User:Kamyers/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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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....

<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....</blockquote>

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>

<blockquote>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>

That Hemingway eventually died as a result of his gambling with life is not so important as that he grew by it. By challenging fate he was saving his soul; by refusing to give into his dread of death, he was making whatever life was left for him more noble; and he was fortifying his spirit so that he might transcend the eternity of hell.

If the individual can save himself from madness and the abyss only by ceasing to repress even his most hidden and dangerous impulses and by flirting with death, so, too, with the nation as a whole. Devoted to the illusion of safety and security, it is condemned to mass insanity and an ignoble end, unless it redeems itself by immediate embarkation on a course of “existential” politics. This would involve a complete remolding of national objectives, not only on the large issues involving danger and death, survival or extinction, but also on less apocalyptic matters like urban housing.

For if America is not already incurably insane, she is certainly in a state of plague. Mailer sees the symptoms everywhere: in architecture, frozen food, television commercials, sleeping pills, sexual excess, sexual repression, the deterioration of the language. One has only to look at the kind of people who regulate and set the tone of the nation. Mailer lists them: politicians, medicos, policemen, professors, priests, rabbis, ministers, psychoanalysts, builders, and executives. It has not always been so:

<blockquote>[Once] America was the land where people still believed in heroes: George Washington, Billy the Kid; Lincoln, Jefferson, Mark Twain, Jack London, Hemingway, Joe Louis, Dempsey, Gentleman Jim; American believed in athletes, rum-runners, aviators, even lovers. It was a country which had grown by the leap of one hero past another.</blockquote>

Now, more than ever before, America needed a hero. Was he Norman Mailer? Not yet. For the time being Mailer’s faith was in Kennedy, the inspiration for the essay, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” in which Mailer had expressed his faith in Kennedy’s capacity to lead the country in “the recovery of its imagination, its pioneer lust for the unexpected and the incalculable.” And yet no sooner had Kennedy won the election than Mailer was possessed “by a sense of awe,” an intuition that he had betrayed himself, and, as a result, he began to follow Kennedy’s career obsessively, as if he, Norman Mailer, personally “were responsible and guilty for all which was bad...and potentially totalitarian.” There are suggestions in this abrupt reversal of sentiment of three forces at work in Mailer: serious concern for the fate of the spiritual and political ideals he cherishes; a histrionic penchant for breast-beating; an almost petulant envy of Kennedy’s power and possibility, an irrational and vast extension of the simple literary envy he occasionally felt for James Jones.

To be sure, the heroism of which Mailer speaks is a cure which both individual and nation might decide is too hazardous and too painful to undertake. The patient is apt to protest that he does not really feel so sick as Mailer tells him he is and that even if he were, he would rather fade gradually into death than risk the unknown under surgery. If it is the “Establishment” that objects in these terms, Mailer regards it as plain cowardice, the cardinal sin, which should be avoided even if the strictures of eternity were not waiting as retribution. But with minority groups, the Negro in particular, his urgency is softened. He understands that it would be no small act of presumption on his part to demand that the Negro, who has lived with violence all his life, surrender the goals of security and stability.

<blockquote>The demand for courage may have been exorbitant. Now as the Negro was beginning to come into the white man’s world, he wanted the logic of the white man’s world: annuities, mental hygiene, sociological jargon, committee solutions for the ills of the breast. He was sick of a whore’s logic and a pimp’s logic.</blockquote>

And yet the paradox here is only too obvious to Mailer. Believing that he must turn his back on the values of the ghetto, the Negro seeks recovery through assimilation into the moribund world of white liberal America. In reality, he is abandoning a way of life which is founded on those extreme states of human feeling and action which for Mailer constitute the only true possibility for spiritual rehabilitation. Mailer regrets that

<blockquote>there is no one to tell [the Negro] it would be better to keep the psychology of the streets than to cultivate the contradictory desire to be...a great, healthy, mature, autonomous, related, integrated individual.</blockquote>

This problem is crystallized in the eleventh (and perhaps best) essay in ''The Presidential Papers'', “Death,” which focuses on the proceedings before, during, and immediately after the first Floyd Patterson-Sonny Liston heavyweight championship fight. Most Negroes wanted Patterson to win, a fact which Mailer explains by identifying Patterson as the symbol of security. Patterson was polite, quiet, humble, diligent, and Catholic; he was, in short, “White.” Liston, on the other hand, personified “the old torment,” the darker, dangerous side of life that the Negro had known only too well. Liston was surly, unpredictable, mob affiliated, and an ex-convict; he was “black.”

