The Prisoner of Fame

BY ANTHONY BURGESS

MAILER: HIS LIFE AND TIMES byPeter Manso.

NORMAN MAILER’S F AME is large and his immortality assured. But for precisely what is he famous and immortal? The Naked and the Dead is still the best of the war novels, Evelyn Waughs Sword of Honour failing even to sidle into its class (too patrician, too Catholic, too unbloody and unfecal). What gives The Naked and the Dead distinction is its stiffening of sharp war reportage with the prophetic philosophy that, by coincidence, Orwell presented in Nineteen Eighty-Four (the books came out almost simultaneously in Britain): the future lies with power, and the Second World War is a rehearsal of the future; nevertheless, the capacity for free choice may descend upon men when they least look for it (as with the swarm of bees that sends the soldiers packing). That the book was stylistically derivative was either overlooked or pardoned: it owed a great deal to John Dos Passos, and its subject matter—like that of most American best sellers—was too important for its readers to wish to niggle over distinction or individuality in the writing. When, with Barbary Shore and The Deer Park, Mailer was accused of having failed to fulfill great promise, most of his critics refused to see that he was only now beginning his literary career: The Naked and the Dead had been a kind of sport written by the Muse of American History with a certain assistance from Mailer, and now he had embarked on the heartbreaking business of forging a style.

And it is, in fact, as a stylist that Mailer deserves his fame and his immortality. Whereas Hemingway created the “simple, declarative sentence,” which was apt for an age that wanted no more of the bloated, periodic rhetoric of a discredited liberalism, Mailer restored the baroque and salted it with new and dangerous condiments—existential violence, anal magic, Brooklyn street-boy expletives. But whether he was ever again, after his first book, to be regarded as a novelist—promising or achieved— should never really have been the point. Give him a subject—the battle of the sexes, the moon shots, Marilyn Monroe, Vietnam, the mindless violence of a Utah hoodlum and his opting for an outmoded lethe, ancient Egypt—and you can be sure of getting a rare and inimitable prose, which, like D. H. Lawrences, takes mad chances and risks silliness to gain new tonalities and resonances.

Whether Mailer is an intelligent writer is another matter. He is certainly— again, like Lawrence—not a rational writer. As Lawrence located reality in the loins, Mailer, on the evidence of both An American Dream and Ancient Evenings, finds it in the anal tract. He has made some dangerous constatations, like that early one, vaguely Camusian, about the possibility of finding the moment of truth in an “existential” killing. He has been too fond of the term existential, and Iris Murdoch—whom Mailer insisted on meeting in Oxford—failed to put him right as to its meaning. It is probably impossible to argue with Mailer, as it was with Lawrence. He has convictions in his gut, or lower, and for good or ill these make him what he is.

AMERICAN WRITERS differ from their European brothers and sisters in seeing their craft as a kind of key to a world bigger than literature. This is very un-Flaubertian: to the author of Salammbo (the only historical novel to which Ancient Evenings can be compared), art was all that mattered, and life was merely its raw material. Like Hemingway before him, Mailer has wanted the nonliterary world to take him seriously; like Fitzgerald before him, he has been a cause of scandal. His public personality has rubbed onto his art, which is very un-European and probably harmful. We all know about his many marriages and the slogging for alimony, the stabbing of a wife, the obstreperousness under drink or drugs, the unfortunate espousal of criminals as custodians of the truth or the way, the absurd political ambition, the tasteless obscenities in public addresses, the desire to be above all a public figure. That he has not been destroyed, as either a man or a writer, by his engagement with the dirty world is a testimony to his Brooklyn Jewish toughness and his basic literary integrity.

And now—a little too soon, I would have thought—we have his biography, or rather a do-it-yourself kit for the making of a biography. I cannot sufficiently deplore the production of biographies when their subjects are still alive. A book bigger than War and Peace about Solzhenitsyn was recently published, and it clearly suffers from the lack of cooperation of its subject, who can be adequately anatomized only when he is dead. Mailer is a mere child, and his biography can be no more than a kind of interim report. The subject of a life should sit still, or lie still. Moreover, he should have done his work, and a life’s pattern ought to be discernible. Herbert Gorman’s life of Joyce was written not only when Finnegans Wake was a long way from completion but with the handicap of the subject himself insisting on a hagiography featuring a prolonged, if proleptic, martyrdom. That is how Richard Ellmann, who was to write the real thing, put it. The real thing, which came out when both James and Nora Joyce had settled in their separate tombs in ZÜrich, not only has a perfect wholeness but is, as befits the life of a supreme stylist, itself a model of style. Like Boswell’s masterpiece, perhaps the type of all great biographies, it also discloses an attitude: the biographer loves with a certain wryness, he knows his hero inside out, lihe relates the man to the work. Peter Manso’s book is not that sort of thing at all.

The by-line is a kind of lie. Manso has not written this book. He has filled leagues, miles, versts, kilometers, of recording tape with reminiscences and observations from the people in Mailer’s life. Because, in the manner of speech, this material is repetitive, vague, sometimes inaccurate, frequently slangy, and often obscene, Manso has done some editing, but he has not done much checking on matters of reliability. for instance, he has William Burroughs remembering the Edinburgh Writers’ Conference of 1962. Mailer was there but not remarkably or even noteworthily there. Also present was Scotland’s greatest poet, and conceivably the greatest poet of the English-speaking world, Hugh MacDiarmid. He is transformed into &3822;Hugh McDermott, a frosty old Scots poet, quite a local celebrity.” I bis is not good enough; there ought to be a corrective footnote.

