Authors: Louis Menand
American Studies (15 page)
In 1985, soon after the
New Yorker
was sold, Shawn wrote a “Notes and Comment” piece designed to defend the magazine’s editorial position against possible encroachments by the new ownership, and to reassure the magazine’s readers. “We, the editorial people,” he explained, “knew by instinct that to be able to make the
New Yorker
the magazine we wanted it to be we had to separate ourselves from the business side of the venture … . In this atmosphere of freedom, we have never published anything in order to sell magazines, to cause a sensation, to be controversial, to be popular or fashionable, to be ‘successful.’”
10
The analysis is entirely correct, and it explains the true commercial genius of the
New Yorker
.
New Yorker
was sold, Shawn wrote a “Notes and Comment” piece designed to defend the magazine’s editorial position against possible encroachments by the new ownership, and to reassure the magazine’s readers. “We, the editorial people,” he explained, “knew by instinct that to be able to make the
New Yorker
the magazine we wanted it to be we had to separate ourselves from the business side of the venture … . In this atmosphere of freedom, we have never published anything in order to sell magazines, to cause a sensation, to be controversial, to be popular or fashionable, to be ‘successful.’”
10
The analysis is entirely correct, and it explains the true commercial genius of the
New Yorker
.
Nearly all American culture is commercial. It is either marketdriven, as in the case of popular music, paperback fiction, and movies; or it is advertising-driven, as in the case of radio, television, newspapers, and magazines. And this culture is, of course, only an aspect of the American way of life generally, in which virtually every good—food, housing, furniture, clothing, cars, shaving cream—is understood to be designed to extract the greatest possible profit from the market conditions available, and to be susceptible to alteration the instant those conditions change. Because it is the chief tool for making conditions change, thereby creating new areas of demand and new sources of profit, advertising has become for most people the symbol of the thoroughgoing commercialism of American life.
Everyone participates in this system, and partakes of its benefits (individual economic opportunity and national economic expansion) and puts up with its drawbacks (cheap goods, an often banal and sometimes exploitative popular culture, financial uncertainty). The group that has benefited the most from this way of life, and that
has done the most to shape it and to keep the system producing more of it, is the group of upper-middle-class professionals—lawyers , bankers, stockbrokers, designers, advertising executives, editors, publishers, business executives, television producers, and the college professors who educated them. These people were made possible—were made necessary, in fact—by the spectacularly successful commercialization of American life in the twentieth century; for they supply its creative and analytic intelligence. They are the society’s most highly prized and highly rewarded members. But until recently, this group always demonstrated one peculiarity. Its tastes, its values, its lifestyle were all anticommercial. The Wall Street banker lived like a member of the English gentry in a mock-Tudor mansion in Mount Kisco. The Madison Avenue adman had a place in Vermont with outdoor plumbing and no electricity. The television producer bought his filet at an old-fashioned butcher, where it was wrapped in old-fashioned butcher paper. The publisher of a magazine for teenage girls watched public television—or had a passion for Mozart, or Trollope, or vintage wines. He vacationed in the cathedral towns of France. He didn’t like motorboats, or billboards, or big American cars. And so forth. His face was turned away from the culture that gave him his living. The upper-middle-class professional had these tastes and values because they were part of his socialization. In midcentury America, this man was, prototypically, the graduate of an Ivy League college, married to the graduate of a select women’s college or a major public university. His and his wife’s education stressed the values of the liberal arts, which were understood to be opposed to everything transient and commercial. The consumables in their world were not mass-market: the features they shopped with an eye to were traditionalism, craftsmanship, longevity.
