The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Reflections of Time Past: Pattern, Time, and Memory in Norman Mailer

Written by
Raymond M. Vince

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Abstract: How will Norman’s Mailer’s work be regarded in the future? From our current vantage point, we have no way of knowing. But we can say this: from WWII to the new millennium—with passion, intelligence, and skill—Mailer has charted the strange and troubled times of the United States.

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Note: An earlier version of this paper was given at the 2008 Norman Mailer Conference, October 16–18, in Provincetown, MA.

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URL: https://prmlr.us/mr03vin

Nearly seventy years ago, T. S. Eliot wrote these words in his poem, “East Coker,” published in 1935 and later a part of his masterpiece, Four Quartets. Hugh Kenner reminds us that East Coker is the name of “the village in Somerset where Eliots or Elyots lived for some two centuries, before the poet’s ancestor Andrew Eliot emigrated in 1667 to found the American branch of the family." After Eliot died three decades later in 1965, his ashes were interred at St. Michael’s Church—in that same village of East Coker. In the church on a simple wall plaque are other words from that poem, “In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning.” These enigmatic words seem, as Marysa Demoor has pointed out, “designed to elude death.” Whether we see life as a manifestation of God’s providence or of a more impersonal Wheel of Life, surely we could see a strange sense of recursion and return in these simple facts of Eliot’s pilgrimage. At times, does not life seem to fold back on itself? Or, to take up a hint from the title of Four Quartets, is not life like a string quartet or a Bach fugue, weaving a series of complex musical variations upon various themes? As Kenner suggests, Eliot’s Four Quartets “traverse and exploit a diversity of timbres and intonations, interchange themes, set going a repetitive but developing minuet of motifs.”

Did not Norman Mailer’s untimely death on November 10, 2007 cause some of us to look again at the trajectory of our own lives, seeking to come to terms with his passing but also, implicitly, with our own mortality? This reflection is not to become obsessed or haunted by death—our own or others—but to examine the more positive aspects of aging, to chart the slow development of character, to find deeper meaning in the contingencies of life. This path, surely, is a crucial part of self-knowledge: in discovering character, Heraclitus tells us, we shall discover our fate. I freely acknowledge that such a stance may well reflect my own advancing years. However, as James Hillman the Jungian psychologist argues, part of the purpose of our “later years” may be that we are able to explore these deeper patterns of life.

Then we will be able to look at the decay of body and mind as more than affliction. We will connect it with an underlying truth we already feel: Something forms a human life into an overall image, including life’s haphazard contingencies and wasted irrelevancies. Later years are often devoted to exploring these irrelevances, adventuring into past mistakes so as to discover understandable patterns.

In so doing, we are reflecting on time past—to use Eliot’s useful phrase from Four Quartets. In pondering the life and significance of Mailer (1923–2007), we are persuaded to re-examine the times in which he lived and about which he so eloquently wrote. We wonder how his work will be understood in time future. In this process of reflection, I believe that Eliot’s words in “East Coker” may suggest to us three useful questions. First, as each of us grows older, how do we now understand today’s “strange world” and “more complicated” pattern—and how can Mailer’s task as a writer help in that understanding? Second, are Mailer’s own “beginning” and “end” connected, perhaps in some recursive pattern, some contrapuntal or fugal relationship, or some kind of Return? And third, what roles do pattern, time, and memory play in Mailer’s work—in his significance as a writer and in his critical reflections upon American society and the literature of his times?

However, some might reasonably ask, is there a particular relevance in turning to T. S. Eliot—and specifically the Eliot of the Four Quartets to understand Mailer? I would argue that there is. Eliot, in writing the four poems that eventually made up Four Quartets, was at the height of his poetic powers, meditating upon the mysteries of time and the poet’s task, and working out an understanding of his life and mortality. Although Eliot was to live over twenty years after publishing “Little Gidding” (1942), it seems undeniable that the shadow of death hangs over this final poem and the other three in the collection. As Stephen Spender puts it, “‘Little Gidding’ is the darkest, most wintry, most death-saturated of the quartets, and also the culminating point of Eliot’s oeuvre. ‘In my end is my beginning.’” But this recognition is not simply a reflection of Eliot’s personal mortality: we realize that this mid-winter poem, written in 1942, was crafted “at the dark cold center of the war.” Mailer’s final novel, The Castle in the Forest (2007), focusing on Hitler and the tragic events that would lead to World War II, is very different from Eliot’s Four Quartets, but Spender’s words on “Little Gidding” have at the very least a certain poignancy. Could not Mailer’s Castle be described as the “darkest, most wintry, most death-saturated” of all his writings? Is not this novel in some ways “the culminating point” of Mailer’s oeuvre? Of course, the form of Eliot’s poems and Mailer’s novel are very different. However, the authorial tone and the life setting—what Hermann Gunkel called the sitz im leben–are far less so. If we were to add On God: An Uncommon Conversation (2007), the other work published in Mailer’s final year, the relevance in using Eliot’s Four Quartets as one way—and only one among many—of understanding Mailer may become a little clearer and more persuasive.

