Norman Mailer and the Cutting Edge of Style: Difference between revisions

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 {{hatnote|Still being edited as of March 04, 2019}}
+{{byline|last=McConnell|first=Frank D.}}
 {{notice|Chapter 2 from {{cite book |last=McConnell |first=Frank D. |date=1977 |title=Four Postwar American Novelists: Bellow, Mailer, Barth, and Pynchon |url= |location=Chicago |publisher=University of Chicago Press }} Reprinted here with permission from Celeste (McDonnell) Barber.}}
 [[File:Mcconnell.jpeg|thumb|Cover art from McConnell's ''Four Postwar Novelists''.]]
-{{byline|last=McConnell|first=Frank D.}}
 {{cquote|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.|author=The speaker is Norman Mailer's contemporary, fellow novelist, and frequent television talk show antagonist, Gore Vidal, interviewed in ''Newsweek'' (November 18, 1974).}}
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 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.
+But if Cummings and Croft triumph over Hearn, it is a sour triumph, since both men, by the end of the book, are forced—not to live through a moment of nakedness—but precisely to miss such a moment and to bear the realization of their failure. Croft, passionate to complete the assignment of the reconnaissance mission by scaling the forbidding heights of Mount Anaka, finally has to turn back from that ascent because of the growing mutinousness of his men and the most absurd of accidents—one of his men disturbs a hornet’s nest, sending the whole platoon fleeing back down the slopes of the mountain. And as he leaves the shore of Anopopei, he gazes at the mountain he has failed:
+{{quote|Croft kept looking at the mountain. He had lost it, had missed some tantalizing revelation of himself.
+Of himself and much more. Of life.
+Everything.}}
+And Cummings lives through an even more galling retribution for his failure of life, one which repeats on a gigantic scale the absurdity of Croft’s hornet’s nest. The invasion and occupation of Anopopei succeeds, but succeeds despite Cummings’s grandiose strategy of attack. On a day Cummings is away, organizing the elaborate naval support he needs for his operation, his second in command, the bovine Major Dalleson, discovers that American troops have broken through one Japanese position. In a reluctant and confused attempt simply to move up support for these successful troops, Dalleson finds that he has eventually moved up the entire invading army and routed the already starved, ammunitionless Japanese resistance. Like Croft, Cummings pays for his refusal of life in a costly coin: the realization of the terminal, unremitting futility of his best efforts. The last word in the novel is given to the most unlikely of all its characters, the insipid Dalleson, who still does not quite realize what he has, through the anthill wisdom of bureaucracy, accomplished. We see him planning an ultimate triviality—map-reading classes employing a pinup of Betty Grable to keep the men’s attention—and pathetically hoping, with this idea, to win some recognition, even maybe a promotion, from the powers he doggishly serves:
+{{quote|That was it. He’d write Army. And in the meantime he might send a letter to the War Department Training Aids Section. They were out for improvements like that. The Major could see every unit in the Army using his idea at last. He clenched his fists with excitement.
+''Hot dog!'' }}
+One can imagine no more magnificently, uncompromisingly bleak ending for this stunning novel; for at this point it becomes a time machine, not into the past, but opening into the future, postwar life of the American psyche. That future, implicit in the dull victory of Major Dalleson, is to be one of grim and terminal conflict between the naked and the dead whose warfare opens on Anopopei. The book prophesies precisely the manic world of visionary politics and visceral revolution which will increasingly become the landscape of Mailer’s fiction and—in the sixties, at least—the quite real landscape of American public life.
+Indeed, Hearn, just before his death, achieves a privileged moment of vision which sounds, in retrospect, almost like a manifesto for his creator’s future. As Hearn resolves his relationship to the Cummingses and Crofts of the world, he also envisions a mission of revolution and resistance—one of Mailer’s most perfectly articulated moments of the coalescence and unification of the private and the political:
+{{quote|If the world turned Fascist, if Cummings had his century, there was a little thing he could do. There was always terrorism. But a neat terrorism with nothing sloppy about it, no machine guns, no grenades, no bombs, nothing messy, no indiscriminate killing. Merely the knife and the garotte, a few trained men, and a list of fifty bastards to be knocked off, and then another fifty.}}
+This is, of course, partly a very young man’s vision of revolution as a glorified Boy Scout excursion. And Mailer, with one of those self-critical movements which so often save his fiction (if not his theorizing) from becoming ridiculous, has Hearn realize this and snort to himself, “Hearn and Quixote. Bourgeois liberals.” But then, having purified the style of his own vision by understanding and elevating to consciousness its very stylized nature, Hearn can continue, can complete the moment: “Still, when he got back he would do that little thing. If he looked for the reasons they were probably lousy, but it was even lousier to lead men for obviously bad motives. It meant leaving the platoon to Croft, but if he stayed he would become another Croft.”