has done the most to shape it and to keep the system producing more of it, is the group of upper-middle-class professionals—lawyers , bankers, stockbrokers, designers, advertising executives, editors, publishers, business executives, television producers, and the college professors who educated them. These people were made possible—were made necessary, in fact—by the spectacularly successful commercialization of American life in the twentieth century; for they supply its creative and analytic intelligence. They are the society’s most highly prized and highly rewarded members. But until recently, this group always demonstrated one peculiarity. Its tastes, its values, its lifestyle were all anticommercial. The Wall Street banker lived like a member of the English gentry in a mock-Tudor mansion in Mount Kisco. The Madison Avenue adman had a place in Vermont with outdoor plumbing and no electricity. The television producer bought his filet at an old-fashioned butcher, where it was wrapped in old-fashioned butcher paper. The publisher of a magazine for teenage girls watched public television—or had a passion for Mozart, or Trollope, or vintage wines. He vacationed in the cathedral towns of France. He didn’t like motorboats, or billboards, or big American cars. And so forth. His face was turned away from the culture that gave him his living. The upper-middle-class professional had these tastes and values because they were part of his socialization. In midcentury America, this man was, prototypically, the graduate of an Ivy League college, married to the graduate of a select women’s college or a major public university. His and his wife’s education stressed the values of the liberal arts, which were understood to be opposed to everything transient and commercial. The consumables in their world were not mass-market: the features they shopped with an eye to were traditionalism, craftsmanship, longevity.
Of course, this couple represented a market—by virtue of their income and education, a highly desirable market. But they were not people susceptible to anything that smacked of opportunism or commercialism. Nor could they be reached by gossip about the successful and celebrated. Their taste—their great virtue, really—was for the self-effacing, the unpretentious, the literate and witty. They
were secure enough to enjoy poking fun at themselves and their world; that was part of the nobility of their sense of humor. And it was a satisfaction, given their view of commerce and coercion, to imagine themselves to be ineffectual, silly, powerless. But they were genuinely insecure enough to require assurance that they would not be “out-browed”—that they would find their cultural experiences accessible and unthreatening, without being flavorless or incurious or prudish.
were secure enough to enjoy poking fun at themselves and their world; that was part of the nobility of their sense of humor. And it was a satisfaction, given their view of commerce and coercion, to imagine themselves to be ineffectual, silly, powerless. But they were genuinely insecure enough to require assurance that they would not be “out-browed”—that they would find their cultural experiences accessible and unthreatening, without being flavorless or incurious or prudish.
The old
New Yorker
looked terrific, as everyone knows, on a coffee table. Its covers were invariably pleasing, and some of them were modestly artful. But the most distinctive design feature of the
New Yorker
cover was that it said nothing about what was inside. Unlike the cover of every other commercial magazine in America, the cover of the
New Yorker
was not a piece of advertising. In fact,
nothing
in the old
New Yorker
was advertised. It ran no table of contents. Its reported pieces carried generic titles: “Reporter at Large,” and, in much smaller print: “Soybeans.” There might be, by way of illustration, a small, hand-lettered map. There was no accompanying blurb (“You will never feel the same way about this amazing foodstuff again!”). There were no pull-quotes or subheads. The writer’s name appeared only at the end, in type that was the same point size as the type in which the article was printed. The cynical explanation for this is that the editorial matter in the
New Yorker
was subdued (for instance, no color) so that the ads would be more vivid. That may be how it worked for the advertisers; but Shawn was right. On the editorial side, the idea really was to give the
New Yorker’
s readers what they wanted: a straight dose of fiction, poetry, reportage, and criticism, without patronizing help or hype. If soybeans didn’t interest you, you were free to turn the page (well, pages).
New Yorker
looked terrific, as everyone knows, on a coffee table. Its covers were invariably pleasing, and some of them were modestly artful. But the most distinctive design feature of the
New Yorker
cover was that it said nothing about what was inside. Unlike the cover of every other commercial magazine in America, the cover of the
New Yorker
was not a piece of advertising. In fact,
nothing
in the old
New Yorker
was advertised. It ran no table of contents. Its reported pieces carried generic titles: “Reporter at Large,” and, in much smaller print: “Soybeans.” There might be, by way of illustration, a small, hand-lettered map. There was no accompanying blurb (“You will never feel the same way about this amazing foodstuff again!”). There were no pull-quotes or subheads. The writer’s name appeared only at the end, in type that was the same point size as the type in which the article was printed. The cynical explanation for this is that the editorial matter in the
New Yorker
was subdued (for instance, no color) so that the ads would be more vivid. That may be how it worked for the advertisers; but Shawn was right. On the editorial side, the idea really was to give the
New Yorker’
s readers what they wanted: a straight dose of fiction, poetry, reportage, and criticism, without patronizing help or hype. If soybeans didn’t interest you, you were free to turn the page (well, pages).
