The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Woman Redux: de Kooning, Mailer, and American Abstract Expression: Difference between revisions

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 {{Byline|last=Miller|first=Linda Patterson |abstract=An examination of Norman Mailer’s appropriation of the painterly distortions of [[w:Willem de Kooning|Willem de Kooning]], a leading figure among the American Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s and 1960s in New York. Mailer’s portrait of Deborah Rojack’s murder in ''[[An American Dream]]'' bears uncanny parallels to de Kooning’s “Woman I,” a painting that Norman Mailer knew well by the time he was working on his novel. An examination of the two works in tandem illuminates how Mailer’s attempt, at least in this novel, was not to destroy women but to liberate them from within and to restore harmony for both
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 When I first read ''An American Dream'', the murder of Deborah, which opens the novel, mesmerized me with its bold and compelling intricacy, and I was starkly reminded of “Woman I,” a painting I first encountered as a college student. I wondered then, and still do, why people found the painting so troubling, for I found it strangely exhilarating. I felt the power of its counter-movements and the sense that this woman was alive and had broken her chains, bursting forth with her aliveness from all perspectives simultaneously, defying expectations and triumphing in the essence of her ugly beauty. So when I read ''An American Dream'' and encountered the opening murder sections and immediately thought of de Kooning’s “Woman I,” the association seemed valid given that Mailer’s descriptions of Deborah’s dead body mimic de Kooning’s iconoclastic work.
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+“Look first at Deborah’s face,” Rojack’s voice in his brain tells him as he then kneels “to turn her over.” As she faces him now head on, he sees staring back at him “a beast.” “Her teeth showed, the point of light in her eye was violent, and her mouth was open. It looked like a cave. I could hear some wind which reached down to the cellars of a sunless earth. A little line of spit came from the corner of her mouth, and at an angle from her nose one green seed had floated its small distance on an abortive rill of blood.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|pp=39–40}}
+Earlier, prior to his killing her, he had noticed the “mottling” of her skin that “spread in ugly smears and patches upon her neck, her shoulders, and what I could see of her breast. They radiated a detestation so palpable that my body began to race as if a foreign element, a poison altogether suffocating, were beginning to seep through me.” He begins to question: “Did you ever feel the malignity which rises from a swamp? It is real, I could swear it, and some whisper of ominous calm, that heavy air one breathes in the hours before a hurricane, now came to rest between us. I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me. . . . She did not wish to tear the body, she was out to spoil the light, and in an epidemic of fear, as if her face—that wide mouth, full-fleshed nose, and pointed green eyes, pointed as arrows—would be my first view of eternity, as if she were ministering angel (ministering devil) I knelt beside her and tried to take her hand. It was soft now as a jelly- fish, and almost as repugnant.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|pp=25–26}}
+When Rojack later goes to view Deborah’s body at the morgue, he admits: “I did not want to look at Deborah this time. I took no more than a glimpse when the sheet was laid back, and caught for that act a clear view of one green eye staring open, hard as marble, dead as the dead eye of a fish, and her poor face swollen, her beauty gone obese.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=76}}
+Mailer was clearly aware of his painterly writing in the new expressionist manner as he references the “ultra-violet” lighting and green the color of guacamole, as in a painting by Vincent Van Gogh or Henri Rousseau. Indeed, Deborah’s hallway wallpaper seems like a jungle background “conceived by Rousseau” with its “hot-house of flat velvet flowers, royal, sinister, cultivated in their twinings.” They breathe at Rojack “from all four walls, upstairs and down.{{Sfn|Mailer|1965|pp=13–14, 21}} The world looms large, all distorted, angular, pulpy and surreal. Rojak thinks: “There was something so sly at the center of her, some snake . . . guarding the cave which opened to the treasure.”{{Sfn|Mailer|1965|p=34}} He thinks about her own duality, good, evil, and then realizes: “But what I did not know was which of us imprisoned the other, and how? I might be the one who was . . . evil,” he concludes, “and Deborah was trapped with me.”{{Sfn|Mailer|1965|p=37}}
