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A remarkable exchange of letters between Mailer and Beat poet Michael McClure renders the flat authoritarianism of “The White Negro” as questionable, dialectic, and even chronologically false: Mailer’s letters to McClure certainly weigh in an approval of the occult ethnographies and mythologi-

{{pg|232|233}}cal wizardry of the Beat writers. Much of McClure’s correspondence date to 1964, and show an anxious McClure trying to publish a novel and some short manuscripts including “Untitled Novel,” “Ghost Tantras,” and “Mad Cub.” The letters from McClure, far in excess of what Mailer writes back—reflect a proselytizing tone, an aggressive eagerness to suggest beatnik ideas in the post-Beat era. One such letter, dated from February 1964, includes his rendition of the beatnik “legend” of writing mythology. What also becomes clear from this letter is McClure’s admiration of Mailer: he is close to idolizing Mailer as a literary godfather who can help him with his publishing fiction and poetry attests to a very different social and intellectual imagination than the curt criticisms found in “The White Negro.” Letters from Mailer are comparatively short, even handwritten. Letters from McClure are voluminous and copious in number. Mankind’s subconscious motivations, too, are an important theme in Mailer’s most acclaimed novels. What is less known was his appreciation of the mythological and anthropological adventuring of the Beats, and the impact of narco-criticism that could identify a very different dynamic to the motions of the psychic organism through drugs. Of course, we should be cognizant of the fact that the literary conventions of 1964 were very different from those of 1957. Clearly, however, Mailer is moved by the literary possibilities for conscious expansion and occult mythologies as they might derive or enhance American spirit.

On February 17, 1964, Mailer responded and expressed the visible tension between refinement and animate penning of self- and world-mythology that through the portrait of the writer gives credence to the art of discovery and self-promotion through writing. Mailer’s cautionary disdain is matched with an approval of the writing scene and the promotion of art and culture through writing, rather than an overstatement of the dilemmas of social realism. While far from a complete reversal of opinions and criticism in “The White Negro,” the anxiety of mentorship is given new impetus because of the cultural gap between the conservative-leaning 1950s and the explosive, global, revolutionary 1960s. Mailer projects an educated responsibility. He tacitly admits the relevance of liberalism and occultism in a less homogenous world, and coincides with some of the possibilities for excavating a modern epistemology against the tides of materialism and authoritarianism. “Flesh of the form” directly translates Sampas’s 1942 letter to Kerouac as that of authorial progeny—what could be said about the modern development of American manhood could be as easily said about the influence of writing {{pg|233|234}}on one’s imagination, and suggests a maybe-ambivalent directioning of the Beatnik social and intellectual “possibility” (Kerouac, ''Selected''). Egoistic granting of cultural status through writing modifies considerably the art of social revolution. What is clear is that Mailer recognizes in the Beat Generation a potential that was completely rejected by him at the embryonic time when the Beats were completely unrecognized and unpublished, not a factor at all in the making of ideas on the political world stage. That Mailer recognizes something going on that is subtle yet dramatically impactive borrows directly from his assuming tutelage to an ever-growing population of renegades—he has incorporated the concept of “beatnik” into his idea of the modern selfhood through the mask of writing itself. Mailer’s passion for the ego-soul and for the imaging and fame of American consciousness is here greatly altered and suggestive of a very new stage of development for him.

Mailer’s fairly paternal tone is contrastive with the general disapproval of publishers for “renegade” literatures that praise rebellion, animate power, and the ecstatic. We should, of course, remember that publishers denied Kerouac his attainment of literary glory for twelve years—and that most Beat novels and poetry were shunned or bowdlerized by editorial interpretations designed to protect doctrines of American conservatism. In the genesis of “Flower Power” and hippiedom, replete with animate, environmental, and occult glories, many literary greats presided over a degenerated bunch of would-be writers with no true talent. Paul Bowles’s Itesa apartment in Tangier was a classic example of the engine of failure when it came to collaborative re-invention of the modernist form, with many writers appearing at his apartment in a scheme of literary disfocus and psychic abandonment unreconcilable with the business of true literary production. We could even make much of the excursion of hipsters and hippies to remote regions of the world. That literary genius involved far-off travel implies the unsaleable quality of these ideas and the weakness and embryonic passiveness of those truly “fighting” the establishment and the military-industrial complex. The subject matter for McClure’s letters includes digests of ''Mad Cub'' and ''Ghost Tantras''. Both are tributes to primal, essential, animate reclamation of instinct and poetic animateness. Written in the early 1960s, they restate Sampas’s letter and the debacle between officialism and animate ownership of the psyche, the earth, and primordial consciousness. It is suggestible, of course, that Mailer saw enough self-characteristics in these narrations, but the pop-

