View source for Norman Mailer and the Cutting Edge of Style

{{hatnote|Still being edited as of December 21, 2018}}
[[File:Mcconnell.jpeg|thumb|Cover art from McConnell's ''Four Postwar Novelists''.]]
{{cquote|To be, like Norman, a New York Jewish boy from Harvard who had written a war novel, I cannot imagine any situation better for the beginning of a career.|author=The speaker is Norman Mailer's contemporary, fellow novelist, and frequent television talk show antagonist, Gore Vidal, interviewed in ''Newsweek'' (November 18, 1974).}}

Vidal's characteristically malicious amiability carries more than a seed of truth, and much more than a seed of the essential problem — that of being Norman Mailer. To many readers, indeed, and to many people who may not have read a novel in years, the problem — or the profession — of being Norman Mailer might well appear to be the central drama of American literature since World War II. Other writers, novelists, poets, and journalists may content themselves with the comfortably traditional eminence of an academic career, with the more complex and demanding satisfaction of a private existence with writing their sole activity, or with an intricate, almost monkish quest for anonymity. But Norman Mailer, alone among the significant writers of his generation (or now, his generations), has made himself at home within the full panoply of publicity media and personality mongering which is the climate of America in the television era. He has been a frequent, outrageous, comic-metaphysical guest on innumerable talk shows. He has produced, directed, and starred in his own movies. He has run for mayor of New York City. He has, as I write, received a much-publicized million dollar contract from his publishers for his next (not yet completed) novel. Vidal’s venom is understandable; indeed, coming as it does from a fellow laborer in the often barren vineyards of fiction, inevitable. For “a New York Jewish boy from Harvard who had written a war novel,” Mailer has come as close as one can imagine coming (closer, perhaps) to being one of the Beautiful People of his age, to winning and holding the kind of fame and fascination the American public normally reserves for politicians, film stars, and criminals.

He has not (what writer has?) been well served by his most avid supporters. The Mailer style, the Mailer panache, is a deliberately constructed and maintained role — and one which offers, perhaps, too many easy consolations to the critic not prepared himself to undergo the arduous and risky task of being Norman Mailer. He has been celebrated, by such dissimilar cheerleaders as Jimmy Breslin and Richard Poirier, as the prophet of a new sexual vitality, a profound and original philosophical thinker, a liberator of the cloistered and inhibited American imagination. He is, I suggest, none of these things and o en the reverse of some of them. But so over blown has become the celebration (or the damnation) of Mailer that such a paring of the image is bound to seem like an attack (or a defense) of the writer and the man. Mailer has, with signal efficiency, made his personality and his a inseparable; but he has paid the price of this unification, and an important part of that price is the refusal of his fans (fans everywhere, whether of a rock singer, a movie star, or a novelist, are the same) to allow him to be anything less than everything. The man who wrote the daring and painfully personal ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) has had to live with the implications of that brilliant title, for in turning his a into an “advertisement,” a more-than-aesthetic act of existential salesmanship, he has been burdened - at least in his career as a novelist - precisely by the success of his ads, by the “Norman Mailer” who has become such a surefire seller and high-ratings personality in contemporary American letters.

There is no doubt that Mailer has always thought of himself primarily as a novelist; and here, as often, he is more correct in his self-assessment than are his enthusiasts. And here, as often, his career displays a curious ambiguity, a deep-seated malaise underlying the proclamations of health, a dark flirtation with failure beneath the arrogantly flaunted triumphs. Of his twenty books, only five — six, stretching a point to include ''The Armies of the Night'' — are novels. Indeed, for a writer as prolific as Mailer, remarkably little of his published work is in the field, fiction, which is his announced, chosen, loved and hated vocation. It is, of course, an easy and cheap temptation to discover the saving, humanizing flaws of a splendid success, the hidden insecurities of a “star”; but if we consider Mailer's career as a novelist, it is difficult not to see such a set of contradictions. One remembers Vidal’s flippant dismissal of his first success: “who had written a war novel.” But what is implicit in that phrase is, surely, the most important event of Mailer’s life as a writer. The “war novel” is ''The Naked and the Dead'', published in 1948, Mailer’s first novel and — much more than a “war novel” — one of the major achievements of American fiction in this century.

It was a cruel fate for a young novelist. We have already spoken, in the previous chapter, of the “one-book” nemesis of the American writer, the inability of so many major American talents to overcome the success and the burden of their earliest important achievements. And, as Mailer’s own first triumph in ''The Naked and the Dead'' is so much more surprising even than the promise of ''The Sun Also Rises'' or ''This Side of Paradise'', so the difficulty of living up to that achievement appears to have been for him all the more painful. This is, oddly, a frequently ignored or glossed over, but central point about Mailer; for ''The Naked and the Dead'' is not simply a brilliant first book, it is the work of a master. Given the reach of that early (perhaps premature) mastery, the wonder is not that Mailer has since written so little fiction, comparatively, but rather that he has managed to complete so much. He has lived and worked, since he first appeared as a writer, as a first magnitude star whose talent and appeal are, if anything, too massive for any vehicle which we might imagine efficiently carrying them. No wonder, then, that one of his most embarrassingly revelatory nonfiction books is his recent biography of another definitive presence in search of an adequate incarnation, Marilyn Monroe.

Mailer's affair with the novel, unlike Marilyn Monroe's with the film, has been an affair of intelligence as well as of passion. Monroe's tragedy is to have sought an identity, a sexual fulfillment, promised her by the very medium, the movies, which continually denied the satisfaction of that promise in any but the most artificial ways. Mailer, however, has not only pursued the elusive image of the culminating work but, as a man of wide literary culture, has from the beginning understood the deceptive, slippery, fallacious nature of the medium in which he has elected to seek that culmination.
No one, indeed, has written more vividly about the infuriating, seductive appeal of the novel as a literary form. In a long essay originally published in Esquire at the very beginning of the sixties, he describes the novel as the Bitch Goddess, at once whore and virgin, easy conquest and impossible mistress:
Every novelist who has slept with the Bitch (only poets and writers of short stories have a Muse) comes away bragging afterward like a G.I. tumbling out of a whorehouse spree - "Man, I made her moan," goes the cry of the young writer. But the Bitch laughs afterward in her empty bed. "He was so sweet in the beginning," she declares, "but by the end he just went, 'Peep, peep, peep.' " A man lays his character on the line when he writes a novel. Anything in him which is lazy, or meretricious, or unthought-out, or complacent, or fearful, or overambitious, or terrified by the ultimate logic of his exploration, will be revealed in his book. Some writers are skillful at concealing their weaknesses, some have a genius for converting a weakness into an acceptable mannerism of style.
It would be hard to find a passage with more of the nervous, run-on confession, the blustering vulgarity and deep insecurity, the acute culture and genius for metaphor which characterize Mailer's distinctive talent. The archetypal novelist is a G.I. who is perhaps superpotent, perhaps sexually deficient. It is impossible, confronted with that image, not to remember Mailer's own first success with a novel about G.I.'s, his frenetic struggles, throughout the following decade, with both a series of wives and a series of coldly received novels, and his violent assertion, during the sixties, of the equivalence of sexual and literary power. The key line of the passage, and perhaps the key line for the writer's entire enterprise, is "A man lays his character on the line when he writes a novel." Many novelists - and surely all of the best - have felt this, but few (Henry James excepted) have taken it as much to heart, made it as unyielding a part of their personal credo as has Mailer. If he has, in his journalism and his public clowning, shown a genius for performance, that genius is only a spillover, a secondary derivation from Mailer's sense of the art of fiction itself as a performance par excellence, of the novel as an ultimate risk, revelation, and perhaps betrayal of oneself. Poets and short story writers, he contemptuously observes, may have Muses, the reassuring and pacific ladies of artistic inspiration; but the novelist's business is not inspiration, it is struggle and hard work - under the shadow of the sweet, easy, vulgar and in accessible Bitch who will at once elicit and mock his best attempts to prove himself. Sartre, in Saint Genet, invented the phrase comedian and martyr to describe Jean Genet's dedication to the art of fiction which could lead a man to the most abject buffoonery and the most self-denying discipline. The same phrase applies to Norman Mailer, novelist, with perhaps even more force.
It is an ancient piece of pop-psychological wisdom that great blusterers and braggarts are, usually, very shy men. Mailer's achievement, on one level at least, is to have carried the truth of that observation to the pitch of high art. A man may lay his life on the line when he writes a novel, but - such are the suasions of the Bitch - there is, underlying the existential gamble of storytelling, the continual possibility of evasion, of avoiding that ultimate confrontation with the self, of concealment; and it is this aspect of fiction which accounts, finally, for the lasting power of Mailer's best writing. The storyteller always, whether he knows it or not, tells a story about himself. That is the deep gamble of the craft, and the more acutely aware the storyteller is of the confessional nature of his art, the deeper the gamble, the higher the stakes. But if the teller reveals himself, he also conceals himself more efficiently than he may realize. Mailer says, "Some writers are skillful at concealing their weaknesses"; but as he surely knows, and as all longtime readers and writers of fiction know, most writers become, in the course of a life devoted to telling tales, skillful at concealing, or transforming into specious strengths, their weaknesses. If self-revelation and self-confrontation are the mocking threat of the Bitch Goddess, the evasions of style, the possibility of transforming private weakness into public power, are perhaps her primary seduction. At least this appears to be the case with Mailer. The last word of the passage I have cited is "style," and that word with its attendant associations may be the most important in Mailer's lexicon.
During the sixties, Barth, Pynchon, and others were to define, effectively, a new mode in American writing by creating novels whose content was largely a self-conscious commentary on their own form - novels, that is, which included their own critical commentary. Mailer foreshadows the fictive self-consciousness of these writers - just as Saul Bellow, in his very different way, foreshadows their concern with the inheritance of Western culture and with the "terms of our contract," the burden of making that culture a moral force in contemporary urban reality. While Mailer, anticipating later writers, demonstrates a self-consciousness about his own narrative processes, he nevertheless - unlike Barth or Pynchon - carefully segregates that self-consciousness from the creation of the story itself (at least, until his later novels which are themselves influenced by Barth, Pynchon, and others). His plots themselves, that is, tend to come from the conventional stuff of action-packed, sexual melodrama; and the elaborations of self-conscious style are, as it were, overlaid upon the prime matter of this "popular" (sometimes almost B-movie) substratum. His concern with style, then, is at least partly a concern with the masking, self-disguising powers of fiction - with fiction as a highly formal, almost ritual performance and test of the self which must conceal, as all good rituals do, its own machinery.
Mailer's concept of "style" - it becomes almost a totem word in his discussions of himself and his work - involves a good deal more than the simple masking of the self or transformation of private debilities into narrative strengths. Style, indeed, at least by the writing of his third novel, The Deer Park, becomes an agency of imaginative and personal salvation for Mailer and for his characters, a last vestige of morality and honor in a world which will no longer tolerate the open expression or embrace of those values. Sergius O'Shaugnessy, the improbably named, aspiring novelist who is the hero of the book, decides near the end of his curious adventures to prepare himself for his writing career by giving himself a public library liberal education:
I would spend my days in the public library, often giving as much as twelve hours at a time if I had the opportunity, and I read everything which interested me, all the good novels I could find, and literary criticism too. And I read history, and some of the philosophers, and I read the books of psychoanalysts, those whose style I could tolerate, for part of a man's style is what he thinks of other people and whether he wants them to be in awe of him or to think of him as an equal.
Style is not simply a matter of literary, verbal habits but part of a man's whole sense of himself as a member of society and perhaps as a shaper of the society to which he belongs; it is a political, existential act (two words which are never far from each other with Mailer). The passage cited is not only one of the author's major pronouncements on the nature of style, but also a dramatic acting out of its concepts. Sergius O'Shaugnessy (as he remarks, his name is only artificially Irish - it lacks a crucial "h") is everything Mailer, the "New York Jewish boy from Harvard who had written a war novel," is not: he is part Irish Catholic, has not written a novel, is minimally educated and - most of all - is an orphan, a man unencumbered by traditions precisely because he cannot remember, has never known, the pressure of those traditions upon his own life. The style of his speech in this passage is, with a rightness of pitch which is one of Mailer's most uncanny gifts, exactly the proper tone of a brilliant, perceptive young man possessed of the gift for fiction but denied the culture to deploy that gift. Sergius, in other words, is a deliberately constructed, sensitized savage. And it is Sergius's own imperceptions and failures which liberate his creator to write The Deer Park. For Mailer, surrounded by what he sees as the shattered traditions of value, living in a society whose personal life and political life are inextricably confused and perennially violent, style becomes a diminished, crisis sacrament - the sacrament of the existential orphan. To follow Mailer's career as a novelist, then, and his enormous if ambiguous influence on later American writers, we must regard the sequence of his novels as a continued experiment with the concept and the cutting edge of style.