If you grew up in a household in which the
New Yorker
was a constant presence, you probably retain, whatever reservations your superior sophistication now requires you to make, a residual fondness for the magazine’s cultural traditions. If you grew up in one of those households and had an interest in the arts, you are likely still to feel a debt to one or another of the magazine’s regular critics:
Harold Rosenberg on art, Arlene Croce on dance, Pauline Kael on movies. And if you had an interest in becoming a writer yourself, the magazine almost surely formed part of your sense of what good writing was like. But the anticommercialism, the carefully maintained distance from the crass, capitalist world, will not mean to you what it meant to your parents. For among today’s upper-middle-class professionals, the separation between culture and commerce has collapsed. Nor is the sense of membership in a common taste group as strong as it was. The social class of professionals is much less homogeneous than it used to be, and the education those people receive is less of a pious and clubby affair. And they do not find the pose of ineffectuality attractive.
New Yorker
was a constant presence, you probably retain, whatever reservations your superior sophistication now requires you to make, a residual fondness for the magazine’s cultural traditions. If you grew up in one of those households and had an interest in the arts, you are likely still to feel a debt to one or another of the magazine’s regular critics:
Harold Rosenberg on art, Arlene Croce on dance, Pauline Kael on movies. And if you had an interest in becoming a writer yourself, the magazine almost surely formed part of your sense of what good writing was like. But the anticommercialism, the carefully maintained distance from the crass, capitalist world, will not mean to you what it meant to your parents. For among today’s upper-middle-class professionals, the separation between culture and commerce has collapsed. Nor is the sense of membership in a common taste group as strong as it was. The social class of professionals is much less homogeneous than it used to be, and the education those people receive is less of a pious and clubby affair. And they do not find the pose of ineffectuality attractive.
Of course, upper-middle-class tastes still run to the traditional, the custom-built, the exclusive. But there is no special conscience about the relation between these tastes and the values of the marketplace. There is often, in fact, a kind of promiscuous delight in the commercialism of upscale pleasures, and an uninhibited interest in whatever mid- and mass-market experiences seem attractive. The younger professional today has become so adept at reading the language of advertisement and promotion that it has become a stimulation to be welcomed rather than a blight to be evaded. There are surely as many things that are hateful about this new upper-middle-class cast of mind as there were about the old one; but there are surely many things to be admired about it, too. It is an audience that could use a little help understanding which things are which, which is one of the needs magazines exist to serve.
I
n 1998, when he was seventy-five, Norman Mailer published
The Time of Our Time,
an anthology of his own writing, selected by him and arranged as a commentary on American life since the Second World War. Almost all of Mailer’s books are represented in the volume, starting with
The Naked and the Dead
(1948), plus several magazine pieces that had not been reprinted before. Two of the excerpted books—
Ancient Evenings
(1983), which is set in the time of Ramses II, and
The Gospel According to the Son
(1997), a retelling of the Jesus story—do not have much to tell us about postwar American life; but they do have something to tell us about Norman Mailer, and they help to make the volume a surprisingly coherent recapitulation of Mailer’s career.
n 1998, when he was seventy-five, Norman Mailer published
The Time of Our Time,
an anthology of his own writing, selected by him and arranged as a commentary on American life since the Second World War. Almost all of Mailer’s books are represented in the volume, starting with
The Naked and the Dead
(1948), plus several magazine pieces that had not been reprinted before. Two of the excerpted books—
Ancient Evenings
(1983), which is set in the time of Ramses II, and
The Gospel According to the Son
(1997), a retelling of the Jesus story—do not have much to tell us about postwar American life; but they do have something to tell us about Norman Mailer, and they help to make the volume a surprisingly coherent recapitulation of Mailer’s career.
