The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Reflections of Time Past: Pattern, Time, and Memory in Norman Mailer

From Project Mailer
« The Mailer Review • Volume 3 Number 1 • 2009 • Beyond Fiction »
Written by
Raymond M. Vince
Abstract: How will Norman’s Mailer’s work be regarded in the future? From our current vantage point, we have no way of knowing. But we can say this: from WWII to the new millennium—with passion, intelligence, and skill—Mailer has charted the strange and troubled times of the United States.
Note: An earlier version of this paper was given at the 2008 Norman Mailer Conference, October 16–18, in Provincetown, MA.
URL: https://prmlr.us/mr03vin

Nearly seventy years ago, T. S. Eliot wrote these words in his poem, “East Coker,” published in 1935 and later a part of his masterpiece, Four Quartets. Hugh Kenner reminds us that East Coker is the name of “the village in Somerset where Eliots or Elyots lived for some two centuries, before the poet’s ancestor Andrew Eliot emigrated in 1667 to found the American branch of the family."[1] After Eliot died three decades later in 1965, his ashes were interred at St. Michael’s Church—in that same village of East Coker. In the church on a simple wall plaque are other words from that poem, “In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning.”[2] These enigmatic words seem, as Marysa Demoor has pointed out, “designed to elude death.”[3][a] Whether we see life as a manifestation of God’s providence or of a more impersonal Wheel of Life, surely we could see a strange sense of recursion and return in these simple facts of Eliot’s pilgrimage.[b] At times, does not life seem to fold back on itself? Or, to take up a hint from the title of Four Quartets, is not life like a string quartet or a Bach fugue, weaving a series of complex musical variations upon various themes? As Kenner suggests, Eliot’s Four Quartets “traverse and exploit a diversity of timbres and intonations, interchange themes, set going a repetitive but developing minuet of motifs.”[4][c]

Did not Norman Mailer’s untimely death on November 10, 2007 cause some of us to look again at the trajectory of our own lives, seeking to come to terms with his passing but also, implicitly, with our own mortality? This reflection is not to become obsessed or haunted by death—our own or others—but to examine the more positive aspects of aging, to chart the slow development of character, to find deeper meaning in the contingencies of life. This path, surely, is a crucial part of self-knowledge: in discovering character, Heraclitus tells us, we shall discover our fate.[d] I freely acknowledge that such a stance may well reflect my own advancing years. However, as James Hillman the Jungian psychologist argues, part of the purpose of our “later years” may be that we are able to explore these deeper patterns of life.

Then we will be able to look at the decay of body and mind as more than affliction. We will connect it with an underlying truth we already feel: Something forms a human life into an overall image, including life’s haphazard contingencies and wasted irrelevancies. Later years are often devoted to exploring these irrelevances, adventuring into past mistakes so as to discover understandable patterns.[5]

In so doing, we are reflecting on time past—to use Eliot’s useful phrase from Four Quartets. In pondering the life and significance of Mailer (1923–2007), we are persuaded to re-examine the times in which he lived and about which he so eloquently wrote. We wonder how his work will be understood in time future. In this process of reflection, I believe that Eliot’s words in “East Coker” may suggest to us three useful questions. First, as each of us grows older, how do we now understand today’s “strange world” and “more complicated” pattern—and how can Mailer’s task as a writer help in that understanding? Second, are Mailer’s own “beginning” and “end” connected, perhaps in some recursive pattern, some contrapuntal or fugal relationship, or some kind of Return? And third, what roles do pattern, time, and memory play in Mailer’s work—in his significance as a writer and in his critical reflections upon American society and the literature of his times?