But the real trouble with the whole insufficiently boiled-down boiling is divagation, irrelevance, gossip that sometimes entertains but rarely illuminates. All right, Mailer was a cook in the Army, and he did not know how to separate whites from yolks when making a platoon-sized lemon meringue pie; he was fond of skillet hash topped with canned pears; he made lousy chop suey. What does this signify in terms of his (nonmilitary) calling? Ellmann relates Joyce and food to the eucharistic ceremonies of Finnegans Wake; Dr. Johnson’s reconciliation of grossness and delicacy at table finds a parallel in a prose style both robust and exquisite. It is the lack of a pattern that damages Manso’s collocation of ana (Johnson’s term), and it is the lack of time to reconsider that damages certain dicta—for example, Alfred Kazan’s observation to the effect that Jews divorce more because they are richer. The only contributor who emerges as wholly serious, compassionate, intelligent, and objectively critical is Diana Trilling.

If Mailer is primarily a writer, which he is, we need more about his writing than can be conveyed by snippets from reviews. The reviews themselves are nearly all from American periodicals, and Mailer’s world status deserved a sampling from the world’s critics, especially those British ones who were quicker to see his distinction than many of their American counterparts. There is often a sense, not only in respect of literary matters, that the reader is expected to come to the book equipped with the knowledge that it is the duty of a biographer to provide, and that he should be satisfied with the kind of commentaryappropriate to journalism or gossip. It is rather like prolonged and rambling dinner-table conversation with no dinner. The primary task of a biographer is to provide a biographical narrative.

I am especially annoyed with this bound file of minutes on Mailer because the possibility of creating a useful biographico-critical work on the man (a kind of expansion of the brief book that has already appeared in the Modern Masters series) seems thus foreclosed. When time, money, and talent are spent on a bad film of a great book, the satisfactory film is indefinitely delayed. And the nature of this pseudo-biography is such that Manso has effectively preempted the materials from which another biographer, meaning a genuine one, could hack out, with the appropriate literary pain, a work worthy of its subject. Let us have no nonsense about this. Biography is art and can be great art. But the bogus claims of taped “immediacy” may well in this electronic age prevail over the approach that was good enough for Boswell and, for that matter, Ellmann.

SIGHING, ! ADMIT that some sort of “portrait” comes out of this rough, synoptic gallimaufry. It is an image of an American intellectual (if a term not really applicable to the Anglo-American culture can be used here) trying to cope with life in the United States. This meant jumping the barrier that excluded poor Brooklyn Jewry, into the ASP fastness of Harvard (Anglo-Saxons are necessarily W), where lack of Latin made him a kind of centaur—hoofs in engineering, snout in English. He ought to know Latin: Juvenal and Sallust might show him something of himself. He entered the war with the intention of writing a novel about it, a good motive for serving (though not perhaps as good as wanting to save the free world). He was in Hollywood young and, as Shelley Winters informs us, too sensible to be bemused or corrupted. Radical politics was then mandatory for one who had, with Barbary Shore, written a very interesting radical novel. The urge to be a kind of prophet—Lawrence’s near undoing—explains Mailer’s ventures into journalism and his hectoring, with jokes in doubtful taste, from various platforms. Add serial polygamy, multiple alimony, depression, pot, booze, scandal, and you have a fairly standard contemporary’ American literary life.

America is to Mailer, as his French friend and translator Jean Malaquais says, “cancerous” but the one mistress “to whom he remains faithful in a perennial love-hate affair.” In his recent Tough Guys Don’t Dance we have the telling phrase “I wanted my country on my cock,” which may be taken as meaning a desire to love or rape his country, probably anally, into a sense of its destiny. I think that he, like many of his generation, was traumatized by Kennedy’s assassination into a profound sense less of horror that an “existential” outrage should either confirm or deny democracy than of deep grief that the kind of renascence prefigured in The Presidential Papers was now forever denied realization. Why he spent a decade on a novel about ancient Egypt has never been made fully clear (it was one of the jobs of this biography to give us at least the intimation of a reason), but the novel is surely partially about the problems of American rule, the importance of the irrational in American culture, and why great empires rise and fall. What is still awaited from him is a work of Tolstoyan weight, as opposed to mere Tolstoyan wordiness. Diana Trilling says:

I once asked him when he was going to write his War and Peace. He wasn’t thrown by the question nor by its elaboration: I went on to say that his War and Peace should be a novel of middle-class life, firmly rooted in established society, but that where Tolstoy had made his excursions into history, Mailer should make his excursions into dissidence.

Which, of course, is what I’d really like him to do, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be a novel; it could be another Armies of the Night, or even autobiography. When you can see that somebody has the capacity to do something so uncommonly good, then you have to hold on to that and say, “Oh, boy, please, please come through.”

As for what he’s actually doing, John Leonard, a very honest and perceptive critic, says the right things:

I can imagine everything Bellow and Updike and other writers are telling me, but what’s so characteristic of Mailer is that he’s finding something, telling me something I couldn’t have imagined beforehand. Which is why 1 trust him. He continues to astonish.

The capacity to astonish is precisely what is not featured in this loose, multivocal survey. What we chiefly have is the capacity to hit the headlines, shock with routine modes of polemical violence, and behave like any mixed-up American in an age that is hard enough, God knows, to understand but perhaps willing to yield its secrets to a sensibility like Mailer’s. It was an unworthy thing to unleash so much mere gossip on that sensibility.