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<blockquote>For the last fifty years ... Picasso has used his brush like a sword.... Up and down the world of appearances he has marched, sacking and pillaging and tearing and slashing, a modern-day Cortez conquering an empire of appearances. It is possible that there has never been a painter who will leave the intimate objects of the world so altered by the swath of his work ... He is the first painter to bridge the animate and the inanimate.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|461}}</blockquote> | <blockquote>For the last fifty years ... Picasso has used his brush like a sword.... Up and down the world of appearances he has marched, sacking and pillaging and tearing and slashing, a modern-day Cortez conquering an empire of appearances. It is possible that there has never been a painter who will leave the intimate objects of the world so altered by the swath of his work ... He is the first painter to bridge the animate and the inanimate.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|461}}</blockquote> | ||
The first painter perhaps, but soon followed by a writer, for certainly this is also Mailer’s bailiwick. We have only to think of “The White Negro” to realize his espousal of a similar approach. Of course that essay and a great deal of his thinking at that time is also rooted in an existential ethic of necessary confrontation with one’s own weakness, and with the individual’s challenge to the post war consensus in American culture. This had all but succeeded in placing its brand on a population who existed in a state of clammy cowardice and totalitarian control—“[a] stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life, and we suffer from a collective failure of nerve”{{sfn| | The first painter perhaps, but soon followed by a writer, for certainly this is also Mailer’s bailiwick. We have only to think of “The White Negro” to realize his espousal of a similar approach. Of course that essay and a great deal of his thinking at that time is also rooted in an existential ethic of necessary confrontation with one’s own weakness, and with the individual’s challenge to the post war consensus in American culture. This had all but succeeded in placing its brand on a population who existed in a state of clammy cowardice and totalitarian control—“[a] stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life, and we suffer from a collective failure of nerve”{{sfn|''Advertisements for Myself''|1959|p=338}}. | ||
''Marilyn'', in addition to being a great biography, is a seminal chapter in Mailer’s lifelong critique of American mores. It presents Monroe both as a victim of those values and as one who, in her courage and all but Faustian ambition, offered a challenge to them. For when “the luminous life of her face grew ten feet tall” on the movie screen, then to her audiences “Marilyn was deliverance”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=15,16}}. Yet that image was also “the magnified mirror of ourselves, our exaggerated and now all but defeated generation”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=17}}. As a girl she witnessed men like her “Uncle” Wayne Bolender, who did nothing to defend against the cruel abrasions of the world beyond domesticity; her life would often show the scars of exposure to those moments of catastrophe and cowardice: Whole washes of the apathy that would sit upon her in later years, that intolerable dull and dead round she passed through in the year after her marriage to Miller was over, “is probably sealed in the reflex of sorrowing for Tippy”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=33}}. If “psychosis, like death, move[s] back into the past”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=213}}, then this life-study provides us with a harvest of possibilities from which to choose. Little wonder that in his final paragraph as he writes “Goodbye Norma Jean,” Mailer above all wishes that her spirit finds its resting place and that it “be rather in one place and not scattered in pieces across the firmament; let us hope her mighty soul and the mouse of her little one are both recovering their proportions in some fair and gracious home.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=248}} | ''Marilyn'', in addition to being a great biography, is a seminal chapter in Mailer’s lifelong critique of American mores. It presents Monroe both as a victim of those values and as one who, in her courage and all but Faustian ambition, offered a challenge to them. For when “the luminous life of her face grew ten feet tall” on the movie screen, then to her audiences “Marilyn was deliverance”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=15,16}}. Yet that image was also “the magnified mirror of ourselves, our exaggerated and now all but defeated generation”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=17}}. As a girl she witnessed men like her “Uncle” Wayne Bolender, who did nothing to defend against the cruel abrasions of the world beyond domesticity; her life would often show the scars of exposure to those moments of catastrophe and cowardice: Whole washes of the apathy that would sit upon her in later years, that intolerable dull and dead round she passed through in the year after her marriage to Miller was over, “is probably sealed in the reflex of sorrowing for Tippy”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=33}}. If “psychosis, like death, move[s] back into the past”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=213}}, then this life-study provides us with a harvest of possibilities from which to choose. Little wonder that in his final paragraph as he writes “Goodbye Norma Jean,” Mailer above all wishes that her spirit finds its resting place and that it “be rather in one place and not scattered in pieces across the firmament; let us hope her mighty soul and the mouse of her little one are both recovering their proportions in some fair and gracious home.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=248}} | ||