{{pg|234|235}}ular message is clear enough. By 1964, Mailer saw in McClure what he would deny of Kerouac. He understood that “Beat” or “beatnik” inveighed a general sense of the development of modern Western man, and could not as easily confine the Beat literary works to a colonial scheming of its characters and ideas. That the “last” meeting of the Beat Generation takes place in 1964 in San Francisco heralds a “new” beginning, one in which literary production could be divorced from its older mentors and hence some of the political idealism that informed them. Mailer, by being paternalistic and circumspect, divines the prospect of literary acquisition as a developable strand of his own literary genius, and a recalculation of literary possibility to influence culture and therefore move forward the architectonic of American selfhood in the Modern Era. Mailer’s tone, in the letters, shows moments of warmth, authorial reciprocity in communications, and the lingering anxiety of publishing and its expectations from the writer. A shared anxiety is continuously documented in lieu of the 1964 political elections in the US.

Mailer was also commissioned by Allen Ginsberg and other Beat writers to testify against the censoring of Burroughs’s novel, ''Naked Lunch'', which was finally cleared of American censorship in 1966. Mailer testified that

<blockquote>We are richer for [Burroughs’s] record; and we are more impressive as a nation because a publisher can print that record and sell it in an open bookstore, sell it legally. It even offers a hint that the “Great Society,” which Lyndon Johnson speaks of, may not be merely a politician’s high wind, but indeed may have the hard seed of a new truth; for no ordinary society could have the bravery and moral honesty to stare down into the abyss of ''Naked Lunch''. But a Great Society can look into the chasm of its own potential Hell and recognize that it is stronger as a nation for possessing an artist who can come back from Hell with a portrait of its dimensions. (“''Naked''” XVII–XIX)</blockquote>

Mailer’s message here is very obvious—as a nation and as a “collective soul,” America and its conception of democracy are expanded and strengthened by the existence of drug-addicted literary genius. The phrasing of “dimensions of Hell” repeats the doctrine of American “learning” rather than the diminution, comedism, and nihilism of surrealist writers who also used drugs. We almost feel that Mailer believes that taking drugs is a step towards {{pg|235|236}}totalistic self-redemption and even cultural-historical redemption, an answering of the seemingly meaningless and jocular decay of the earlier beatniks who praised Black and other minorities for spawning the adulation of excess. Yet there is also an authorial recognition of grandeur and achievement: Burroughs may easily be mismatched against the United States Government in the sense that Burroughs’s written and social understandings of drugs, consciousness, addiction, and “culture” was far greater and considerably more objective and human. It is also very likely that Mailer saw reasons to praise Burroughs where he would have been reluctant to do so for Kerouac, that he recognized a gutsier and more cerebrated authorship and the promise of a more durable idealism. Surely, in the early part of the Twentieth Century, man’s understanding of narcotics was far from literary. Once again, the literary medium is a common ground, a moment of psychosocial development away from colonial or “Jim Crow” barbarizations meant to racialize and therefore diminish the true impact of suffering and intoxication upon the modern self. There is also an implied note of recognition of the changes in popular culture. Mailer’s comparatively centrist ''metier'' develops a much broader social understanding of drugs and their arguable utility in a rapidly changing world. Gone are the fantasies and undefined adventures that meshed with Victorian portraits of horror, and ushered in is a definable modern subject that is ''a part of'' the modern reality, lingual and otherwise. Mailer attempts this without giving any credence to occult or multicultural possibilities for experience: he is soberly realistic and attempts to incorporate a divergent stream of texts and their signification into the mainstream setting. Mailer’s typing of Burroughs as a “religious” writer maintains some of the traditional mask. However, he concurs with the portrait of a profound if terrifying reflection on the mind and its lingual construction of experience. His identifying religion and damnation give credence to the contemporary concept of drugs and rehabilitation, while escaping them by stressing “the real” and its influence on the modern society. The impulse to democratization, or rather a recognition of the form and humanity of drug-addicted experience, projects without much reservation the idea of a maturing spirit that is older, wiser, and with a greater grasp of psychic agency. Authoritarian dogma, then, is not refuted but rather channeled into a more intimate discussion, one favorable to the individual and to social freedoms. Although Mailer is not a strong proponent of the legalization of drugs, he certainly recognizes that writing about drugs contributed {{pg|236|237}}to a greater understanding, and maybe even the redemption, of man from his long-standing social and personal ills.