The poet W. H. Auden has been described by his editor, Edward Mendelson, as “the first poet writing in English who felt at home in the twentieth century.” Mendelson’s evaluation could be argued but there is little doubt that Auden’s poem, “September 1, 1939,” written as a response to the beginning of World War II and set in Manhattan, New York, became significant for many as the twenty-first century began in the light of the traumatic events in Manhattan and elsewhere of September 11, 2001. In fact, along with another poem of Auden’s and Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent (1907), these three texts became the most cited and referenced literary texts in America after 9/11. But it is in another of his poems, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” that Auden wrote, “The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living.” As we remember and celebrate Mailer’s work, beginning with The Naked and the Dead (1948) and ending with Castle (2007) and On God (2007), so we might well ask—how might his words be “modified” in our guts today? We are meditating not only on one man’s death but the passing of an era. Norman Mailer has left us but the whole World War II generation—his generation—is fast disappearing. Already we miss their perspective, their realistic, no-nonsense understanding of the world so typical of the “greatest generation.” But we are left. So we ask: how then should the words of Mailer impact us in this generation?

Stranger World, More Complicated Pattern: Mailer’s Task

Eliot said, “As we get older / The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated.” Now, in those lines from “East Coker,” the word older would seem to refer initially to our personal aging—Eliot was fifty two when he wrote and published “East Coker.” In fact, the later work of many poets may offer profound glimpses into old age: along with Eliot, we might think of Yeats, Auden, and Frost, among many others. While our culture often dismisses the elderly in purely negative terms—the not-young, not-new, not-strong, and not-capable—it is sometimes the poets who have thought more deeply about aging. Other disciplines have also examined aging in more positive ways, including religion and psychology. To quote Hillman again,

Aging is no accident. It is necessary to the human condition, intended by the soul. Aging is built into our physiology; yet, to our puzzlement, human life extends beyond fertility and outlasts muscular usefulness and sensory acuteness. For this reason we need imaginative ideas that can grace aging and speak to it with the intelligence it deserves.

But older in Eliot’s lines could refer also to the age of mankind, to what many people see as the evolution and increasing complexity of the human world. In the twentieth century, indeed our world did become strange—the curved space-time of Einstein, the mysterious reality of the quantum, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the Freudian depths, the artistic revolutions of modernism and postmodernism, the strangeness of chaos and complexity theory, and—perhaps above all—the horrific traumas of two world wars. The twenty-first century, shadowed by 9/11, is proving no less strange. What about the search for pattern? Many of us, I think, try to find some kind of pattern to the world: maybe a simple philosophy or a paradigm along the lines of Thomas Kuhn. For some, such a search might include some kind of faith commitment such as Judaism or Christianity. But in our stranger, Alice-in-Wonderland, postmodern world, the struggle to find personally significant patterns is, for many, increasingly demanding. Unless one is persuaded by the more simplistic forms of Fundamentalism, the patterns are indeed becoming, as Eliot foretold over sixty years ago, “more complicated.”

The mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) once said, “Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.” Could we imagine our world, for instance, without the amazing patterns of Johann Sebastian Bach or of Rembrandt? But this enjoyment of and need for meaningful patterns is not simply an artistic or humanistic perspective: pattern recognition and theory appraisal seem increasingly important in science, technology, and mathematics. In his book, Mathematics, the Science of Patterns, Keith Devlin begins with these words: “Numbers, that is to say, whole numbers, arise from the recognition of patterns in the world around us: the pattern of ‘oneness’, the pattern of ‘twoness’, the pattern of ‘threeness’, and so on.” So the human desire to find—or to impose—meaningful patterns amid the chaos of life may be universal. Presumably because of individual temperaments or varying cultures, each person finds meaning in a particular pattern: but the search for pattern itself may be universal.

