Norman Mailer and the Cutting Edge of Style

Still being edited as of March 04, 2019

Cover art from McConnell's Four Postwar Novelists.

Written by
Frank D. McConnell

“ To be, like Norman, a New York Jewish boy from Harvard who had written a war novel, I cannot imagine any situation better for the beginning of a career. ” — The speaker is Norman Mailer's contemporary, fellow novelist, and frequent television talk show antagonist, Gore Vidal, interviewed in Newsweek (November 18, 1974).

Vidal's characteristically malicious amiability carries more than a seed of truth, and much more than a seed of the essential problem — that of being Norman Mailer. To many readers, indeed, and to many people who may not have read a novel in years, the problem — or the profession — of being Norman Mailer might well appear to be the central drama of American literature since World War II. Other writers, novelists, poets, and journalists may content them­selves with the comfortably traditional eminence of an academic career, with the more complex and demanding satisfaction of a private existence with writing their sole activity, or with an intricate, almost monkish quest for anonymity. But Norman Mailer, alone among the significant writers of his generation (or now, his genera­tions), has made himself at home within the full panoply of publicity media and personality mongering which is the climate of America in the television era. He has been a frequent, outrageous, comic-meta­physical guest on innumerable talk shows. He has produced, di­rected, and starred in his own movies. He has run for mayor of New York City. He has, as I write, received a much-publicized million­ dollar contract from his publishers for his next (not yet completed) novel. Vidal’s venom is understandable; indeed, coming as it does from a fellow laborer in the often barren vineyards of fiction, inevitable. For “a New York Jewish boy from Harvard who had written a war novel,” Mailer has come as close as one can imagine coming (closer, perhaps) to being one of the Beautiful People of his age, to winning and holding the kind of fame and fascination the Ameri­can public normally reserves for politicians, film stars, and crimi­nals.

Through it all, moreover, Mailer has remained an apparently inexhaustible writer of prose. His twenty-odd books discuss, with unflagging enthusiasm, whatever may catch both Mailer’s imagination and the current interest of the reading public. From the administration of John Kennedy (The Presidential Papers) through Nixon and the moon landing (Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Of a Fire on the Moon) to women’s liberation, nostalgia, and the urban counterculture (The Prisoner of Sex, Marilyn, The Faith of Graffiti), he has established himself as a kind of demonic Winston Churchill, the most contentious and consistently interesting journalist of his time. But while Churchill’s journalism was partisan, conservative, and ponderously, ostentatiously judicious, Mailer’s is partisan, “left-conservative” (as he first identified himself in Miami and the Siege of Chicago), and irreverently, obsessively confessional. No writer since Lord Byron-except, perhaps, Oscar Wilde-has so successfully made his writing an adjunct to his life, his life a feature of his writing. At his worst, Mailer seems to us a heroic but tiresome monologist (one’s half-drunk uncle at the annual Christmas party), unendingly repeating the tale of his hopes, passions, and failures; while at his best he can achieve a tense, nearly Byronic union of the personal and the public, the metaphysical and the political, in a prose style uniquely and inimitably suited to that difficult task.

He has not (what writer has?) been well served by his most avid supporters. The Mailer style, the Mailer panache, is a deliberately constructed and maintained role-and one which offers, perhaps, too many easy consolations to the critic not prepared himself to undergo the arduous and risky task of being Norman Mailer. He has been celebrated, by such dissimilar cheerleaders as Jimmy Breslin and Richard Poirier, as the prophet of a new sexual vitality, a profound and original philosophical thinker, a liberator of the cloistered and inhibited American imagination. He is, I suggest, none of these things and often the reverse of some of them. But so overblown has become the celebration (or the damnation) of Mailer that such a paring of the image is bound to seem like an attack (or a defense) of the writer and the man. Mailer has, with signal efficiency, made his personality and his art inseparable; but he has paid the price of this unification, and an important part of that price is the refusal of his fans (fans everywhere, whether of a rock singer, a movie star, or a novelist, are the same) to allow him to be anything less than everything. The man who wrote the daring and painfully personal Advertisements for Myself (1959) has had to live with the implications of that brilliant title, for in turning his art into an “advertisement,” a more-than-aesthetic act of existential salesmanship, he has been burdened—at least in his career as a novelist—precisely by the success of his ads, by the “Norman Mailer” who has become such a surefire seller and high-ratings personality in contemporary American letters.

There is no doubt that Mailer has always thought of himself primarily as a novelist; and here, as often, he is more correct in his self-assessment than are his enthusiasts. And here, as often, his career displays a curious ambiguity, a deep-seated malaise underlying the proclamations of health, a dark flirtation with failure beneath the arrogantly flaunted triumphs. Of his twenty books, only five—six, stretching a point to include The Armies of the Night—are novels. Indeed, for a writer as prolific as Mailer, remarkably little of his published work is in the field, fiction, which is his announced, chosen, loved and hated vocation. It is, of course, an easy and cheap temptation to discover the saving, humanizing flaws of a splendid success, the hidden insecurities of a “star”; but if we consider Mailer’s career as a novelist, it is difficult not to see such a set of contradictions. One remembers Vidal’s flippant dismissal of his first success: “who had written a war novel.” But what is implicit in that phrase is, surely, the most important event of Mailer’s life as a writer. The “war novel” is The Naked and the Dead, published in 1948, Mailer’s first novel and—much more than a “war novel”—one of the major achievements of American fiction in this century.