However, some might reasonably ask, is there a particular relevance in turning to T. S. Eliot—and specifically the Eliot of the Four Quartets to understand Mailer? I would argue that there is. Eliot, in writing the four poems that eventually made up Four Quartets, was at the height of his poetic powers, meditating upon the mysteries of time and the poet’s task, and working out an understanding of his life and mortality. Although Eliot was to live over twenty years after publishing “Little Gidding” (1942), it seems undeniable that the shadow of death hangs over this final poem and the other three in the collection. As Stephen Spender puts it, “‘Little Gidding’ is the darkest, most wintry, most death-saturated of the quartets, and also the culminating point of Eliot’s oeuvre. ‘In my end is my beginning.’”[6] But this recognition is not simply a reflection of Eliot’s personal mortality: we realize that this mid-winter poem, written in 1942, was crafted “at the dark cold center of the war.”[6] Mailer’s final novel, The Castle in the Forest (2007), focusing on Hitler and the tragic events that would lead to World War II, is very different from Eliot’s Four Quartets, but Spender’s words on “Little Gidding” have at the very least a certain poignancy. Could not Mailer’s Castle be described as the “darkest, most wintry, most death-saturated” of all his writings? Is not this novel in some ways “the culminating point” of Mailer’s oeuvre? Of course, the form of Eliot’s poems and Mailer’s novel are very different. However, the authorial tone and the life setting—what Hermann Gunkel called the sitz im leben–are far less so. If we were to add On God: An Uncommon Conversation (2007), the other work published in Mailer’s final year, the relevance in using Eliot’s Four Quartets as one way—and only one among many—of understanding Mailer may become a little clearer and more persuasive.[e]

The poet W. H. Auden has been described by his editor, Edward Mendelson, as “the first poet writing in English who felt at home in the twentieth century.”[8] Mendelson’s evaluation could be argued but there is little doubt that Auden’s poem, “September 1, 1939,” written as a response to the beginning of World War II and set in Manhattan, New York, became significant for many as the twenty-first century began in the light of the traumatic events in Manhattan and elsewhere of September 11, 2001.[f] In fact, along with another poem of Auden’s and Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent (1907), these three texts became the most cited and referenced literary texts in America after 9/11.[g] But it is in another of his poems, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” that Auden wrote, “The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living.”[10][h] As we remember and celebrate Mailer’s work, beginning with The Naked and the Dead (1948) and ending with Castle (2007) and On God (2007), so we might well ask—how might his words be “modified” in our guts today? We are meditating not only on one man’s death but the passing of an era. Norman Mailer has left us but the whole World War II generation—his generation—is fast disappearing. Already we miss their perspective, their realistic, no-nonsense understanding of the world so typical of the “greatest generation.” But we are left. So we ask: how then should the words of Mailer impact us in this generation?

Stranger World, More Complicated Pattern: Mailer’s Task

Eliot said, “As we get older / The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated.” Now, in those lines from “East Coker,” the word older would seem to refer initially to our personal aging—Eliot was fifty two when he wrote and published “East Coker.” In fact, the later work of many poets may offer profound glimpses into old age: along with Eliot, we might think of Yeats, Auden, and Frost, among many others. While our culture often dismisses the elderly in purely negative terms—the not-young, not-new, not-strong, and not-capable—it is sometimes the poets who have thought more deeply about aging.[i] Other disciplines have also examined aging in more positive ways, including religion and psychology. To quote Hillman again,

Aging is no accident. It is necessary to the human condition, intended by the soul. Aging is built into our physiology; yet, to our puzzlement, human life extends beyond fertility and outlasts muscular usefulness and sensory acuteness. For this reason we need imaginative ideas that can grace aging and speak to it with the intelligence it deserves.[13]

But older in Eliot’s lines could refer also to the age of mankind, to what many people see as the evolution and increasing complexity of the human world. In the twentieth century, indeed our world did become strange—the curved space-time of Einstein, the mysterious reality of the quantum, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the Freudian depths, the artistic revolutions of modernism and postmodernism, the strangeness of chaos and complexity theory, and—perhaps above all—the horrific traumas of two world wars. The twenty-first century, shadowed by 9/11, is proving no less strange. What about the search for pattern? Many of us, I think, try to find some kind of pattern to the world: maybe a simple philosophy or a paradigm along the lines of Thomas Kuhn.[j] For some, such a search might include some kind of faith commitment such as Judaism or Christianity.[k] But in our stranger, Alice-in-Wonderland, postmodern world, the struggle to find personally significant patterns is, for many, increasingly demanding. Unless one is persuaded by the more simplistic forms of Fundamentalism, the patterns are indeed becoming, as Eliot foretold over sixty years ago, “more complicated.”


