A Fear of Dying: Norman Mailer's An American Dream: Difference between revisions

Rojack's worldly success is incapable of preserving him from a despair so vast that he is brought to the verge of suicide. The idea of death has haunted him since he killed four German soldiers on the battlefield. A fear of dying mingled with a

'''Norman Mailer'''

Born in Long Branch, New Jersey, in 1923 and educated in Brookdlyn publie I schools, Norman Mailer is a versatile and active professional writer- a novelist, poet, columnist, critic and essayist. He went to Harvard where, in 1941, he won the Story magazine college contest with his story, "The Greatest Thing in the World," and he was in the U. S. Army from March, 1944, until May, 1946, serving as a Field Artillery surveyor, a clerk, a rifleman, and a cook. After the war he studied at the Sorbonne in 1952, but his career has been almost exclusively literary since the publication and popular success of The Naked and the Dead. In addition to his novels and poems, he has written regular columns in both the Village Voice (of which he was co-founder) and Esquire, where he published An American Dream serially. He is an editor of Dissent, an independent quarterly of socialist opinion, but his political interests have not been strictly socialistc, for he has been involved in political activity ranging from support of Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party in 1948 to his recent announced intention to run for Mayor of New York. His lively and very per sonal journalistic criticisms of modern public figures have involved him in a series of verbal duels with such varied figures as Sonny Liston, James Baldwin and the Kennedy family. He has collected these pieces and a variety of other essays and stories in his Advertisements for Myself and The Presidential Papers, both of which were remarkably successful despite their unusual nature. He has four children and lives presently in New York City.

-A.B.B.

yearning for release from the agony of terror coursed through him then beneath a cold, bright moon before he executed the enemy. Now, years later, the moon again kindles his awareness of death: "Yes,' said the moon, 'you haven't done your work, but you've lived your life, and you are dead with it!"" But Rojack, despite his wish for annihilation, refuses to destroy himself, cries: " "Let me be not all dead.'" And in fright turns for sustenance to the love of his wife: "When she loved me . . . her strength seemed then to pass to mine and I was alive with wit, I had vitality, I could depend on stamina, I possessed my style...I had to see her. I had a physical need to see her as direct as an addict's panic waiting for his drug."  

The viability of the novel, then, depends upon the manner in which Rojack recounts his obeervations, reflections, and experiences. And this is where the style of of An American Dream becomes all-important. No amount of preliminary knowledge existentialist thought or even of ideas already delineated in Mailer's Advertisements for Myself and The Presidential Papers could sustain the novel were its prose fat uninspired, without psychological and poetic ramifications. It must be confessed that most of Mailer's earlier fiction would not encourage one to believe him capable of rising significantly above the merely serviceable, often stereotyped, awkward, and plodding language of The Naked and the Dead and Barbary Shore. Glimmerings of a fresh voice had begun to appear in The Deer Park, it is true, but not until the appearance of The Time of Her Time" in Advertisements for Myself did that voice assume recognizably individual character. Even after that there was reasonable doubt about its longevity; Mailer's critical statements about contemporary American writers and some of his expository prose were rich in texture, yet the poetry in Deaths for the Ladies and Other Disasters was embarrassingly crude, both musically and imagistically. Furthermore, "Advertisements for Myself on the Way Out," the prologue to a novel in progress which appeared in Advertisements for Myself and which Mailer heralded as a major opus, appeared a stylistic regression in its reliance upon an expository

<big>'''Books by Norman Mailer'''</big>  

THE NAKED AND THE DEAD New York: Rinehart &Company, 1948. $4.00 Toronto: Clarke, Irwin and Company, Ltd., 1948. London: Allan Wingate, Ltd., 1949. 15/ London: Allan Wingate, Ltd., 1952. 8/6 New York: Grosset&Dunlap, Inc., 1956. $2.49 Toronto: George J. McLeod, Ltd., 1956. $3.25 New York: Modern Library, Random House, Inc., 1961. $1.95 Toronto: Random House, Ltd., 1961. $2.25  

THE WHITE NEGRO San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1959. .50 (pa.)  

AN AMERICAN DREAM New York: The Dial Press, 1965. $4.95  

monologue and dialogue similar to that in The Barbary Shore.  

Pushed the button, of she flew in full Disarray, to seek a greener peril. -JOHN ALEXANDER ALLEN gloom-what depression surrounded the rich-and some compass of direc tion went awry in my mind; I had the physical impression we were moving once again I felt something begin to go out of the very light of my mind, as if the colors which lit the stage of my dreams would be more modest now, something vital was ready to go away forever even as once, not thirty hours ago. I had lost some other part of myself, it had streamed away on a voyage on that instant when I had been too fearful to jump, something had quit me forever, that ability of my soul to die in its place, take failure, go down to the moon, launched out honorably. Now something else was preparing to leave, some certainty away, some knowledge it was the reward for which to live love was that voice which I could no longer deny spoke again through the medium of the umbrella. I have deliberately avoided referring to Mailer's public role, that which he has sought and that which has been thrust upon him by virtue of private behavior that has been brought to public attention, because it has no bearing on the quality of An American Dream. There is an advantage in being able to approach the work of a contemporary without being informed about his escapades, marriages, and political judgments, without having been at a party where he beat up another guest and was in turn tossed out into the gutter. An American Dream demands such innocence

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