User:Kamyers/sandbox

Written by
James Toback

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Note: This essay first appeared in Commentary magazine in 1967

Totalitarianism has suffocated individuality; the Hilton in San Francisco is emulated before the Plaza in New York; housing projects look like nurseries and nurseries look like hospitals; appliances are plastic rather than metal; vile bully tactics in Vietnam have developed from simple occupation of Southeast Asia; the psychotic has taken over from the psychopath; pornography has gained another step on sexuality. In a word, Lyndon Johnson has replaced John Kennedy.

Johnson, Mailer tells us, is the archetypically alienated figure—a fact which can be observed in his prose (perhaps “the worst ever written by any political leader anywhere”), in his boorish manners, in his deceitfulness, in his voracious ego, and in his almost arrogant lack of style. If a President has a profound effect on the quality of life during his era—and Mailer is convinced that he does—then hope is indeed dim. And the consequences may be far worse than possible loss of prestige, power, or land; for there is the unknown to face after death, and the possibility that there is no absolution for cowardly sins.

But Mailer’s exhortations against the insanities of the age of Johnson do not come from one whose own tensions—between radicalism and Puritanism, heroism, and buffoonery, the playboy’s life and the intellectual’s vocation—are anywhere near control. And there is a further complication in Mailer’s complex personality, an unmistakably reactionary streak, not unrelated in impulse to his intense religiosity, which challenges his natural and professed political radicalism. Apart from the kind of conservatism that is common property among many contemporary radicals—a quasi-isolationism that urges America to terminate involvement in practically all foreign countries and a profound distrust of the liberal establishment—Mailer holds positions on matters not directly political which fall neatly into line with the conservative spirit (he is, for example, strongly opposed to birth control and abortion, and he speaks of homosexuality as a “vice”). But two pieces of evidence (both from the essay on the 1964 Republican Convention) are particularly striking. First, Mailer confesses to a buried urge to see Barry Goldwater elected:

I knew Goldwater could win because something in me leaped out at the thought; a part of me, a devil, wished to take that choice.

Secondly, Mailer’s ambivalence toward Negroes, manifested earlier only in the individual cases of Sonny Liston and Shago Martin, is now explicitly broadened. His reaction to James Baldwin’s suggestion that there may be no remission for the white man’s sins against the Negro is violent:

I had to throttle an impulse to . . . call Baldwin, and say, “You get this, baby. There’s a shit storm coming like nothing you ever knew. So ask yourself if what you desire is for the white to kill every black so that there be total remission of guilt in your black soul.”

If the relief of such tensions and conflicts and the consequent fortification of the self can come only from bold action, then Mailer’s primary means of personal salvation lies in his work. It is in the very act of creating the artistic sermons which he claims will show us the way to redemption that Mailer redeems himself. His influence has given rise to several “cults.” At one extreme there is a segment of the underground hipster community, closely involved with drugs, which worships him as the high priest of God and Sex. At the other end is that increasingly large group of liberal and radical intellectuals, centered in New York and comprised of such critics as Norman Podhoretz, Steven Marcus, and Richard Poirier who see in Mailer, as Marcus once put it, the embodiment of extraordinary literary talent, personal honesty and loyalty, and penetrating social criticism. And yet, in the last analysis, Mailer’s influence is limited, for the Word has hardly reached, let alone changed, the heart of the land he is trying to transform.

From the first three sermons of the 1960’s, the congregation is likely to walk away interested and, sometimes, excited, rather than transformed. Entertainment overshadows eschatology. And in Mailer’s fourth effort of the 6o’s, The Deer Park, a stage adaption of his novel of 1956, religion gives way completely to comedy (both intentional and unintentional).

This is not to imply that Mailer has abandoned his urgent message; practically all his obsessions of the 6o’s are here: sex, love, lust, heroism, cowardice, power, God, and the Devil. If Mailer has added anything new to his philosophy, it lies in the expansion of his idea as sexual freedom and it is expressed through the pimp Marion Faye, who “follows sex to the end, turns queer, bangs dogs, and sniffs toes.” But in the figure of Herman Teppis (or “H.T.”), a Hollywood mogul in the tradition of Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn, genuine humor replaces heavy rhetoric and caustic wit. In the desert of endless debates over who is—and who is not—a genius in bed, Teppis's pronouncements are oases.

You know what an artist is? He's a crook. They even got a Frenchman now, you know what, he picks people’s pockets at society parties. They say he’s the greatest writer in France. No wonder they need a dictator, those crazy French. I could never get along with the French.

