The publicity bumf for this "anti-autobiography" from the author and film-maker boasts that its format is "breaking the autobiographical mould". That's not completely true. Here Comes Trouble, as the seminary-schooled Moore will be only too aware, fits into a well-established literary tradition. It's a contribution to the lives-of-the-saints genre, its principal innovation being that its author is also its subject.
I'm serious. It's all there, in mythic (that is, semi-fictional) form: miracles and parables; early signs of being marked out by God; precocious insight and courage in telling truth to power; and the foot-washing humility of the ordinary hardscrabble guy from Flint, Michigan. How else do you explain, for instance, a chapter called "A Blessing" which opens, with no apparent sign of humour "My priest had a confession he wanted to make to me", and whose pivotal moment comes in the positively biblical two-word paragraph: "I spoke."
Where I say "semi-fictional", by the way, I'm not sneering: that is Moore's own position. He says in a foreword: "This is a book of short stories based on events that took place in the early years of my life. Many of the names and circumstances have been changed to protect the innocent, and sometimes the guilty."
The disclaimer cuts both ways. It gives him licence to invent and embellish but it also gives the reader licence to doubt. When he reports that, as he travelled through security on the way back from the Academy Awards, "Homeland Security officials purposefully keyed my Oscar, scratching long lines into its gold plate", you think: really?
Scenes are coloured by hack-novelistic detail "I took a deep breath, staring at the photo, then looking away, and then looking at him. His dark eyes seemed even darker now" and dialogue is fancifully reconstructed. There's verbatim recall of the conversation Moore had, aged 11, when he got lost in the Capitol building and bumped into Bobby Kennedy. There's verbatim recall of the admiring phone call he took from John Lennon not long before the latter's death. The above-mentioned "A Blessing" is an eight-page Socratic dialogue with the priest who blessed the Enola Gay before its mission to Hiroshima.
The overwhelming impression is that as with stories of saints' lives these tales have been adapted or embellished from reality to illustrate a greater, spiritual truth. (Which is, of course, a cousin of the instrumentalist defence advanced in support of the more tendentious aspects of Moore's documentary-making.) They are, duly, arranged more issue-by-issue than chronologically.
There's the one in which Moore sees firsthand the pain that intolerance of homosexuals causes (the local gay teen dances to Motown, plays with his mum's make-up, is ostracised, lashes out viciously, runs away, later kills himself). There's the one in which Moore helps rescue a female friend when a backstreet abortion nearly kills her (at the hospital, he has the presence of mind to lecture a doctor on progressive civics: "It's not a baby. She was ten weeks pregnant. It was a foetus. If Michigan wasn't so backward, she wouldn't be lying in there like that. That's all I'm mad about. Thank you for helping her.")
There's the one in which he founds an alternative paper, the Flint Voice "a true muckraking paper that didn't care who it pissed off our journalism was hard-hitting and relentless" and defies the corrupt local mayor and corrupt police to inspire a national change in the law protecting newsrooms from police harassment.
There's one in which he eyeballs Richard Nixon, one in which he outwits any number of German neo-Nazis to picket Ronald Reagan, one in which he disrupts his class graduation ceremony to deliver a spontaneous lecture on disability rights and discrimination. There's the one in which he goes on a "journalism fellowship" to the Middle East sponsored by an Arab-American PR outfit (that's, I think, a fancy way of describing a freebie) and nearly gets blown up by Abu Nidal. There's the one in which confronted by a suicidal lunatic with a shotgun at the (maverick, progressive) counselling service he founded he disarms the man simply through the power of his words and his ordinary blokeness, sending him off into the night with his shotgun unloaded and a fresh sense of their common humanity.
There's even one in which, aged 17, he singlehandedly brings an end to institutional racism in the United States. Noting that the Elks a club with a Caucasians-only policy, then still legal for private organisations were sponsoring a school speech competition in honour of Abraham Lincoln, the young Moore stepped up to the plate on behalf of the Great Emancipator and delivered a withering denunciation of the Elks. He won the competition, had to redeliver his speech to the unsuspecting Chief Elk in a huge public ceremony, and soon after was turning down invitations to appear on CBS with Walter Cronkite. The resulting national outcry did for the private-members exemption. "My speech was occasionally cited as a spark for this march forward in racial fixing in the great American experiment," he admits, "but there were other speeches far more eloquent than mine." Shucks!
Moore was conceived, he tells us, after his mother made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Sainte-Anne de Beaupré in Quebec and climbed the stairs of the basilica on her knees (reputed to help barren women conceive). Baby Michael was a rebel from the off. Other kids crawled forwards, but this maverick little thing crawled backwards. And, boy, was he smart! His mom had him reading the newspaper and doing maths while the other kids were still struggling with crayons.
Where it gets really strange is in the chapter called "Pietà". In 1965 his mother took the family to the New York World's Fair, where at the Vatican City pavilion a Michelangelo Pietà was on display. While his contemporaries munched their corn-dogs, or did whatever normal children do, 11-year-old Mike was transfixed by the sculpture insisting on being allowed to rejoin the nearly hour-long queue to see it not once but twice more. The chapter ends with a rather moving account of his mother's death, and a photograph of the author as a baby cradled in her arms. I'm sure Moore doesn't actually think he's Jesus, but "Pietà" certainly makes that interpretation available.
To say Moore's incessant boasting is annoying is not an attack on his politics. I think he is, broadly, a good thing. I remember watching Fahrenheit 9/11, well aware of the criticisms that had been levelled against it incoherence, tendentiousness, a free hand with context and still thinking: wow, if even 50 per cent of this is true, it's a damn good thing we know about it. I feel the same way here: if even 50 per cent of what he boasts of having done, he did, he's a better man than me.
His outlook on the world is what most of us will consider sound. He's in favour of state-subsidised healthcare and homosexual equality. He's in favour of the rights of labour to organise against capital and of women to organise against unwanted foetuses. He's against Jim Crow laws, expeditionary wars and teenagers taking assault rifles to school. Only in a country where a large number of citizens think the New York Times is staffed by socialists could Michael Moore look like a dangerous radical. That's all the more reason to be glad that he enjoys the prominence and acclaim he does.
But there's no political analysis in here. Like a short-story writer (rather than, say, a left-wing historian), Moore sees history advancing through personal epiphanies and turning points. Nixon's behaviour in Vietnam, for instance, acts on the nation like original sin: "We lost our moral compass with him and we've never gotten it back Before Nixon there was so much hope. Since Nixon we have known only the Permanent War."
There's no real self-examination either: only a series of warm recollections of how courageous, indomitable and ahead of his time he is. Yet also, y'know, strangely humble. Were you aware that Rob Reiner said his film would have "the impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin"? And that it's "the largest-grossing documentary in the history of cinema, and the largest-grossing Palme d'Or winner ever (a list of winners that included films like Apocalypse Now and Pulp Fiction)"? I know amazing!
The purpose of every story here is not to enlighten or surprise, but to redound to the credit of Michael Moore. You wish him every success in fighting the good fight. But you can't help wishing, too, that he wasn't such a douche-nozzle about it.
Sam Leith's The Coincidence Engine is published by Bloomsbury.