It was a cruel fate for a young novelist. We have already spoken, in the previous chapter, of the “one-book” nemesis of the American writer, the inability of so many major American talents to overcome the success and the burden of their earliest important achievements. And, as Mailer’s own first triumph in The Naked and the Dead is so much more surprising even than the promise of The Sun Also Rises or This Side of Paradise, so the difficulty of living up to that achievement appears to have been for him all the more painful. This is, oddly, a frequently ignored or glossed over, but central point about Mailer; for The Naked and the Dead is not simply a brilliant first book, it is the work of a master. Given the reach of that early (perhaps premature) mastery, the wonder is not that Mailer has since written so little fiction, comparatively, but rather that he has managed to complete so much. He has lived and worked, since he first appeared as a writer, as a first magnitude star whose talent and appeal are, if anything, too massive for any vehicle which we might imagine efficiently carrying them. No wonder, then, that one of his most embarrassingly revelatory nonfiction books is his recent biography of another definitive presence in search of an adequate incarnation, Marilyn Monroe.

Mailer’s affair with the novel, unlike Marilyn Monroe’s with the film, has been an affair of intelligence as well as of passion. Monroe’s tragedy is to have sought an identity, a sexual fulfillment, promised her by the very medium, the movies, which continually denied the satisfaction of that promise in any but the most artificial ways. Mailer, however, has not only pursued the elusive image of the culminating work but, as a man of wide literary culture, has from the beginning understood the deceptive, slippery, fallacious nature of the medium in which he has elected to seek that culmination.

No one, indeed, has written more vividly about the infuriating, seductive appeal of the novel as a literary form. In a long essay originally published in Esquire at the very beginning of the sixties, he describes the novel as the Bitch Goddess, at once whore and virgin, easy conquest and impossible mistress:

Every novelist who has slept with the Bitch (only poets and writers of short stories have a Muse) comes away bragging afterward like a G.I. tumbling out of a whorehouse spree—“Man, I made her moan,” goes the cry of the young writer. But the Bitch laughs afterward in her empty bed. “He was so sweet in the beginning,” she declares, “but by the end he just went, ‘Peep, peep, peep.’” A man lays his character on the line when he writes a novel. Anything in him which is lazy, or meretricious, or unthought-out, or complacent, or fearful, or overambitious, or terrified by the ultimate logic of his exploration, will be revealed in his book. Some writers are skillful at concealing their weaknesses, some have a genius for converting a weakness into an acceptable mannerism of style.

It would be hard to find a passage with more of the nervous, run-on confession, the blustering vulgarity and deep insecurity, the acute culture and genius for metaphor which characterize Mailer’s distinctive talent. The archetypal novelist is a G.I. who is perhaps superpotent, perhaps sexually deficient. It is impossible, confronted with that image, not to remember Mailer’s own first success with a novel about G.I.s, his frenetic struggles, throughout the following decade, with both a series of wives and a series of coldly received novels, and his violent assertion, during the sixties, of the equivalence of sexual and literary power. The key line of the passage, and perhaps the key line for the writer’s entire enterprise, is “A man lays his character on the line when he writes a novel.” Many novelists—and surely all of the best—have felt this, but few (Henry James excepted) have taken it as much to heart, made it as unyielding a part of their personal credo as has Mailer. If he has, in his journalism and his public clowning, shown a genius for performance, that genius is only a spillover, a secondary derivation from Mailer’s sense of the art of fiction itself as a performance par excellence, of the novel as an ultimate risk, revelation, and perhaps betrayal of oneself. Poets and short story writers, he contemptuously observes, may have Muses, the reassuring and pacific ladies of artistic inspiration; but the novelist’s business is not inspiration, it is struggle and hard work—under the shadow of the sweet, easy, vulgar and inaccessible Bitch who will at once elicit and mock his best attempts to prove himself. Sartre, in Saint Genet, invented the phrase comedian and martyr to describe Jean Genet’s dedication to the art of fiction which could lead a man to the most abject buffoonery and the most self-denying discipline. The same phrase applies to Norman Mailer, novelist, with perhaps even more force.

It is an ancient piece of pop-psychological wisdom that great blusterers and braggarts are, usually, very shy men. Mailer’s achievement, on one level at least, is to have carried the truth of that observation to the pitch of high art. A man may lay his life on the line when he writes a novel, but—such are the suasions of the Bitch—there is, underlying the existential gamble of storytelling, the continual possibility of evasion, of avoiding that ultimate confrontation with the self, of concealment; and it is this aspect of fiction which accounts, finally, for the lasting power of Mailer’s best writing. The storyteller always, whether he knows it or not, tells a story about himself. That is the deep gamble of the craft, and the more acutely aware the storyteller is of the confessional nature of his art, the deeper the gamble, the higher the stakes. But if the teller reveals himself, he also conceals himself more efficiently than he may realize. Mailer says, “Some writers are skillful at concealing their weaknesses”; but as he surely knows, and as all longtime readers and writers of fiction know, most writers become, in the course of a life devoted to telling tales, skillful at concealing, or transforming into specious strengths, their weaknesses. If self-revelation and self-confrontation are the mocking threat of the Bitch Goddess, the evasions of style, the possibility of transforming private weakness into public power, are perhaps her primary seduction. At least this appears to be the case with Mailer. The last word of the passage I have cited is “style,” and that word with its attendant associations may be the most important in Mailer’s lexicon.

