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The Mailer Review/Volume 1, 2007/The Devil only Knows: Difference between revisions
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William Blake is one of the forerunners and one of the forefathers of Norman Mailer, another radical conservative who takes the greatest liberties and who seeks to liberate us from body-forged as well as “mind-forged manacles” (Blake, as it happened, deleted “german” from that line of his), seeks even to liberate us from such sentimental hopes of liberation as “the sexual revolution.” Blake, searching within one of his forefathers, famously and infamously averred that “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” The proposition, as so often with Blake, is at once direct and equivocal. A true Poet is of the Devil’s party: fine, and now (as always) is the time for all bad men to come to the aid of the party. But is a true Poet ''of-the-Devil’s-party-without-knowing-it'', or was it just that Milton was one who didn’t know it? Is ''not knowing it'' a condition of being it, or was it rather that, with Milton, etc.? | {{start|William Blake is one of the forerunners}} and one of the forefathers of Norman Mailer, another radical conservative who takes the greatest liberties and who seeks to liberate us from body-forged as well as “mind-forged manacles” (Blake, as it happened, deleted “german” from that line of his), seeks even to liberate us from such sentimental hopes of liberation as “the sexual revolution.” Blake, searching within one of his forefathers, famously and infamously averred that “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” The proposition, as so often with Blake, is at once direct and equivocal. A true Poet is of the Devil’s party: fine, and now (as always) is the time for all bad men to come to the aid of the party. But is a true Poet ''of-the-Devil’s-party-without-knowing-it'', or was it just that Milton was one who didn’t know it? Is ''not knowing it'' a condition of being it, or was it rather that, with Milton, etc.? | ||
Milton’s aspiration was to “justify the ways of God to men.” Mailer’s latest ambition is to imagine how the Devil might justify to men his ways to men — and his ways to God. “An honest man’s the noblest work of God”: at least, such was Robert Burns’s hope. Samuel Butler’s was a tersely perverse reversal: “An honest God’s the noblest work of man.” As for Mailer, he sings along with Rowland Hill: “He did not see any reason why the devil should have all the good tunes.” Rowland Hill shares a column with Adolf Hitler in the ''Oxford Dictionary of Quotations''. | Milton’s aspiration was to “justify the ways of God to men.” Mailer’s latest ambition is to imagine how the Devil might justify to men his ways to men — and his ways to God. “An honest man’s the noblest work of God”: at least, such was Robert Burns’s hope. Samuel Butler’s was a tersely perverse reversal: “An honest God’s the noblest work of man.” As for Mailer, he sings along with Rowland Hill: “He did not see any reason why the devil should have all the good tunes.” Rowland Hill shares a column with Adolf Hitler in the ''Oxford Dictionary of Quotations''. | ||