The contrast between the art of Norman Mailer and that of Saul Bellow becomes clearer at this level of discussion and more central for understanding the course of American fiction in the fifties and sixties. Bellow's career has been a steady, unrelenting examination of and assertion of the permanent relevance of the major traditions of Western liberal thought to the complexities and upheavals of the contemporary City, but Mailer has carried on a two decade warfare with precisely those certitudes in which Bellow finds himself so much at home. Each of Mailer's six novels has defined for the reading public a "new" Mailer, a new and, for the moment, aggressively self-confident approach to the problems of our personal and political strivings; and this frenetic, almost pathological uneasiness with his own achievement, has in turn caused the history of his books to be one of mingled, sometimes accidental and often deliberately managed failure. Mailer, like most strong novelists, finds it hard to write fiction. But he has, in a valuable way, made that difficulty one of the central materials of his fictive stance and in so doing has become, for American fiction, the indispensable and archetypal self-conscious fabulator of the postwar years.
The Naked and the Dead
Robert Langbaum, writing of Mailer in 1968, after the publication of The Armies of the Night, observes that "in spite of his apparently unrealistic new style, Mailer still adheres to the large realistic tradition of the novelist as a chronicler of his time." That is an acute point to make about the author of such seemingly (but speciously) "unrealistic" novels as An American Dream and Why Are We in Vietnam? although it scants, I think, the degree to which Mailer's "realism" and "unrealism" have always been held in a curious, highly idiosyncratic mixture. His celebrated discovery, toward the middle of the fifties, of the mythic force of the orgasm and the cult of visionary violence - a bundle of prophecies to which he gave the name Hip - is a discovery, as always with Mailer, not of something new and outside the scope or implications of his previous work, but precisely a discovery of tendencies and underlying metaphors in what he has already done and subsequently, an attempt to refine those implicit tendencies into a conscious, narrative and political program. Style, again, maddeningly both masks and reveals the true, primal soul of the writer struggling toward self-realization. The vocation - not the craft - of fiction is the writer's vigilant insistence on making his developing style a continued transformation of the hidden into the revealed. Even in The Naked and the Dead, then, we can see the most anarchic tendencies of his later work to be not only present, but in large part responsible for the stunning power of that book.
When it appeared in 1948, The Naked and the Dead immediately established itself as the best American novel about World War II and a masterpiece of "realism." Indeed, the novel's very triumph has been a key factor not only in the author's later difficulties with fiction, but in large-scale critical misapprehension of those later efforts. The book's reputation as a triumph of realism and as a work quite unlike Mailer's other novels as obscured the fact that, meticulously realistic as it often is, The Naked and the Dead is also as much a dream or nightmare vision as Why Are We in Vietnam?
The book's title has become so famous that by now it is easy to ignore its curious implications; but they are, after all, strange and original, particularly in view of what must be the normal, unreflecting interpretation of "the naked and the dead." Most readers, probably, understand the title to mean "the naked and dead," that is, the blasted, stripped bodies of soldiers on a battlefield, the conventional scenery of innumerable war movies and innumerable blood-and-guts war novels. But that is not the title. It is "the naked and the dead"; that "and" implies, not an identity, but rather an opposition, between the two key terms.
Who are the naked, who the dead? If a heavy death count is one of the indices of "realism" in a war story, this book is relatively peaceful. Only four characters of any importance die in the course of the tale, the first one within the opening thirty pages, and the other three not until well toward the end of this long novel. Moreover, there are not even any battle scenes in The Naked and the Dead. The one major Japanese assault upon the invading American army is described - with brilliant indirection - not in terms of the clash of troops, but rather in terms of the violent tropical storm which washes away the American bivouacs and provides cover for the attack. Much as with Stendhal's famous description of the Battle of Waterloo in The Charterhouse of Parma, the heroic battle is over before its participants realize it has actually begun. The final American breakthrough, the massive push which ensures American control of the mythic Pacific island which is the scene of the novel, is hardly described at all, for while it is taking place, the characters who are the center of our interest are on the other side of the island, on a reconnaissance mission which, ironically, contributes nothing to the success of the invasion.
One clue to the subtler implications of Mailer's title comes fairly late in the book, on that crucial and futile reconnaissance detail. Roth, a college-educated private in the platoon, a man already into middle age, tired, frustrated, and haunted by the specter of anti-Semitism among his fellow soldiers, has just collapsed in exhaustion. Gallagher, a blustering Irishman, strikes Roth, shouting, "Get up, you Jew bastard!" And suddenly Roth, through his exhaustion and panic, sees new vistas of terror and violence open before him:
All the protective devices, the sustaining facades of his life had been eroding slowly in the caustic air of the platoon; his exhaustion had pulled out the props, and Gallagher's blow had toppled the rest of the edifice. He was naked another way now. He rebelled against it, was frustrated that he could not speak to them and explain it away.
Naked another way now; five words and a blow have forced Roth to a point of existential nakedness, a point where he comes face to face-not with the cosmic void-but rather with the conditional, fragile, mortal nature of his own mind and his own body, a point where the props and assurances, the style, of his normal at-homeness with himself no longer avails to mask himself from himself. And if he is naked at this moment, he is also more startlingly alive than at any other moment of his life. To be naked, then, is to be at once terribly frightened, exalted, and intimate with one's own most intensely conscious self. And to be dead, then, truly dead, is never to have had such a moment, never to have watched the intricate style of your assurances crumble around you and then be forced to recognize what, amid the rubble of that fallen temple of normality, there is to assist in the construction of a new and stronger selfhood.
Roth's moment of risk and panic is, indeed, a minor one, and one more heavily fraught with terror and failure than with the explosive, exhilarating discovery of a new life. But it is nevertheless an important incident. It helps us see that - among the many interrelated narrative structures of the novel - one way to read The Naked and the Dead is as a series, a carefully varied cluster, of just such moments.
Roth's confrontation with an intimately personal void, moreover, could not be possible without the pressure of politics and so-called peacetime society. Roth is a New York Jew, Gallagher a Boston Irish Catholic; and the ironic interplay of those two hieratic American identities provides Mailer with one of his most permanent and revelatory metaphors in his ongoing exploration of the national psyche. The real war in this gigantic war novel, one feels, is not the conflict of Japanese and American troops on a trivial island, but the perennial warfare of political and personal styles of identity, of dullness with vitality, of prejudice with vision, of the existentially naked with the imaginatively dead. The war, indeed, both as historical, political fact and as metaphor, is seen throughout the novel primarily as a precipitating image - almost what T. S. Eliot once called an "objective correlative" - for this underlying, critical conflict. Since the Iliad, of course, the most valuable and greatest stories of war have been stories about precisely what the extreme, limiting situation of war does to men's ideas of themselves, their world, and their gods. Mailer manages to sustain and enrich that ancient tradition - to create a novel which is, paradoxically, as much a novel of manners as it is a battlefield epic.
Another moment of "nakedness" in this complex sense comes to the cowardly, sycophantic Sergeant Brown as he is carrying a dying comrade back from the jungle to the beach. It is an important counterpart to Roth's confrontation through violence, for Brown experiences his "nakedness" as an access of tender, almost feminine solicitude for the dying man (formerly one of his despised enemies) whom he is bearing. The two men exchange small talk about their families, as men often speak of anything, in the face of death, except death itself. And in a sudden rush of pity and love, Brown whispers, "Just take it easy, boy" to the dying Wilson. In that instant Brown feels the misery and failure of his life open into an exultant sense of participation and unity. It would be (and has been, in any number of sentimental war films and books) an unbearably mawkish scene, except for Mailer's own toughmindedness about the quality and the duration of the revelation. "It could not last," Brown realizes.
It was as if Brown had awakened in the middle of the night, helpless in the energies his mind had released in sleep. In the transit to awareness, to wakefulness, he would be helpless for a time, tumbling in the wake of his dream, separated from all the experience, all the trivia that made his life recognizable and bearably blunted to himself. He would be uncovered, lost in the plain of darkness, containing within himself not only all his history and all of the present the ebbs and pulses of his body, but he would be the common denominator of all men and the animals behind them, waking blindly in the primordial forests.
This, it seems more and more as one studies Mailer's fiction, is the quintessential moment - the destruction of politics and the reestablishment of a primordial, visionary politics in its place - toward which all his characters, in one way or another, strive. But, for Brown, it cannot and will not last. In Mailer's world, a man is not only tested and refined by his moments of nakedness, he is also judged by them; and if the man's past has been one of tiny evasions, small hypocrisies, then the moment will not endure, nor will it issue, as it should, in the creation or fabrication of a new style for living, a more embracing and heroic style of being in the world.
Continental existentialism, particularly the austere and dramatic vision of Albert Camus, obviously lies behind this elevation and mythologization of the naked moment, as does the whole intellectual inheritance of romanticism with its Rousseauistic emphasis upon the primitive nobility of man, untrammeled by the nets of social conditioning. For Mailer, the human equation is more unyieldingly moralistic than for the French existentialists and more ambiguously, problematically artificial than for the high romantics. In The Naked and the Dead and his other novels, there is something almost medieval in the ferocity with which his characters, at their crucial moments of confrontation, are judged - both by themselves and by their creator - and frozen, at the moment of judgment, into the postures of their heroism or cowardice. It is one of the many paradoxes of this highly paradoxical writer that, for all his insistence upon the protean, infinitely self-contradictory nature of human personality, no one is more rigidly un-protean in his view of his own characters. Like the damned in Dante's Hell or the figures in an allegorical tapestry, his people are (at their best) giant figures of the states and perils of the soul in search of its own salvation. For the progress of the soul in that search we have, usually, to look to the example set by the speaking, narrating voice of the author himself and to look even more closely at the variable shape of his novelistic career. Sartre once observed of the fatality of William Faulkner's characters that they are all amputees: they have no sense of, no possibility of, a real future. With Mailer, that psychic amputation is even more severe. His characters are all trapped within a testing and judging present, the present of the "naked moment," which will admit the possibility of the past only as a preparation for it and the possibility of a future only as the infinite repetition of its hieratic form.
In The Naked and the Dead this highly individual quality of Mailer's world achieves its most perfectly articulated expression: a wedding of vision and story, form and substance, which is lacking in the later novels precisely because never again does Mailer have the good fortune to write a novel about war itself, that most innately allegorical, schematic, tapestrylike of human activities. The first thing one sees, opening the book, is a map of "Anopopei," the is land whose invasion is the major, generative event of the novel. Anopopei is a dream or nightmare island; the name itself, surely, carries as many associations and memories of the language of the nursery as it does of the dialects of Micronesia. The island is shaped, as no one ever tires of saying in the book, like an ocarina: an elongated oval lying east and west, with, toward its western end, a nearly perpendicular shortened peninsula jutting into the ocean.
Maps are usually rather dull and unimportant adjuncts to works of fiction, but the shape of Anopopei is worth studying carefully, since the plot of the book will follow so precisely and with such literally strategic organization, the course of the invading army down the "mouthpiece" of this giant ocarina and thence on an eastward sweep, along the northern side of the island, until it finally breaks through the Japanese line of defense.
It is perhaps excessive to compare Mailer's performance in the dramatic delineation of great masses of armies in movement and logistical arrangement to Tolstoy - but only "perhaps" - for if on one level The Naked and the Dead is a series of individual, existential confrontations on the part of the members of the invading army, on another, equally important level the book is a magisterially complete and convincing picture of men living and acting in the mass, a story of military invasion which is unequaled, in recent memory, in its power to convey the impression of a truly large-scale movement of human beings. The very shape of Anopopei, in this respect, is one of the most brilliant and paradoxically "unrealistic" inventions of the novel. The island is shaped to fit a textbook case of invasion tactics, designed by the author to clarify perfectly the classical military problems of entering hostile territory, supplying one's forces for extensive maneuvers against an entrenched enemy, and finally breaking down the enemy's resistance and occupying the territory.
If on the existential level of personal confrontation the book is a series of instants of revelatory nakedness, on the political level it is the large-scale "plot" of the invasion and occupation of the schematic island of Anopopei. On both levels, the situation of war serves primarily to refine and clarify, through panic and urgency, the underlying qualities of everyday, peacetime personality and politics.
The "Homeric simile," articulated in the Iliad and the Odyssey and ever after celebrated as one of the first literary techniques of the Western imagination, is an extended comparison of some act of wartime slaughter to an analogous, but idyllically agricultural or civic feature of the acts of peace. At the simplest level, for example, it may be said that a mighty warrior cuts down the hosts of his enemies as a farmer cuts down, at harvest time, the stalks of his wheat field - the point being, of course, the ironic contrast between man's destructive and creative labors, and also, at least traditionally, the disruptive, unnatural quality of those acts of destruction. (Simone Weil, it might be mentioned in passing, wrote one of her most brilliant essays - The Iliad, or the Poem of Force - about just this classical, Homeric sense of the terminally perverted nature of physical violence.) But Mailer, whether deliberately or simply by instinct, inverts the classical formula, so that The Naked and the Dead can be read as a massive Homeric simile turned inside out. The killing, destructive activities of war are seen, that is, not as ironically deformed analogues to the acts of peacetime, but rather as ironically, horrifyingly clarified extensions of those acts. Rather than viewing war, with Homer and Vergil, as the apocalyptic cancellation of the life of the peaceful city, the polis or the urbs, Mailer presents us with a vision of war - of The War - as the ongoing, unacknowledged, and deeply nauseating condition of even the most comfortably pacific urban life. It is an inversion which, in Mailer's later work, becomes perhaps his central contribution to the social and spiritual mythology of his time: the insight that civilized life, whatever its ordinary, daylight assurances about itself, is always, to the enlightened imagination, involved in a state of total war between the visionary naked and the visionary dead.