During the sixties, Barth, Pynchon, and others were to define, effectively, a new mode in American writing by creating novels whose content was largely a self-conscious commentary on their own form—novels, that is, which included their own critical commentary. Mailer foreshadows the fictive self-consciousness of these writers—just as Saul Bellow, in his very different way, foreshadows their concern with the inheritance of Western culture and with the “terms of our contract,” the burden of making that culture a moral force in contemporary urban reality. While Mailer, anticipating later writers, demonstrates a self-consciousness about his own narrative processes, he nevertheless—unlike Barth or Pynchon—carefully segregates that self-consciousness from the creation of the story itself (at least, until his later novels which are themselves influenced by Barth, Pynchon, and others). His plots themselves, that is, tend to come from the conventional stuff of action-packed, sexual melodrama; and the elaborations of self-conscious style are, as it were, overlaid upon the prime matter of this “popular” (sometimes almost B-movie) substratum. His concern with style, then, is at least partly a concern with the masking, self-disguising powers of fiction—with fiction as a highly formal, almost ritual performance and test of the self which must conceal, as all good rituals do, its own machinery.

Mailer’s concept of “style”—it becomes almost a totem word in his discussions of himself and his work—involves a good deal more than the simple masking of the self or transformation of private debilities into narrative strengths. Style, indeed, at least by the writing of his third novel, The Deer Park, becomes an agency of imaginative and personal salvation for Mailer and for his characters, a last vestige of morality and honor in a world which will no longer tolerate the open expression or embrace of those values. Sergius O’Shaugnessy, the improbably named, aspiring novelist who is the hero of the book, decides near the end of his curious adventures to prepare himself for his writing career by giving himself a public-library liberal education:

I would spend my days in the public library, often giving as much as twelve hours at a time if I had the opportunity, and I read everything which interested me, all the good novels I could find, and literary criticism too. And I read history, and some of the philosophers, and I read the books of psychoanalysts, those whose style I could tolerate, for part of a man’s style is what he thinks of other people and whether he wants them to be in awe of him or to think of him as an equal.

Style is not simply a matter of literary, verbal habits but part of a man’s whole sense of himself as a member of society and perhaps as a shaper of the society to which he belongs; it is a political, existential act (two words which are never far from each other with Mailer). The passage cited is not only one of the author’s major pronouncements on the nature of style, but also a dramatic acting out of its concepts. Sergius O’Shaugnessy (as he remarks, his name is only artificially Irish—it lacks a crucial “h”) is everything Mailer, the “New York Jewish boy from Harvard who had written a war novel,” is not: he is part Irish Catholic, has not written a novel, is minimally educated and—most of all—is an orphan, a man unencumbered by traditions precisely because he cannot remember, has never known, the pressure of those traditions upon his own life. The style of his speech in this passage is, with a rightness of pitch which is one of Mailer’s most uncanny gifts, exactly the proper tone of a brilliant, perceptive young man possessed of the gift for fiction but denied the culture to deploy that gift. Sergius, in other words, is a deliberately constructed, sensitized savage. And it is Sergius’s own imperceptions and failures which liberate his creator to write The Deer Park. For Mailer, surrounded by what he sees as the shattered traditions of value, living in a society whose personal life and political life are inextricably confused and perennially violent, style becomes a diminished, crisis sacrament—the sacrament of the existential orphan. To follow Mailer’s career as a novelist, then, and his enormous if ambiguous influence on later American writers, we must regard the sequence of his novels as a continued experiment with the concept and the cutting edge of style.

The contrast between the art of Norman Mailer and that of Saul Bellow becomes clearer at this level of discussion and more central for understanding the course of American fiction in the fifties and sixties. Bellow’s career has been a steady, unrelenting examination of and assertion of the permanent relevance of the major traditions of Western liberal thought to the complexities and upheavals of the contemporary City, but Mailer has carried on a two decade warfare with precisely those certitudes in which Bellow finds himself so much at home. Each of Mailer’s six novels has defined for the reading public a “new” Mailer, a new and, for the moment, aggressively self-confident approach to the problems of our personal and political strivings; and this frenetic, almost pathological uneasiness with his own achievement, has in turn caused the history of his books to be one of mingled, sometimes accidental and often deliberately managed failure. Mailer, like most strong novelists, finds it hard to write fiction. But he has, in a valuable way, made that difficulty one of the central materials of his fictive stance and in so doing has become, for American fiction, the indispensable and archetypal self-conscious fabulator of the postwar years.