What does Mailer think of postwar America? The answer (this is not the surprising part) is: something good and something bad. The something good is what Mailer calls “democracy,” ordinarily a term of broad application, but by which he means specifically the conditions under which moral freedom and intellectual honesty are possible. He is not under the illusion that these qualities are
sustainable to the same degree anyplace else in the world. That’s the bright side of life in America. The dark side is what he calls “technology,” ordinarily a term of specific application, but which he uses broadly to mean all efforts to clean up human messiness, to find a nice, rational, hygienic shortcut to satisfaction. His shorthand term for the results of such efforts is “plastic.” Plastic, in his view, threatens freedom. It is a metaphor for creeping totalitarianism.
sustainable to the same degree anyplace else in the world. That’s the bright side of life in America. The dark side is what he calls “technology,” ordinarily a term of specific application, but which he uses broadly to mean all efforts to clean up human messiness, to find a nice, rational, hygienic shortcut to satisfaction. His shorthand term for the results of such efforts is “plastic.” Plastic, in his view, threatens freedom. It is a metaphor for creeping totalitarianism.
So far we are comfortably inside the realm of liberal middle-class culture. Everyone within that culture salutes the principles of moral freedom and intellectual honesty, and loathes the idea (without necessarily forgoing the convenience) of plastic. And this is Mailer’s problem. In a nutshell: it is possible to have a nice, rational, hygienic contempt for plastic. A person can despise all the bogeymen of “technology” as Mailer identifies them in his essays and books—the military-industrial complex, the Hollywood studios, NASA, television, synthetics, high-rise buildings in which the windows don’t open—and still suffer (by Mailer’s measure) from moral cowardice and self-deception. Liberals are acculturated to feel superior to technology, even as they prosper, directly or indirectly, by its successes. In Mailer’s view, though, technology isn’t just depressing or tasteless or something to write editorials about. Technology is the devil. You don’t beat the devil by writing editorials. You can’t have a rational response to the threat of technology. Rationality is part of the disease.
Mailer spent the decade following the publication of
The Naked and the Dead
working this difficulty out. Though the elements of his solution were not original, their synthesis surely was. He began by biologizing the conflict between technology and freedom. The United States, he thought, was in danger of becoming just as totalitarian as the Soviet Union—a point he had already made in the closing section of
The Naked and the Dead
, where he portrayed, in the figure of a character named Major Dalleson, the postwar triumph of the bureaucratic mentality. Mailer thought that American totalitarianism would emerge under the guise of what he called, in
The Naked and the Dead,
“conservative liberalism,”
1
meaning that regimentation would be accomplished by subjecting dissidents to
therapy rather than by sending them to Siberia or having them shot. Thus in two famous early stories, “The Man Who Studied Yoga” (1952) and “The Time of Her Time” (1959), the representative of technology is Freudianism, which paralyzes through introspection. (The man who studied yoga is able, after years of meditation, to unscrew his own navel. He does so, and his ass falls off.) The real danger, Mailer thought, was not economic; Marx had missed the point. The real danger was psychological. Our nervous systems were being invaded. The answer was not to argue but to act.