+The moral puritanism of Hearn’s final style, his insistence that one must never rest, never allow oneself the easy repetition of what seems most comforting, is one of the most finely realized moments in Mailer’s fiction; but it is also to become one of the most severe problems of Mailer’s later career. ''The Naked and the Dead'', as bears repeating one more time, is a supreme achievement, a fable, like few others, good beyond hope; but the very sternness of its ethic makes the repetition of its triumph impossible—indeed, in terms of the code of the book itself, immoral. During the decade following its publication, Mailer was to act out the frenetic honesty of Hearn’s vision with perhaps more accuracy than he had expected or would have wished. ''The Naked and the Dead'' was followed in 1951 by ''Barbary Shore'' and in 1955 by ''The Deer Park''. After ''The Deer Park'', ten years were to elapse before the publication, in 1965, of his next novel, ''An American Dream''. Before the 1964 serialization of ''An American Dream'' in ''Esquire'', it was a fairly common—and largely unquestioned—belief that Mailer’s creative life had exhausted itself, that he was written out, a classic example of the American one-book genius doomed for the remainder of his career to search aimlessly for the greatness he had once won and lost. ''Barbary Shore'' and ''The Deer Park'', to most readers and critics of the fifties, seemed to be successive and pathetic chapters in the decay of a once-strong talent. After the magisterial power of ''The Naked and the Dead'', the two novels were generally received as floundering, self-indulgent, egomaniacal exercises not so much in the art of fiction as in a kind of self-appointed philosophical hucksterism—“ideological” novels in the worst, most forbidding, sense of that word.
+Looking back at the two books from the vantage of Mailer’s current fame and rebirth, it is easy to believe that the critics of the fifties were simply too obtuse, too insensitive to the urgency and complexity of the writer’s enterprise to understand his brilliance. Norman Podhoretz, at the very end of the decade, in 1959, published an important essay defending Mailer’s second and third novels, arguing that, far from having waned into a minor talent, he was writing novels even richer in political and moral vision than his first great book. Podhoretz’s eloquent defense of ''Barbary Shore'' and ''The Deer Park'' is still, even in the midst of the present Mailer boom, one of the most convincing and valuable elucidations we have.
+But it would be a serious mistake to overemphasize the genius, power, or perfection of Mailer’s later novels, would be, in fact, a blatant ''[[Wikipedia:Parti pris|parti pris]]''. Undeniably—and it is one of the most poignant stories of twentieth-century American literature—Norman Mailer has not yet, really, produced a work to equal the stature of ''The Naked and the Dead''. Nor—notwithstanding the enthusiasm of his most ardent supporters—has he produced a novel in which his later-developed theories of existential, visceral politics are so convincingly articulated. His career since that book has been largely the search for a style or a set of styles which will allow him, with honesty and elegance, to act out the “neat terrorism” imagined by the doomed Hearn: a lifelong act of resistance to and rebellion against the life-denying, soul-crushing forces of dullness and orthodoxy which Mailer sees as the most serious threat to the America of the century’s second half. It is a neat—that is, a stylized—terrorism he seeks. So, precisely because of the tentativeness and guerilla-like tactics of his program, he has been forced to produce a series of novels which are, in a strange way, deliberately unfinished, self-consciously flawed, since for him once again to achieve a totally realized, totally conventional perfection would represent a kind of surrender to the forces of security against which he has set his teeth. Artists of every kind are threatened by nothing so much as by their own success, their own celebrity. And Mailer, in a mixture of courage and foolishness, has dealt with the threat of his own immense success by flaunting it, risking it against the odds of disgrace and embarrassment at every new moment of his career. The neat terrorism of the writer is his willingness to do violence to his own image, his own most widely accepted triumphs, in the interest of guaranteeing the very honesty, the very moral power, of those triumphs. If the artist has not been lucky enough to be born an orphan in the Mailer world, then he must be brave enough to murder his own encumbering ancestors—even his own previous books.
