The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today

Written by
James Toback

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Note: This essay first appeared in Commentary magazine in 1967

In the late 50’s, Norman Mailer’s Reputation still stood on The Naked and the Dead (1948), neither of his subsequent efforts, Barbary Shore (1951) and The Deer Park (1955), having quite convinced Mailer or anyone else that he was the major novelist he insisted he could become. By his own later account, his head was leaden with seconal, benzedrene, and marijuana: a sense of what he himself has termed passivity, stupidity, and dissipation threatened to overcome him. Only gradually, after returning to New York from Paris and giving up drugs and cigarettes, did he begin to feel that he could write once again. Then, in 1957, Mailer produced “The White Negro,” an essay which restored his faith in his literary future and presaged the forms and directions that it would take.

Mailer has always professed an umbilical attachment to the Left, but since “The White Negro” the drift has been unmistakably from political radicalism toward spiritual radicalism, from an obsession with Marx to an obsession with Reich, from economic revolution to apocalyptic orgasm, from the proletariat to heroes, demons, boxers, tycoons, bitches, murderers, suicides, pimps, and lovers. And correspondingly, concern with extreme psychic states has become more important to his work than concern with extreme political states (the center having always been a bore for Mailer in all its manifestations).

It was not that eschatology replaced politics, but rather that it came to constitute a new means of diagnosis, both of personal and social plague, and that it promised answers to the crisis in which both the individual and the nation were entrapped. The criteria by which the health of a particular man (the organ) were to be assessed—his complexity, his bravery, his daring, his capacity for love—were essentially the same as those which measured the salubrity of America (the organism). Similarly, the disease which threatened both individual and state (expressed at once literally and metaphorically as cancer) evinced identical symptoms: mediocrity, uniformity, repression, and security.

Assuming the voice of religious physician, the Mailer of the 60’s reveals a vision of malady and possible restoration that is profoundly radical; at the same time the terminology and conceptual foundation of his homily are Puritan to the core. God and the Devil, Good and Evil, Heaven and Hell, History and Eternity are as inescapably real for Mailer as they were for Jonathan Edwards—and he has repeatedly asserted that such ultimate questions are proper and indeed necessary preoccupations for the contemporary novelist. Many would dissent, but even if we do look to the novelist for salvation, can we look to Mailer? There is, at least on the surface, an insistent buffoonery to his self-projected public image that can make it difficult to take him seriously, let alone to believe he can show us the way to redemption. Yet even a cursory examination of his work suggests that he is justified in claiming to be an intellectual adventurer of broad dimension. If he sometimes seems to be more familiar with Captain Blood than Middlemarch, he nevertheless possesses an uncanny ability to recall and make use of what he has read. If he is sometimes guileful, more often he strives for complete honesty and the subject of his work. If his thinking is occasionally wild and unsound, he is also capable of rigorously logical intellection. And if his emphasis on scatology is at times repugnant, his undeniable charisma excites interest in practically everything he writes or says or does.

Consequently, when a new work by Mailer appears, we turn to it eagerly—expectant and hopeful—especially when, as in the case of his latest novel, Why Are We in Vietnam?, the new work also represents a new literary departure. By itself perhaps the most ambitious and the most difficult effort of his career, Why Are We in Vietnam? is also a crystallization and an extension of Mailer’s other major productions of the 6o’s. To do justice to its complexity, to make it more accessible, and to place it properly in the perspective of Mailer’s development as a writer, one must first look back to The Presidential Papers, An American Dream, Cannibals and Christians, and the dramatic adaptation of The Deer Park.

With Advertisements for Myself (1959), Mailer showed that whatever stature he might or might not achieve as a novelist, he was certainly becoming a major essayist. This impression was confirmed by The Presidential Papers (1963), in which Mailer took it upon himself to indicate to John F. Kennedy the brave new paths he must follow in order to achieve greatness as a President, heroism as a man, and salvation for his country. In Mailer’s view, the only kind of hero who can appear in contemporary American life is the “existential” hero, a man who lives—in his thoughts as in his actions—by daring the unknown. On one occasion, when discussing symptoms of the national disease, Mailer remarks that no one in America is capable of tolerating a question that cannot be answered in twenty seconds. And he finds deeds courageous (and hence potentially heroic) only if there is death, or at least danger, as a possible consequence.