The Naked and the Dead

Robert Langbaum, writing of Mailer in 1968, after the publication of The Armies of the Night, observes that “in spite of his apparently unrealistic new style, Mailer still adheres to the large realistic tradition of the novelist as a chronicler of his time.” That is an acute point to make about the author of such seemingly (but speciously) “unrealistic” novels as An American Dream and Why Are We in Vietnam? although it scants, I think, the degree to which Mailer’s “realism” and “unrealism” have always been held in a curious, highly idiosyncratic mixture. His celebrated discovery, toward the middle of the fifties, of the mythic force of the orgasm and the cult of visionary violence—a bundle of prophecies to which he gave the name Hip—is a discovery, as always with Mailer, not of something new and outside the scope or implications of his previous work, but precisely a discovery of tendencies and underlying metaphors in what he has already done and subsequently, an attempt to refine those implicit tendencies into a conscious, narrative and political program. Style, again, maddeningly both masks and reveals the true, primal soul of the writer struggling toward self-realization. The vocation—not the craft—of fiction is the writer’s vigilant insistence on making his developing style a continued transformation of the hidden into the revealed. Even in The Naked and the Dead, then, we can see the most anarchic tendencies of his later work to be not only present, but in large part responsible for the stunning power of that book.

When it appeared in 1948, The Naked and the Dead immediately established itself as the best American novel about World War II and a masterpiece of “realism.” Indeed, the novel’s very triumph has been a key factor not only in the author’s later difficulties with fiction, but in large-scale critical misapprehension of those later efforts. The book’s reputation as a triumph of realism and as a work quite unlike Mailer’s other novels has obscured the fact that, meticulously realistic as it often is, The Naked and the Dead is also as much a dream or nightmare vision as Why Are We in Vietnam?

The book’s title has become so famous that by now it is easy to ignore its curious implications; but they are, after all, strange and original, particularly in view of what must be the normal, unreflecting interpretation of “the naked and the dead.” Most readers, probably, understand the title to mean “the naked and dead,” that is, the blasted, stripped bodies of soldiers on a battlefield, the conventional scenery of innumerable war movies and innumerable blood-and-guts war novels. But that is not the title. It is “the naked and the dead”; that “and” implies, not an identity, but rather an opposition, between the two key terms.

Who are the naked, who the dead? If a heavy death count is one of the indices of “realism” in a war story, this book is relatively peaceful. Only four characters of any importance die in the course of the tale, the first one within the opening thirty pages, and the other three not until well toward the end of this long novel. Moreover, there are not even any battle scenes in The Naked and the Dead. The one major Japanese assault upon the invading American army is described—with brilliant indirection—not in terms of the clash of troops, but rather in terms of the violent tropical storm which washes away the American bivouacs and provides cover for the attack. Much as with Stendhal’s famous description of the Battle of Waterloo in The Charterhouse of Parma, the heroic battle is over before its participants realize it has actually begun. The final American breakthrough, the massive push which ensures American control of the mythic Pacific island which is the scene of the novel, is hardly described at all, for while it is taking place, the characters who are the center of our interest are on the other side of the island, on a reconnaissance mission which, ironically, contributes nothing to the success of the invasion.

One clue to the subtler implications of Mailer’s title comes fairly late in the book, on that crucial and futile reconnaissance detail. Roth, a college-educated private in the platoon, a man already into middle age, tired, frustrated, and haunted by the specter of anti~Semitism among his fellow soldiers, has just collapsed in exhaustion. Gallagher, a blustering Irishman, strikes Roth, shouting, “Get up, you Jew bastard!” And suddenly Roth, through his exhaustion and panic, sees new vistas of terror and violence open before him:

All the protective devices, the sustaining facades of his life had been eroding slowly in the caustic air of the platoon; his exhaustion had pulled out the props, and Gallagher’s blow had toppled the rest of the edifice. He was naked another way now. He rebelled against it, was frustrated that he could not speak to them and explain it away.

Naked another way now; five words and a blow have forced Roth to a point of existential nakedness, a point where he comes face to face—not with the cosmic void—but rather with the conditional, fragile, mortal nature of his own mind and his own body, a point where the props and assurances, the style, of his normal at-homeness with himself no longer avails to mask himself from himself. And if he is naked at this moment, he is also more startlingly alive than at any other moment of his life. To be naked, then, is to be at once terribly frightened, exalted, and intimate with one’s own most intensely conscious self. And to be dead, then, truly dead, is never to have had such a moment, never to have watched the intricate style of your assurances crumble around you and then be forced to recognize what, amid the rubble of that fallen temple of normality, there is to assist in the construction of a new and stronger selfhood.

Roth’s moment of risk and panic is, indeed, a minor one, and one more heavily fraught with terror and failure than with the explosive, exhilarating discovery of a new life. But it is nevertheless an important incident. It helps us see that—among the many interrelated narrative structures of the novel—one way to read The Naked and the Dead is as a series, a carefully varied cluster, of just such moments.