The Naked and the Dead
working this difficulty out. Though the elements of his solution were not original, their synthesis surely was. He began by biologizing the conflict between technology and freedom. The United States, he thought, was in danger of becoming just as totalitarian as the Soviet Union—a point he had already made in the closing section of
The Naked and the Dead
, where he portrayed, in the figure of a character named Major Dalleson, the postwar triumph of the bureaucratic mentality. Mailer thought that American totalitarianism would emerge under the guise of what he called, in
The Naked and the Dead,
“conservative liberalism,”
1
meaning that regimentation would be accomplished by subjecting dissidents to
therapy rather than by sending them to Siberia or having them shot. Thus in two famous early stories, “The Man Who Studied Yoga” (1952) and “The Time of Her Time” (1959), the representative of technology is Freudianism, which paralyzes through introspection. (The man who studied yoga is able, after years of meditation, to unscrew his own navel. He does so, and his ass falls off.) The real danger, Mailer thought, was not economic; Marx had missed the point. The real danger was psychological. Our nervous systems were being invaded. The answer was not to argue but to act.
This much Mailer appears to have picked up from his Trotskyist friend Jean Malaquais, whom he met in Paris soon after finishing
The Naked and the Dead
; from Sartre, whose essay “Existentialism Is a Humanism” popularized the philosophy in the late 1940s; from Henry Miller and D. H. Lawrence, whose influence on Mailer’s writing soon eclipsed the influence, evident in
The Naked and the Dead
, of James T. Farrell and John Dos Passos; from the Baltimore psychoanalyst Robert Lindner, who wrote a number of clinical studies of sociopathic behavior, including
Rebel without a Cause
; and from Wilhelm Reich, who politicized psychoanalysis by erecting (as it were) the liberated sexual instinct as the antagonist of the modern state. Mailer brought Sartre and Reich together by making sex the site of existential struggle. Where he differed from Sartre and Reich (and from all his other teachers except Lawrence) was in making sex the site of metaphysical struggle, as well. The quality of the orgasm became a matter not only of political but of cosmic significance. A bad orgasm—a thwarting or perversion of instinct—could lead (a Reichian idea) to cancer, which Mailer regarded as the biological equivalent of plastic. A good orgasm (an exhausting proposition, incidentally, if we are to rely on the example offered in “The Time of Her Time”) was not only a victory over the machinery of psychological oppression; it was a victory on behalf of God in his war with the devil. In short, Mailer developed a Manichean version of Sartre’s left-wing existentialism and Reich’s left-wing Freudianism. Every choice became a choice between God and the devil, with the margin separating the two always razor-thin. Hence the existential frisson: to miss salvation by a hair was to risk damnation. Life
was imagined as the psychic equivalent of rock-climbing (which, along with balancing on balcony railings while drunk, became a popular sport in Mailer’s fiction). “The best move,” as Mailer has liked to say, “lies close to the worst.”
The Naked and the Dead
; from Sartre, whose essay “Existentialism Is a Humanism” popularized the philosophy in the late 1940s; from Henry Miller and D. H. Lawrence, whose influence on Mailer’s writing soon eclipsed the influence, evident in
The Naked and the Dead
, of James T. Farrell and John Dos Passos; from the Baltimore psychoanalyst Robert Lindner, who wrote a number of clinical studies of sociopathic behavior, including
Rebel without a Cause
; and from Wilhelm Reich, who politicized psychoanalysis by erecting (as it were) the liberated sexual instinct as the antagonist of the modern state. Mailer brought Sartre and Reich together by making sex the site of existential struggle. Where he differed from Sartre and Reich (and from all his other teachers except Lawrence) was in making sex the site of metaphysical struggle, as well. The quality of the orgasm became a matter not only of political but of cosmic significance. A bad orgasm—a thwarting or perversion of instinct—could lead (a Reichian idea) to cancer, which Mailer regarded as the biological equivalent of plastic. A good orgasm (an exhausting proposition, incidentally, if we are to rely on the example offered in “The Time of Her Time”) was not only a victory over the machinery of psychological oppression; it was a victory on behalf of God in his war with the devil. In short, Mailer developed a Manichean version of Sartre’s left-wing existentialism and Reich’s left-wing Freudianism. Every choice became a choice between God and the devil, with the margin separating the two always razor-thin. Hence the existential frisson: to miss salvation by a hair was to risk damnation. Life
was imagined as the psychic equivalent of rock-climbing (which, along with balancing on balcony railings while drunk, became a popular sport in Mailer’s fiction). “The best move,” as Mailer has liked to say, “lies close to the worst.”