In The Naked and the Dead itself, Mailer rises to something like an explicit awareness of his Homeric inversion in the curious sections entitled "The Time Machine." For each of the major characters, there is a time machine segment, usually coming directly before or directly after his existential moment of nakedness. This is an impressionistic, sometimes stream-of-consciousness tableau of the character's peacetime life, his background, his ruling passions, his signal failures and signal triumphs. Formally, the time machine device is a rather close borrowing from the "Camera Eye" segments of John Dos Passos's great trilogy of World War I and its aftermath, U.S.A. But the device is also distinctively "Maileresque"; it serves, again in the medieval fashion of allegorizing I have described, to deepen and consolidate the implications of what a character discovers about himself, or fails to discover, in his moment of nakedness. The political satire of Dos Passos's camera eye, that is, is overlaid and transformed by Mailer's own obsession with the radically personal, passional bases of politics.
Indeed, if we must locate a single aw, a single evidence of clumsiness and apprenticeship in this overwhelmingly masterful novel, it is probably the presence of the time machine interchapters. They are obtrusive, and they do, with something of a too mechanical economy, emphasize the predeterminations, passional and political, acting upon the men of Anopopei. But even this clumsiness is, after all, more fascinating and instructive than it is bothersome. Mailer's effort, in The Naked and the Dead, is to fabricate a myth of the war which will include at once the physical, historical details of the Pacific campaign, the political and economic origins and consequences of that war and the private, phenomenological, and sometimes mystical discoveries which that eternal warfare can generate. Such an ambitious enterprise demands a certain degree of clumsiness, a certain modicum of narrative backtracking and indirection, if is at all successfully to make its multiple points. As an attempt to unify a public with a private vision of America, the time machine interchapters - like the novel of which they are a part - have all the strengths of their weaknesses.
The novel as a whole, then, operates on two discrete but ultimately unified levels, the political and the private, as does the division of its cast of characters. The political division, not surprisingly, is between officers and enlisted men, particularly the men of "the I and R platoon of headquarters company of the 460th Infant Regiment." Mailer's treatment leaves little doubt that the tension between officers and G.I.'s is simply a magnification of the peace time conflict between the wielders of power and money and the exploited victims of those wielders. It is, in fact, a class conflict in an almost purely Marxist sense. The three most important officers are General Cummings, the commander of the invading army and a character of boundless self-knowledge and cynicism about the life-denying work which is his vocation; Major Dalleson, a blissfully unintelligent, plodding career man whose greatest talent is his ability not to think; and Lieutenant Hearn, perhaps the most important character in the novel, a sensitive, liberal intellectual who despises the power to which his rank entitles him but who cannot - till the very end of his life - break beyond that outrage to a vision of rebellion against the structures of power and exploitation. The G.I.'s are headed by Sergeant Croft, the leader of the reconnaissance platoon, a man whose complex hatred for life has turned him into a cool, unthinking killing machine. Croft is feared and disliked by the other men in his platoon, among them Roth; Brown; Wilson, the easygoing, sensual Southerner whose death gives Brown his moment of transport; Gallagher, the Bostonian nearly paralyzed by his rage at the disappointments of his peacetime life; and Red Valsen, the ailing, ironically fatalistic hobo whose life up to and including his military service has been a succession of part-time jobs for the wielders of power, from which he has evolved a philosophy of clear-eyed but despairing bitterness .
This abstract division between haves and have-nots is deeply rooted in the conventions of the social-realist fiction of the thirties. But, as the popular conception of American literature has it, the advent of the war was supposed to have eliminated this sense of class struggle from the national imagination. One thinks of such representative mythologies of the war as Bill Mauldin's "Willie and Joe" cartoons, films like Battleground or The Sands of Iwo Jima, or novels like Mr. Roberts and The Caine Mutiny. Even well after the conclusion of the fighting, the assumption remained the same: officers may tend to be a trifle pompous, even sometimes tyrannical, and enlisted men may tend to be insubordinate, even sometimes unsympathetic to the war effort - but in the end, the eminent good of making the world safe for foxhole democracy would ensure that the best of them would all pull together. Mailer - anticipating Joseph Heller's perhaps overrated Catch-22 - will have none of this. There is real courage in the precision with which he delineates, at the center of the war which was supposed to have been our liberation from the inequities of peacetime capitalist society, the persistence and triumph of those very inequities.
The political allegory of the novel, however, though strong and important, serves chiefly as a scaffolding - one might almost say an imaginative pretense - for the much more originally conceived partition of characters on the private, existential level. Here, especially in the pivotal figures of General Cummings, Sergeant Croft, and Lieutenant Hearn, Mailer defines a spectrum of personalities - or, better, a spectrum of possibilities of personality - which remains his most constant metaphor for the human, political condition.
I have said that war is the most schematic, allegorical of human activities. In The Naked and the Dead, at least, this is strikingly borne out in the ranks assigned the three men who most explicitly define the spiritual, metaphysical limits of the novel's vision. Cummings, the general, is in absolute control of the invasion of Anopopei, and therefore in control of the lives of everyone else in the book. He is the first and perhaps the most disturbing of those self conscious, preternaturally intelligent, horrifyingly soulless capitalists and controllers who are a permanent feature of the Mailer landscape. In him we see the epic ancestor of movie mogul Herman Teppis in The Deer Park, millionaire Barney Kelley in An American Dream, even President Lyndon Johnson in The Armies of the Night. Cummings is an evil man; and his evil consists, more than in any thing else, in the deliberation and callousness with which he takes part in the dance of power and death, all the while knowing it to be a crime against the very sources of the human spirit. He is a homosexual, as we learn toward the end of the novel - not a repressed homosexual, but a deliberately abstinent one, cold husband to a frustrated wife. To enjoy even that form of love (always the most minimal and despicable, in Mailer's basically puritan ethic) would be to jeopardize his military career and therefore the true style of his passion, the exercise of power. A fascist warring against fascists, Cummings announces to Hearn, early in the novel, his hopes for a war to outlast the war, for an era of totalitarian power of which World War II would be only the prelude. "You're a fool," he tells Hearn, "if you don't realize this is going to be the reactionary's century, perhaps their thousand-year reign. It's the one thing Hitler said which wasn't completely hysterical." He continues, even more chillingly: "You can look at it, Robert, that we're in the middle ages of a new era, waiting for the renaissance of real power. Right now, I'm serving a rather sequestered function, I really am no more than the chief monk, the lord of my little abbey, so to speak."
This Gothic vision of the "renaissance of real power," of a society manipulated with absolute efficiency by a gigantic cartel of power brokers, will loom larger and larger in Mailer's later novels. It is also an important analogue - indeed, as we shall see, a direct influence - for the dark myth of a manipulated, automatized humanity in the work of Thomas Pynchon, especially in Gravity's Rainbow, which can be read as an immense and brilliant fantasia upon the themes of The Naked and the Dead.
At the opposite end of the personal spectrum from the general is Sergeant Croft - "The Hunter," as he is called in his time machine segment. Croft is another highly recognizable Mailer type, the first and most arresting of those unschooled, elemental, murderous Southerners whose presence and whose myth Mailer delight in. But in Croft's case, something has gone wrong, something has soured and inverted his talent for life, so that he has become a splendidly equipped, gracefully athletic killer. If, indeed, Cummings's wielding of power-for-death involves the exploitation and automatization of the classes he governs, Croft is the perfect victim, the perfect butt for the general's grim plans. While Cummings is a self-conscious denier of life (his homosexuality here is a powerful metaphor for this passionate sterility), Croft is a victimized and victimizing destroyer of a life he cannot possess, cannot fully comprehend (he is a cuckold). War is the ideal sphere of action for a man like Croft, since it allows him to exercise his baffled violence without fear of retribution or the threat of having to face his own moral responsibilities.
Between themselves, Cummings and Croft incarnate a grim vision of the passional structures underlying political and social relations. Both men, finally, are among the visionary "dead" of the book's title, the one because he has refused himself his chance for life, the other because his baffled, outraged imagination fails to grasp the chance when it is offered. And between Cummings and Croft stands Lieutenant Hearn.
It is ancient but accurate army folklore that a second lieutenant is one of the most unfortunate of human beings, contemned by his fellow officers as the lowest and most inexperienced of their number and resented by the enlisted men as their most familiar, most constant point of contact with the hateful class of commanders. Hearn, since he moves in both political spheres of the novel, is an ideal figure to become the unifying consciousness, the central moral voice of The Naked and the Dead. His progeny in Mailer's later novels will be those tough-sensitive, aspiring novelists and manqués intellectuals who are Mailer's most frank and probing projections of his own temperament: Lovett in Barbary Shore, O'Shaugnessy in The Deer Park, Rojack in An American Dream, D. J. in Why Are We in Vietnam? and "Norman Mailer" in The Armies of the Night. But Hearn himself is both more ambivalent than these later characters and more immediately engaging.
TK - stopped
The most common activity for a Mailer hero is, oddly enough, watching. Despite the novelist's enthusiasm for-indeed, cult of -action, almost all his central characters, with the exception of
the murderer Rojack in An American Dream, spend the majority of their time watching and waiting to act. They strive to understand a complex situation, all the while keying themselves to the point
of urgency, the critical point of understanding where action is unremittingly forced upon them.
It is an illuminating contrast to the classic situation described
by the novels of Mailer's antitype, Saul Bellow. With Bellow, as
we saw in the last chapter, the definitive story is that of a man who sees chaos, the irrational, open before him in his everyday life and who then attempts, somehow, to come to terms with that apocalyptic eruption, to reconstitute the validity in his life of the traditional moral certitudes. Mailer does not so much contradict Bellow's myth of man in society, as he inverts its terms. To the Mailer hero, the Mailer sensibility, society in its everyday appearance is a sham, a trap hiding beneath it deep and dark conspiracies , games of power and death which are subtle perils to the soul. The Mailer hero, then, characteristically enters upon a process of examination, investigation, and discovery whose final illumination, ideally, will force him into just such a shattering confrontation with the existential void
as Bellow's characters are in the business of surviving or overcom ing. Mailer's central consciousness, that is, seeks the very moment of testing and decision from which Bellow's tales begin their exem plary voyages back to the civilized .
As befits the first of such seekers-for-the-void, Hearn goes through this process in a relatively simplified, schematic form. Caught by his rank between the two antagonistic political factions of the army, he is also acute enough to realize that that antagonism itself is the outward sign of a much more deeply rooted, perhaps epochal con flictbetween two possibilities for civilization, that of the totalitar ian, socially engineered power games of the upper classes and that of the anarchic, murderous energies of the lower. Trapped in rank between Cummings and Croft, he is also passionately caught be tween their two equally life-destroying visions of possibility. Hearn is one of the existentially naked , perhaps the most fully so in the book, and not one of the visionary dead. Born the WASP son of
a Midwestern merchant prince, he is the natural heir to all that attracts him and repels him in the assured, rich culture of Cum mings and the raw , hunterly primitivism of Croft (and here again the schematism of the book is splendidly graphic, for Croft is, nat urally, a westerner , while Cummings is an eastern seaboard product) .
As the book begins, Hearn is Cummings's special attache, the intimate and unwilling admirer of the general's most shockingly personal reveries and confessions. At the imaginative center of the book, he rebels against the panoply of power Cummings has ex hibited to him and is dismissed from the general's staffto become the lieutenant of the reconnaissance platoon formerly headed by Croft. And if Cummings hates Hearn for his humanitarianism,
his resistance to Cummings's own sprawling dreams of total control, so Cro hates him as an intruder upon the intimate society of the platoon which the sergeant had controlled, a threat to his own un trammeled exultation in killing (just before Hearn joins the platoon , Cro has pointlessly executed a captured and weeping Japanese soldier, for the pure joy of the act) . Finally-a grim enough proph ecy of the fate of the civilization which has spawned them-the o complementary forces of death will destroy the central character
of life and intelligence in this novel; for Cummings, in an attempt to execute his own elegant strategy for the capture of Anopopei, deta s Hearn's platoon on an impossible, suicidal scouting mission on the fa hest side of the island ; and Cro , on that mission, de-
liberately falsifies a scouting report about enemy troop placement and thereby lures Hearn to his death in an ambush. It is a superb evidence of Mailer's narrative skill that Cummings and Cro never once meet in the course of the novel-for both men are seduced
by complementary ideals of pure power. Their unwitting conspiracy with each other murders the one man who, more than anyone else in The Naked and the Dead, refuses the seductions of power to live on the naked edge of intelligence and self-doubt.