Notes

  1. ↑ And T. S. Eliot’s poetry was the source for the epitaphs on two plaques commemorating his death in 1965. His ashes are interred in the church of St. Michael’s in East Coker, where a commemorative plaque on the church wall bears his chosen epitaph—two lines from Four Quartets: ‘In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning.’ Significant lines of course, considering the topic of this paper. The circularity of the reasoning, as well as the engraving on the stone, seems designed to elude death. The T. S. Eliot memorial stone in Westminster Abbey, featured in the BBC documentary, reads: ‘The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.’ Taken from Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding,’ this even more intriguing passage marks a communication between the dead, the living, and the ‘beyond’—in other words, a communication licensed by God. Communication ‘tongued with fire’ may indeed be poetic language, endowed with special godly powers going ‘beyond the language of the living.’ Here, then, modernist poets see their dead selves as immortal souls whose language has divine qualities capable of reaching the living.”[3]
  2. ↑ The concepts of recursion, strange loops, and “metaphorical fugues” are dealt with by Douglas Hofstadter in his Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Basic Books, 1979). His book won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, the same year that Norman Mailer won the Pulitzer Fiction Prize for The Executioner’s Song.
  3. ↑ The music parallel to Eliot’s Four Quartets is sometimes said to be the “late” quartets of Beethoven, but Kenner (relying on information from Hodgart) maintains that Eliot was “paying attention chiefly to Bartok’s Quartets, Nos. 2–6.”[4]
  4. ↑ “The idea we are moving in its place says it is to character that you are most truly yoked. ‘Character,’ said Heraclitus at the beginning of Western thought, ‘is fate.’ No, Napoleon, not geography; and no, Freud, not anatomy, either. Character! Character governs—governing physiology, too. We will be maintaining, with all the heft and perseverance we can still summon, that genetic inheritance is shaped into our own peculiar pattern by character, that specific composition of traits, foibles, delights, and commitments, that identifiable figure bearing our name, our history, and a face that mirrors a ‘me.’”[5]
  5. ↑ I am not here dealing with the vexed question of Eliot’s anti-Semitism, which—if proven—would strongly suggest that Eliot might not be appropriate as a way to interpret Mailer’s work. Matthew Hart deals with this issue in a recent article, writing of “the centrality, in recent criticism, of the question of anti-Semitism.”[7] Giving a brief bibliography on this subject (note 5), he writes, “the point is not just that Eliot helped create the unpleasant myths through which we comprehend his writing and thought; it is that these myths are partly accurate.”[7] What seems undeniable is that Eliot’s complex identity—English, American, international, and perhaps the representative of modernism—makes such evaluations unusually problematic.
  6. ↑ Shortly after 9/11, Auden’s poem was read on National Public Radio and elsewhere on the Web. Eric McHenry wrote, “Auden on Bin Laden” in Slate.com on September 20, 2001. Some months later, Peter Steinfels (2001) wrote that the poem had been “endlessly quoted and reprinted to express grief over what had happened and foreboding about what was to come” in his New York Times article.
  7. ↑ “In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent became one of the three works of literature most frequently cited in the American media. (The other two were poems by Wynstan Auden: ‘Sept 1, 1939’—also the subject of ‘Culturebox’—and ‘Musee des Beuux Arts.’)”[9]
  8. ↑ On a lighter note, Auden’s poem “Stop all the clocks” became popular after it was featured in the funeral scene of Mike Newell’s 1994 film, Four Weddings and a Funeral. The poem, also known as “Funeral Blues,” is poem IX in Auden’s “Twelve Songs.”[11]
  9. ↑ “When ‘old’ gains its definition only by pairing, it loses its value. In a culture that has identified with the ‘new’ since Columbus, ‘old’ gets the short end of the comparative stick, and it becomes ever more difficult to imagine oldness as a phenomenon apart from the lazy simplicities of conventional wisdom.”[12]
  10. ↑ Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996) used the idea of paradigm and paradigm shift in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Although the term paradigm has been used for a long time in English, it is Kuhn’s usage that since the 1960s has become influential.
  11. ↑ I briefly examine religion as a form of patterning in the final paragraph below.