Heroism is the victory over Dread, the sensation that haunts not only The Presidential Papers, but the whole of Mailer’s work in the 6o’s. Although doubtless a natural threat to man from the earliest days of his consciousness, Dread has become rather fashionable (to talk about if not to feel) in recent years. It has perhaps been best described by Tennessee Williams. After indicating that the war, the atom bomb, and terminal disease are not really to the point, Williams writes:

These things are parts of the visible, sensible phenomena of every man’s experience or knowledge, but the true sense of dread is not a reaction to anything . . . strictly, materially knowable. But rather it’s a kind of spiritual intuition of something almost too incredible and shocking to talk about, which underlies the whole so-called thing.

Either one knows what Williams is talking about or one doesn’t, and Williams implies that only artists and madmen do. Mailer, however, sees no one safe from the possibility of confrontation with the abyss, and he seems to feel a moral obligation to awaken us all to the danger. All roads lead to it, and it is only through the unmanly deceptions of right-wing politics, logical positivism, linguistic analysis, popular journalism, and Freudian psychology that “the terror which lies beneath our sedition [is hidden from us].” The vigilantes of the right wing, like the Un-American Activities Committee, the F.B.I., and the Birch Society, seek to transform metaphysical Dread into Red dread, to give internal emptiness the tangible outer shape of Communism. And Freudians tell us that Dread is merely a recurrence of the fear we feel as helpless infants. But Mailer, like the latter-day hell-fire Puritan preacher he is, asserts that the horrible intimation of Dread is that “we are going to die badly and suffer some unendurable stricture of eternity.” This is no metaphor; it is an expression of Mailer’s belief in the literal existence of hell.

The Maileresque hero—suspecting that his Dread is a real premonition of the agony that awaits him after death, an agony that can be averted only be daring death to come sooner, to come right away—will always put up an ante that amounts to more than he can afford to lose. Here, for example, is Mailer on Hemingway’s suicide:

How likely that he had a death of the most awful proportions within him. He was exactly the one to know that the cure for such disease is to risk dying many a time . . . .

I wonder if, morning after morning, Hemingway did not go downstairs secretly in the dawn, set the base of his loaded shotgun on the floor, put the muzzle into his mouth, and press his thumb to the trigger . . . . He can move the trigger up to a point [of no man’s land] and yet not fire the gun . . . . Perhaps he tried just such a reconnaissance one hundred times before, and felt the touch of health return . . . . If he did it well, he could come close to death without dying.

That Hemingway eventually died as a result of his gambling with life is not so important as that he grew by it. By challenging fate he was saving his soul; by refusing to give into his dread of death, he was making whatever life was left for him more noble; and he was fortifying his spirit so that he might transcend the eternity of hell.

If the individual can save himself from madness and the abyss only by ceasing to repress even his most hidden and dangerous impulses and by flirting with death, so, too, with the nation as a whole. Devoted to the illusion of safety and security, it is condemned to mass insanity and an ignoble end, unless it redeems itself by immediate embarkation on a course of “existential” politics. This would involve a complete remolding of national objectives, not only on the large issues involving danger and death, survival or extinction, but also on less apocalyptic matters like urban housing.

For if America is not already incurably insane, she is certainly in a state of plague. Mailer sees the symptoms everywhere: in architecture, frozen food, television commercials, sleeping pills, sexual excess, sexual repression, the deterioration of the language. One has only to look at the kind of people who regulate and set the tone of the nation. Mailer lists them: politicians, medicos, policemen, professors, priests, rabbis, ministers, psychoanalysts, builders, and executives. It has not always been so:

[Once] America was the land where people still believed in heroes: George Washington, Billy the Kid; Lincoln, Jefferson, Mark Twain, Jack London, Hemingway, Joe Louis, Dempsey, Gentleman Jim; American believed in athletes, rum-runners, aviators, even lovers. It was a country which had grown by the leap of one hero past another.