Roth’s confrontation with an intimately personal void, moreover, could not be possible without the pressure of politics and so-called peacetime society. Roth is a New York Jew, Gallagher a Boston Irish Catholic; and the ironic interplay of those two hieratic American identities provides Mailer with one of his most permanent and revelatory metaphors in his ongoing exploration of the national psyche. The real war in this gigantic war novel, one feels, is not the conflict of Japanese and American troops on a trivial island, but the perennial warfare of political and personal styles of identity, of dullness with vitality, of prejudice with vision, of the existentially naked with the imaginatively dead. The war, indeed, both as historical, political fact and as metaphor, is seen throughout the novel primarily as a precipitating image—almost what T. S. Eliot once called an “objective correlative”—for this underlying, critical conflict. Since the Iliad, of course, the most valuable and greatest stories of war have been stories about precisely what the extreme, limiting situation of war does to men’s ideas of themselves, their world, and their gods. Mailer manages to sustain and enrich that ancient tradition—to create a novel which is, paradoxically, as much a novel of manners as it is a battlefield epic.

Another moment of “nakedness” in this complex sense comes to the cowardly, sycophantic Sergeant Brown as he is carrying a dying comrade back from the jungle to the beach. It is an important counterpart to Roth’s confrontation through violence, for Brown experiences his “nakedness” as an access of tender, almost feminine solicitude for the dying man (formerly one of his despised enemies) whom he is bearing. The two men exchange small talk about their families, as men often speak of anything, in the face of death, except death itself. And in a sudden rush of pity and love, Brown whispers, “Just take it easy, boy” to the dying Wilson. In that instant Brown feels the misery and failure of his life open into an exultant sense of participation and unity. It would be (and has been, in any number of sentimental war films and books) an unbearably mawkish scene, except for Mailer’s own toughmindedness about the quality and the duration of the revelation. “It could not last,” Brown realizes.

It was as if Brown had awakened in the middle of the night, helpless in the energies his mind had released in sleep. In the transit to awareness, to wakefulness, he would be helpless for a time, tumbling in the wake of his dream, separated from all the experience, all the trivia that made his life recognizable and bearably blunted to himself. He would be uncovered, lost in the plain of darkness, containing within himself not only all his history and all of the present in the ebbs and pulses of his body, but he would be the common denominator of all men and the animals behind them, waking blindly in the primordial forests.

This, it seems more and more as one studies Mailer’s fiction, is the quintessential moment—the destruction of politics and the reestablishment of a primordial, visionary politics in its place—toward which all his characters, in one way or another, strive. But, for Brown, it cannot and will not last. In Mailer’s world, a man is not only tested and refined by his moments of nakedness, he is also judged by them; and if the man’s past has been one of tiny evasions, small hypocrisies, then the moment will not endure, nor will it issue, as it should, in the creation or fabrication of a new style for living, a more embracing and heroic style of being in the world.

Continental existentialism, particularly the austere and dramatic vision of Albert Camus, obviously lies behind this elevation and mythologization of the naked moment, as does the whole intellectual inheritance of romanticism with its Rousseauistic emphasis upon the primitive nobility of man, untrammeled by the nets of social conditioning. For Mailer, the human equation is more unyieldingly moralistic than for the French existentialists and more ambiguously, problematically artificial than for the high romantics. In The Naked and the Dead and his other novels, there is something almost medieval in the ferocity with which his characters, at their crucial moments of confrontation, are judged—both by themselves and by their creator—and frozen, at the moment of judgment, into the postures of their heroism or cowardice. It is one of the many paradoxes of this highly paradoxical writer that, for all his insistence upon the protean, infinitely self-contradictory nature of human personality, no one is more rigidly un-protean in his view of his own characters. Like the damned in Dante’s Hell or the figures in an allegorical tapestry, his people are (at their best) giant figures of the states and perils of the soul in search of its own salvation. For the progress of the soul in that search we have, usually, to look to the example set by the speaking, narrating voice of the author himself and to look even more closely at the variable shape of his novelistic career. Sartre once observed of the fatality of William Faulkner’s characters that they are all amputees: they have no sense of, no possibility of, a real future. With Mailer, that psychic amputation is even more severe. His characters are all trapped within a testing and judging present, the present of the “naked moment,” which will admit the possibility of the past only as a preparation for it and the possibility of a future only as the infinite repetition of its hieratic form.

In The Naked and the Dead this highly individual quality of Mailer’s world achieves its most perfectly articulated expression: a wedding of vision and story, form and substance, which is lacking in the later novels precisely because never again does Mailer have the good fortune to write a novel about war itself, that most innately allegorical, schematic, tapestrylike of human activities. The first thing one sees, opening the book, is a map of “Anopopei,” the island whose invasion is the major, generative event of the novel. Anopopei is a dream or nightmare island; the name itself, surely, carries as many associations and memories of the language of the nursery as it does of the dialects of Micronesia. The island is shaped, as no one ever tires of saying in the book, like an ocarina: an elongated oval lying east and west, with, toward its western end, a nearly perpendicular shortened peninsula jutting into the ocean.

Maps are usually rather dull and unimportant adjuncts to works of fiction, but the shape of Anopopei is worth studying carefully, since the plot of the book will follow so precisely and with such literally strategic organization, the course of the invading army down the “mouthpiece” of this giant ocarina and thence on an eastward sweep, along the northern side of the island, until it finally breaks through the Japanese line of defense.

