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~~{{Byline|last=Toback|first=James|note=This essay first appeared in ''Commentary'' magazine in 1967}}~~

{{dc|dc=I|n 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?'',{{efn|Putnam, 208 pp., $4.95}} 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:

<blockquote>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.</blockquote>

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:

~~<blockquote>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.</blockquote>

~~=== Notes ===~~

~~{{notelist}}~~

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-{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
-{{Working}}
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-{{Byline|last=Toback|first=James|note=This essay first appeared in ''Commentary'' magazine in 1967}}
-{{dc|dc=I|n 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?'',{{efn|Putnam, 208 pp., $4.95}} 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:
-<blockquote>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.</blockquote>
-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:
-<blockquote>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.</blockquote>
-=== Notes ===
-{{notelist}}