Now, more than ever before, America needed a hero. Was he Norman Mailer? Not yet. For the time being Mailer’s faith was in Kennedy, the inspiration for the essay, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” in which Mailer had expressed his faith in Kennedy’s capacity to lead the country in “the recovery of its imagination, its pioneer lust for the unexpected and the incalculable.” And yet no sooner had Kennedy won the election than Mailer was possessed by “a sense of awe,” an intuition that he had betrayed himself, and, as a result, he began to follow Kennedy’s career obsessively, as if he, Norman Mailer, personally “were responsible and guilty for all which was bad . . . and potentially totalitarian.” There are suggestions in this abrupt reversal of sentiment of three forces at work in Mailer: serious concern for the fate of the spiritual and political ideals he cherishes; a histrionic penchant for breast-beating; an almost petulant envy of Kennedy’s power and possibility, an irrational and vast extension of the simple literary envy he occasionally felt for James Jones.

To be sure, the heroism of which Mailer speaks is a cure which both individual and nation might decide is too hazardous and too painful to undertake. The patient is apt to protest that he does not really feel so sick as Mailer tells him he is and that even if he were, he would rather fade gradually into death than risk the unknown under surgery. If it is the “Establishment” that objects in these terms, Mailer regards it as plain cowardice, the cardinal sin, which should be avoided even if the strictures of eternity were not waiting as retribution. But with minority groups, the Negro in particular, his urgency is softened. He understands that it would be no small act of presumption on his part to demand that the Negro, who has lived with violence all his life, surrender the goals of security and stability.

The demand for courage may have been exorbitant. Now as the Negro was beginning to come into the white man’s world, he wanted the logic of the white man’s world: annuities, mental hygiene, sociological jargon, committee solutions for the ills of the breast. He was sick of a whore’s logic and a pimp’s logic.

And yet the paradox here is only too obvious to Mailer. Believing that he must turn his back on the values of the ghetto, the Negro seeks recovery through assimilation into the moribund world of white liberal America. In reality, he is abandoning a way of life which is founded on those extreme states of human feeling and action which for Mailer constitute the only true possibility for spiritual rehabilitation. Mailer regrets that

there is no one to tell [the Negro] it would be better to keep the psychology of the streets than to cultivate the contradictory desire to be . . . a great, healthy, mature, autonomous, related, integrated individual.

This problem is crystallized in the eleventh (and perhaps best) essay in The Presidential Papers, “Death,” which focuses on the proceedings before, during, and immediately after the first Floyd Patterson-Sonny Liston heavyweight championship fight. Most Negroes wanted Patterson to win, a fact which Mailer explains by identifying Patterson as the symbol of security. Patterson was polite, quiet, humble, diligent, and Catholic; he was, in short, “White.” Liston, on the other hand, personified “the old torment,” the darker, dangerous side of life that the Negro had known only too well. Liston was surly, unpredictable, mob affiliated, and an ex-convict; he was “black.”

Most Negroes, then, wanted to see Liston beaten by Patterson for much the same reason that they would not react warmly to proposals that they seek out violence, danger, and the unknown. But if Mailer cannot blame them, he is nevertheless distressed by the insidious assimilation of Negroes (and Jews as well) into Anglo-Saxon America. For a Negro or a Jew, to stifle the rich uniqueness of his potential contribution to American life is to betray himself and to withhold the transfusion that might save this bloodless land.

Mailer likes Patterson—his loneliness, his pride, his persistent struggle against the odds. But just as the Fascist Croft had stolen Mailer’s interest from the liberal Hearn in The Naked and the Dead, so Mailer’s real fascination here is not with Patterson but with Liston, whose inexorable toughness makes him the kind of Negro other Negroes refer to (sometimes in fear, sometimes in praise, sometimes in disapproval, but always in awe) as “a bad cat.” Liston takes on mythic proportions in Mailer’s mind, a mind which by nature tends to intensify, to exaggerate, and to think in terms of extremes. He is “near to beautiful” and one can think of “very few men who have beauty.” But that is in no way all.

Liston was voodoo, Liston was magic . . . . Liston was the secret hero of every man who had ever given mouth to a final curse against the dispositions of the Lord and made a pact with Black magic. Liston was Faust.

He was the kind of Negro that any white man who imagined himself hip would have to come to terms with—either as model or as rival. Predictably, Mailer chooses the latter course, and does battle with Liston. Not physical battle, but psychic warfare that could have erupted into violence.

Liston’s incredibly fast knockout of Patterson left Mailer in a state of feverish frustration, a condition aggravated by a conscience which taunted him for his own recent failures—for too much alcohol and too little discipline. It was out of this sense of despair and defeat that another of Mailer’s obsessions was born.