But if Cummings and Croft triumph over Hearn, it is a sour tri umph, since both men, by the end of the book, are forced-not to live through a moment of nakedness-but precisely to miss such
a m o m e n t a n d t o b e a r t h e r e a l i z a t i o n o f t h e i r f a i l u r e . C r o ft , p a s  sionate to complete the assignment of the reconnaissance mission by scaling the forbidding heights of Mount Anaka, finally has to turn back from that ascent because of the growing mutinousness
of his men and the most absurd of accidents-one of his men dis turbs a hornet's nest, sending the whole platoon fleeing back down the slopes of the mountain. And as he leaves the shore of Anopopei,
he gazes at the mountain he has failed :
Croft kept looking at the mountain. He had lost it, had missed some tantalizing revelation of himself.
Of himself and much more. Of life. Everything.
And Cummings lives through an even more galling retribution for his failure of life, one which repeats on a gigantic scale the absurdity of Croft's hornet's nest. The invasion and occupation of Anopopei succeeds, but succeeds despite Cummings's grandiose strate of attack. On a day Cummings is away, organizing the elaborate naval support he needs for his operation , his second in command , the bovine Major Dalleson, discovers that American troops have broken through one Japanese position. In a reluctant and confused attempt simply to move up support for these successful troops, Dalleson finds that he has eventually moved up the entire invading army and routed the already starved, ammunitionless Japanese resistance. Like Croft, Cummings pays for his refusal of life in a costly coin: the realization of the terminal, unremitting futility of his best ef forts. The last word in the novel is given to the most unlikely of all its characters, the insipid Dalleson, who still does not quite realize what he has, through the anthill wisdom of bureaucracy, accom plished. We see him planning an ultimate triviality-map-reading classes employing a pinup of Bet Grable to keep the men's at-
tention-and pathetically hoping, with this idea, to win some recognition, even maybe a promotion, from the powers he doggishly serves :
That was it. He'd write Army. And in the meantime he might send a letter to the War Depa ment Training Aids Section. They were out for improvements like that. The Major could see every unit in the Army using his idea at last. He clenched his fists with excitement.
Hot dog!
One can imagine no more magnificently, uncompromisingly bleak ending for this stunning novel ; for at this point it becomes a time machine, not into the past, but opening into the future, postwar
life of the American psyche . That future, implicit in the dull victory of Major Dalleson, is to be one of grim and terminal conflict be tween the naked and the dead whose warfare opens on Anopopei. The book prophesies precisely the manic world ofvisionary politics and visceral revolution which will increasingly b ecome the landscape of Mailer's fiction and-in the sixties, at least-the quite real land scape of American public life.
Indeed, Hearn, just before his death, achieves a privileged mo ment of vision which sounds, in retrospect, almost like a manifesto for his creator's future. As Hearn resolves his relationship to the Cummingses and Cro s of the world, he also envisions a mission of revolution and resistance-one of Mailer's most perfectly a ic ulated moments of the coalescence and unification of the private and the political:
If the world turned Fascist, if Cummings had his century, there was a little thing he could do. There was always terror ism. But a neat terrorism with nothing sloppy about it, no machine guns, no grenades, no bombs, nothing messy, no indiscriminate killing. Merely the knife and the garotte, a few trained men, and a list of fifty bastards to be knocked off, and then another fifty.
This is, of course, partly a very young man's vision of revolution as a glorified Boy Scout excursion. And Mailer, with one of those self-critical movements which so often save his fiction (if not his theorizing) from becoming ridiculous, has Hearn realize this and snort to himself, "Hearn and Quixote. Bourgeois liberals." But then, having purified the style of his own vision by understanding and elevating to consciousness its very stylized nature, Hearn can continue, can complete the moment: "Still, when he got back he
would do that little thing. If he looked for the reasons they were probably lousy, but it was even lousier to lead men for obviously bad motives. It meant leaving the platoon to Croft, but if he stayed he would become another Cro . "
The moral puritanism of Hearn's final style, his insistence that one must never rest, never allow oneself the easy repetition of what seems most comforting, is one of the most finely realized moments in Mailer's fiction; but it is also to become one of the most severe problems of Mailer's later career. TheNaked and theDead, as bears repeating one more time, is a supreme achievement, a fable, like few others, good beyond hope; but the very sternness of its ethic makes the repetition of its triumph impossible-indeed , in terms
of the code of the book itself, immoral . During the decade following its publication, Mailer was to act out the frenetic honesty of Hearn's vision with perhaps more accuracy than he had expected or would
havewished. TheNaked and theDeadwas followed in 1951 byBar ba Shore and in 1955 by The DeerPark. A er The DeerPark.
ten years were to elapse before the publication, in 1965, of his next novel, An American Dream. Before the 1964 serialization ofAn American Dream in Esquire, it was a fairly common-and largely unquestioned-belief that Mailer's creative life had exhausted it self, that he was written out, a classic example of the American one-book genius doomed for the remainder of his career to search aimlessly for the greatness he had once won and lost. Barba Shore and TheDeerPark, to most readers and critics of the fifties, seemed to be successive and pathetic chapters in the decay of a once-strong talent. A er the magisterial power of TheNakedand theDead,
the two novels were generally received as floundering, self-indul gent, egomaniacal exercises not so much in the art of fiction as in a kind of self-appointed philosophical hucksterism-"ideological" novels in the worst, most forbidding, sense of that word.
Looking back at the two books from the vantage of Mailer's cur rent fame and rebirth, it is easy to believe that the critics of the fif ties were simply too obtuse, too insensitive to the urgency and complexity of the writer's enterprise to understand his brilliance. Norman Podhoretz, at the very end of the decade, in 1959, pub lished an important essay defending Mailer's second and third novels, arguing that, far from having waned into a minor talent,
he was writing novels even richer in political and moral vision than his first great book. Podhoretz's eloquent defense of Barba Shore and The DeerPark is still, even in the midst of the present Mailer boom , one of the most convincing and valuable elucidations we have .
But it would be a serious mistake to overemphasize the genius, power, or perfection of Mailer's later novels, would be, in fact, a blatant parti pris. Undeniably-and it is one of the most poignant stories of twentieth-century American literature-Norman Mailer has not yet, really, produced a work to equal the stature of The
Naked and the Dead. Nor-notwithstanding the enthusiasm of his most ardent supporters-has he produced a novel in which his later developed theories of existential, visceral politics are so convincingly articulated. His career since that book has been largely the search for a style or a set of styles which will allow him, with honesty and elegance, to act out the "neat terrorism" imagined by the doomed Hearn: a lifelong act of resistance to and rebellion against the life denying, soul-crushing forces of dullness and orthodoxy which Mailer sees as the most serious threat to the America of the century's second half. It is a neat-that is, a stylized-terrorism he seeks.
So, precisely because of the tentativeness and guerillalike tactics of his program, he has been forced to produce a series of novels which are, in a strange way, deliberately unfinished, self-consciously awed , since for him once again to achieve a totally realized , totally conventional perfection would represent a kind of surrender to the forces of security against which he has set his teeth . Artists of every kind are threatened by nothing so much as by their own success, their own celebri . And Ma er, in a mixture of courage and fool ishness, has dealt with the threat of his own immense success by aunting it, risking it against the odds of disgrace and embarrass ment at every new moment of his career. The neat terrorism of the writer is his willingness to do violence to his own image, his own most widely accepted triumphs, in the interest of guaranteeing the very honesty, the very moral power, of those triumphs. If the artist has not been lucky enough to be born an orphan in the Mailer world, then he must be brave enough to murder his own encumbering an cestors-even his own previous books .
Barba Shore
The first lines of Barba Shore are a truly startling act of renuncia tion, of self-denial, or of a kind of stylistic ritual suicide: "Probably I was in the war. There is the mark of a wound behind my ear, an oblong of unfertile flesh where no hair grows. It is covered over now, and may be disguised by even the clumsiest barber, but no barber can hide the scar on my back. For that a tailor is more in order."
"Probably I was i n the war . " This i s the greeting offered t o his readers, a er a three-year silence, by the author of the century's
best war novel. It demands to be read as a hazardously arrogant dismissal of all the popular enthusiasm for The Naked and the Dead, all the convenient and reassuring misunderstandings which may have arisen out of the success of that highly problematic novel. The narrator of Barba Shore is Mikey Lovett, aspiring novelist, unwilling but compulsive empathizer in the sufferings of others,
and amnesiac. World War II, the scene of Mailer's early triumph,
is canceled out of Lovett's experience, just as Mailer wishes to cancel out our own memory of his war novel, to begin again his exploration of the visionary underpinnings of society. I have said that, in terms of his critical reception , M ailer has seemed to be an exemplary vic tim of the "first novel" kind of success. Beginning with Barba Shore, he himself pursues the dangerous and exhilarating course
of creating-not a fictional oeuvr -but a series of "first novels , " each one rejecting or redefining the achievements of its predeces sors .
Thus Mikey Lovett, amnesiac, is the first in a series of amnesiacs, orphans, and putative bastards who will be the heroes of Mailer's later books ; and as such he is a particularly interesting example of Mailer's quest for a fictionalized, artificial orphanhood (we might notice here that his fascination with Marilyn Monroe in Ma lyn
is largely bound up with Monroe's orphanage origins). If "inauthen ticity," the panicky realization of one's own conditioned, made-up nature, is the signal theme and problem of most contemporary American fiction , then Lovett's loss of memory-both personal and cultural memory-is one of the earliest and still one of the most radi cal versions of that dilemma. To be a novelist-indeed, to live at all-he must literally reinvent the past, reinvent his own selfhood:
It made little difference whether I had met a man or he existed only in a book; there was never a way to determine if I knew
a country or merely remembered another's description. The legends from a decade of newsprint were as intimate and dis tant as the places in which I must have lived . No history be longed to me and so all history was mine. Yet in what a state.
The intellectual hero of the first half of the twentieth centu -T. S. Eliot in The Wasteland, Lafcadio in Gide's Les Caves du
Vatican, Frederick Hen in Hemingway's A Farewell to A s-has witnessed the eruption of chaos into civilized life and tries to find
an ethic, a tradition which will allow him to live with that chaos
and reintegrate its eruption into the great myth of human continu ity. Bellow's novels, examples of a kind of "pre-postmodemism, "
follow largely the same psychic graph, except that for Bellow the eruption of chaos is both more intimate and more violent, while
the search for a compensatory intellectual tradition is more des perate and more ironic, self-doubtful. In Lovett, Mailer gives us a figure who is distinctively the intellectual of the post-World War II era, for whom the chaos, the sundering explosion which destroys memory and tradition , is primal , the first fact of his experience . His quest for reunification, then, for a saving image of community, will be a quest performed on a shifting, treacherous landscap which is the landscape of the mind grown aware of the fictiveness of its own deepest , most immediate impulses and beliefs . If all his tory-and no history-belongs to him, this is to say that history itself has become style, but style in a moral and political vacuum. The problem for Love -and for the novel-is to discover the "right" style for one's life and at the same time to invent a life in which such a style can make one fully human.
This process, abstract and contradictory as it sounds in the pre ceding paragraph, is the central and powerful drama of Barba Shore. Lovett takes a top-floor, shabby apartment in a run-down New York apartment house-a summer lease from a friend who
is already a moderately successful writer-to begin work on his book . But the book never gets written, for Lovett finds himself rap idly involved in the lives and the pasts of his fellow boarders : Guine vere , the preternaturally vulgar and sensuous landlady ; McLeod , the mysterious and mocking fellow roomer on the top floor; Hol lingswo h, an apparently stupid and prurient young man from the Midwest; and Lannie, the sensitive and half-mad, vulnerable and seductive proto-hippie. The action begins at an uncertainly comic level-appropriate for Lovett's own fumbling, tentative first at tempts to construct a personality for himself-centering upon his attraction to the self-advertising Guinevere and the frustrations
of his efforts to bed her .
The tone of the opening, in fact, is almost that of Nathanael
West's earlier, absurdist visions of a venal and hypocritical America -probably a deliberate allusion on Mailer's part, especially in the presence of Monina, Guinevere's horribly spoiled, knowingly ob scene, and constantly interrupting daughter. Guinevere has raised Monina, in an insane fantasy, to be a child star in Hollywood, and indeed, Monina is an obvious and uglier reminiscence of the boy child actor, Baby Adore, in West's TheDay of theLocust. (It is perhaps an even deeper pa of the "allusion" that West, born Nathan Weinstein , is another major American Jewish novelist whose
career and whose "public" name were a sustained self-denial of the solaces and styles of an established personal and historical tradi tion.) But West's vision of America, acerbic as it is, is primarily a
satiric one-that is , a vision which allows itself, at the end , at least the terminal satisfaction of the sophisticated man's laughter at
the vulgarity and hopeless confusion of the mass . Satire-whether by Horace, Swift, West, or Lenny Bruce-is a relatively comfortable a , since it is based upon the ultimate intellectual solace, that of being an insider at the expense of the outsiders . Mailer , and Lovett, are finally not at home in the relative comfort of the satirist's irony. They are both-finally-charitable imaginations , and charity either destroys satire or transforms it into something even darker, richer, and more disturbing. As Lovett learns more about his fellow board
ers, he begins to see that they are actually all intimately interrelated in an insidious and subtle plot of revolution and repression, a plot which ends by shattering the comic, satiric poise of the opening pages. Lovett, that is, like a true Mailer hero, wat-ches his world
until he finds it changed into a structure of violence and chaos which demands his participation-transcends his own inauthenticity by discovering it to be a version, writ small, of the desperate inauthen ticity of the culture around him .