The
summa
of these meditations was “The White Negro” (1956). The essay is notorious for a passage in which the case of two eighteen-year-olds murdering a candy-store owner is proposed, without much qualification, as an example of “daring the unknown.” (“One enters into a new relation with the police,”
2
as the essay explains.) Irving Howe, who published “The White Negro” in
Dissent
(it was reprinted in
Advertisements for Myself
[1959]), later expressed regret for having chosen to run it, as a “scoop” for his little magazine, rather than reject it for its endorsement of violence. (The best move lies close to the worst.) Mailer may have offered the piece to Howe with a view precisely to forcing such a dilemma on him; he regarded the American left as a culturally backward bunch that needed a shot of the morally outrageous. But “The White Negro” was not merely a provocation. It was a claim to turf. “I wrote it,” Mailer said almost thirty years later, “with tremendous fear and agitation and great difficulty … . If I wanted to be a great writer—and by then being terribly fortified both by success
and
failure, I absolutely wanted to be a great writer—then I’d found a place where perhaps I could do it. I felt I had perceptions about these matters that I’d never read in anyone else’s literature.”
3
summa
of these meditations was “The White Negro” (1956). The essay is notorious for a passage in which the case of two eighteen-year-olds murdering a candy-store owner is proposed, without much qualification, as an example of “daring the unknown.” (“One enters into a new relation with the police,”
2
as the essay explains.) Irving Howe, who published “The White Negro” in
Dissent
(it was reprinted in
Advertisements for Myself
[1959]), later expressed regret for having chosen to run it, as a “scoop” for his little magazine, rather than reject it for its endorsement of violence. (The best move lies close to the worst.) Mailer may have offered the piece to Howe with a view precisely to forcing such a dilemma on him; he regarded the American left as a culturally backward bunch that needed a shot of the morally outrageous. But “The White Negro” was not merely a provocation. It was a claim to turf. “I wrote it,” Mailer said almost thirty years later, “with tremendous fear and agitation and great difficulty … . If I wanted to be a great writer—and by then being terribly fortified both by success
and
failure, I absolutely wanted to be a great writer—then I’d found a place where perhaps I could do it. I felt I had perceptions about these matters that I’d never read in anyone else’s literature.”
3
The argument of “The White Negro” is built up from the proposition that American Negroes (by which Mailer means, of course, American Negro men), by virtue of their alienation from mainstream American society, are natural existentialists (they have “existential synapses”), and thus have better orgasms. They appreciate as well the cathartic effects of violence (“individual acts of violence are always to be preferred to the collective violence of the State,”
4
the essay suggests). The white American who would imitate them—the white Negro—is the Hipster. His goal is to be “with it.”
4
the essay suggests). The white American who would imitate them—the white Negro—is the Hipster. His goal is to be “with it.”
To be with it is to have grace, is to be closer to the secrets of that inner unconscious life which will nourish you if you can hear it, for
you are then nearer to that God which every hipster believes is located in the senses of his body, that trapped, mutilated, and nonetheless megalomaniacal God who is It, who is energy, life, sex, force, the Yoga’s
prana,
the Reichian’s orgone, Lawrence’s “blood,” Hemingway’s “good,” the Shavian life-force; “It”; God; not the God of the churches but the unachievable whisper of mystery within the sex, the paradise of limitless energy and perception just beyond the next wave of the next orgasm.
you are then nearer to that God which every hipster believes is located in the senses of his body, that trapped, mutilated, and nonetheless megalomaniacal God who is It, who is energy, life, sex, force, the Yoga’s
prana,
the Reichian’s orgone, Lawrence’s “blood,” Hemingway’s “good,” the Shavian life-force; “It”; God; not the God of the churches but the unachievable whisper of mystery within the sex, the paradise of limitless energy and perception just beyond the next wave of the next orgasm.