{{start|3. "God, catastrophe, and the language of form were all manifests to Picasso of another world beneath the world of appearances."{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=83}}}} | |||
''Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man: An Interpretive Biography'' was eventually published in 1995 and its subtitle is a clear indication that since 1962 Mailer had learned that in writing biographies the approach of “no original scholarship, much personal interpretation”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=xii}} was the way forward. Once again, as with Marilyn, his prefatory pages promise a life-study based upon an imaginative and idiosyncratic reconstruction of his subject. Yet in his interpretation of Picasso’s work, readers will find much that is central to the thinking of Norman Mailer: | |||
<blockquote>[T]he desire to make Picasso as real as any good character in life or in art has been the literary virtue sought after here. Which is equal to saying that the interpretation of Picasso’s life and work as a young man is my individual understanding of him, and I will rest on such a claim.{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=xii}}</blockquote> | |||
It is mainly this willingness to foreground the personal view that marks the contrast with his first attempt more than 30 years earlier. And though he tells readers of the Preface that in this biography very little survives from his early attempt, only “a page of notes I had written back in 1962,” still “[I]t was nice to know that a part of oneself was still playing the same tune three decades later”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=xiii}}. There is, however, a good deal more than that single page of notes that links the two projects. Above all, both in Picasso and in the dialogue “The Political Economy of Time,” published in Cannibals and Christians (this dialogue itself being one of those works which, according to Mailer, had been “stimulated” by his earlier, unfinished book on Picasso’s art), we find his abiding interest in the nuances of form. This interest is remembered in the second paragraph of the Preface to ''Picasso'': “I spent the summer writing a dialogue between an imaginary interviewer and myself dealing with such questions as ‘What is the distinction between soul and spirit?’ and ‘How do we decide on the nature of form?’”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=xi}}. | |||
Writing in 1972, Richard Poirier found that Mailer’s responses to this question were so various as to be well-nigh incoherent. He was exasperated by Mailer’s use of the term “form” arguing that it is “like others that are used repeatedly by Mailer, meanderingly in motion”{{sfn|Poirier|1972|p=15}}. It is true that in the dialectic of forces that define Mailer’s theology the term is given a good deal of work to do, but this is very far from rendering it meaningless. For instance, in the following passage from “The Political Economy of Time” we are given a complex, but lucid explanation of the relationship between a culture and its expressive form. That relationship is the physical sign of the culture’s spiritual health and it may not be surprising to find Mailer arguing that in the mid-twentieth century this has been subordinated to a totalitarian imperative: | |||
<blockquote>Form is the deepest clue we possess to the nature of time in any epoch, to the style of the time, to the mode by which reality is perceived in the time, to the way time moves in the consciousness of man, where it possesses grace, where it is hobbled, how strength addresses itself to weakness. Time is all but equal to creativity, for time is the potential to create as it resides in each of us. So form is the clue to the vitality or lethargy of time, and the most pervasive forms of the modern world now speak of an absence of invention, a pall upon good spirit, an erosion of memory. Only in the corners is there preoccupation with complexity of form, with those interruptions of time we comprehend in the absurd. Full of feverish creativity and feverish destruction are the forms in the corners and the edges—in the center is nothing but an aesthetic desert, those pillars of salt which rise out of ... the triumph of that totalitarian spirit whose impulse is to betray form, to abstract form, until the meanings in its creation are lost.{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=304-305, 367-368}}</blockquote> | |||
It is surely significant that in this essay,widely recognized as a key to Mailer’s thinking (even by Poirier, who allows that it “is one of three pieces that are probably indispensable to any understanding of Mailer’s oeuvre”{{sfn|Poirier|1972|p=15}}), Picasso is the only artist mentioned. His special significance is further highlighted in that the citation appears not only in the essay’s final paragraph, but is also one of the very few references to the book’s title throughout ''Cannibals and Christians'': “Cannibals are Christians. And forms which look alike are alike. In some mysterious way. Or at least they are alike until the souls which create them become the spirit of treachery. So says Picasso, I suspect”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=375}}. | |||
Mailer’s lifelong concern with the necessary probity of form finds in Picasso the perfect artist. Far from being obtuse, the preamble to “The Political Economy of Time” has admirable clarity: “a future to life depends on creating forms of an intensity which will capture the complexity of modern experience and dignify it”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=311}}. The image of “capture” recalls the earlier essay, “An Eye on Picasso,” in which the painter is hailed as a victorious commander who has achieved a “conquest of form so complete that all modern painting including the relative emancipation from form of such artists as Hofmann and Pollock derive from his Napoleonic marches”{{efn|Mailer also applies the personification to Monroe:“She is a female Napoleon.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p==210, 226}}}}{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=461}}. Mailer’s Picasso is all of that as well as a demiurge{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=83}}, subordinate only to God but invested with His supreme power. This is made even clearer in the biography, wherein the artist and the deity are shown to be in deep collaboration: | |||