McLeod is at the center of this hidden plot and grows to be a crucial epicenter-almost an alternative her of the book. For McLeod , a bitter and self-destructive Irishman , is in fact a former Communist. He has, in despair at the chances for a worldwide so cialist revolution, resigned his high (and highly adventurous) posi tion in the party and worked, instead, for a top-secret government agency. But disgusted with his own despair and with the hypocritical policies of the people he has chosen to serve, McLeod betrays that trust, too. He absconds with a "little object," never more definitely identified, which is nevertheless crucial to the government's national and international plans. When Lovett enters the story, McLeod
has taken up a gloomy exile at the top of the shabby apartment building, where his wife , Guinevere-we eventually learn-acts
as his landlady and his perpetual sexual tormentor. Hollingsworth, furthermore, far from being simply an apotheosis of the American inane, is an agent of the government who has been sent, along with the half-mad Lannie, to track McLeod down and force him to return the "li le object" to its rightful; if unrighteous , possessors . The crucial section of the novel , then , is a long series of interviews with McLeod , first by Hollingsworth and then by Hollingswo h and Lannie, to all of which Lovett is invited to listen by his hunted
friend. These interviews take on a truly Kafkaesque dimension as McLeod's defenses against returning the little object-his remnants of self-respect, that is-are systematically and cruelly broken down . As McLeod dies his own imaginative death, he deliberately transfers his revolutionary ardor-thQugh oddly mutated-to the intellectual and spiritual tabula rasa that is Lovett. By the end of the novel, when McLeod is killed in a final refusal to surrender the little ob ject, Lovett has become his visionary heir, committed to continue the good fight-not for communism or capitalism-but for the imaginative liberation of men from the murderous official hypoc risies with which they are ever here strangled. In McLeod's last act, Lovett is left the little object and himself embarks upon his finally discovered career, not as novelist, but as alienated secret agent, loyal to no cause but that of imaginative liberation, and driven into a lifetime of exile, seclusion, and visionary sabotage.
In many ways , Barba Shore has all the elements of an exciting, off-center, but finally recognizable political espionage thriller rather like Kafka as filmed by Alfred Hitchcock. The "little ob ject , " in fact, nearly invisible but ironically fateful for eve one who comes into contact with it, is surely a conscious reminiscence of the celebrated "McGuffin," the unimportant but critical some thing which Hitchcock has described as a central element of plot construction in his films.
Even as a thriller, Barba Shore is oddly flawed. After the polish and poise of The Naked and the Dead, this book is tentative, unsure of its tone, roundabout in developing its central situation, and filled with clumsy, prosy longeurs, such as the section where Mc od,
in his final inte iew with Hollingsworth, insists upon giving an interminable speech justifying his own career and his idiosyncratic revolutionary theory. One can well understand the disappointment of those critics who read Barba Shore immediately after Mailer's rst novel , for it is as if the talent has somehow gone flaccid, be come homiletic , grown not more assured and mature but , pe ersely, younger, more callow.
In the context of Mailer's later work, though, we can see the novel as a ruin but a brilliant ruin, one which holds our interest precisely because it introduces that killing conflict be een ideology and nar rative which is to characterize all the author's later struggles. For
a book published in 1951 , at the center of the McCa hy menace
and the Red scare which was to pervert so much of American politi cal life during the last o decades, it is an admirably courageous political and imaginative manifesto. Indeed, if one of the book's
plots is the political consciousness-raising of Lovett to the p oint where he abandons his career in fiction for a career in political ac tivism, the book itself is Mailer's own imitation of the same con version , a largely successful attempt to turn the stuff of the novel into the stuff of political action-an attempt which, as we shall see, has remained one of his perennial concerns.
The transfer of energy from the old revolutiona McLeod to the young amnesiac Lovett, furthermore, may be read almost allegori cally as Mailer's realization of his position vis A vis the traditions
of earlier American and European modernism . It is an imaginative
shorthand for his sense that, for the contemporary writer, the es sential quest is not finding new directions for fiction, but consolidat ing the achievement of Joyce, Kafka, Faulkner, et. al. , into a viable, eclectic, and above all civilizing-which is to say, liberating-politi cal sensibility. We have already observed that the first words of Barba Shore repudiate the fame earned by The Naked and the Dead. But, more importantly, Lovett's abandonment of ction for action is a powerful metaphor for Mailer's decision, from Barba Shore onward , to eschew the consolations of narrative elegance for the harder, embattled vision of writing as action .
The novel Lovett is trying to write-and which never gets written -is in this regard a crucial element in the book. He describes its vague, almost parodistically Kafkaesque, plot early in Barba Shore:
I intended a large ambitious work about an immense insti tution never defined more exactly than that, and about the people who wandered through . The book had a hero and
a heroine, but they never met while they were in the insti tution. It was only when they escaped, each of them in sepa rate ways and by separate methods, that they were capable of love and so could discover each other.
It need hardly be pointed out that the plot of Lovett's projected novel is exactly the plot of his own experience in Barba Shore, with the important difference that Lovett's "escape" will involve no romantic union with a wished-for lover. Lif such is Mailer's continual hope and despair-will eventually realize and transcend the fictive imagination of life. But before Lovett can become the hero of his own intended novel, before he can transcend the forms of fiction for the forms of life, he must undergo a purification which forces him to abandon his trust in the blandishments of fiction, realize his own inauthenticity against the murderous backdrop of
fifties politics. It is McLeod who forces him to such a purification. The man without a memory, for whom all history is a universal fic tion, is forced to invent the "real" history of his era:
McLeod's words returned to me then, and more. Out of that long day and longer night, I could be troubled again by the talk we had had on the bridge and the memory which followed it . . . . What, I heard myself asking in the silence of the room , are the phenomena of the world today? And into that formal void my mind sent an answer, the tat to the tit; I could have been reciting from a catechism .
The history of the last twenty years m ay be divided into two decades: adecadeofeconomiccrisis, andadecadeofwarand the preparations for a new war.
The answer to his question leaps into Lovett's mind as if "from a catechism" because it is, of course, a standard formula of the cate chisms of Marxism and socialism of the period. But, precisely be cause Lovett has to rediscover that formula from the midst of his own personal void , the crudely predigested nature of its assertion is transformed; socioeconomic cliche becomes visionary politics, through the mediacy of fiction. There is, in Barba Shore, no better or more brilliantly real ed instance of Mailer's ability, when writing at the top of his form, to use the novel as the one, unique, indispen sable medium for his full-scale redefinition of society and its discon tents. Stanley Edgar Hyman persuasively argues, in The Tangled Bank, that the underlying dramatic form of Marx ' s Capital is that of the Victorian melodramatic novel. It is tempting to regard Mai ler's fiction, then, as an inversion-or reversion-of the processes
of Marx's imagination, an identification of politics and economics as the underlying form of melodrama itself.
At least, Mailer seems unimpeachably right in his insight that the horrors of the McCarthy years are important not so much for their specific history of demagoguery and psychic brutalization, but rather as an overture to the years of imaginative warfare which
succeeded them . Richard Nixon , whose career oddly parallels the novelist's, may or may not have been in Mailer's mind when he cre ated the figure of Hollingsworth, that self-satisfied, but deeply in secure, moralizing, but totally unscrupulous Inquisitor of the middle class ; but the inadve ence of the portrait is , if anything, only an earnest of the prophecy's accuracy. The "new war" which Barba Shore envisions is not one between countries or continents , but one, perhaps the final one, between the naked and the dead
of the spirit; between those ready to sacrifice everything-even their talent-for the construction of a new, humane society and those for
whom the impotence of an exhausted political and imaginative con vention is a comfortable and desirable habitation.
To say this much about Barba Shore is to say that it is an anar chic novel . Mailer's alternatives of imaginative life and imaginative death have none of the subtle interplay-none of that sense of the saving norm-which characterize their struggle in the work of Saul Bellow or, later, John Barth. Like Thomas Pynchon, his greatest heir, Mailer's is a mind at home only among absolutes, which may account for the immense power and the sometime puerility of both Mailer and Pynchon. From Barba Shore on, Mailer's own imag inative war is a life-and-death struggle which, in its ve violence, frequently ruptures either the fabric of his fiction (which often can not bear the ponderous weight of his half-emergent ideas) or the consistency of his ideas (whose frequent simplicity is undercut by the subtlety of his fictive imagination) . In Barba Shore this strug
gle is almost allegorically caught by the strange rivalry between Mc od and Lovett for the elusive, vulgar, outrageous, and seductive Guinevere. Her name itself, the name of the great adulterous queen of Arthur's court, is surely designed to indicate something of her symbolic weight. A bitch very like the bitch goddess of the novel itself so often described by Mailer, Guinevere is also, in some way, America itself-in her absurd and pathetic movie fantasies, in her neurotic prurience and ostentation, and in her deep, almost meta physical yearning for sexual transcendence. Neither the old intellec tual longing for peace nor the young failed novelist longing for
action can ever quite possess her. If, as I have suggested, Mailer's blustering often masks an intensely shy self-consciousness, we
can see from the struggle for the impossible Guinevere that his cele brated, orgasmic sexual mythology also masks a deep fear of impotence, a suspicion that the best and most fully imagined struc tures of the soul's freedom may not, a er all, be adequate to win that freedom, that more-than-ecstatic moment of release.
The book's anarchism, then, so corrosive of Mailer's own skill
as a maker of fiction, is nevertheless one of his most valuable achievements here and in his later novels. It establishes, as no other writer before him had managed to establish, the fully apocalyptic tone of a terminal conflict between the possibilities and entrapments of civilization, which has become the distinctive tone of major American fiction in the last two decades.
The Deer Park
Barba Shore 's description of the intimate and complicated re lationship between sexual and political forms of liberation and re
pression is carried further, inverted and intensified, in Mailer's next novel, The DeerPark. For if Mikey Lovett discovered the sex ual underpinnings of even the most abstract political power-games, Sergius O'Shaugnessy, Lovett's spiritual godson in The Deer Park, will discover the more disturbing presence of the power-games, the existential risks and little murders which underlie sexual passion itself.
TheDeerParkbelongs, on the surface, to that particularly Amer ican genre, the "Hollywood novel" ; but unlike West's The Day of the Locust, Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, or Vidal's My Brecken dge, it is not primarily concerned with the effect of Hollywood
and the Hollywood film upon the quality of our national daydreams or national psychoses (indeed , as I have said , Barba Shore is in this respect a more "Hollywood" novel-in the characters of Guine vere and Monina-than is The Deer Park) . Rather, The DeerPark is an exploration, through the well-established myth of "Hollywood, " of much deeper scars and deformations in the American sense of life-scars which touch the very nature of man and man's attempts to remain civilized and courageous in the midst of a universe of death. None of the major action of the book, in fact, even takes place in Holl ood , but occurs rather in the mythical resort com munity, Desert D'Or, somewhere near the film capital, where the novel's chief characters come to act out, refine, and perhaps resolve their personal and political agonies.
Mailer's relationship to the popular film has always been one of his most idiosyncratic and important characteristics, and The Deer Park helps us see its relevance to his performance as a novelist. We have already noted how Barba Shore utilizes, for its complex polit ical and psychological point, the melodramatic conventions of the thriller plot. Mailer-producer, director, and star of his own home made gangster films, and biographer of Marilyn Monroe-is dis tinctly a child of film culture, rather than a critic or highbrow patron of it. Unlike Nabokov, who professes nothing but contempt for the art of the film (while at the same time utilizing it extensively,
as Alfred Appel shows in Nabokov's Dark Cinema), or Graham Greene, who, though a sensitive and profound film viewer and critic, nevertheless maintains a careful imaginative distance from the vul garity of the a , Mailer is an enthusiast-a fan. The artificial, mas sively popularized d aydreams of the Hollywood film are for him -as for most Americans of his generation-a precondition of life in this society, not an accidental factor to be judged or ranked as "cre ative" or "detrimental to creativi ," but a basic part of the real
landscape of our mental lives, the landscape from which creativity, if it is to develop at all, must grow. In this respect, Mailer's sen sibility is prophetic , a precursor of such highly creative uses of the popular film as those of Donald Barthelme and, particularly, Thomas Pynchon.
