Of course, criminals will obtain guns whether they are legal or not. Based on this, the pro-gun lobby argues that it would only be law-abiding citizens that would suffer from gun control or an outright ban. But I can’t help thinking that, if only the police and criminals had arms, we would be a bit better off because right now all children are gangsters and they shoot people indiscriminately. It’s pretty frightening.

  The latest school shooting[16], at Columbine High School, which is currently receiving blanket coverage on television, was very surprising. The perpetrators were apparently planning it for a long time and that makes it really very sinister. That you get hold of your best friend and you say, “Let’s shoot them up.” If I had possessed a gun at school, I would certainly have shot everybody. Chiefly the staff. But I didn’t have a gun and it would have been very difficult for me to get one. It’s so easy for people to get guns these days in America. Guns lie about the houses of people where there are children. Or children know where the guns are stored and can get at them.

  People worry about the effect on children of television, but no one faces the real issue. Why do you make toy guns? Why not forbid them to be made? If children didn’t see them in shops, within six months they wouldn’t want them. And these days manufacturers make toy guns that are long and hyper-realistic. The kids all want them and then they run around ‘shooting’ everybody with them. It’s not a stretch to see why they then go and shoot people with real guns. Another tragedy is when children point the toy guns at the police, who think they are real, and get shot for real themselves. All you have to do is forbid the making of toy guns.

  I can understand the disasters of the world if they are unforeseeable or unforgettable, but when things are so easy to prevent and are still not done, it’s incomprehensible to me. Currently, to an American child, to be grown up is to carry a gun. You have to alter that, which only takes a little arrangement. I don’t know if there’s much money to be made out of selling toy guns, but I don’t think money should be made this way. I don’t think money or profit should be the sole reason for anything.

  So, it’s all so strange, but I have a very calm view of life. I’ve never been in a street where there’s been a shooting, and I walk about the streets quite a lot on the Lower East Side. In fact, I’ve never been in any danger of any kind. I have never lived in a house where I suddenly heard two loud bangs and went out of my room and found someone lying in the corridor, dead. In fact, I’ve never seen anyone who is dead.

  A more understandable position of the Religious Right is their pro-life stance. When I say, more understandable, I don’t mean that I agree with it. Just that it seems more in keeping with their narrow view of the world.

  When I made the terrible mistake of saying that, if a woman was pregnant and had a child which had a gay gene, she was justified in aborting the fetus, my agent, Ms. Clausen said, “What a terrible thing to say! Would your mother, if she had known you were going to be gay, have aborted you?” Well, of course, the question is absurd because we lived in the suburbs at a time when no one had an abortion. So I said as much. In 1908, when I was born, the only people who had abortions were those who became pregnant and were unmarried. In that instance they simply went away to have some unmentionable illness cured. Of course, really they were having an abortion.

  My mother would never have had an abortion, but if she had known the trouble I was going to be, she would have done anything to prevent me from being born. All the screaming matches with my father, the squabbles with my brothers and sister and their hatred toward me, the weeping and wailing and the carrying on. She certainly would not have had me if it could have been avoided. But you see, no one knew any of that when I was sufficiently unformed to be safely aborted.

  And now we have fertility drugs to help make even more children! I think we need to preempt the next crisis by making contraception available to everybody, because as far as I can see we’re heading towards a potentially insurmountable problem of overpopulation. If the population doubles in the next twenty-five years, we shall all be standing on the shore with our feet pointing to the sea because there won’t be any room. So we have got to think of ways to reduce this future burden on the earth and on mankind.

  Now, I do like the Pope[17]. I think he looks nice and that he looks papal. And I love his gestures and the way he holds his hands out so that they are like little wings. But I don't know why he encourages people to have more children, especially in places like South America and Mexico where the population is increasing so fast that no one can cope with it. But, I suppose, he doesn’t know what else to say that is within the teachings of Christianity. Abortion didn’t exist when Christ was alive, so he didn’t have any opinions about that. If he had, I don’t think he would have said that everyone should have children.

  The problem is that more children means more families and more strife, though this is principally the fault of another failed viewpoint of the Religious Right, namely that of family values: the notion that the family unit should be the center of the universe and the sole concern of every family member. In my experience it’s the surest way to unhappiness.

  Since I became a sort of mail-order guru, by which I mean since people started writing to me with their problems, seeking my counsel on what they should do, I have come to the opinion that all human beings should live alone. It is the only way to avoid conflict in your life and live a truly harmonious life. All of the problems I hear about involve a husband, lodger, father, mother, daughter or brother. Which is to say that all life’s problems involve the people you live with.

  So, the solution to human unhappiness is for everybody to live alone, but, of course, that’s very expensive. So, instead, people live together in the same way that students live, six in an apartment. They manage somehow to get on for a while until finally their age overtakes them and they walk out.