It is perhaps excessive to compare Mailer’s performance in the dramatic delineation of great masses of armies in movement and logistical arrangement to Tolstoy—but only “perhaps”—for if on one level The Naked and the Dead is a series of individual, existential confrontations on the part of the members of the invading army, on another, equally important level the book is a magisterially complete and convincing picture of men living and acting in the mass, a story of military invasion which is unequaled, in recent memory, in its power to convey the impression of a truly large-scale movement of human beings. The very shape of Anopopei, in this respect, is one of the most brilliant and paradoxically –“unrealistic” inventions of the novel. The island is shaped to fit a textbook case of invasion tactics, designed by the author to clarify perfectly the classical military problems of entering hostile territory, supplying one’s forces for extensive maneuvers against an entrenched enemy, and finally breaking down the enemy’s resistance and occupying the territory.

If on the existential level of personal confrontation the book is a series of instants of revelatory nakedness, on the political level it is the large-scale “plot” of the invasion and occupation of the schematic island of Anopopei. On both levels, the situation of war serves primarily to refine and clarify, through panic and urgency, the underlying qualities of everyday, peacetime personality and politics.

The “Homeric simile,” articulated in the Iliad and the Odyssey and ever after celebrated as one of the first literary techniques of the Western imagination, is an extended comparison of some act of wartime slaughter to an analogous, but idyllically agricultural or civic feature of the acts of peace. At the simplest level, for example, it may be said that a mighty warrior cuts down the hosts of his enemies as a farmer cuts down, at harvest time, the stalks of his wheat field—the point being, of course, the ironic contrast between man’s destructive and creative labors, and also, at least traditionally, the disruptive, unnatural quality of those acts of destruction. (Simone Weil, it might be mentioned in passing, wrote one of her most brilliant essays—The Iliad, or the Poem of Force—about just this classical, Homeric sense of the terminally perverted nature of physical violence.) But Mailer, whether deliberately or simply by instinct, inverts the classical formula, so that The Naked and the Dead can be read as a massive Homeric simile turned inside out. The killing, destructive activities of war are seen, that is, not as ironically deformed analogues to the acts of peacetime, but rather as ironically, horrifyingly clarified extensions of those acts. Rather than viewing war, with Homer and Vergil, as the apocalyptic cancellation of the life of the peaceful city, the polis or the urbs, Mailer presents us with a vision of war—of The War—as the ongoing, unacknowledged, and deeply nauseating condition of even the most comfortably pacific urban life. It is an inversion which, in Mailer’s later work, becomes perhaps his central contribution to the social and spiritual mythology of his time: the insight that civilized life, whatever its ordinary, daylight assurances about itself, is always, to the enlightened imagination, involved in a state of total war between the visionary naked and the visionary dead.

In The Naked and the Dead itself, Mailer rises to something like an explicit awareness of his Homeric inversion in the curious sections entitled “The Time Machine.” For each of the major characters, there is a time machine segment, usually coming directly before or directly after his existential moment of nakedness. This is an impressionistic, sometimes stream-of-consciousness tableau of the character’s peacetime life, his background, his ruling passions, his signal failures and signal triumphs. Formally, the time machine device is a rather close borrowing from the “Camera Eye” segments of John Dos Passos’s great trilogy of World War I and its aftermath, U.S.A. But the device is also distinctively “Maileresque”; it serves, again in the medieval fashion of allegorizing I have described, to deepen and consolidate the implications of what a character discovers about himself, or fails to discover, in his moment of nakedness. The political satire of Dos Passos’s camera eye, that is, is overlaid and transformed by Mailer’s own obsession with the radically personal, passional bases of politics.

Indeed, if we must locate a single flaw, a single evidence of clumsiness and apprenticeship in this overwhelmingly masterful novel, it is probably the presence of the time machine interchapters. They are obtrusive, and they do, with something of a too mechanical economy, emphasize the predeterminations, passional and political, acting upon the men of Anopopei. But even this clumsiness is, after all, more fascinating and instructive than it is bothersome. Mailer’s effort, in The Naked and the Dead, is to fabricate a myth of the war which will include at once the physical, historical details of the Pacific campaign, the political and economic origins and consequences of that war and the private, phenomenological, and sometimes mystical discoveries which that eternal warfare can generate. Such an ambitious enterprise demands a certain degree of clumsiness, a certain modicum of narrative backtracking and indirection, if it is at all successfully to make its multiple points. As an attempt to unify a public with a private vision of America, the time machine interchapters—like the novel of which they are a part—have all the strengths of their weaknesses.