I began . . . to see myself as some sort of center about which all that had been lost must now rally. It was not simple egomania nor simple drunkenness, it was not even simple insanity: it was a kind of metaphorical leap across a gap. To believe the impossible may be won creates a strength from which the impossible may be attacked.

The essence of Mailer’s claim was that he was “the only man in the country” who could build the gate of a second Patterson-Liston fight into the proportions of an epic. The insistence with which he promoted his proposal the next day, the rude insults he hurled at Liston, and his petulant refusal to leave the dais (where he did not belong) all indicate that what Mailer wanted above everything was some kind of direct confrontation with Liston, some chance to prove to himself that he was still a possible hero, that he was larger than the myth into which his own mind had transformed the new heavyweight champion.

After the series of humiliations which gave reporters, detectives, by-standers, and Liston himself ample opportunity to laugh at him, Mailer finally got his chance. While obviously intoxicated, he approached Liston.

“You called me a bum.” I said . . . “Well, you are a bum,” he said. “Everybody is a bum. I'm a bum too. It’s just that I’m a bigger bum than you are.” He stuck out his hand. “Shake, bum,” he said . . . . Could it be, was I indeed a bum? I shook his hand . . . . “Listen,” said I, leaning my head closer, speaking from the corner of my mouth as if I were whispering in a clinch, “I’m pulling this caper for a reason. I know a way to build the next fight from a $200,000 dog in Miami to a $2,000,000 gate in New York.” . . . “Say,” said Liston, “that last drink really set you up. Why don’t you go and get me a drink, you bum.”

“I’m not your flunky,” I said. It was the first punch I’d sent home. He loved me for it. The hint of corny old darky laughter, cottonfield giggles, peeped out a moment from his throat. “Oh, sheet, man!,” said the wit in his eyes. And for the crowd watching, he turned and announced at large, “I like this guy.”

Three phrases in this most revealing passage are particularly significant. First, Mailer views the dialogue in the terms of a fight; he speaks to Liston as if they were “in a clinch.” Secondly, Mailer’s “first punch” (“I’m not your flunky”) is delivered while he is behind on points and trapped in a corner. When he finally makes this move, he risks taking a (literal) punch in the mouth from Liston, who is not, one imagines, in the habit of being told off in public by inebriated reporters. Then, there is Liston’s remarkable reaction (“I like this guy”) to Mailer’s thrust, a totally unexpected profession of feeling for the writer that amounts to admiration, and the even more remarkable response that Liston’s concession generates in Mailer’s mind. For Mailer, Liston’s grunt becomes “a chuckle of corny old darky laughter, cottonfield giggles”: not only has Mailer taken final honors in his combat with the “Supreme Spade,” but he has metaphorically reduced him to his (ancestrally) original condition of servitude. From king of the Northern urban jungle where the white man is afraid to meet him on the street at night, Liston has been deported to a Southern cotton plantation where he knows his place and recognizes his master.

Liston is at once Mailer himself and Mailer’s alter ego. When he is the latter, Mailer becomes Patterson: “The fighters spoke as well from the countered halves of my nature.” Mailer even conjectures that perhaps Patterson is God and Liston the Devil, an idea which emanates from a conviction that every man is a potential agent for either of the two great warring cosmic powers, and that by one’s actions one affects the outcome in their ultimate struggle for control of a Manichean universe. On that night in Chicago, Liston, in his demonic role, “had shown that the Lord was dramatically weak.” Was it possible that Mailer’s press-conference comeback had restored some of the Deity’s strength? No negative answer could be given with full assurance.

In An American Dream (1964)—his first novel since The Deer Park— Mailer is again concerned with the themes that inform the essays: danger, death, and heroism. The pattern of the novel, one might say, is designed on intercourse—with God, with the Devil, with voices from the inner recesses of the mind, with the vagina, and with the anus: intercourse leading to oceanic climax, coming variously in waves of love, lust, or pure aestheticism. The center of all this activity, the narrator and hero, is Stephen Richards Rojack, the embodiment of Mailer’s unrealized fantasies and of his radical Puritanism as well. A Harvard graduate summa cum laude, he is also a war hero (“the one intellectual in America’s history to win a distinguished service cross”), an ex-congressman, a television personality, a professor of existentialist psychology, an author, a boxer, and an unsurpassed stud. He lives in contemporary New York amid people who, in Mailer’s view, personify the cancerous totalitarianism of our age.

