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

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 Prison 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" (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 his 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" (140-41). But herein lies the rub and the essence of Mailer's beautiful artistic violence. Civilization taints love to the degree that pretence and dishonesty rule and to the degree that civilization fails to see the larger harmonious picture.

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 woman, 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" (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, "that a man cannot write of a woman's soul, or a white man of a black man, does not believe in literature itself" (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 American 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. (1)