+As Mailer questioned the idea of being imprisoned for both men and women, he faced down the feminists during the inflammatory 1960s and 1970s. I applaud his bravado when he recognized in ''The Prisoner of Sex'' that he is the fall guy in a world of one-liners that resists complex arguments. Although Hemingway faced down his fair share of criticism in his day, no one equals Mailer’s fearlessness in speaking out for the primal purity of our sexual identities in love that cant, hypocrisy, and pretension smothers. He argues that “love is more stern than war” and that “people can win at love only when they are ready to lose everything they bring to it of ego, position, or identity.” “Men and women can survive,” Mailer states, “only if they reach the depths of their own sex down within themselves.”{{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=147}} Part of that might well involve them slashing away at the phony, sniffling exteriors. Part of that might involve the hatchet approach that both de Kooning and Mailer implemented in their art to show how this delivery “over to the unknown” cannot happen when people assume stances rather than take risks. He concludes adamantly that the “physical love of men and women, insofar as it [is] untainted by civilization, [is] the salvation of us all.”{{sfn|Mailer|1971|pp=140–141}} But herein lies the rub and the essence of Mailer’s beautiful artistic violence. Civilization taints love to the degree that pretense and dishonesty rule and to the degree that civilization fails to see the larger harmonious picture.
+“When you make love,” Mailer said, “whatever is good in you or bad in you, goes out into someone else. I mean this literally. I’m not interested in the biochemistry of it, the electromagnetism of it, nor in how the psychic waves are passed back and forth, and what psychic waves are. All I know is that when one makes love, one changes a woman slightly and a woman changes you slightly. . . . If one has the courage to think about every aspect of the act—I don’t mean think mechanically about it, but if one is able to brood over the act, to dwell on it—then one is changed by the act. Even if one has been jangled by the act. Because in the act of restoring one’s harmony, one has to encounter all the reasons one was jangled.” In essence, he concludes, one needs to test oneself.{{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=189}}
+Hemingway railed against the pretense and cant of his day, and he had what he called his “inborn shit detector.” Mailer too could not shut up when things did not ring true, particularly as related to women, and he found it ironic that people failed to recognize that his true thematic concern always was women—not all those heroes he seemed to write about. “Every theme he had ever considered,” he said in ''Prisoner'', “was ready to pass with profit through the question of women, their character, their destiny, their life as a class, their tyranny, their slavery, their liberation, their subjection to the wheel of nature, their root in eternity—no German metaphysician, no Doctor of Dialectics could have been happier at the thought of traveling far on the Woman Question.” Furthermore, “He was forever pleased with himself at how cleverly he had buried this as yet undisclosed vision of women in his books.”{{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=20}} He believed that, like D. H. Lawrence, he wrote with “the soul of a beautiful woman.” “Whoever believes that such a leap is not possible across the gap,” he stated, “that a man cannot write of a woman’s soul, or a white man of a black man, does not believe in literature itself.”{{Sfn|Mailer|1971|p=152}}
+Or of the transformative power of art when it pushes beyond the boundaries. Art during the 1920s in Paris became, as Archibald MacLeish described it, a “conflagration,” primarily because of the interdisciplinary convergence and explosion of all the arts. A similar phenomenon occurred in 1950s America in and around New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts. Here the abstract expressionist painters such as de Kooning and the post-WWII writers such as Mailer mingled on the beach and in the bars as they redefined Modernism for a new era. They were aware of each other’s work and influenced by a radicalism that dared, yet again, to upend realism and prosaic truths. Like all great art that might seek to discover an inner truth, they created works that would shock rather than soothe. De Kooning’s “Woman I” rattled the art world with its violent distortions and ugly beauty. When I met Norman Mailer at his home in Provincetown in November, 2005, he readily acknowledged his awareness of de Kooning’s “Woman I” painting. He went on to add, however, with a look of bemusement, “I never did like that painting. Do you?” As he looked me in the eyes, “Woman I” seemed to hang in the air between us as its own complicated and unspoken explanation.
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