Just as Barba Shore had treated New York as the scene of an existential battle for the imaginative future of America. The Deer Park uses the Hollywood phenomenon to deepen that exploration
of the imaginative war for the political and sexual soul of the coun try. Sergius O'Shaugnessy, the hero, is-once again-an aspiring novelist, not an amnesiac, but a war veteran (this time a pilot and veteran of the Korean War), an orphan, and an impersonator. His stylized alienation is , if anything, more severe than that of the am nesiac compelled to invent his past. O'Shaugnessy, an orphan not even sure of his Irish ancest (his name is significantly misspelled) , is compelled to invent identities for himself which he cannot trust even as he invents them, not to fill a void left by the loss of memory, but rather to fill a void left by his own lack of faith in the meager identity with which he has been provided by the state . He is, then , Inauthentic Man in an even more problematic manifestation than that of Barba Shore. As he says early in his story, " When I was twelve, I found out my last name was not O'Shaugnessy but some thing which sounded close in Slovene. It turned out the old man
was mongrel sailor blood-Welsh-English from his mother. Russian
and Slovenefrom his father, and all of it low. There is nothing in
t h e w o r l d l i k e b e i n g a f a l s e I r i s h m a n . " I n t h e f i g u r e o f t h e " fa l s e Irishman , " the deliberately gross and overexuberant parody of a certain kind of street savvy, we recognize an important analogue to Mailer's own public posturings . But Sergius himself takes his false Irishness as a cue for a lifetime of impersonation and existen tial disguise. Reminiscing about his life in a Catholic orphanage, he says, "They always gave me the lead in the Christmas play, and when I was sixteen I won a local photography contest with a bor rowed camera. But I was never sure of myself, I never felt as if I came from any particular place, or that I was like other people. Maybe that is one of the reasons I have always felt like a spy or a fake."
The plot of The DeerPark is largely the plot of Sergius's deliver ance from that uncomfortable feeling of being a " spy or a fake . " That is, unlike his earlier incarnation in the figure of Lovett, Sergius will not be cured of his feeling of inauthenticity, imprisonment in the pure style of existence, by the deliverance into action. He will,
rather, learn the lesson of style as a mode of salvation-will become the novelist Lovett has chosen not to become, and will thereby be come, for Mailer, a more viable, even perhaps a comically trium phant, compromise between the claims of pure fiction and pure politic s .
Like Lovett, Sergius encounters an older man whose career has been blighted by the Red scare of the early fi ies , who has been wounded in a central way by the politics of his era, and who will teach his younger friend something essential about himself. But Charles Eitel, the blackballed film director who befriends Sergius in Desert D'Or, has little of the rather simpleminded Marxist fervor of McLeod. He has, indeed, defied the House committee investigat ing communism in Hollywood, but he has defied it out of a kind
of desperation, a last-ditch courage which has more to do with an intensely personal standard of spirit, honor, and style than with
the political praxis that governs McLeod's behavior. As Eitel re flects, late in the novel, "The essence of spirit . . . was to choose the thing which did not better one's position but made it more peril ous." This might almost be the manifesto of Mailer's essays, both during the period of TheDeerPark and later; a transformation
of his earlier political concerns into the myth of a private honor,
an exigent standard of moral aesthetics , which becomes increasingly the cornerstone of any "political" reformations the author or his characters can believe in.
Eitel himself, though , is finally defeated in terms of his own ex istential morality. An artist barred by the state from pursuing his art, he eventually capitulates to the demands of the Congressional committee, becomes a "friendly witness, " and as a reward is allowed to return to filmmaking. But this sacrifice for his a is a sacrifice
at the expense of the moral athleticism , the exigent search for spiri tual peril , which in this novel is the precondition for a as for life . After his return to Holl ood, Eitel's films are only a faint and cheapened simulacrum of the radiant designs he had entertained
in his exile. And the failure of his a is paralleled by the failure
of his love for his wife, the beautiful and simple Elena with whom,
in his exile at Desert D'Or, he had enjoyed as fulfilling a sexual relationship as any in his life (or, for that matter, as any in all of Mailer's fiction). For Sergius, it is an instructive failure. As Eitel capitulates out of the best of motives , Sergius decides to leave Dese D'Or, breaking off his own love affair with the actress Lulu Meyers, and pursues his writing career in a voluntary alienation which is superior to Eitel's precisely because it is deliberately chosen.
The relationship between the two men is one of the most con vincing human relationships in Mailer's novels; but more than that, it is the rich and allusive formal center of The DeerPark. Most of the book , in a feat of real technical brilliance , is concerned , not with the activities of Sergius, its first-person narrator, but rather with the life of Eitel , including conversations , sexual performances , and inner reflections which Sergius could not possibly know about, and which he is quite explicit about inventing, on behalf of the con sistency of his story. In a literal way, that is, the failure of Eitel fe cundates Sergius's imagination by making him into a narrator, into a tale teller whose truth is not the simple truth ofjournalism but the fabrication ofjust such a consistent vision as Eitel's own films will, sadly, never attain. By telling the tale of Eitel's disaster, Ser
gius succeeds in inventing the tale of his own triumph. This formal relationship is more than a feat of narrative skill-it is a suggestive , and surely deliberate, parody and inversion of one of the most cen tral American myths of the century, The Great Gatsby.
In Gatsby, Fitzgerald creates his eloquent obsequy to the Ameri can Ideal by creating a character, Gatsby, who tries to live according to the demands of that ideal and finds that the world will not sup port such purity. We are given Gatsby's story, moreover, through the narrative of the unidealistic, callow Nick Carraway-a narrator whose life is transformed by his great subject, but transformed into a weary, bitter wisdom about history and the melancholy, dangerous splendor of dreams. In TheDeerPark, the same formal relationship holds between the first-person narrator and the character who oc cupies our attention for most of the story. But the point-signifi cantly for the imaginative life of the decade in which the book was written-is reversed . Here , it is the object of the narrative , Eitel , who learns the grimy lesson of jettisoning his dreams for the world of the possible; and the subjective narrator, Sergius, whose imagina tion is inflamed , liberated , made fruitful by the spectacle of his great friend's ruin.
Mailer himself has written, in AdvertisementsforMyse , of the pressure of Gatsby upon The Deer Park, particularly in terms of the style of Sergius's speech. "To allow him to write in a style, " says Mailer, "which at best sounded like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby must of course blur his character and leave the book un real." But Mailer is perhaps being disingenuous in this limited con fession of influence, for it is through his oddly warped re-vision of Fitzgerald's values that he has achieved his most effective articula tion of many of his own political and personal assertions. TheDeer
Park is not anything so crude as a "refutation" or "satire" of Fitzgerald's myth, but it is a central inversion or "misreading" of that myth, an argument for the values of enthusiasm, vatic mad ness, even of profligacy. The book went far, in fact, toward enshrin ing those values in at least one major wing of American writing during the fifties and sixties; just as Mailer was, around the time of the book's appearance, involved in proselytizing the totem word for its set of responses: Hip.
"Hip" was in currency as a term for awareness , for an especially intense, ne ous receptivity to whatever is going on right now, long before Mailer took over the word. Especially, of course, it had been part of the jazz musician's lexicon. And concurrently with Mailer's elaboration, that other crucial performer, Lenny Bruce, was even more violently expounding the implications of the term . There can be li le doubt that Mailer's essay, "The White Negro: Super cial Re ections on the Hipster," published in 1957, two years a er The Deer Park, helped establish the word and the concept as one of the dominant features in the imaginative life of the time. For Mailer, living in the age of the Atomic Bomb, Dulles diplomacy, the break down of conventional morality, and the ever-encroaching threats of technology, the truly sensitive a ist needs to become a "white Ne gro" : that is , a deliberately se - chosen outsider whose withdrawal from the co,rporate state creatively parodies the alienation which, throughout American history, has been imposed from outside upon the Negro. To be Hip is to elect a life on this brittle edge of psychic outlawry:
The unstated essence of Hip, its psychopathic brilliance, quivers with the knowledge that new kinds of victories in crease one's power for new kinds of perception ; and defeats , the wrong kind of defeats, attack the body and imprison one's energy until one is jailed in the prison air of other people's habits, other people's defeats, boredom, quiet des peration, and muted icy self-destroying rage. One is Hip
or one is Square.
This is the "war, and preparations for a new war" which we have seen dominating the landscape of Mailer's fiction since The Naked and the D ead, but now the concept of the war has become almost irreversibly one of private, psychic, stylized war. The Naked and the Dead have become the Hip and the Square. Espousals like this of the revolutionary (yet oddly passive) stance of Hip caused Mailer, during the fifties, to become identified as the chief novelist and theoretician of the movement then called the "Beat Generation" :
the direct literary ancestors, as Mailer himself is a direct ancestor,
of such major countercultural novelists of the sixties and seventies as Kurt Vonnegut, Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, Rudolph Wurlitzer, and of course Thomas Pynchon. But Mailer's kinship to the Beats can be easily overstated ; his idea of Hip is , a er all, merely an extension of the ideas of style and personality he had been devel oping from his first novel on.
I have already said that, for Mailer, the conflict of imagination and the unimaginative is more ferocious, more intolerant of com promise , than for any other writer of his generation-another way of saying that he is , in his prophetic fervor, the most purely roman ticofrecentAmericannovelists. Infact,EitelinTheDeerPark articulates the metaphysics of Hip more precisely-and more straightforwardly in the tradition of the American and European romantics-than Mailer himself has done in his essays. One night, during a long drinking bout, Eitel tells the innocent, unread, won dering Sergius (Mephistopheles to Faust? Byron's Ahrimanes to Manfred?) about "the savage":
Eitel made references t o famous people and famous books
I never heard about until that evening although I have go en around to reading them since, but the core of Eitel's theory was that people had a buried nature-"the noble savage" he called it-which was changed and whipped and trained by everything in life until it was almost dead . Yet if people were lucky and if they were brave , sometimes they would find a mate with the same buried nature and that could make them happy and strong. At least relatively so. There were so many things in the way, and if everybody had a buried nature, well everybody also had a snob, and the snob was usually stronger. The snob could be a tyrant to buried nature.
We recognize, in this "theory" of Eitel's, the lineage of Rousseau, Shelley , Byron , and B audelair the whole romantic myth of the untainted natural man buried under civilized hypocrisy, who only needs to be released from his state-conditioned bondage to possess once more the unfallen Garden of the human world . And we also recognize the peculiar form that myth took in such problematic cases as Byron, Baudelaire-and Oscar Wilde-the form of the Dandy, the outrageously a ificial man whose artificiality is his own admission of nostalgia for and despair of a purely "natural" self hood. The Hipster, in other words, and especially the Hipster as incarnated in the career and public performance of Norman Mailer, is in many ways simply a reincarnation of that most scandalous,
dangerous, and fascinating figure of the nineteenth centu , the Dandy or the Beau.
These old ideas-indeed, ideas at the heart of the modern di lemma-are rendered fresh by the context of fabricated innocence in which they are uttered. Sergius, that is, does not know how an cient or how fraught with ironies is the myth of the "noble savage," even though Mailer does. And through the focus of Sergius's nar rative, through The Deer Park 's carefully fabricated style, the idea can, then, be reborn as the myth of Hip, or regained innocence,
which was so central to the Beats' program for a resurrection of
the American imagination. It is instructive to compare this method of revivifying the romantic heritage with the hyperconscious, his torically sensitized treatment of that heritage in the novels of Bellow or Barth. Mailer's fabricated innocence, his way of using the speak ing voice to circumvent difficulties of consciousness , bears important if mutated fruit in many fictions of the sixties-just as it parallels the disingenuous obscenities of a nightclub prophet like Bruce .
AnAme canD am
If The Deer Park marks the most radical internalization of the themes first sounded in The Naked and the Dead, it also marks
the beginning of what must, in retrospect, be viewed as Mailer's desert sojourn as a writer of fiction. Between 1955 and 1964, Mailer published no novels. He wrote, of course: essays, poems, short sto
ries, even the beginnings of another novel. But for those nearly ten years it seemed as if his chosen vocation , fiction , had somehow be trayed him into an imaginative impotence from which he could not escape. The razor-edge exigencies of Hip , after all , projected a stan dard of awareness, poise, and paradoxical engagement/disengage ment for the novelist which were all but impossible in their severity. Especially during the last years of Eisenhower's administration and the first of Kennedy's, such a pose seemed militated against by the very structure of the society. The war between the Naked and the Dead, after all, between the Hip and the Square, assumed at the very least that there remained some spark of curative violence, some vestige of Hip even in the heart of the OSt unregenerate Square.
Otherwise it would not be a war at all, only a pointless ranting against a power too absolute to take account of its attackers (the nightmare situation that a Cummings might not even notice the "neat terrorism" of a Hearn). War, in other words, broods over Mailer's imagination in much the way "mental fight" broods over that of his great imaginative-revolutionary ancestor, William Blake.