In the humanities, music, literature, and art are quite obviously patterning devices. These different art forms take a few basic elements and arrange them—often as transformations in time—in a profusion of ways, all in order to express human meaning. The basic elements are often simple: in Western music a mere eleven notes from A to G# are arranged as a progression in time; in English Literature just twenty six letters and a few other symbols are required, arranged in linear time progression (a text decoded on a page from left to right, a story placed in time) or maybe in non-linear form (hypertext). In the visual arts, a few primary colors and a set of basic shapes (point, line, square, circle, etc.) and sufficient to generate the diverse beauty of Western art. The elements, then, may well be simple: the resulting patterns are very complex. What we know as the artifacts of culture and civilization could be regarded as a vast array of meaningful patterns—from the sculpture of Ancient Greece to the late string quartets of Beethoven, from the poetry of Eliot to the colors and shapes of Picasso. Scientific theories and mathematical models can also be seen as patterning devices, an insight, I would argue, that goes back to William Herbert George and his The Scientist in Action.

Developing this approach, we could argue that the novel and the story—like any other works of art—also create such patterns: we can regard story as a complex pattern of narrative, grammar, metaphor, metonymy, and other rhetorical devices. We may well be homo faber, but we are also Mankind the Storyteller. Peter Brooks has argued, “We live immersed in narrative, recounting and reassessing the meaning of past actions, anticipating the out-come of future projects, situating ourselves at the intersections of several stories not yet completed. The narrative impulse is as old as our oldest literature.” Certainly the modern novel—unlike previous literary genres—does not offer simplistic explanations of the world or unchanging religious dogmas. Today, Grand Narratives are not much in fashion. But the novel does offer, I suggest, an implicit pattern, a bold attempt—indirectly and tacitly—to grasp the complexity of life. Actually, in contemporary religion, not all preachers and theologians would stress fixed dogmas rather than that kind of implicit pattern. Frederick Buechner, both novelist and preacher, has suggested that:

All theology, like all fiction, is at its heart autobiography, and that what a theologian is doing essentially is examining as honestly as he can the rough-and-tumble of his own experience with all its ups and downs, its mysteries and loose ends, and expressing in logical, abstract terms the truths about human life and about God that he believes he has found implicit there.

What of the work of Norman Mailer? In his novels and in a work like The Armies of the Night, we can see the relevance of Brooks’ words: “immersed in narrative, recounting and reassessing the meaning of past actions ... situating ourselves at the intersections of several stories not yet completed.” Certainly, Mailer seems more at ease with Buechner’s “mysteries and loose ends” than with “logical, abstract terms”—even, I think, in his final work, On God. In many ways, I would argue that his views on art and narrative are not too far from Whitehead, Brooks, and Buechner. He sees storytelling as an essential human characteristic, one of the ways we create patterns to make sense of the absurd. In The Spooky Art, Mailer says: “We tell ourselves stories in order to make sense of life. Narrative is reassuring. There are days when life is so absurd, it’s crippling—nothing makes sense, but stories bring order to the absurdity. Relief is provided by the narrative’s beginning, middle, and end.” So, Mailer’s stories—in whatever genre they are written—try to “make sense of life,” creating some kind of pattern. A little later in The Spooky Art, in his critique of Gore Vidal, Mailer almost echoes Eliot’s words in “East Coker”: “What I would argue, however, is that his particular tradition has become inadequate to our needs. The world is growing so genuinely complex (and perplexed) that it’s limiting to enclose it with aphorisms, no matter how brilliant. One has to qualify them."

I must admit that when I first began to read Mailer I found the breadth and complexity of his work difficult. Why couldn’t he stick with one genre, one type of writing? While Hemingway and Fitzgerald are hardly simplistic writers, even as a British native I felt somehow that I could find my way around their work. With Mailer, I was in a different realm, more surrealistic, absurd, and violent: this was no Norman Rockwell America. In part, this may be because his world is stranger and more disturbing than Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s—whether we call it a shift from Modernism to Postmodernism or whether we describe it in some other way. The pattern indeed has become “more complicated.” But in the breadth and ambition of his work, has anyone else captured the crazy, chaotic pattern of post-war and post-modern American society quite so perceptively as Norman Mailer? I think not. Making art, forming patterns, or creating spells—that was Mailer’s mission, whatever his critics said. As he himself put it:

The artist seeks to create a spell . . . a spell equivalent to the spell a primitive felt when he passed a great oak and knew something deeper than his normal comprehension was reaching him. Perhaps the primitive felt close to what we feel when we see a great painting on a museum wall.