But Mailer pays a price for his success in the comic mode. One laughs so hard at Teppis that one keeps right on laughing, even at the tortured, self-searching characters—spokesmen all for traditional Maileresque values—one is meant to take seriously. If there is a lesson to be learned from this play, it is that comedy may be suitable to many dramatic modes, including tragedy, but that it has no place at all in eschatological homily.

After a pop play perhaps one should have expected, or at least have been prepared for, a pop novel from Mailer’s pen. Nevertheless, Why Are We in Vietnam? comes as a shock. Radical as the ideas contained in them may have been, Mailer’s earlier novels were more or less conservative in form: except for Barbary Shore, they were all clearly in the mainstream of the realist-naturalist tradition. But in Why Are We in Vietnam? ordered syntax has yielded to the total liberation of the word; intricate plot structure has given way to hallucinatory fantasy; fully realized characters living in what we know as the real world have been replaced by the protean apparitions in Mailer’s mind; the last trace of ratiocination has been obliterated by a relentless bombardment of sensual impressions and apocalyptic utterances. Dreiser and Farrell have disappeared in favor of Joyce, Faulkner, Burroughs, McLuhan, and Norman O. Brown.

At one point or another virtually every theory Mailer has ever had appears—but now with an important difference. Rather than preaching his messages baldly as in the past, Mailer drops them mockingly. And the mockery is directed both at himself and at those he would edify.

The world is going shazam, hahray harout, fart in my toot, air we breathe is the prez, present dent, and god has always wanted more from man than man has wished to give him. Zig a zig a zig. That is why we live in dread of god.

Even the seminal concept of Dread is translated into the pop language of rock-and-roll. A vast chasm of culture and sensibility separates the tone of Rojack’s agonized monologues from the narrative voice of the present novel.

. . . Mr. Sender, who sends out that Awe and Dread is up on their back . . . because they alone, man, you dig? They all alone, it’s a fright wig, man, that Upper silence alone is enough to bugger you, whoo-ee.

Indeed, the very claim to a prophetic stance in Why Are We in Vietnam? is established in a similarly (and intentionally) ambiguous tone.

This is your own wandering troubadour brought right up to date, here to sell America its new handbook on how to live . . . . We're going to tell you what it's all about.

Although there is a bare minimum of dramatic tension or external conflict, Why Are We in Vietnam? has several “characters,” each significant primarily on a symbolic plane. D.J. (Disc Jockey, Dr. Jekyll), the adolescent hero narrator of patrician Texas blood, is sometimes convinced that he is really a “Harlem Nigger,” and since “there is no such thing as a totally false perception,” perhaps he is. Not literally, of course, but rather in the same way that Mailer recognized Sonny Liston in himself and in the same way that the white hipster of “The White Negro” is, in his psychic makeup, black. If D.J. is the hipster, Rusty, his father, is the square, a corporation tycoon in Dallas—coarse, selfish, and, at heart, a coward. Tex (the Mr. Hyde to D.J.’s Dr. Jekyll) is part Indian, manly, bisexual, and the son of an undertaker.

The three go bear hunting in Alaska, but the most important action takes place in D.J.’s mind. At one point he has an urge to turn his gun on his father and “blast a shot, thump in his skull.” Although he resists, he soon commits the act symbolically by contradicting his father’s warning and courageously approaching a wounded bear, putting his life on the line, while his father lies hidden, waiting for the bear to become helpless before firing the fatal shot. Thus liberated from paternal authority, D.J. finds his instincts for love and battle shifted to Tex, D.J. encounters nakedly for the first time his other self. And through a mutual awareness of their mutual desire for both intercourse and fratricide, D.J. and Tex finally achieve a sense of purification and personal integration.

. . . Tex Hyde . . . was finally afraid to prong D.J., because D.J. once become a bitch would kill him, and D.J. breathing that in by the wide-awake of the dark with Aurora Borealis jumping to the beat of his heart knew he could make a try to prong Tex, there was a chance to get in and steal the iron from Texas’ ass and put it on his own . . . now it was there, murder between them under all friendship, for god was a beast, not a man, and god said, “Go out and kill—fulfill my will, go and kill,” and they hung there each of them on the knife of the divide in all conflict of lust to own the other . . . Killer brothers, owned by something, prince of darkness, lord of light, they did not know; they just knew that telepathy was on them, they had been touched forever by the North and each bit a drop of blood from his own finger and touched them across and met blood to blood . . . .