Most Negroes, then, wanted to see Liston beaten by Patterson for much the same reason that they would not react warmly to proposals that they seek out violence, danger, and the unknown. But if Mailer cannot blame them, he is nevertheless distressed by the insidious assimilation of Negroes (and Jews as well) into Anglo-Saxon America. For a Negro or a Jew, to stifle the rich uniqueness of his potential contribution to American life is to betray himself and to withhold the transfusion that might save this bloodless land.

Mailer likes Patterson—his loneliness, his pride, his persistent struggle against the odds. But just as the Fascist Croft had stolen Mailer’s interest from the liberal Hearn in T''he Naked and the Dead'', so Mailer's real fascination here is not with Patterson but with Liston, whose inexorable toughness makes him the kind of Negro other Negroes refer to (sometimes in fear, sometimes in praise, sometimes in disapproval, but always in awe) as “a bad cat.” Liston takes on mythic proportions in Mailer’s mind, a mind which by nature tends to intensify, to exaggerate, and to think in terms of extremes. He is “near to beautiful” and one can think of “very few men who have beauty.” But that is in no way all.

<blockquote>Liston was voodoo, Liston was magic.... Liston was the secret hero of every man who had ever given mouth to a final curse against the dispositions of the Lord and made a pact with Black magic. Liston was Faust.</blockquote>

He was the kind of Negro that any white man who imagined himself hip would have to come to terms with—either as model or as rival. Predictably, Mailer chooses the latter course, and does battle with Liston. Not physical battle, but psychic warfare that could have erupted into violence.

Liston’s incredibly fast knockout of Patterson left Mailer in a state of feverish frustration, a condition aggravated by a conscience which taunted him for his own recent failures—for too much alcohol and too little discipline. It was out of this sense of despair and defeat that another of Mailer’'s obsessions was born.

<blockquote>I began...to see myself as some sort of center about which all that had been lost must now rally. It was not simple egomania nor simple drunkenness, it was not even simple insanity: it was a kind of metaphorical leap across a gap. To believe the impossible may be won creates a strength from which the impossible may be attacked.</blockquote>

