An American Dream Expanded/There’s Hope in Mailer

There's Hope in Mailer

The life and art of Norman Mailer are discussed all over the pages of Life Magazine this week by an intelligent and gifted writer. Brock Brewer. who had the sense to acknowledge even before setting out on his 12-page journey that he doesn't know (and neither does Mailer what in fact is the goal of Mailer's "reckless quest." The heavy recognition of Mailer by the editors of Life is final confirmation that he is big on the literary scene--and more: that he is big on the American scene, for two reasons that most critics do not know how to explain but, by their friendly activity in trying, go so far as to acknowledge that the Quest to Explain Norman Mailer is itself worthwhile.

And indeed it is. He is probably the single best known living American writer, only second to John Dos Passos. It doesn't mean his books have sold as well as Erskine Caldwell's or John Steinbeck's, merely that far more of the people who read Mailer's books wonder about who he is, and what he trying to get at, than ever have on reading Caldwell or Steinbeck.

Mailer is interesting in two respects. The first--and her is why I love him as an artist--is that he makes the most beautiful metaphors in the business, as many as a dozen of them on a single page worth anthologizing.

The second reason why he is interesting is that to many who read him hungrily (and perhaps too seriously) he represents present-day America. He expresses their feelings that America today is shivering in desolation and hopelessness, is longing for her identity after a period of self-alienation marked by a couple of world wars, a depression and a cyclonic advance through technology and automation.

Cult of the Hipster

It was Mailer who developed the cult of the Hipster--the truly modern American who lets the bleary world go by doing whatever it bloody well likes, because nothing it does can upset the Hipsters' inexhaustible Cool. It isn't that Mailer's characters are without passion: on the contrary they tend to be so highly strung that no matter how gently you stroke them, they emit twangy sharp tones. It is that the workaday pressures of civilization don't affect them. They aren't influenced very much by tradition; or by the venerable arguments for continence and moderation; or by the recognition that other people's existences, and hopes, abut against our own ambitions and self-concern.

In every categorical sense, Norman Mailer is an utter and hopeless mess. If their is an intellectual in the United States who talks more predictable nonsense on the subject of foreign policy, I will pay a week's wages not to have to hear him.