The novel as a whole, then, operates on two discrete but ultimately unified levels, the political and the private, as does the division of its cast of characters. The political division, not surprisingly, is between officers and enlisted men, particularly the men of “the I and R platoon of headquarters company of the 460th Infantry Regiment.” Mailer’s treatment leaves little doubt that the tension between officers and G.I.s is simply a magnification of the peacetime conflict between the wielders of power and money and the exploited victims of those wielders. It is, in fact, a class conflict in an almost purely Marxist sense. The three most important officers are General Cummings, the commander of the invading army and a character of boundless self-knowledge and cynicism about the life—denying work which is his vocation; Major Dalleson, a blissfully unintelligent, plodding career man whose greatest talent is his ability not to think; and Lieutenant Hearn, perhaps the most important character in the novel, a sensitive, liberal intellectual who despises the power to which his rank entitles him but who cannot—till the very end of his life—break beyond that outrage to a vision of rebellion against the structures of power and exploitation. The G.I.s are headed by Sergeant Croft, the leader of the reconnaissance platoon, a man whose complex hatred for life has turned him into a cool, unthinking killing machine. Croft is feared and disliked by the other men in his platoon, among them Roth; Brown; Wilson, the easygoing, sensual Southerner whose death gives Brown his moment of transport; Gallagher, the Bostonian nearly paralyzed by his rage at the disappointments of his peacetime life; and Red Valsen, the ailing, ironically fatalistic hobo whose life up to and including his military service has been a succession of part-time jobs for the wielders of power, from which he has evolved a philosophy of clear-eyed but despairing bitterness.

This abstract division between haves and have-nots is deeply rooted in the conventions of the social-realist fiction of the thirties. But, as the popular conception of American literature has it, the advent of the war was supposed to have eliminated this sense of class struggle from the national imagination. One thinks of such representative mythologies of the war as Bill Mauldin’s “Willie and Joe” cartoons, films like Battleground or The Sands of Iwo Jima, or novels like Mr. Roberts and The Caine Mutiny. Even well after the conclusion of the fighting, the assumption remained the same: officers may tend to be a trifle pompous, even sometimes tyrannical, and enlisted men may tend to be insubordinate, even sometimes unsympathetic to the war effort—but in the end, the eminent good of making the world safe for foxhole democracy would ensure that the best of them would all pull together. Mailer—anticipating Joseph Heller’s perhaps overrated Catch-22—will have none of this. There is real courage in the precision with which he delineates, at the center of the war which was supposed to have been our liberation from the inequities of peacetime capitalist society, the persistence and triumph of those very inequities.

The political allegory of the novel, however, though strong and important, serves chiefly as a scaffolding—one might almost say an imaginative pretense—for the much more originally conceived partition of characters on the private, existential level. Here, especially in the pivotal figures of General Cummings, Sergeant Croft, and Lieutenant Hearn, Mailer defines a spectrum of personalities—or, better, a spectrum of possibilities of personality—which remains his most constant metaphor for the human, political condition.

I have said that war is the most schematic, allegorical of human activities. In The Naked and the Dead, at least, this is strikingly borne out in the ranks assigned the three men who most explicitly define the spiritual, metaphysical limits of the novel’s vision. Cummings, the general, is in absolute control of the invasion of Anopopei, and therefore in control of the lives of everyone else in the book. He is the first and perhaps the most disturbing of those self-conscious, preternaturally intelligent, horrifyingly soulless capitalists and controllers who are a permanent feature of the Mailer landscape. In him we see the epic ancestor of movie mogul Herman Teppis in The Deer Park, millionaire Barney Kelley in An American Dream, even President Lyndon Johnson in The Armies of the Night. Cummings is an evil man; and his evil consists, more than in anything else, in the deliberation and callousness with which he takes part in the dance of power and death, all the while knowing it to be a crime against the very sources of the human spirit. He is a homosexual, as we learn toward the end of the novel—not a repressed homosexual, but a deliberately abstinent one, cold husband to a frustrated wife. To enjoy even that form of love (always the most minimal and despicable, in Mailer’s basically puritan ethic) would be to jeopardize his military career and therefore the true style of his passion, the exercise of power. A fascist warring against fascists, Cummings announces to Hearn, early in the novel, his hopes for a war to outlast the war, for an era of totalitarian power of which World War II would be only the prelude. “You’re a fool,” he tells Hearn, “if you don’t realize this is going to be the reactionary’s century, perhaps their thousand-year reign. It’s the one thing Hitler said which wasn’t completely hysterical.” He continues, even more chillingly: “You can look at it, Robert, that we’re in the middle ages of a new era, waiting for the renaissance of real power. Right now, I’m serving a rather sequestered function, I really am no more than the chief monk, the lord of my little abbey, so to speak.”

This Gothic vision of the “renaissance of real power,” of a society manipulated with absolute efficiency by a gigantic cartel of power brokers, will loom larger and larger in Mailer’s later novels. It is also an important analogue—indeed, as we shall see, a direct influence—for the dark myth of a manipulated, automatized humanity in the work of Thomas Pynchon, especially in Gravity’s Rainbow, which can be read as an immense and brilliant fantasia upon the themes of The Naked and the Dead.

At the opposite end of the personal spectrum from the general is Sergeant Croft—“The Hunter,” as he is called in his time machine segment. Croft is another highly recognizable Mailer type, the first and most arresting of those unschooled, elemental, murderous Southerners whose presence and whose myth Mailer delights in. But in Croft’s case, something has gone wrong, something has soured and inverted his talent for life, so that he has become a splendidly equipped, gracefully athletic killer. If, indeed, Cummings’s wielding of power-for-death involves the exploitation and automatization of the classes he governs, Croft is the perfect victim, the perfect butt for the general’s grim plans. While Cummings is a self-conscious denier of life (his homosexuality here is a powerful metaphor for this passionate sterility), Croft is a victimized and victimizing destroyer of a life he cannot possess, cannot fully comprehend (he is a cuckold). War is the ideal sphere of action for a man like Croft, since it allows him to exercise his baffled violence without fear of retribution or the threat of having to face his own moral responsibilities.