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 A remarkable exchange of letters between Mailer and Beat poet Michael McClure renders the flat authoritarianism of “The White Negro” as questionable, dialectic, and even chronologically false: Mailer’s letters to McClure certainly weigh in an approval of the occult ethnographies and mythologi-
 {{pg|232|233}}cal wizardry of the Beat writers. Much of McClure’s correspondence date to 1964, and show an anxious McClure trying to publish a novel and some short manuscripts including “Untitled Novel,” “Ghost Tantras,” and “Mad Cub.” The letters from McClure, far in excess of what Mailer writes back—reflect a proselytizing tone, an aggressive eagerness to suggest beatnik ideas in the post-Beat era. One such letter, dated from February 1964, includes his rendition of the beatnik “legend” of writing mythology. What also becomes clear from this letter is McClure’s admiration of Mailer: he is close to idolizing Mailer as a literary godfather who can help him with his publishing fiction and poetry attests to a very different social and intellectual imagination than the curt criticisms found in “The White Negro.” Letters from Mailer are comparatively short, even handwritten. Letters from McClure are voluminous and copious in number. Mankind’s subconscious motivations, too, are an important theme in Mailer’s most acclaimed novels. What is less known was his appreciation of the mythological and anthropological adventuring of the Beats, and the impact of narco-criticism that could identify a very different dynamic to the motions of the psychic organism through drugs. Of course, we should be cognizant of the fact that the literary conventions of 1964 were very different from those of 1957. Clearly, however, Mailer is moved by the literary possibilities for conscious expansion and occult mythologies as they might derive or enhance American spirit.
+On February 17, 1964, Mailer responded and expressed the visible tension between refinement and animate penning of self- and world-mythology that through the portrait of the writer gives credence to the art of discovery and self-promotion through writing. Mailer’s cautionary disdain is matched with an approval of the writing scene and the promotion of art and culture through writing, rather than an overstatement of the dilemmas of social realism. While far from a complete reversal of opinions and criticism in “The White Negro,” the anxiety of mentorship is given new impetus because of the cultural gap between the conservative-leaning 1950s and the explosive, global, revolutionary 1960s. Mailer projects an educated responsibility. He tacitly admits the relevance of liberalism and occultism in a less homogenous world, and coincides with some of the possibilities for excavating a modern epistemology against the tides of materialism and authoritarianism. “Flesh of the form” directly translates Sampas’s 1942 letter to Kerouac as that of authorial progeny—what could be said about the modern development of American manhood could be as easily said about the influence of writing {{pg|233|234}}on one’s imagination, and suggests a maybe-ambivalent directioning of the Beatnik social and intellectual “possibility” (Kerouac, ''Selected''). Egoistic granting of cultural status through writing modifies considerably the art of social revolution. What is clear is that Mailer recognizes in the Beat Generation a potential that was completely rejected by him at the embryonic time when the Beats were completely unrecognized and unpublished, not a factor at all in the making of ideas on the political world stage. That Mailer recognizes something going on that is subtle yet dramatically impactive borrows directly from his assuming tutelage to an ever-growing population of renegades—he has incorporated the concept of “beatnik” into his idea of the modern selfhood through the mask of writing itself. Mailer’s passion for the ego-soul and for the imaging and fame of American consciousness is here greatly altered and suggestive of a very new stage of development for him.
+Mailer’s fairly paternal tone is contrastive with the general disapproval of publishers for “renegade” literatures that praise rebellion, animate power, and the ecstatic. We should, of course, remember that publishers denied Kerouac his attainment of literary glory for twelve years—and that most Beat novels and poetry were shunned or bowdlerized by editorial interpretations designed to protect doctrines of American conservatism. In the genesis of “Flower Power” and hippiedom, replete with animate, environmental, and occult glories, many literary greats presided over a degenerated bunch of would-be writers with no true talent. Paul Bowles’s Itesa apartment in Tangier was a classic example of the engine of failure when it came to collaborative re-invention of the modernist form, with many writers appearing at his apartment in a scheme of literary disfocus and psychic abandonment unreconcilable with the business of true literary production. We could even make much of the excursion of hipsters and hippies to remote regions of the world. That literary genius involved far-off travel implies the unsaleable quality of these ideas and the weakness and embryonic passiveness of those truly “fighting” the establishment and the military-industrial complex. The subject matter for McClure’s letters includes digests of ''Mad Cub'' and ''Ghost Tantras''. Both are tributes to primal, essential, animate reclamation of instinct and poetic animateness. Written in the early 1960s, they restate Sampas’s letter and the debacle between officialism and animate ownership of the psyche, the earth, and primordial consciousness. It is suggestible, of course, that Mailer saw enough self-characteristics in these narrations, but the pop-
