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Mailer is one of the few, incredibly few, writers or artists of any kind in our whole land who is willing to stake his reputation, his career, even his very sanity, on the once-revered principle that the artist is the standard-bearer, the vatic spokesman, the prophet...he is courageous enough to make an ass out of himself half the time, in order to say something important the other half. Mailer has more courage, more integrity, and more passion than any number of sweet, oh-so-precious writers like Salinger and Updike, who never show public concern over any issue. We live in a neurotic anti-emotional age, and our society prefers to hear truths or ideas whispered discreetly rather than shouted passionately. Anyone who commits himself publically with any degree of passion whatever, offends our sense of propriety. No, Mailer's style is not impeccable, nor are his ideas always profound- the ideas of Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, Freud, Sartre, were not always profound either. Genius has rough edges- that means, you're likely to get splinters in your mind from contemplating what it has to say. Aren't those splinters nasty, though? Don't they make you uncomfortable? Oh, that's tooooo bad, here's the least Updike story in the New Yorker- see the pretty metaphors? Aren't they glittery and spotless and impressive? See the new Salinger collection- aren't all those nice stories nice? Maybe they all do seem like an endless re-write of the same yearn, but they're all so cleverly literary! | Mailer is one of the few, incredibly few, writers or artists of any kind in our whole land who is willing to stake his reputation, his career, even his very sanity, on the once-revered principle that the artist is the standard-bearer, the vatic spokesman, the prophet...he is courageous enough to make an ass out of himself half the time, in order to say something important the other half. Mailer has more courage, more integrity, and more passion than any number of sweet, oh-so-precious writers like Salinger and Updike, who never show public concern over any issue. We live in a neurotic anti-emotional age, and our society prefers to hear truths or ideas whispered discreetly rather than shouted passionately. Anyone who commits himself publically with any degree of passion whatever, offends our sense of propriety. No, Mailer's style is not impeccable, nor are his ideas always profound- the ideas of Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, Freud, Sartre, were not always profound either. Genius has rough edges- that means, you're likely to get splinters in your mind from contemplating what it has to say. Aren't those splinters nasty, though? Don't they make you uncomfortable? Oh, that's tooooo bad, here's the least Updike story in the New Yorker- see the pretty metaphors? Aren't they glittery and spotless and impressive? See the new Salinger collection- aren't all those nice stories nice? Maybe they all do seem like an endless re-write of the same yearn, but they're all so cleverly literary! | ||
Carp away, damn you all. Mailer will survive all the back-alley ambushes laid for him by people like Wallace and the reviewers of <big>????????</big>. In | Carp away, damn you all. Mailer will survive all the back-alley ambushes laid for him by people like Wallace and the reviewers of <big>????????</big>. In a literary world where most of the champions are featherweights with glass-jaws, it's a dangerous life being one of the few real pro heavyweights. Everything he publishes is important, and a novel with the daring and vigor of An American Dream cannot be dismissed with pathetic references to Ian Fleming (my Lord...) or accusations of pretension and bad taste. The bad taste lies not with a man like Mailer, but with the middle-brow public that consumes television and the books of Wouk, Michener and Harold Robbins. This nation has two choices, RIGHT NOW, (not twenty years from now): it can wake up and drop its frontiersman hatred of intellectual attainment and "kulcher' and be willing to dare, to live more vividly, to stop being afraid of sex, life, death or hell's very passions; or it can muddle through on its own momentum for perhaps another half-century <big>?????</big> the rot sets in for good. The neo-Renaissance could happen here, or we could miss our <big>?????</big> utterly. It's a hard job waking up 200 million consciousnesses, but Mailer and a few others are throwing buckets of ice water into our faces as hard as they can. If the doom comes, we'll have only our own bad tastes to blame. | ||
In the beginning, Mister Wallace, Sartre's book were full of pretension, so..... | In the beginning, Mister Wallace, Sartre's book were full of pretension, so..... | ||