Citations

  1. ↑ Kenner 1965, p. 263.
  2. ↑ Eliot 1952, p. 263.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Demoor 2005, p. 258.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Kenner 1965, p. 261.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Hillman 1999, p. xvi.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Spender 1975, p. 172.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Hart 2007, p. 179.
  8. ↑ Auden 2007, p. ix.
  9. ↑ Shulevitz 2001.
  10. ↑ Auden 2007, p. 44.
  11. ↑ Auden 1991, p. 141.
  12. ↑ Hillman 1999, p. 42.
  13. ↑ Hillman 1999, p. xii.

Works Cited

  • Auden, W. H. (2007) [1979]. Mendelson, Edward, ed. Selected Poems. New York: Vintage.
  • — (1991). Mendelson, Edward, ed. Collected Poems (Revised ed.). New York: Vintage.
  • Bernstein, Mashy (2008). "The Heart of the Nation: Jewish Values in the Fiction of Norman Mailer". The Mailer Review. 2 (1): 376–384. Retrieved 2021-06-20.
  • The Book of Common Prayer...according to the Episcopal Church (BCP). New York: Oxford UP. 1979.
  • Bronowski, J. (1973). The Ascent of Man. New York: Little, Brown.
  • Brooks, Peter (1996). "Reading for the Plot". Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. pp. 326–347.
  • Buechner, Frederick (1982). The Sacred Journey: A Memoir of Early Days. San Francisco: HarperCollins.
  • — (1991). Telling Stories. San Francisco: HarperCollins.
  • Busa, Chris (2008). "This is a Town Worth Digging in and Fighting For". The Mailer Review. 2 (1): 87–96. Retrieved 2021-06-20.
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  • Demoor, Marysa (Spring 2005). "From Epitaph to Obituary: the Death Politics of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound". Biography. 28 (2): 255–275.
  • Devlin, Keith (1997). Mathematics, the Science of Patterns: the Search for Order in Life, Mind, and the Universe. New York: Scientific American.
  • Eliot, T. S. (1952). The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950. New York: Harcourt Brace.
  • George, William Herbert (1936). The Scientist in Action. London: Williams and Norgate.
  • Hahn, Hans-Christoh (1978). "Time, kairos". The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology. 3.
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  • Hillman, James (1999). The Force of Character and the Lasting Life. New York: Random House.
  • Hurston, Zora Neale (2006) [1937]. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: HarperCollins.
  • Josephs, Allen (1994). For Whom the Bell Tolls: Ernest Hemingway’s Undiscovered Country. New York: Twayne.
  • Kenner, Hugh (1965). The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot. London: Methuen.
  • Kuhn, Thomas (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
  • Lee, Michael (Summer 2007). "The Devil in Norman Mailer". Literary Review. 50 (4): 202–216.
  • Leeds, Barry (2008). "He was a Fighter: Boxing in Norman Mailer's Life and Work". The Mailer Review. 2 (1): 385–395. Retrieved 2021-06-20.
  • Mailer, Norman (2003). The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing. New York: Random House.
  • — (1998). The Time of Our Time. New York: Random House.
  • Mailer, Susan (2008). "Tapestry". The Mailer Review. 2 (1): 28–29. Retrieved 2021-06-20.
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  • O’Gorman, Lawrence (October 2008). "Six Years of Pattern Recognition". IAPR Newsletter. 30 (4): 3–4.
  • Rodwan, John G. (2008). "Fighters and Writers". The Mailer Review. 2 (1): 396–406. Retrieved 2021-06-20.
  • Scott, Robert Ian (1991). "Entropy vs. Ecology in The Great Gatsby". In Bloom, Harold. Gatsby. Major Literary Characters. New York: Chelsea House. pp. 81–92.
  • Shulevitz, Judith (September 27, 2001). "Chasing after Conrad's Secret Agent". Slate. Retrieved 2021-06-20.
  • Spender, Stephen (1975). Eliot. Fontana Modern Masters. Fontana.
  • Steinfels, Peter (December 1, 2001). "Beliefs; After Sept. 11, a 62-year-old poem by Auden drew new attention. Not all of it was favorable". The New York Times (late ed.). sec. A. p. 13. Retrieved 2021-06-20.
  • Whitehead, Alfred North (2001). The Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead. New York: David R. Godine.
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