<blockquote>We have to assume that he is not only God-driven in his ambitions ... but that he feels an uncomfortable intimacy with the Deity ... When Picasso draws,the line that delineates a limb seems to spring up out of some graceful collaboration between his hand and the power that conceived the design of that limb-God may be as amorphous as a cloud, but God is also as clear as a well defined form.... The key is to be found in form. Form is the language that God has decided to share with a few painters, the very best painters. They are apostles serving the mystery of form.{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=205-206}}</blockquote> | |||
If Picasso “saw his mission as coming ever closer to the mind of God,” it was specifically with regard to “neither His spiritual secrets nor His pain but His engineering ... Picasso was ... looking to discover how God might have put it all together”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=273-274}}. Mailer also presents Picasso’s fundamental revision of form as a part of his growing mutual rivalry with Matisse whose passionate, explosive use of color reached apotheosis with his painting ''Le Bonheur deVivre''(1905–1906), hailed by the Paris art world as a bold embodiment of the modern (it was bought by Leo Stein who regarded it as “the most important painting done in our time”{{sfn|Flam|1986|p=163}}). If Picasso’s ultimate aim was to “depict the savagery of the form beneath the form,” then spurred on by Matisse’s success he would insist on doing this “with considerable independence from color”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=243}}. | |||
At first in ''Les Demoiselles d’Avignon'' and then through that portal into cubism, Mailer shows Picasso’s determination to explore the revelations of form. The stress is always upon freedom, for as Picasso said, “If we give spirits a form, we become independent ... I understood why I was a painter”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=258}}. Cubism developed into an ultimate expression of the freedom to translate the deep structures of reality, eventually sculpting both landscape and human shape as related, intimate. Yet Mailer is right to find that Picasso’s dense cubist paintings of 1912 (such as ''The Aficionado'', ''Sorgues'', ''summer 1912'') are also exemplary as ''memento mori'', their “coalescence of forms”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=271}} a striking play on the meaning of death—another theme that links Picasso with Marilyn. As Monroe’s death was “covered over with ambiguity”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=15}}, so for Picasso, the forms of “[a] tree, a plant, a nude, a mountain ... draw toward one another” even as he “lives in all-but-constant fear of his own death”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=272}}. Both are on familiar terms with what Mailer calls “Mr. Dread”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=248}}, and both perhaps used such knowledge as a means of artistic stimulation. “[I]n fear and trembling [and] [i]n dread”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=17}}, Monroe wrote in her own dressing room notebook, “‘What am I afraid of? Why am I so afraid? Do I think I can’t act? I know I can act but I am afraid. I am afraid and I should not be and I must not be’”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=17}}. And amidst some of “the most miserable days of his life” Picasso also “had a gift for making use of his own dread”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=87-88}}. But whereas he “could live with dread” and “[c]ontrolled amounts encouraged him to work in order to exorcise the sensation”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=88}}, Monroe had in the end been living too long “in fear of some unnamed disaster to come”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=248}}. In contrast Picasso was able to confront such dread by objectifying it; his heroic cubist masterpieces of 1910–1912 are uncompromising in their descent to the heart of death. So Mailer is absolutely right to find in those paintings “an exploration of death” and to see in them “the appearance of corpses, their flesh in strips and tatters, organs open”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=311}}. | |||
{{start|4. Attacking Reality}} | |||
While cubism may be seen as “an exploration of death”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=311}}, this is very far from Mailer’s total reading of Picasso’s work. Years ago in ''Advertisements for Myself'' he demanded that American novelists “dare a new art of the brave”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=473}}, and throughout his own life it is precisely this capacity to set himself such challenges that has kept his own career so exuberantly engaging. It should not surprise us therefore that Picasso is Mailer’s hero, protean and courageous, a genius of energy and reach who contrived a bold art of the possible, always “looking to paint stasis and motion, growth and decomposition, the perceptions of infancy and the dissolutions of death, and do them all at once and in each painting”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=312}}. The accolade is complete: | |||