The action is generated by Rojack’s murder of his wife, Deborah, a great bitch, beautiful, extremely rich, and secretly involved in international intrigue as a spy. The love he once felt for her has withered into a sense of dependence so paralyzing that she has now become the very structure of his ego. Without her, he fears he “might topple like clay.” In such a condition Rojack, who expresses Mailer’s eschatological vision, knows he is unprepared to face eternity. The first step toward reconstruction of self is to exorcise the demon that possesses him—and to exorcise Deborah is to kill her. The act of strangulation is committed with sexual passion, which is true to Mailer’s insistence that sex, love, and murder are inseparable and cathartic:

Some blackbiled lust, some desire to go ahead (and kill her) not unlike the instant one comes in a woman against her cry that she is without protection came bursting with rage from out of me and . . . crack I choked her harder . . . and crack I gave her payment.

With Deborah’s death begins the arduous process of Rojack’s rebirth; he realizes that if murder is sometimes necessary, it is never simple. The gods, like furies, haunt him; he is acutely conscious of everything he thinks or says or does, for now cowardice or weakness or smallness will bring swift retribution—Dread, insanity, and the abyss. To strengthen himself, and to find, once again, something he can honestly call love are the ends of Rojack’s quest, but fulfillment of it and freedom from these new furies can be attained only through heroism, through seeking danger and daring death.

. . . I believed that God was not love but courage. Love can come only as a reward . . . . A voice said in my mind: “That which you fear most is what you must do.”

The very phrasing of the passage is related to the nature of the punishment that will accrue if the command goes unheeded. Rojack’s mental life is split into a “voice” and “mind,” a separation dangerously close to the empty panic of schizophrenia.

But if madness looms as the penalty for prudence and cowardice (Mailer uses the two as almost indistinguishable), it is also possible that Dread will overwhelm even the bold Promethean. Rojack knows that “if man wished to steal the secret of the gods . . . they would defend themselves and destroy whichever man came too close.” With so narrow a chance of escape from insanity and an eternity in the abyss, suicide quite naturally presents itself as an alternative. What is to hold one back?

Despite all his frenetic activity, it is not merely a sensual lust for experience that keeps Rojack going. On the contrary, while his senses are irrepressibly active (especially his sense of smell), his mind persists relentlessly in observation, commentary, and criticism. Any physical sensation is immediately subject to conscious analysis. In Rojack, sex is the effort of the body to rape the mind, to pulsate in waves of ecstasy transcending consciousness. But even here he fails. Whether it is with the German maid, Ruta, or with the Southern chanteuse, Cherry, Rojack’s concern is with power rather than with pleasure, with the psychic domination he achieves after her orgasm rather than with the physical rapture of his own. Like his creator, Rojack is far more a Puritan than a hedonist; life is struggle rather than joy.

So the question remains: why go on? It is true that Rojack puts his life on the line more than once. The murder of his wife, the competition with mafia goons, the insults to a former boxing champion in an unfriendly bar, and, especially, the nocturnal walk on the parapet of a windy terrace thirty stories above the ground—all could easily have resulted in his death. But rather than misguided suicide attempts, these acts are a part of Rojack’s supreme effort to prepare himself for death. The goal in life is finally religious—to make oneself as fit as possible to meet the unknown after life is done, to face the judgment of eternity; and Rojack is possessed by the faith of the gambler. Like a poker player who is convinced that his next hand is bound to be the lucky one, Rojack acts on the assumption that the longer he lives, the more heroic he may become.

And the assumption is not unfounded, for Rojack’s heroism is boundless. He argues with demonic voices and then dispels them, he outwits and outfights his indomitable tycoon father-in-law, and, above all, he humiliates and beats up a sexually magnetic Negro hero, Shago Martin. Not only does Rojack cause Cherry to have her first sexual explosion, after Shago had failed with her for months, but through a combination of psychic intuition and physical power he changes a situation where Shago is standing over him with a knife to one in which he is standing over Shago, who is now writhing pulp at the bottom of a staircase (and all in the space of ten minutes).

Practically everything Rojack says or does suggests parallels to his creator’s personal life, and the episode with Shago Martin, recalling the Mailer-Liston confrontation, is perhaps the richest example. If Liston was a large part of Mailer, Shago’s ode to himself is easily applicable to the dark sides of both Rojack and Mailer.