=== Notes ===

@@ Line 27: / Line 27: @@
 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....
+<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....</blockquote>
-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>
+<blockquote>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>
+That Hemingway eventually died as a result of his gambling with life is not so important as that he grew by it. By challenging fate he was saving his soul; by refusing to give into his dread of death, he was making whatever life was left for him more noble; and he was fortifying his spirit so that he might transcend the eternity of hell.
+If the individual can save himself from madness and the abyss only by ceasing to repress even his most hidden and dangerous impulses and by flirting with death, so, too, with the nation as a whole. Devoted to the illusion of safety and security, it is condemned to mass insanity and an ignoble end, unless it redeems itself by immediate embarkation on a course of “existential” politics. This would involve a complete remolding of national objectives, not only on the large issues involving danger and death, survival or extinction, but also on less apocalyptic matters like urban housing.
+For if America is not already incurably insane, she is certainly in a state of plague. Mailer sees the symptoms everywhere: in architecture, frozen food, television commercials, sleeping pills, sexual excess, sexual repression, the deterioration of the language. One has only to look at the kind of people who regulate and set the tone of the nation. Mailer lists them: politicians, medicos, policemen, professors, priests, rabbis, ministers, psychoanalysts, builders, and executives. It has not always been so:
+<blockquote>[Once] America was the land where people still believed in heroes: George Washington, Billy the Kid; Lincoln, Jefferson, Mark Twain, Jack London, Hemingway, Joe Louis, Dempsey, Gentleman Jim; American believed in athletes, rum-runners, aviators, even lovers. It was a country which had grown by the leap of one hero past another.</blockquote>
+Now, more than ever before, America needed a hero. Was he Norman Mailer? Not yet. For the time being Mailer’s faith was in Kennedy, the inspiration for the essay, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” in which Mailer had expressed his faith in Kennedy’s capacity to lead the country in “the recovery of its imagination, its pioneer lust for the unexpected and the incalculable.” And yet no sooner had Kennedy won the election than Mailer was possessed “by a sense of awe,” an intuition that he had betrayed himself, and, as a result, he began to follow Kennedy’s career obsessively, as if he, Norman Mailer, personally “were responsible and guilty for all which was bad...and potentially totalitarian.” There are suggestions in this abrupt reversal of sentiment of three forces at work in Mailer: serious concern for the fate of the spiritual and political ideals he cherishes; a histrionic penchant for breast-beating; an almost petulant envy of Kennedy’s power and possibility, an irrational and vast extension of the simple literary envy he occasionally felt for James Jones.
+To be sure, the heroism of which Mailer speaks is a cure which both individual and nation might decide is too hazardous and too painful to undertake. The patient is apt to protest that he does not really feel so sick as Mailer tells him he is and that even if he were, he would rather fade gradually into death than risk the unknown under surgery. If it is the “Establishment” that objects in these terms, Mailer regards it as plain cowardice, the cardinal sin, which should be avoided even if the strictures of eternity were not waiting as retribution. But with minority groups, the Negro in particular, his urgency is softened. He understands that it would be no small act of presumption on his part to demand that the Negro, who has lived with violence all his life, surrender the goals of security and stability.
+<blockquote>The demand for courage may have been exorbitant. Now as the Negro was beginning to come into the white man’s world, he wanted the logic of the white man’s world: annuities, mental hygiene, sociological jargon, committee solutions for the ills of the breast. He was sick of a whore’s logic and a pimp’s logic.</blockquote>
+And yet the paradox here is only too obvious to Mailer. Believing that he must turn his back on the values of the ghetto, the Negro seeks recovery through assimilation into the moribund world of white liberal America. In reality, he is abandoning a way of life which is founded on those extreme states of human feeling and action which for Mailer constitute the only true possibility for spiritual rehabilitation. Mailer regrets that
+<blockquote>there is no one to tell [the Negro] it would be better to keep the psychology of the streets than to cultivate the contradictory desire to be...a great, healthy, mature, autonomous, related, integrated individual.</blockquote>
+This problem is crystallized in the eleventh (and perhaps best) essay in ''The Presidential Papers'', “Death,” which focuses on the proceedings before, during, and immediately after the first Floyd Patterson-Sonny Liston heavyweight championship fight. Most Negroes wanted Patterson to win, a fact which Mailer explains by identifying Patterson as the symbol of security. Patterson was polite, quiet, humble, diligent, and Catholic; he was, in short, “White.” Liston, on the other hand, personified “the old torment,” the darker, dangerous side of life that the Negro had known only too well. Liston was surly, unpredictable, mob affiliated, and an ex-convict; he was “black.”
+Most Negroes, then, wanted to see Liston beaten by Patterson for much the same reason that they would not react warmly to proposals that they seek out violence, danger, and the unknown. But if Mailer cannot blame them, he is nevertheless distressed by the insidious assimilation of Negroes (and Jews as well) into Anglo-Saxon America. For a Negro or a Jew, to stifle the rich uniqueness of his potential contribution to American life is to betray himself and to withhold the transfusion that might save this bloodless land.
+Mailer likes Patterson—his loneliness, his pride, his persistent struggle against the odds. But just as the Fascist Croft had stolen Mailer’s interest from the liberal Hearn in T''he Naked and the Dead'', so Mailer's real fascination here is not with Patterson but with Liston, whose inexorable toughness makes him the kind of Negro other Negroes refer to (sometimes in fear, sometimes in praise, sometimes in disapproval, but always in awe) as “a bad cat.” Liston takes on mythic proportions in Mailer’s mind, a mind which by nature tends to intensify, to exaggerate, and to think in terms of extremes. He is “near to beautiful” and one can think of “very few men who have beauty.” But that is in no way all.
+<blockquote>Liston was voodoo, Liston was magic.... Liston was the secret hero of every man who had ever given mouth to a final curse against the dispositions of the Lord and made a pact with Black magic. Liston was Faust.</blockquote>
+He was the kind of Negro that any white man who imagined himself hip would have to come to terms with—either as model or as rival. Predictably, Mailer chooses the latter course, and does battle with Liston. Not physical battle, but psychic warfare that could have erupted into violence.
+Liston’s incredibly fast knockout of Patterson left Mailer in a state of feverish frustration, a condition aggravated by a conscience which taunted him for his own recent failures—for too much alcohol and too little discipline. It was out of this sense of despair and defeat that another of Mailer’'s obsessions was born.
+<blockquote>I began...to see myself as some sort of center about which all that had been lost must now rally. It was not simple egomania nor simple drunkenness, it was not even simple insanity: it was a kind of metaphorical leap across a gap. To believe the impossible may be won creates a strength from which the impossible may be attacked.</blockquote>
 === Notes ===
 {{notelist}}