His is a talent that feeds upon and demands violence, verbal or phys ical, at the same time it fears violence, the possibility that chaos
may escape the power of style to contain and direct it. Thus it is
no surprise that the best prose work of his arid decade, and perhaps the best nonfiction of his career, is the series of columns he wrote
in the early sixties for Esquire, called The Big Bite and partially collected as The Presidential Papers. In this series of meditations
on the events of the Kennedy administration, Mailer voices again and again his hope that the Kennedy presidency will mark a return, after the tepid late Eisenhower years, to an atmosphere of possi bilities , both for great violence and great attainments in the political sphere. In one paper, for example, he urges that the real solution
to the problem of crime in the streets for New York and other major cities would be to organize the murderous youth gangs into gladia
torial societies and sponsor street-fighting jousts in Central Park ; and the outrageous absurdity of the suggestion only underscores the deep commitment to the mythology of purgative action it a icu lates. Or, in his open letter to Kennedy on the disastrous Bay of Pigs incident, he utters what may well be the definitive Hip sentence,
in its scandalous, arrogant, artificially innocent mixture of the pub lic and the private, the serious and the deliberately frivolous: "I mean: Wasn't there anyone around to give you the lecture on Cuba? Don't you sense the enormity of your mistake-you invade a country without understanding its music . "
Mailer's nostalgia for apocalypse was to be satisfied, on Novem ber22, 1963,inamoreterriblefashionthanThePresidentialPapers had imagined . If the assassination of Kennedy was , as it appears more and more to have been, the signal public disaster in the Amer ican imagination of the sixties, then no writer registered the force of its trauma more immediately or accurately than Mailer. It is surely not accidental that the year a er the assassination saw Mai ler's return to the novel, with the publication of An American Dream, first in Esquire serialization and then , much revised , in book form in 1965.
An Ame can Dream is, of course, a heavily ironic title, and one intimately related to the assassination and its aftermath-for the "dream" is of violence, murder, vengeance, and rape. Stephen Richards Rojack, the book's narrator, relates how he has killed
his wife, defied the Mafia and his wife's Irish millionaire father, brutally beaten up a powerful black musician, taken the black's place with Cherry, a sexy nightclub singer-and gotten away with
it all. Rojack's dream is the dream of all those disruptive, annihilat-
ing forces which the Eisenhower decad in Mailer's reading of
our psychic history-had banished from the daylight world of public consciousness , and which the assassination explosively reintroduced into our official version of life. Without sounding overly ghoulish about it, we can say that the assassination provided Mailer with
the realization of that psychic warfare, that intimately intertwined public and private struggle for identity, in expectation of which his fiction has always thrived. There is even a sense of crisis, of physical urgency, in the details of the book's composition; for, as Mailer has said , he agreed to the arduous task of writing An A me can Dream in monthly, deadline-bound installments precisely in order to force upon himself a pressure which would reveal either new strengths or deep weaknesses in his talent.
In this way, at any rate, An A merican Dream begins the second phase of Mailer's novelistic career, a phase which curiously reverses the movement of his first three books. If, from The Naked and the Dead to The D eer Park, he progressively internalized and personal ized his overwhelming sense of the war-to-come which would be the real war for the freedom of America, then from An Ame can Dream to The A ies of the Night he has created a fiction which tries, at least, to move from the intense privacy of the stylized Hip ster to a more public, explicitly political, almost at times rhetorical role for the novelist as a shaper of social awareness. The two phases taken together, in fact, are the clearest way in which Mailer's work recapitulates that paradigmatic action of so much important post war fiction, the reconstruction of the myth of the good city on the basis of the bitter lessons of inauthenticity and fictiveness which are our century's inheritance.
An American Dream, in fact, takes the form of a mirror image of the Kennedy assassination. For if the nightmare forces of re pressed violence were unleashed , against his will , against the radi antly successful Kennedy, Mailer gives us, in the fable of Rojack,
a picture of an equally successful man's willing descent into the same spiritual maelstrom-which , implicitly, is the maelstrom be neath all our lives. Unlike Hearn, Lovett, or O'Shaugnessy, Rojack is a resounding success. A former New York congressman, an au thor and television personality married to a wealthy, glamorous woman, he is a deliberate-and deliberately not too clos parody of the main features of the JFK mystique . If The Deer Park was , formally, a reprise and inversion of the myth of success so central to Fitzgerald's vision of America, An American Dream, in its open ing paragraph , establishes itself as an even more explicit parody-
inversion, beginning as it does with a reference to the great initial disaster of the decade and ending with a forthright quotation of
the title of Fitzgerald's best-known short story: "I met Jack Kennedy in November, 1946. We were both war heroes, and both of us had just been elected to Congress. We went out one night on a double date and it turned out to be a fair evening for me. I seduced a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz."
OfallMailer'sinauthenticmen, Rojackcomesclosesttobeinga true equal in fictiveness to the obsessed characters of B arth , Pyn chon, and the "black humorists" of the sixties, precisely because of the tone he maintains throughout his narrative, caught so suc cessfully in this opening. A man whose "personality," insofar as that dangerous term can be defined by our public media, is estab
lished firmly on the basis of fame and success, Rojack will, in the course of his story, learn how inescapable are the quotation marks around his "personality," and upon how delicate and chaos-threat ened a foundation the idea of a civilized personality rests.
The girl he seduces on his double date with Jack Kennedy is Deborah Caughlin Mangaravidi Kelly, the millionairess he will mar and murder. Surely we can recognize, in her frustrating, maddening allure and in the multiracial jumble of her names, an echo and a development of the myth of a feminized America first imagined in the Guinevere of Barba Shore. By this stage of Mai ler's evolution, the bitch goddess of an impossibly liberated America and the bitch goddess of the novel itself have become more indis solubly fused than ever; Rojack's murder of Deborah, in the midst of a violent marital quarrel, is also Mailer's violent antagonism to the novel form , a deliberate shattering of its conventions for the purpose of political prophecy. (We might also remark, in relation
to the movie-thriller conventions of the earlier novels , that the early killing-off of such a fascinating character as Deborah is almost certainly in uenced by Hitchcock's 1960 Psycho, which disposes
of its heroine, Janet igh, before the film is half over. And we might remark, as a double irony, that it was Janet igh who played the role of Deborah in the film version of An Ame can Dream. ) The killing of Deborah is also an admission, for the America of the six ties, that the impossible dream of possessing the visionary, tawd Guinevere is not only delusory but-in terms of the present state of the nation-suicidal.
This is an important point about the shocking plot ofA n A meri can Dream and one which Mailer's more rabid fans tend to get out of focus. To be sure, the novel is an enthusiastic embrace of the
dark gods of the blood and the loins. And there is, as we have ob served frequently, a strong tendency to the cult of outrage in his fiction and in his deepest poses . His lifelong imitation of the athleti cism of Hemingway (if Papa went fishing with bullfighters, Mailer has arm-wrestled with Muhammad Ali) and his continual pronounce ments upon death, rape, and cancer guarantee that no one but the most perversely ingenious of literary critics will interpret him to be the twentieth-century heir of Jane Austen . But, as I have tried to indicate throughout this chapter, his vision of total war between
the forces of repression and those of the imagination is a more sub tle, complex-and ultimately civilizing-warfare than his followers, and perhaps Mailer himself, have imagined. The fact is thatAn Ame can Dream is not only the tale of a successful murder, but also the story of a kind of imaginative suicide. Mailer is an assiduous,
if quirky, enough reader of Sartre and the Marquis de Sade to real ize that the two acts are never, really, very far from each other. And Rojack's murder of Deborah, which thrusts him-as Kennedy's assassination thrusts us-directly into the nightmare underground of our public imagination, also robs him of all the certainties of
his own selfhood except, always an important exception for Mailer, the saving visions of style.
Rojack has had his moment of maximum vitality, his moment
of existential nakedness in the same world war which generated Mailer's first and fullest novel. As he keeps remembering through out his narrative, once he had singlehandedly stormed a German machine-gun emplacement, hurling grenades with a wild and totally efficient energy, in complete control of his body and his senses.
It is precisely one of those moments which, in The Naked and the Dead, come as the redemption and justification of the sordid busi ness of living through a war fought for corrupt interests . But for Rojack the moment is only a memory. If there is a counterpoint
to that moment of nakedness in his "American Dream" life, it comes when Barney Kelly, Deborah's millionaire-possibly incestuous father dares him, if he wishes to escape vengeance, to walk around the parapet of Kelly's high-rise apartment patio. But this latter
is a child's game, albeit raised to the level of (foolish) life-and-death risk; and as a child's game, it is perhaps Mailer's sad commenta on how much of vitality, how much of truly effective heroism, has been lost both from the public life of the republic and from the life
of Stephen Rojack. Having plumbed the depths of rage and destruc tion, Rojack finds, in the richest and grimmest irony of this highly ironic tale, that those depths, instead of containing the existential
terror of the abyss imagined by Lawrence and Kafka, contain only the incorrigible silliness of a Mafia- and mogul-ridden underworld which is nowhere adequate even to the yearnings of a Dostoievskian killer-for-justice.
Not that An American Dream articulates these themes with total success or conviction. Indeed, despite its occasional genius and immense wit, it is perhaps the weakest of Mailer's novels, just be cause the story is such a bald and finally unsatisfying allegory for the dark myths of national madness and psychic cancer it attempts to realize. Of all Mailer's novels, at any rate, it is the one to which the reader returns with the greatest reluctance and which seems to growless complete, less adequate, with rereading. Since TheNaked and the Dead, Mailer's career has been marked by the tension o en creative, often disastrous-between his ideas and the fictive form through which those ideas strive toward articulation. An Ame can Dream, in fact, is fascinating precisely because in it this
perennial tension of his work seems to have reached a breaking point, or a point of new departures. Rojack's melancholy memory
of his perfect moment during the war is partly an elegiac memory
of the lost strength of America; but it is also, surely, Mailer's melan choly reminiscence of his own single moment of absolute control,
of absolutely unquestionable narrative power. There is something inexpressibly touching about the fact that the book is , to date-and discounting the autobiographical A rmies of the Night-Mailer's only novel about a man in middle age, striving with the entrapments of his own success: a man, that is, in Mailer's own position. Rojack is Hearn, Lovett, O'Shaugnessy grown up, confronting an older
and more problematic America as well as an older and more prob lematic self.
As the nature of the psychic war has become more terminal in An Ame can Dream, so has the author's reliance upon the saving power of styl the assertion of personality in a moral vacuum-to resurrect at least a vestige of sense , a trace of the good life of the mind , from the morass of cheap dreams into which we have be trayed ourselves. The opening paragraph, with its witty and bitter invocation of the Fitzgerald tradition in American writing, heralds the most rewarding feature of Rojack's narrative, the virtually un interrupted , monologistic parody of classic American fiction which underlies the action of the " American Dream , " and which , as par ody, makes the book's strongest and most clever point about the encroachments of nightmare upon our own best vision of ourselves.
The man who dedicates his life to the discovery of his own, in-
alienable and distinctively personal style is likely to find , at the end , that there is no style, no voice which is his own, which is not bor rowed or unconsciously adapted from another writer, another man. This is very old wisdom, of course, but wisdom which our age has had to rediscover in a particularly passionate, disturbing fashion. And Mailer is , if not our most self-conscious explorer of the d ia lectics of style and originality, at least its exemplary and most highly intelligent victim . All his books , as I have indicated , have tended toward parody in one way or another. But it was not until sometime betweenAnAmericanDreamandhisnextnovel, WhyAreWein
Vietnam?, that he discovered, in parody itself, his most sourly ef ficient political and fictive style.
WhyAre Wein Vie m? d TheA i of theNight
On the face of it, parody is the least promising of literary forms specially if one is interested in making a "serious" literary, vi sionary statement. While the satirist may excoriate contemporary behavior from the standpoint of a firmly established moral code,
the parodist-more frivolous , less certain of his own moral stabili -simply points up the peculiarities, the idiosyncrasies of current
or influential literary styles . Parody is, in its way, satire at a second degree of abstraction , a highly sophisticated and self-effacing judg ment, not upon the morals of its civilization, but upon the preva ing manner in which those moral values are promulgated. In its sly as sumption that the "insiders" will recognize the moralities through the codes in which the moralities are transmi ed, parody is, fact, the classical version of Hip .
For a writer, then, with Mailer's own peculiar relationship to the conventions of style and literary identity-for the inauthentic man of the postwar American novel-parody is capable of achieving a point, afinenessofarticulation, andadegreeofpowervastlygreater than has enjoyed in any recent period. As satire and judgment upon the very idea of style, the possibilities of style to deliver us from the absurdity of our condition, parody can become the ideal vehicle for the simultaneous critique and transformation of political and fictive conventions of "the real" : a kind of Swiftean satire from the inside, whereby the speaker, trapped in styles of existence inim ical to his very life, calls up before us the degree of our own entrap ment within the same styles , and the existential necessity of our deliverance from them .
WhyAre We in Vietnam?, which Mailer has said he regards as his best novel, is just such an exercise in parody, and indeed, one
of his most remarkable books. Like his other books, it re ects not only the evolution of his own stylistic explorations, but a good deal about the literary and political climate of the years in which it was written. By 1967-the date of the novel-the absurdist, "black hu mor" fantasy of writers like Barth, Pynchon, Vonnegut, and Bar thelme-a putative "school," or at least a significant direction of writing which Mailer's own fiction had surely helped make possible -was well established in American letters . Why A re We in Viet nam? is, among other things, Mailer's attempt to write a novel in the dimensions of that school, the attempt of the sometime master to follow the lesson of his brilliant students. It is obviously, but superficially, influenced by the work of Pynchon and perhaps even more so by the austere and pornographic fictions of William S . Bu oughs (Mailer was a n early and passionate campaigner for the AmericanpublicationofBurroughs'sNakedLunch). Butthebook remains, nonetheless, distinctively Mailer's, consistent with the explorations of the previous books and , through its newly enforced
parodistic technique, able to carry those explorations to an unusual level of contemporaneity and urgency.