  It’s obvious to me that people do not get on very well if they see too much of one another. All the murders nowadays are murders within a family. Parents murder their children. Children murder their parents. Husbands murder their wives, and so on. It’s very seldom that you hear of one stranger murdering another stranger.

  The misguided focus on the family unit is especially damaging to mothers, who waste almost the entirety of their lives fussing over their offspring. One doesn’t realize as a child, but mothers never talk about anything except their children. As a child you think, “Oh! I never get out, from under my mother. She’s always telling me what to do. She’s telling me what to wear. She’s telling me what to say.” It never dawns on you that she actually thinks of nothing but you.

  When I was an artists’ model, I occasionally worked in what I have called ‘housewives’ choice classes’. In other words, classes for middle-aged women who’ve got through the housework in record time and have time left over to go to art school.

  The conversation during the rest period of such classes was always about children. Never about themselves. They would ask each other, “How is your youngest daughter?” “Oh, my youngest daughter’s alright. She’s got her head screwed on. It’s my eldest daughter I’m worried about. She’s now got another young man. I haven’t dared to show him to Herbert. He’s got a beard!”

  When I lived for a time in the Algonquin, there was nothing for me to do in the time I had off from my one-man show. So, I used to lie on my bed and watch television. Every program began thus: “I’m worried about Paul. I don’t think Hillary is right for him.” There would be some filler and some action, but at the end of every episode, at least three people were in the hospital, either poisoned, pregnant, self-harmed or shot. No one ever said, “Do you not think perhaps it is time we stopped meddling in the lives of others?” I watched and waited for those words to be said. They never came.

  In my lifetime I must have known at least one hundred and fifty women well enough for them to tell me their life story. And when I meet them in the street, before they’ve said hello, they inevitably tell me, “What do you think he did today?” or “What do you think he’s done now?” People need to ditch the notion that they must get married and raise a family in order to lead a good or worthwhile life. The idea that a family unit is the ideal model for living life is a fallacy. It’s a mistake.

  Yes, many years ago, if you didn’t get married and you instead ended up living at home and looking after your increasingly aged and cantankerous mother and father, you were considered to have had a rotten life. But that is not the only alternative to matrimony these days. Nowadays, living alone is not only a viable option, but the best way to ensure your own happiness. A happiness free of the burden of other people.

  8. americans

  My favorite country is, of course, America. This is not just because I can’t speak another language, but rather because America is my home and the place for doing fame. Generally though, English people do not learn foreign languages. They go abroad and if they’re not immediately understood they simply speak louder. And this, if anything, can only make us harder to understand rather than easier. But this fact doesn’t deter us.

  I've never seen Europe. Americans think that England is part of Europe. The English disagree. They see themselves as English and those people across the English Channel are ‘Continentals’. Typically, the English don’t have a good word to say about any nation other than their own. The French are sex maniacs. The Italians are dirty. The Germans are warmongers. The Welsh are thieves. The Irish are drunkards. The Scottish are mean. Americans are overbearing. Only the English are right. Obviously I do not share these xenophobic viewpoints. It is my ambition to meet everyone in the world, as I have said. Even if I can’t understand them, I bear them no ill will.

  I think the people in America are very nice, and sometimes I wonder why that is. I think the answer is that no one in America is ashamed of being of service. In England, it’s an issue. If an Englishman takes a menial or demeaning job to make some more money, they feel the need to laugh it off. But Americans freely get jobs in hotels and restaurants and they say, “I am doing it to earn some more money.” And they don’t feel they have to explain it in any other way.

  I also think America is a very feminine country. By contrast I found England a masculine country. You see, England was a very small place full of people so the movement was outward, and when they landed in foreign countries and met the unfortunate locals the English said, “These are the crops you will grow. These are the gods you will worship. Now go and do it.” It’s a very masculine thing to do and say, to naturally think that you are right and to direct others to do your bidding.

  But America was, at least initially, a huge place with nobody in it. So, the movement was inward. When immigrants came up from below deck, they would be processed and accepted. Then, when they were offered work, whatever it was, they said, “I’ll do it. What is it?” Because they regarded anything they could be asked to do as being better than what they had in Europe. And that is what gave America its national characteristic of an eagerness to please.

  But something is changing in America now. When I was young, the caricature of Americans was one of boastfulness. Now Americans are apologetic, and that’s very sad. You see, back then everybody owed money to America. Now America owes money to everybody. What has gone wrong? We should be a nation of millionaires. I don’t know why it is that it’s happened, and if I knew I would seek to undo it. But now Americans have been made to doubt themselves by other countries, which is a pity.

  I do not find Americans greedy. I think they are slightly more materialistic, but that’s only because they openly show their materialism. I think the English are just as materialistic, but of course in England there is nothing to covet. There are no great tracts of land over there about which you can fight a war.

  You see, there was a man called Mr. Monroe[18], and he believed that the Americas, North and South, could exist independently of the world. That was, of course, before Americans developed a taste for automobiles and a thirst for gasoline. Now I don’t pretend to understand world events, but I imagine that now America has to be nice to certain Middle-Eastern countries to get the oil it requires, and that has in turn made the Middle-Eastern countries sneer at us.