+{{pg|234|235}}ular message is clear enough. By 1964, Mailer saw in McClure what he would deny of Kerouac. He understood that “Beat” or “beatnik” inveighed a general sense of the development of modern Western man, and could not as easily confine the Beat literary works to a colonial scheming of its characters and ideas. That the “last” meeting of the Beat Generation takes place in 1964 in San Francisco heralds a “new” beginning, one in which literary production could be divorced from its older mentors and hence some of the political idealism that informed them. Mailer, by being paternalistic and circumspect, divines the prospect of literary acquisition as a developable strand of his own literary genius, and a recalculation of literary possibility to influence culture and therefore move forward the architectonic of American selfhood in the Modern Era. Mailer’s tone, in the letters, shows moments of warmth, authorial reciprocity in communications, and the lingering anxiety of publishing and its expectations from the writer. A shared anxiety is continuously documented in lieu of the 1964 political elections in the US.
+Mailer was also commissioned by Allen Ginsberg and other Beat writers to testify against the censoring of Burroughs’s novel, ''Naked Lunch'', which was finally cleared of American censorship in 1966. Mailer testified that
+<blockquote>We are richer for [Burroughs’s] record; and we are more impressive as a nation because a publisher can print that record and sell it in an open bookstore, sell it legally. It even offers a hint that the “Great Society,” which Lyndon Johnson speaks of, may not be merely a politician’s high wind, but indeed may have the hard seed of a new truth; for no ordinary society could have the bravery and moral honesty to stare down into the abyss of ''Naked Lunch''. But a Great Society can look into the chasm of its own potential Hell and recognize that it is stronger as a nation for possessing an artist who can come back from Hell with a portrait of its dimensions. (“''Naked''” XVII–XIX)</blockquote>
+Mailer’s message here is very obvious—as a nation and as a “collective soul,” America and its conception of democracy are expanded and strengthened by the existence of drug-addicted literary genius. The phrasing of “dimensions of Hell” repeats the doctrine of American “learning” rather than the diminution, comedism, and nihilism of surrealist writers who also used drugs. We almost feel that Mailer believes that taking drugs is a step towards {{pg|235|236}}totalistic self-redemption and even cultural-historical redemption, an answering of the seemingly meaningless and jocular decay of the earlier beatniks who praised Black and other minorities for spawning the adulation of excess. Yet there is also an authorial recognition of grandeur and achievement: Burroughs may easily be mismatched against the United States Government in the sense that Burroughs’s written and social understandings of drugs, consciousness, addiction, and “culture” was far greater and considerably more objective and human. It is also very likely that Mailer saw reasons to praise Burroughs where he would have been reluctant to do so for Kerouac, that he recognized a gutsier and more cerebrated authorship and the promise of a more durable idealism. Surely, in the early part of the Twentieth Century, man’s understanding of narcotics was far from literary. Once again, the literary medium is a common ground, a moment of psychosocial development away from colonial or “Jim Crow” barbarizations meant to racialize and therefore diminish the true impact of suffering and intoxication upon the modern self. There is also an implied note of recognition of the changes in popular culture. Mailer’s comparatively centrist ''metier'' develops a much broader social understanding of drugs and their arguable utility in a rapidly changing world. Gone are the fantasies and undefined adventures that meshed with Victorian portraits of horror, and ushered in is a definable modern subject that is ''a part of'' the modern reality, lingual and otherwise. Mailer attempts this without giving any credence to occult or multicultural possibilities for experience: he is soberly realistic and attempts to incorporate a divergent stream of texts and their signification into the mainstream setting. Mailer’s typing of Burroughs as a “religious” writer maintains some of the traditional mask. However, he concurs with the portrait of a profound if terrifying reflection on the mind and its lingual construction of experience. His identifying religion and damnation give credence to the contemporary concept of drugs and rehabilitation, while escaping them by stressing “the real” and its influence on the modern society. The impulse to democratization, or rather a recognition of the form and humanity of drug-addicted experience, projects without much reservation the idea of a maturing spirit that is older, wiser, and with a greater grasp of psychic agency. Authoritarian dogma, then, is not refuted but rather channeled into a more intimate discussion, one favorable to the individual and to social freedoms. Although Mailer is not a strong proponent of the legalization of drugs, he certainly recognizes that writing about drugs contributed {{pg|236|237}}to a greater understanding, and maybe even the redemption, of man from his long-standing social and personal ills.