Between themselves, Cummings and Croft incarnate a grim vision of the passional structures underlying political and social relations. Both men, finally, are among the visionary “dead” of the book’s title, the one because he has refused himself his chance for life, the other because his baffled, outraged imagination fails to grasp the chance when it is offered. And between Cummings and Croft stands Lieutenant Hearn.

It is ancient but accurate army folklore that a second lieutenant is one of the most unfortunate of human beings, contemned by his fellow officers as the lowest and most inexperienced of their number and resented by the enlisted men as their most familiar, most constant point of contact with the hateful class of commanders. Hearn, since he moves in both political spheres of the novel, is an ideal figure to become the unifying consciousness, the central moral voice of The Naked and the Dead. His progeny in Mailer’s later novels will be those tough-sensitive, aspiring novelists and manqués intellectuals who are Mailer’s most frank and probing projections of his own temperament: Lovett in Barbary Shore, O’Shaugnessy in The Deer Park, Rojack in An American Dream, D. J. in Why Are We in Vietnam? and “Norman Mailer” in The Armies of the Night. But Hearn himself is both more ambivalent than these later characters and more immediately engaging.

The most common activity for a Mailer hero is, oddly enough, watching. Despite the novelist’s enthusiasm for—indeed, cult of—action, almost all his central characters, with the exception of the murderer Rojack in An American Dream, spend the majority of their time watching and waiting to act. They strive to understand a complex situation, all the while keying themselves to the point of urgency, the critical point of understanding where action is unremittingly forced upon them.

It is an illuminating contrast to the classic situation described by the novels of Mailer’s antitype, Saul Bellow. With Bellow, as we saw in the last chapter, the definitive story is that of a man who sees chaos, the irrational, open before him in his everyday life and who then attempts, somehow, to come to terms with that apocalyptic eruption, to reconstitute the validity in his life of the traditional moral certitudes. Mailer does not so much contradict Bellow’s myth of man in society, as he inverts its terms. To the Mailer hero, the Mailer sensibility, society in its everyday appearance is a sham, a trap hiding beneath it deep and dark conspiracies, games of power and death which are subtle perils to the soul. The Mailer hero, then, characteristically enters upon a process of examination, investigation, and discovery whose final illumination, ideally, will force him into just such a shattering confrontation with the existential void as Bellow’s characters are in the business of surviving or overcoming. Mailer’s central consciousness, that is, seeks the very moment of testing and decision from which Bellow’s tales begin their exemplary voyages back to the civilized.

As befits the first of such seekers-for-the-void, Hearn goes through this process in a relatively simplified, schematic form. Caught by his rank between the two antagonistic political factions of the army, he is also acute enough to realize that that antagonism itself is the outward sign of a much more deeply rooted, perhaps epochal conflict between two possibilities for civilization, that of the totalitarian, socially engineered power games of the upper classes and that of the anarchic, murderous energies of the lower. Trapped in rank between Cummings and Croft, he is also passionately caught between their two equally life-destroying visions of possibility. Hearn is one of the existentially naked, perhaps the most fully so in the book, and not one of the visionary dead. Born the WASP son of a Midwestern merchant prince, he is the natural heir to all that attracts him and repels him in the assured, rich culture of Cummings and the raw, hunterly primitivism of Croft (and here again the schematism of the book is splendidly graphic, for Croft is, naturally, a westerner, while Cummings is an eastern seaboard product).

As the book begins, Hearn is Cummings’s special attache, the intimate and unwilling admirer of the general’s most shockingly personal reveries and confessions. At the imaginative center of the book, he rebels against the panoply of power Cummings has exhibited to him and is dismissed from the general’s staff to become the lieutenant of the reconnaissance platoon formerly headed by Croft. And if Cummings hates Hearn for his humanitarianism, his resistance to Cummings’s own sprawling dreams of total control, so Croft hates him as an intruder upon the intimate society of the platoon which the sergeant had controlled, a threat to his own untrammeled exultation in killing (just before Hearn joins the platoon, Croft has pointlessly executed a captured and weeping Japanese soldier, for the pure joy of the act). Finally—a grim enough prophecy of the fate of the civilization which has spawned them—the two complementary forces of death will destroy the central character of life and intelligence in this novel; for Cummings, in an attempt to execute his own elegant strategy for the capture of Anopopei, details Hearn’s platoon on an impossible, suicidal scouting mission on the farthest side of the island; and Croft, on that mission, deliberately falsifies a scouting report about enemy troop placement and thereby lures Hearn to his death in an ambush. It is a superb evidence of Mailer’s narrative skill that Cummings and Croft never once meet in the course of the novel—for both men are seduced by complementary ideals of pure power. Their unwitting conspiracy with each other murders the one man who, more than anyone else in The Naked and the Dead, refuses the seductions of power to live on the naked edge of intelligence and self-doubt.