Many reviewers in the popular press, offended by the systematic brutality of the language of Why A re We in Vietnam? took great delight in pointing out that the word, Vietnam, does not even appear until the last page-as if that, itself, were not part of the novel's acute intelligence. The book is about Vietnam, so much so that
one is led to wonder, in retrospect, if any other American writer could have imagined the real dimensions of that obscene adventure as fully as Mailer. Following immediately upon the national shame of the Kennedy assassination , the Vietnam war was , as much as
any historical event could be, the bloody, inhuman , divisive incar nation of that Great War of the Soul that Mailer's heroes, from Hearn through Lovett, O'Shaugnessy, and Rojack, had been proph esying about and preparing us for for nearly two decades. It is by now a cliche to observe that the Vietnam warwas more apocalyptic as an internal conflict within America itself than as a conventional -or unconventional-series of battles upon Asian soil . For in the course of that long and revolting bit of military history the politics
of the nation became polarized as they had not been since the thir ties,withthemassivedefectionofyouth, theintellectuals, theartists, and finally great numbers of the working populace from the publicly announced and officially sanctioned policy of the nation's leaders . The deep fissure Mailer had seen in our life since The Naked and theDead, the fissure between the imaginatively naked and the living
dead ensconced in positions of power, had come to pass, terrifyingly, in the Johnson and Nixon presidencies . And to cure the seeming impotence of the voices of reason , the seeming failure of the good city and the good community, Mailer invents , in Why A re
We in Vietnam? what may well be his most truly effective fiction since his first novel: the long, manically parodistic monologue of the narrator, D .J . , attempting in a frenzy of allusion and outrage
to explain why he is in Vietnam, and why he is, himself, desperately unable to control or even resist the necromantic forces which drove him there.
D.J., in his chief incarnation in the book, is the son of a Texas millionaire, Rusty, and of the vulgar, seductive, fascinating (the formula for Mailer's women is by now granite-congealed) Alice Hallie Lee Jethroe. As "D.J . , " existential disc jockey, he broadcasts his story in a breathless, rapid-fire string of obscenities, metaphysical speculations, and hilariously narrated situations which are a brave, if inevitably stiff, imitation of that most definitive contemporary American patois, the rock-and-roll disc jockey's patter. The rock of the sixties (The Doors , The Beatles , Jefferson Airplane, and The Rolling Stones) is itself an uncannily complete realization of Mailer's own myth of Hip articulated in "The White Negro," a di rect and politically motivated imitation, that is, of black forms of music and alienation by white groups and audiences seeking an appropriate style for their discontent. And therefore, in a brilliant realization of this curious situation, D.J. at crucial moments in his narrative holds out to us the possibility that he may not be what he says he is at all, but instead a "crazy crippled Spade genius," broadcasting from somewhere i n Harlem his own superheated imagination of what it must be like to be D.J. , the millionaire son of a millionaire Texan.
The inauthenticity of this Mailer character, in other words, goes far beyond the relative fictional stability of his earlier orphans and amnesiacs. For D .J . ' s inauthenticity is not invented as a prior situation to his existence in the fiction, but is instead a carefully and confusingly maintained pose throughout Mailer's construction of the narrative itself. It is a lesson in indirection learned , perhaps, from the Pynchon of V. or the Burroughs of Nova Express .
The story that D.J. has to tell, moreover, is a remarkable one. It is almost completely constructed of nonevents, ribald jokes, and most particularly of scenes which are themselves deliberate and brutal parodies of the classic situations of classic American fiction. Sitting bored and distracted at his own farewell dinner in the "Dal-
las ass manse" where he lives, D.J. broadcasts in the crystal set of his mind the events which have led him to this pass. That history
is, primarily, the story of a grizzly hunt in Alaska on which his father takes him and his best friend, an even raunchier young man than D.J . , named-what else?-Tex. In the course of the hunting trip, Rusty manages to disgrace himself before his son by violating the rules of the hunt (a Hemingway reminiscence/inversion, particularly, one feels, of "The Short, Happy Life of Francis Ma comber") , and D.J. and Tex decide, one night, to go on an impossible journey to the heart of the wilderness to confront the savage , the inhuman, the primal Bear.
This , the incident which is the imaginative center of the novel ,
is of course a bravely vulgar inversion of Faulkner's great novella, The Bear but it is much more. Faulkner's story, one of the supreme achievements of American fiction, draws for its own immense power upon the whole tradition of myths of man-in-nature and upon the curative m h of pastoral, the belief that, if man's confrontation with inhuman, unaccommodated nature is intense enough and courageous enough, that confrontation can save his soul, reapportion his ideas of his own identity, and perhaps even redeem his civilization from its own worst excesses. Certainly, in Faulkner's tale, young Ike McCaslin's solitary journey into the forest to meet Old Ben, the ancient and gigantic bear of the title, is such a pastoral moment
of salvage . Bereft of gun and compass, Ike discovers something in his brief encounter with the bear which changes the course of his life; which, in fact, makes him a kind of Faulknerian saint, refusing economic ownership of the aboriginal land , refusing sex, refusing even his own birthright in order to reestablish a primordial, ritual relationship between the human and nonhuman worlds .
Mailer's version of this archetypal plot, however, manages to turn the pastoral myth of unaccommodated man on its head, giving us instead the vision of technological man unable-for whatever complex of reasons-to deny himself his mechanical accommodations to nature and also unable to face the grim implications of that technologized state of existence. D.J. and Tex, at the beginning of their comic quest, engage in a kind of children's "I dare you" con test, each claiming to be able to do with less on their journey until both boys, in a brutally funny burlesque of Ike McCaslin, stand naked and shivering in the arctic snow. But they have second thoughts, deciding that now this and now that piece of equipment is really necessary to their exploration, until finally they set out as fully clothed and equipped as they had begun. And, far from meet-
ing their great bear head-on in a moment of naked confrontation, they are chased up a tree by him, their nostrils filled with his murderous, terrifying scent until he decides to leave them alone. Later still, bedding down under the northern lights, they experience what may be their one moment of possible salvation in the novel, their temptation to make love; and both boys, without ever speaking a word, deny the impulse, converting their sexual urge into the lust for killing which finally leads them to enlist in the Vietnam war.
It is a curious novel, written in an imitation of street slang which seems more undeniably "literary," more sadly dated, as the years wear on. But it is also, paradoxically, one of Mailer's best books because the risks it takes, its self-conscious skirting of the silly and the overwrought, incarnate Mailer's closest approach so far to the idea of fiction as political action which has for so long informed
his storytelling. D.J.'s last words, indeed, are not only a deliberate reminiscence of the bleak "Hot dog!" with which Major Dalleson ended The Naked and the Dead, but also a not-so-tacit acknowledgment by Mailer that he has, at last, once again found a real war
to write a novel about, a war which calls into operation all those dichotomies of the American mind which are his permanent theme: "So, ass-head America, contemplate your butt. Which D.J. white or black could possibly be worse of a genius if Harlem or Dallas
is guiding the other, and who knows which? This is D .J. , Disc Jockey to America turning off. Vietnam, hot damn. "
By the time of WhyAre We in Vietnam? then, Mailer's obsession with style as a mode of fiction and a mode of facing the political situation has caught up with his storytelling technique itself; the style of the novel is its political stance. Why A re We in Vietnam? was followed, in 1968, by TheA ies of theNight, which, while
it is not a work of fiction, nevertheless deserves to be considered as, for the moment, Mailer's final narrative performanc r at least as the narrative performance which anticipates and defines the stance of his recent journalism. The subtitle of The Armies of the Night is History as a Novel: The Novel as History, and the reader who has followed Mailer's work up to this point cannot fail to notice what a finely self-descriptive title that is for his entire narrative work. The book itself is, in fact, a political confession: Mailer's narrative of how, during the 1967 march on Washington protesting the Vietnam war, he found himself transformed from a lukewarm liberal supporter of the protest into a seriously committed , fully politicized resister of the government's policies.
As political autobiography, TheArmies of theNight ranks with, or a little above, such a crucial twentieth-century confession as George O ell's Homage to Catalonia. More interesting than its historical, political value, however, is the way in which its plot re capulates so precisely the experiences of such previous Mailer characters as Hearn, Lovett, O'Shaugnessy, Rojack, and D.J.-but now with "Norman Mailer" himself as the hero and central fictive character of the book. The cu ing edge of style, that saving grace which allows a man, even in the midst of an insane world, to hew out for himself an island of responsive and civilized humanity, has finally been applied to the character who has always been Norman Mailer's most interesting and most carefully sculpted hero, Norman Mailer. Indeed, viewing Mailer's career as a movement, first from explicit political argument toward internalization of politics, and thence back outward to a redefined "public" political stance, we can say that The Armies of the Night, at the most obvious level of style, completes that two-part process. The Naked and the Dead is told from the point of view of a third-person, omniscient narrator, the most conventional and conventionally "public" of narrative modes; whereas all of Mailer's later novels are first-person narratives, moving-from Lovett to D.J.-in the direction of an ever more idiosyncratic, ever more "private" version of the speaking "I." The Armies of the Night, with brilliant paradox, manages to be Mailer's most intimately confessional "novel" (indeed, it is only analogically a novel at all) and at the same time marks his return, a er twenty years, to the third-person narrative form. He is not "I" in the book, but "Mailer," "Norman Mailer," "the Reporter," objectified to himself. It is a habit of style which Mailer has repeated in his later journalism-Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Of aFire on the Moon -to less point, and which has indeed become something of a tic in the reportage of the seventies (as in Tom Wicker's rather self-indulgent use of the device in his otherwise splendid account of the Attica Prison riot, A Time toDie). But, at least in The Armies of the Night, it can be seen as one of Mailer's most original solutions to his life long quest to transmute the embarrassments of the private self into the stuff of the truly political imagination.
The genesis of the Armies of theNight, in fact, is one of Mailer's most embarrassing and vulnerable moments: the night he appeared drunk on the stage of a Washington theater, just before the march on the Pentagon, to be heckled and derided by the youthful audience anxious for serious political prophecy before their great moment. But so convincing and so obsessive is Mailer's own recasting of his personal history during those days, that he is able, in the course of the narrative, to transform that disgrace into the material for a celebration of visionary politics and to present his drunkenness itself as a demonic, highly stylized parody of the killing politics of the American presidency: " 'See here, you know who I am, why it just came to me, ah'm so phony, I'm as full of shit as Lyndon John son. Why, man, I'm nothing but his little old alter ego. That's what you got right here working for you , Lyndon Johnson' s little old dwarf alter ego. How you like him? How you like him?' "
So he describes himself addressing the crowd at the theater, in the full intelligence of his manic style, even to the contemptuous self-denigration of the word, dwarf (and once again, one cannot help but think of the connection between this kind of parody and the demonic monologues of Lenny Bruce) . Like the narrative of D.J., Mailer's speech here is the self-parodistic admission of in authenticity which might, with luck and courage, cure itself and enter fully into the world of a humanized politics. And, inTheA mies of the Night, the self-cure works, for Mailer concludes his narrative with one of the most moving articulations of political commitment an American in this century has managed to create.
The beginning of his career as self-fictionizing journalist has, to this point, marked the end of Mailer's "second" ca er as novelist. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, there has been no novel from Mailer since WhyAre We in Vietnam? His intensely personal journalism has, of course, continued to arouse delight and controversy in the American intellectual establishment, and he himself, in his public pronouncements, still obviously regards him self primarily as a writer of fiction . In this assessment he is correct. He has demonstrated a capacity to surprise his critics; like another maverick, Mark Twain, he has a talent for showing us that reports of his demise are greatly exaggerated. The next month, or the next year, may well see another Mailer novel appear which beggars our previous analyses of the shape of his work. But even if that expected novel does not come forth, his production has earned him a central, if non-Euclidean, place in the history of the contemporary imagination. In an America faced with the decay of its own most fundamental imaginative values, he has, as much as any other writer of his time, attempted to survive in that chilling vacuum and to develop, out of the resources of his own speaking voice alone, a style and a mode of attack which might locate a human, civilized space in chaos. And if that effort, in his own books, is not always as successful as in the books of those who have come after him, the fact itself is a bitter testimony to his centrality. The case of Norman Mailer, a er all, is like the case of Kilroy, that impudent, crudely drawn, absurdly hopeful human caricature which was chalked everywhere, from bathroom stalls to the sides of cathedrals to the casings of bombs during World War II. Whenever we encounter a self-con scious, irreverent, dangerous American fiction which attempts to reinvent, through its own stylization, a viable idea of human life and fruitful human passion, we must recognize that somewhere in the background, like Kilroy, Mailer was here.

Chapter 2 from Frank D. McConnell's Four Postwar American Novelists: Bellow, Mailer, Barth, and Pynchon, U of Chicago P, 1977. Reprinted here with permission from Celeste (McDonnell) Barber.