To which a cool cat might reply, “Crazy, man!”
5
5
Mailer soon dropped the language of Hip (which was just the jargon of beatniks and jazz musicians). Over the years his enthusiasm for real violence was largely replaced by an enthusiasm for play violence—bullfighting, football, and, especially, boxing. As celebrity was visited upon him, his political animus relaxed. But “The White Negro” has remained the well from which his thought is drawn. What
The Time of Our Time
reveals (and this is the surprising part) is the extent to which Mailer has spent forty-five years occupying the ground he staked out in 1956. He is a man—in 2002, he is possibly the last man—of the 1950s.
The Time of Our Time
reveals (and this is the surprising part) is the extent to which Mailer has spent forty-five years occupying the ground he staked out in 1956. He is a man—in 2002, he is possibly the last man—of the 1950s.
Mailer is commonly regarded as a man of the 1960s, for it was in the sixties that he enjoyed his most productive and popular run as a writer: he published two novels,
An American Dream
(1965) and
Why Are We in Vietnam
? (1967); two volumes of essays,
The Presidential Papers
(1963) and
Cannibals and Christians
(1966); two works of reportage,
The Armies of the Night
(1968) and
Miami and the Siege of Chicago
(1968); and a collection of poems, called
Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters)
(1962). He also turned his novel
The Deer Park
into a play, wrote and directed three movies, and ran for mayor of New York City. (He did not finish last.) He had good reason for considering it his favorite decade. But he was not really affected by anything that happened in the sixties. He had entered the decade with his own style of political radicalism and his own brand of sexual liberation already worked out; he did not have much to learn from the counterculture or the New Left. The war in Vietnam did not take him by surprise: it was exactly the sort of technocratic
insanity he had been predicting since 1948. And the general attitude of “anything goes” was, he must have imagined, just the attitude he had prescribed in “The White Negro.”
An American Dream
(1965) and
Why Are We in Vietnam
? (1967); two volumes of essays,
The Presidential Papers
(1963) and
Cannibals and Christians
(1966); two works of reportage,
The Armies of the Night
(1968) and
Miami and the Siege of Chicago
(1968); and a collection of poems, called
Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters)
(1962). He also turned his novel
The Deer Park
into a play, wrote and directed three movies, and ran for mayor of New York City. (He did not finish last.) He had good reason for considering it his favorite decade. But he was not really affected by anything that happened in the sixties. He had entered the decade with his own style of political radicalism and his own brand of sexual liberation already worked out; he did not have much to learn from the counterculture or the New Left. The war in Vietnam did not take him by surprise: it was exactly the sort of technocratic
insanity he had been predicting since 1948. And the general attitude of “anything goes” was, he must have imagined, just the attitude he had prescribed in “The White Negro.”
But it was not. In the end the social movements of the sixties were the undoing of every tenet of Mailer’s radicalism, for they were not, despite appearances at the time, radical movements. They were liberal movements. Their purpose was to make life fairer by clearing away exactly the sort of mumbo-jumbo about race and sex that Mailer built most of his worldview around. The civil rights movement discredited the primitivist myth of black sexuality; the sexual revolution tried to get the language of sin out of talk about sex (“free love” was pretty much the antithesis of any notion of sex Mailer ever had in mind); gay liberation established homosexuality as something other than a heterosexual deformity; and women’s liberation debunked the metaphysics of the orgasm. Mailer had gone to great lengths to mystify biology. The sixties demystified it. “Anything goes” did not mean that all is permitted on the understanding that the wrong move will cost you a piece of your soul. It just meant that all is permitted.
