The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today: Difference between revisions

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 {{quote|I knew Goldwater could win because something in me leaped out at the thought; a part of me, a devil, wished to take that choice.}}
+Secondly, Mailer’s ambivalence toward Negroes, manifested earlier only in the individual cases of Sonny Liston and Shago Martin, is now explicitly broadened. His reaction to James Baldwin’s suggestion that there may be no remission for the white man’s sins against the Negro is violent:
+{{quote|I had to throttle an impulse to . . . call Baldwin, and say, “You get this, baby. There’s a shit storm coming like nothing you ever knew. So ask yourself if what you desire is for the white to kill every black so that there be total remission of guilt in your black soul.”}}
+If the relief of such tensions and conflicts and the consequent fortification of the self can come only from bold action, then Mailer’s primary means of personal salvation lies in his work. It is in the very act of creating the artistic sermons which he claims will show us the way to redemption that Mailer redeems himself. His influence has given rise to several “cults.” At one extreme there is a segment of the underground hipster community, closely involved with drugs, which worships him as the high priest of God and Sex. At the other end is that increasingly large group of liberal and radical intellectuals, centered in New York and comprised of such critics as Norman Podhoretz, Steven Marcus, and Richard Poirier who see in Mailer, as Marcus once put it, the embodiment of extraordinary literary talent, personal honesty and loyalty, and penetrating social criticism. And yet, in the last analysis, Mailer’s influence is limited, for the Word has hardly reached, let alone changed, the heart of the land he is trying to transform.
+From the first three sermons of the 1960’s, the congregation is likely to walk away interested and, sometimes, excited, rather than transformed. Entertainment overshadows eschatology. And in Mailer’s fourth effort of the 6o’s, ''The Deer Park'', a stage adaption of his novel of 1956, religion gives way completely to comedy (both intentional and unintentional).{{efn|One ignores, for Mailer’s sake as much as for one’s own, ''Deaths for the Ladies'', a collection of words which the author extravagantly describes as poetry.}}
+This is not to imply that Mailer has abandoned his urgent message; practically all his obsessions of the 6o’s are here: sex, love, lust, heroism, cowardice, power, God, and the Devil. If Mailer has added anything new to his philosophy, it lies in the expansion of his idea as sexual freedom and it is expressed through the pimp Marion Faye, who “follows sex to the end, turns queer, bangs dogs, and sniffs toes.” But in the figure of Herman Teppis (or
+“H.T.”), a Hollywood mogul in the tradition of Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn, genuine humor replaces heavy rhetoric and caustic wit. In the desert of endless debates over who is—and who is not—a genius in bed, Teppis’s pronouncements are oases.
 === Notes ===
 {{notelist}}