  The least likable quality of Americans is the way they bother other people. I mean this on an international scale. You see, when the Vietnam War was on, I said to Ms. Page[19], “Why didn’t they go out there, measure the place up, send back for a bomb and drop it?” And she said, “So that’s alright for the Vietnamese, is it?” Well, it would have been alright for the Vietnamese because fewer of the brave and the beautiful would have died. To me that would be no worse than all those people dying in a war that was useless. I mean, I hadn’t even heard of the Vietnamese before the Vietnam War.

  Sometimes I am asked to explain ‘the growing one-dimensionality of American society’. I’m not sure I understand. What one dimension does American life have, unless they mean that life is more materialistic in America? That if you become rich, you’ve succeeded and you are right. I do think there’s a certain materialism in American life that people are taught. The great thing is to “Get on!” Which is to say to earn more money than you earned last year, and that is what parents want for their children - but that’s true of almost any set of people.

  My parents wanted more money for me than I ever earned. Yet, though I was a freelancer from the age of about twenty-eight onwards, my mother would always say, “Are you still out of work?” You see, she wanted me to be in a secure job and I think nearly everyone wants that for their children. Americans perhaps want it more conspicuously, but I don’t think that’s bad.

  America is, of course, a country guilty of conspicuous consumption. Americans waste a great deal. They like to feel that they will never come to the bottom of the barrel. “Have some more! Have plenty! Eat what you can!”

  They are very hospitable and, I have found, very generous with everything they have. But that can, of course, be folly. The English are parsimonious. “You can have a little of it, not much. There isn’t much.” And that makes them very stingy and very thin-lipped. But, in truth, Britain is a small island with very little of anything.

  American life is not divided into the haves and have-nots. It’s divided into the people who are on television and the people who are not on television. Television is a quintessentially American thing. The movies are more influential on American life than anybody knows. Everybody wants to be a movie star because they want to be noticed. I once said the only point of fame is that it extends your social horizon, but a woman said, “That’s not the only thing. You get a better table in a restaurant.” I suppose that might be true, though goodness knows why you would want a better table in the first place. The food will still taste the same. But the point she was making was that she believed living with fame makes life one long party.

  The American Dream is a very strange thing. It is principally concerned with happiness. Unfortunately, Americans mistake luxury for happiness, even though they are unconnected. You need plenty of money to be happy, but you don’t need things. It’s a lesson that seems harder for the young to understand. Middle-aged Americans don’t want fast cars and large houses with swimming pools, but young people want them and think that they have a right to them. They will only be happy once they have them. In truth, I think the young will find themselves unhappier when they have all these things, because they will be devoid of excuses to begin looking inwardly at themselves.

  Ideally, what you need is a lot of money and no possessions. Then you can be happy. I once saw a film called Paris is Burning, in which Ms. Livingston[20] asked one of the victims of Harlem what she really wanted. The answer was, “A house with a swimming pool and a large car.” And while these words were being uttered, I thought to myself those are all burdens. With unlimited money and no possessions, you are free to go anywhere and do anything. Alternatively, I suppose you could be happy without money. You could just be content with your lot. I think most Americans would find that an unsatisfactory outcome however.

  Of course, at my core I am British, although I try not to be too British. In truth, I’ve never learned American in spite of all of my observations. I once asked a man called Arthur Cantor[21] whether I should learn the language before I came here, and he dismissed the idea by saying, “On no account! The more English you sound, the more likely you are to be believed.” So, I speak English and I imagine that when Americans hear me they think to themselves, “He’s pronouncing all of the words from beginning to end. He must really mean them.”

  I remember going to a wonderful meeting of American women, all of whom talked about beauty. A few days after I had left, I received a charming note from my hostess thanking me for having attended. It contained a strange sentence: “I’ve never conversed before with anyone who spoke in whole words.” So, I don’t know what Americans do. I know they speak whole sentences. Americans rarely use the full, original versions of words however, so perhaps this is what she meant. I mean, it would choke an American to say the word delicatessen. There are too many syllables. They would abbreviate it to ‘deli’ and instead spend the time they’ve saved shopping.

  Up until this point, I hadn’t really thought about the prevalence of abbreviated language in America. I think it’s because everyone is trying to be cool. I don’t think it’s laziness. It’s not as if they give up halfway through because the syntax is too elaborate. It’s just unamerican to not use simplified conversation.

  My principal experience of America is, of course, New York City. Previously, I have described my adopted home city as a twenty-four-hour, tax-deductible, Roman orgy. It pains me to say that’s a slight exaggeration. But New York is full of people who want to know you, who want to speak with you, who want to take your photograph, and who want to record what you’ve said. It is for me anyway, and England was never like that. And while it might not be an orgy, it certainly feels like you are at a party. It is absolutely nonstop.