contents in their entirety, I shall limit myself here to reminding the reader of a few of its polemical high spots.
The opening essay, on popular culture, was drolly headlined ‘Say Goodnight, Gracie’, the regular envoi of the old Burns and Allen TV show.§ Slavorigin had always been a passionate cinéphile and had, in his journalism, expressed admiration for the work of Welles, Kazan, Kubrick and kindred neo-baroque American filmmakers.¶ In ‘Say Goodnight, Gracie’, by contrast, he flayed the entire mainstream Hollywood cinema as it is currently constituted, a ‘terminally infantilist’ cinema whose products he likened to greasy Big Macs – ‘and the so-called “indies” are Little Macs leavened with a few limp lettuce leaves’. Well, why not, that’s fair comment, and there are probably many of us ready to meet him halfway. But consider this: ‘If you have ever had the chance to watch those German films which were made during World War II by directors of real reputation – G. W. Pabst’s Paracelsus, to take a single example – you will know how hard it is to pass judgment on their strictly cinematic qualities, less on account of the embodied element, restrained but pervasive, of propaganda than because we cannot help reminding ourselves that the actors who appear in them were themselves Nazis, or else Nazi fellow-travellers, or else moral morons prepared, for the sole furtherance of their careers, to collaborate with the unspeakable. So it is today with the contemporary American cinema. How is one to evaluate a new film when all one sees on the screen, leering obscenely into the auditorium, are the neo-Nazoid faces of Hollywood’s current crop of performers, faces as putrid as faeces [oh, come on!], corroded by their very Americanness as an alcoholic’s by a lifetime’s intake of gin?’ Or this, of one cultish director in particular, whom I dare not name, since Slavorigin himself, had he not later had more parlous tribulations to contend with, would without doubt have been hauled into court on a charge of defamation of character: ‘X is an asshole and his movies resemble what oozes from assholes. They leave skid marks on the screen.’
The next essay, ‘The Statistics of American Stupidity’, was even more of a shocker. In it Slavorigin presented his readers with a childish if seductive proof that a statistical majority of Americans must indeed be as stupid as many non-Americans have always believed them to be.