<blockquote>The twentieth-century artist who conceivably had the most influence on my work was not a writer but Picasso. He kept changing the nature of his attack on reality. It’s as if he felt there is a reality to be found out there but it’s not a graspable object like a rock. Rather, it is a creature who keeps changing shape. And if I, Picasso, have been trying to delineate this creature by means of a particular aesthetic style and have come only this far, then I am going to look for another style altogether. And off Picasso goes into a new mode of attack on reality ... In line with Picasso, what I find most interesting in writing at this point is to keep making a new attack on the nature of reality.{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2003|p=156}}</blockquote> | |||
This is the rationale for life-study: which is the life of art, and which can be, as in the case of ''Marilyn: A Biography'' and ''Picasso: An Interpretive Biography'', the art of life. Both Mailer and Picasso may have returned to a central circle of themes as most artists do, but always with new intimations of how the centre may be approached. This essay has therefore focused on the form | |||
of such approaches, for just as “[i]t was not like [Picasso] to use a model over and over in the same pose”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=205}}, so for Mailer style is always provisional,always driven by the demands of the subject. In a 1995 interview he divided American writers into two camps, those who write “with an air that is inimitable” such as “Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, Melville and James,” and others “who go along in a variety of modes. I’m in the latter camp.” He quickly followed this with a comparison between himself and Picasso, noting that “Matisse painted in one recognizable vein, while Picasso entered a hundred before he was done. Style was the cutting tool by which he could delineate a reality. He saw it as a tool rather than as an extension of his identity. I’ve found his attitude to be useful for myself”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2003|p=78}}. | |||
These two life-studies portray Marilyn Monroe and Picasso as narcissists, and again, perhaps only those who could be so described have the freedom to inhabit a variety of personae and voice. Certainly, Mailer has often argued that modern society will always tend towards a monolithic utterance, and in the logic of totalitarianism Picasso’s dissidence was anathema. During the Second World War Picasso had “a bad record with the Nazis,and could be interned, deported, taken hostage,” his works condemned as “degenerate” and “Bolshevik”{{sfn|Brassaï|2002|p=89}}. There may even be little to dismay us in the news that recently discovered Paris police files (returned to France after 55 years in Soviet KGB archives) show that Picasso (who continued to live his life as a Catalan patriot) was refused French citizenship on the grounds of being an anarchist and a threat to the state.{{efn| The details of Picasso’s unsuccessful 1940 request for citizenship emerge from Paris police dossiers covering four decades of his life in France. They have been published by Pierre Daix and Armand Israel as ''Pablo Picasso: Dossiers de la Préfecture de Police 1901–1940''(Lausanne:Acatos,2004). “The times of his comings and goings are very irregular ... Sometimes he even stays out all night ... As a result of all the information which has been gathered, this foreigner has no qualification for being naturalised ... He must beconsidered as a suspect from the state’s point of view.” {{sfn|Bremner|2003|p=16}}}} After that war ended many beat a path to his door since “his courageous attitude made him a standard bearer, and the whole world wanted to salute him as the symbol of recovered freedom”{{sfn|Brassaï|2002|p=205}}. | |||
And indeed it is their freedom and courage that Mailer admires most of all in his two subjects. In Monroe’s case, he represents it as a freedom constrained, but part of an innate complex,“her liberation and her tyrannical desires”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=17}} together driving an ambition described on several occasions as Napoleonic{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=210,226}}, an adjective he applies also to Picasso. In Picasso it was also freedom that shone through, a native idiom in which his genius found expression. Indeed the epigraph to Picasso presents freedom as existential high-wire and artistic necessity. There Mailer chooses the artist’s own words: “Painting is freedom.If you jump, you might fall on the wrong side of the rope. But if you are not willing to take the risk of breaking your neck, what good is it? You don’t jump at all. You have to wake people up. To revolutionize their way of identifying things. ”Substitute writing for painting and in Picasso’s statement we have the Mailer aesthetic too. His own art was also famously committed to the possibility of bringing about “a revolution in the consciousness of our time.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=71}} For if, as Kahnweiler put it, “in seeking his own mode of expression,[Picasso] daringly breaks new ground in every process and brings it to perfection”{{sfn|Brassaï|2002|p=347}}, so too should biographic form entail such freedom, and the biographer venture a relationship with his subject which is both seminal and unique. And when we read that Mailer recognizes in Picasso “the embodiment of a mighty ego”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=304}}, we are reminded that writing biographies can also be a species of self recognition and self-approval. In a life-study that exploits a primary bond of interaction between author and subject, there is palpable awe for this artist whose youthful self-belief would eventually become Promethean, until finally he could see himself as a dynamic link between humankind and the forces that created the world as well as those that kept it in convulsive disarray. ''Picasso'' joins with ''Marilyn'' and Mailer to become life-study, enlarging the repertoire of purist biography and liberating its strictures. | |||