For most of the sixties Mailer was one of the things that was permitted, since anyone who seemed sufficiently far out held an appeal. And Mailer was a performer, a kind of celebrity the sixties loved. At the end of the decade, though, he ran into a wall. This was feminism. Mailer took feminism to be a tool of technology, an attempt to find a shortcut to sexual pleasure. Its aim, as he understood it, was to give women sexual independence from men, which meant making reproduction a laboratory exercise and orgasm a mechanical one. He could not see that there are just different kinds of sexual pleasure and different methods of reproduction, because for him unless these matters carry cosmic consequences, the universe is absurd. If a vibrator is as good as a penis, life has no meaning. Mailer’s crusade against feminism was hopeless from the start, for he was fighting against one of the simplest and most powerful of human hopes, which is that happiness can be made a little easier to grasp. He offered some sort of truce with the movement (it was not accepted) in
The Prisoner of Sex
(1971) (which also includes
defenses, against the strictures of Kate Millet, of Miller and Lawrence, that are, whatever one makes of the book as a whole, brilliant pieces of criticism). But he never really got it. He was done in by the clitoral orgasm.
The Prisoner of Sex
(1971) (which also includes
defenses, against the strictures of Kate Millet, of Miller and Lawrence, that are, whatever one makes of the book as a whole, brilliant pieces of criticism). But he never really got it. He was done in by the clitoral orgasm.
Mailer’s best writing in the sixties, therefore, was conceived in the skeptical spirit of a critic, not in the sympathetic spirit of a convert. The first half of
The Armies of the Night,
which tells the story of his participation in the 1967 march on the Pentagon, is almost certainly the strongest piece of journalistic writing Mailer ever did, and what gives it its sour brilliance is the author’s barely suppressed animus against all the good liberals whose arms are linked with his. As a screed against the war,
The Armies of the Night
is not especially distinguishable from many other writings of the time. But as a mordant portrait of the culture of the antiwar movement, there is nothing to beat it.
The Armies of the Night,
which tells the story of his participation in the 1967 march on the Pentagon, is almost certainly the strongest piece of journalistic writing Mailer ever did, and what gives it its sour brilliance is the author’s barely suppressed animus against all the good liberals whose arms are linked with his. As a screed against the war,
The Armies of the Night
is not especially distinguishable from many other writings of the time. But as a mordant portrait of the culture of the antiwar movement, there is nothing to beat it.
After
The Prisoner of Sex
Mailer’s projects became more diffuse—a biography of Marilyn Monroe, a book on the Apollo moon landing, another on the Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire, a “true-life novel” about Gary Gilmore, the novel set in ancient Egypt, another one set in Provincetown, a huge unfinished novel about the CIA, and books about Pablo Picasso, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Jesus. Mailer continued to cover presidential campaigns for various magazines, although he has not collected this work since
St. George and the Godfather
(1972). There are things to admire in this writing, but the intellectual approach is a little too familiar: the author divides his subject into redemptive and infernal elements, and then muses, at length, upon the possibilities. The general mystery addressed is whether events have a meaning. It is a perfectly respectable mystery to address: to uncover meaning is a reason for writing. What begins to wear the reader down is the Manichean insistence that all meanings are psychic meanings, and that there are only two ultimates. “The Beatles,” Mailer once remarked (and not in the spirit of selfparody), “—demons or saints?”
6
There is never a middle possibility.
The Prisoner of Sex
Mailer’s projects became more diffuse—a biography of Marilyn Monroe, a book on the Apollo moon landing, another on the Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire, a “true-life novel” about Gary Gilmore, the novel set in ancient Egypt, another one set in Provincetown, a huge unfinished novel about the CIA, and books about Pablo Picasso, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Jesus. Mailer continued to cover presidential campaigns for various magazines, although he has not collected this work since
St. George and the Godfather
(1972). There are things to admire in this writing, but the intellectual approach is a little too familiar: the author divides his subject into redemptive and infernal elements, and then muses, at length, upon the possibilities. The general mystery addressed is whether events have a meaning. It is a perfectly respectable mystery to address: to uncover meaning is a reason for writing. What begins to wear the reader down is the Manichean insistence that all meanings are psychic meanings, and that there are only two ultimates. “The Beatles,” Mailer once remarked (and not in the spirit of selfparody), “—demons or saints?”
6
There is never a middle possibility.
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