There is also another kind of pattern here. According to the OED, the word text is related to the word textile—that which is woven, a fabric—another kind of pattern, if you like. In her Carnegie Hall tribute entitled “Tapestry,” his daughter Susan Mailer said this: “Most people think of Dad as a great writer. I like to think of him as a master weaver.” As story-teller, Mailer can be seen as both a magician casting a spell and also a master weaver of complex but meaningful patterns. Eliot’s Four Quartets date from the period 1935–1942. A few years later, Mailer’s first work appeared, The Naked and the Dead. Throughout his long life, Mailer has been weaving this “more complicated” pattern for our “strange” world.

"In My Beginning Is My End": Mailer's Return

Many have commented that in the six-decade evolution from The Naked and The Dead to The Castle in the Forest, from the ordinary heroism of World War Two soldiers to the transcendent evil of Adolf Hitler, Mailer has in a real sense come full circle, he has returned to where he began. In an interview published in 2007, Mailer said that he had been thinking about Hitler “since I was nine years old,” that he “grew up with the idea of Hitler as someone who was going to kill Jews—and he succeeded by half.” His was the generation called on to face Hitler and fascism. Mailer realized that the battle for freedom—the battle against fascism—had to be fought again and again, fought in every generation. He knew that the greatest dilemma posed by Hitler was not so much the existence of his evil ideas as the fact that millions of ordinary Germans voted for him and supported him. It is not enough to admit the existence of fascism as a theoretical possibility: one has to face its awful attraction for some people—and not only in the 1930s. This would seem to be sufficient reason for Mailer to come full circle, to return in his final novel to the genesis of Hitler and fascism. “In my beginning is my end.”

Mailer’s abiding interest in boxing and pugilism is well known: in The Mailer Review (2008), along with allusions to boxing in the memorials and tributes, there were major articles on boxing by Barry Leeds and John Rodwan. Leeds says that,

Boxing has provided a significant moral paradigm throughout much of Norman Mailer’s life and work.... Mailer has, indeed, perceived gladiatorial confrontation and violence as a central metaphor for his own artistic and personal struggles for growth, fulfillment, salvation.

Part of the attraction of boxing as such a metaphor is no doubt temperamental—that is simply part of who Norman Mailer the man was. But I wonder: how much does the readiness to use such martial metaphors arise from his experience as a soldier in World War II, an experience encapsulated in The Naked and the Dead?

In his article, referring to An American Dream, Leeds goes on to say, “Rojack comes to represent what was best in the American character after WWII, what was shamelessly corrupted, and what Mailer suggests may be redeemed.” In his article, Rodwan suggests, “Fighters are heroic warriors, which is precisely how Mailer imagined writers, or at least himself.” In other words, the boxing metaphor could in part be an extrapolation of the warrior’s experience into peace time. Mailer the soldier became Mailer the fighter. We might posit a similar relationship between Hemingway’s Great War experience and his lifelong interest in the art and heroism of bullfighting. So, I suggest that Mailer’s WWII military experiences provide themes and metaphors for his later work as an author—from beginning to end of his published work—throughout his life. “In my end is my beginning.”

Pattern, Time, and Memory: Mailer’s Significance

I have called this paper, “Reflections of Time Past,” alluding to Eliot’s meditation on time in Four Quartets, and reflecting on Norman’s passing. If we are scholars who value his life and work, we might ask what our next step could be. All literary, visual, and musical art—like other human artifacts—is of course rooted in time. Robert Scott describes literature as “making concrete” the tragic truth of life and death symbolized by the concept of entropy: “moments, chances, choices” are—in the end—lost in time. But while it is rooted in time, art is not necessarily bound by time. Art and literature represent a kind of cheating of entropy, a humanistic challenge to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Art and literature promise a form of immortality. The human artists and authors succumb to the Second Law and to death, but their creations live on. Three or four millennia after their various creators have gone, the narratives of Gilgamesh, Homer, and the Old Testament are still being read.

While story-tellers are embedded within a particular time, their stories–if truly great—can speak to the ages, rising above context to communicate some meaningful pattern, some exemplar of art, some human truth that may seem almost timeless. Certainly, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls is rooted in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s—but it may be saying something about heroism, the good earth, and human connection that could last for a thousand years. On a more modest scale, as the Cold War was coming to an end in 1988, the narrative, patterns, and metaphors of John Donne and Ernest Hemingway were found very relevant by Mikhail Gorbachev. How will Mailer’s work be regarded in the future? From this vantage point, we have no way of knowing. But we can say this: from WWII to the new millennium—with passion, intelligence, and skill—Mailer has charted the strange and troubled times of the United States.

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