In one eternal moment the Manichean polarities that have obsessed Mailer are at last synthesized—God and the Devil, heaven and hell, nature and man, Negro and white, Dallas and Harlem, phallus and anus.

But why are we in Vietnam? What relation does the title have to D.J., Tex, Rusty, bear-hunting, Harlem, Dallas, liberated syntax, or Maileresque eschatology? In the strictest sense, nothing at all. But in a broader, metaphysical sense, the title can be explained as another urgent warning to America. We are in Vietnam because we, as a nation, are going, or have already gone, insane. Mailer’s development from politics to meta-politics is complete. The world—and especially America—is now viewed as an expression of Mailer’s own most extreme longings and fantasies. Subject and object, chaos and order, internal imagination and external reality are united in a fusion of creator and creation. In an ultimate sense Mailer is claiming not only relation to America but identity with her. It is likely that he has himself in mind when he writes of Rusty:

{{quote|His secret is that he sees himself as one of the pillars of the firmament, yeah, man—he reads the world’s doom in his own fuckup. If he is less great than God intended him to be, then America is in Trouble. One cannot help wondering whether Why Are We in Vietnam?, unruly and overwhelming, is not at least as much a symptom of our “Trouble” as a cure for it.

Throughout the past decade Mailer has made the world of the hipster the stuff of his sermons—novels, essays, and plays—as well as the style of his personal life. He calls it “a muted cool religious revival,” and a better description (at least of his intentions) would be hard to find. He is Zarathustra coming down from the mountain with his vision of the hero; he is Dostoevsky reminding us that “God and the Devil are fighting, and the battleground is the heart of man!”; he is a Puritan minister informing us that pain may be good, for to suffer is to be given the opportunity to grow and prepare for the mystery of death and the perils of hell; he is a preacher frustrated by his congregation's blind faith in innocence at a time in history when innocence is not only a lie but a crime; he is a seer trying to jar complacent men into an awareness of the despair that lies beneath their conventions; he is Toynbee telling us that if a civilization stagnates, it will die, that if a nation is to survive, it must respond to the reality of challenge; and he is Jonathan Swift couching his eschatological message in the language and imagery of scatology.

It is true that Mailer’s own faith in the validity of his message is not absolute. He has admitted that “the hipster gambles that he can be terribly, tragically wrong, and therefore be doomed to Hell.” But Mailer is a gambler, and so he continues to preach, to reiterate the old verities with a new twist, opening himself to the charge of anachronism, refusing to accept the “modern,” the valueless objectivity of the novels of Robbe-Grillet, the impersonal detachment of the music of Milton Babbitt, and the faceless hotels of Conrad Hilton. He will not give up like Hemingway’s Lieutenant Henry, who trusts only in the names of bridges, cities, and battles; Mailer chooses instead still to believe in God, Love, Heroism, Courage, and Death. His life and work are a contradiction of the message contained in one of his own poems:

Never
contemplate
nothing
said
the saint.

History is a nightmare from which Mailer is still trying to awaken; but he will not take the easy way out in his struggle.

And yet if he is singleminded in his determination to view life in terms of ultimate battle, his desire for victory is not without ambivalence. His involvement in the pop world has become more than peripheral with his play, his new underground movie (where he is cast as a Mafia gangster), his new novel, and his own life style (where he tries to enact simultaneously the roles of writer, fighter, celebrity, lover, and messiah); and like most of the major figures in this eclectic pop world, he is flirting with psychosis. To live on the edge of so many different scenes is to belong truly to none; and to act like so many different people is to endanger the self. The sign of surrender, the indication that the battle has been lost, is the sense of succumbing to Dread. It is not impossible that Mailer’s Dread is essentially the fulfillment of his own unacknowledged desire for that Dread, the intuition that all those "psychotic" ideas and actions he lives by are simply the expression of a profound longing for madness and extinction.

Mailer holds himself together, however, by virtue of his work. Through creation he is able to come closer to the unattainable goal of total victory in the struggle which is the metaphor for his vision of life. Even if we do not believe in it ourselves, even if we are impatient with the intellectual naivete of a man who only a decade ago speculated that perhaps he was the first person to state that God was in danger of dying, and even if we are annoyed by the heavily flawed style of his prose, we can still learn from, and be moved by, this belligerent prophet. At the end of the stage version of The Deer Park, he speaks of debates about God and Time and Sex as constituting “part of the poor odd dialogues which give hope to us noble humans for more than one night.” If Mailer has done this in his own work even a small part of the time, he is one Puritan our age can ill afford to lose.