+==''Barbary Shore''==
+The first lines of ''Barbary Shore'' are a truly startling act of renunciation, of self-denial, or of a kind of stylistic ritual suicide: “Probably I was in the war. There is the mark of a wound behind my ear, an oblong of unfertile flesh where no hair grows. It is covered over now, and may be disguised by even the clumsiest barber, but no barber can hide the scar on my back. For that a tailor is more in order.”
+“Probably I was in the war.” This is the greeting offered to his readers, after a three-year silence, by the author of the century’s best war novel. It demands to be read as a hazardously arrogant dismissal of all the popular enthusiasm for ''The Naked and the Dead'', all the convenient and reassuring misunderstandings which may have arisen out of the success of that highly problematic novel. The narrator of ''Barbary Shore'' is Mikey Lovett, aspiring novelist, unwilling but compulsive empathizer in the sufferings of others, and amnesiac. World War II, the scene of Mailer’s early triumph, is canceled out of Lovett’s experience, just as Mailer wishes to cancel out our own memory of his war novel, to begin again his exploration of the visionary underpinnings of society. I have said that, in terms of his critical reception, Mailer has seemed to be an exemplary victim of the “first novel” kind of success. Beginning with ''Barbary Shore'', he himself pursues the dangerous and exhilarating course of creating—not a fictional oeuvre——but a series of “first novels,” each one rejecting or redefining the achievements of its predecessors.
+Thus Mikey Lovett, amnesiac, is the first in a series of amnesiacs, orphans, and putative bastards who will be the heroes of Mailer’s later books; and as such he is a particularly interesting example of Mailer’s quest for a fictionalized, artificial orphanhood (we might notice here that his fascination with Marilyn Monroe in ''Marilyn'' is largely bound up with Monroe’s orphanage origins). If “inauthenticity,” the panicky realization of one’s own conditioned, made-up nature, is the signal theme and problem of most contemporary American fiction, then Lovett’s loss of memory—both personal and cultural memory—is one of the earliest and still one of the most radical versions of that dilemma. To be a novelist—indeed, to live at all—he must literally reinvent the past, reinvent his own selfhood:
+{{quote|It made little difference whether I had met a man or he existed only in a book; there was never a way to determine if I knew a country or merely remembered another’s description. The legends from a decade of newsprint were as intimate and distant as the places in which I must have lived. No history belonged to me and so all history was mine. Yet in what a state.}}
+The intellectual hero of the first half of the twentieth century—T. S. Eliot in ''The Wasteland'', Lafcadio in Gide’s ''Les Caves du Vatican'', Frederick Henry in Hemingway’s ''A Farewell to Arms''—has witnessed the eruption of chaos into civilized life and tries to find an ethic, a tradition which will allow him to live with that chaos and reintegrate its eruption into the great myth of human continuity. Bellow’s novels, examples of a kind of “pre-postmodernism,” follow largely the same psychic graph, except that for Bellow the eruption of chaos is both more intimate and more violent, while the search for a compensatory intellectual tradition is more desperate and more ironic, self-doubtful. In Lovett, Mailer gives us a figure who is distinctively the intellectual of the post-World War II era, for whom the chaos, the sundering explosion which destroys memory and tradition, is primal, the first fact of his experience. His quest for reunification, then, for a saving image of community, will be a quest performed on a shifting, treacherous landscape—which is the landscape of the mind grown aware of the fictiveness of its own deepest, most immediate impulses and beliefs. If all history—and no history—belongs to him, this is to say that history itself has become style, but style in a moral and political vacuum. The problem for Lovett—and for the novel—is to discover the “right” style for one’s life and at the same time to invent a life in which such a style can make one fully human.
+This process, abstract and contradictory as it sounds in the preceding paragraph, is the central and powerful drama of ''Barbary Shore''. Lovett takes a top-floor, shabby apartment in a run-down New York apartment house—a summer lease from a friend who is already a moderately successful writer—to begin work on his book. But the book never gets written, for Lovett finds himself rapidly involved in the lives and the pasts of his fellow boarders: Guinevere, the preternaturally vulgar and sensuous landlady; McLeod, the mysterious and mocking fellow roomer on the top floor; Hollingsworth, an apparently stupid and prurient young man from the Midwest; and Lannie, the sensitive and half—mad, vulnerable and seductive proto-hippie. The action begins at an uncertainly comic level—appropriate for Lovett’s own fumbling, tentative first attempts to construct a personality for himself—centering upon his attraction to the self-advertising Guinevere and the frustrations of his efforts to bed her.
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