The Artist as Performer

Norman Mailer.
by Richard Poirier.
Viking. 176 pp. $4.95.

St. George and the Godfather.
by Norman Mailer.
Signet-New American Library. 229 pp. $1.50.

Richard Poirier's new book on Norman Mailer is one in a series devoted to “modern masters . . . who have changed or are changing the life and thought of our age.” Shrewd, trendy, and confused by turns, Poirier's monograph may be said to complete a ritual of canonization remarkable at once for its premature swiftness and for its failure to distinguish between Mailer's increasingly grandiose promises and his actual performances.

Mailer's career has not, of course, described an unbroken decline. The Armies of the Night (1967) represented a genuine if partial recovery, and his latest book, though it is narrated by the now overly-familiar Aquarius and journeys through the usual Mailer territory, is a decisive improvement over recent disasters like King of the Hill (1971), a short but still tedious mixture of machismo and apocalypse concerning “the fight of the century” between Ali and Frazier, and The Prisoner of Sex (also 1971), an act of empty self-importance probably without rival in recent American letters. But it is surely small praise to say that the Mailer of the past six or eight years has not always touched the nadir of his gifts; and it remains true, I think, that nothing he has done in the past decade comes near to the seriousness and resonance of his flawed but brilliantly promising earlier work—the first three novels and especially the long stories, “The Man Who Studied Yoga” and “The Time of Her Time,” both included in Advertisements for Myself (1959).

Poirier urges an alternative and far more optimistic valuation of Mailer's later work, though even he concedes that Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), Of a Fire on the Moon (1970), and The Prisoner of Sex give “evidence that Mailer's imagination . . . is becoming dangerously rigid and circumscribed, particularly when he indulges in rather simple and fashionable concerns about the future of the imagination in an age of science and technology.” Such candor is disarming, and suggests that this loyal advocate has learned much from his subject about the utility of anticipating the objections of one's readers. But as with Mailer's more cunning gestures in this vein, Poirier's explicit admission that Mailer can be tiresome and reductive scarcely disposes of the problem. His book, in fact, is hopelessly divided against itself, most persuasive in those passages that admit to impatience and disappointment with Mailer's endless strident posturing about technology and cancer and apocalyptic sex.

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Poirier's own sense of himself as a cultural radical seems to me to explain his excessive regard for Mailer and his willingness to minimize what he knows to be large weaknesses in him. The title essay in Poirier's previous book, The Performing Self (1971), offers a theory of literature as performance that places decisive weight on individually brilliant moments or passages and that proclaims its antipathy to the New Critical standard of coherence. In the broadest sense this essay—along with others in the book and especially the revealingly titled “The War Against the Young”—has political intentions. It wishes to liberate literary study from what it sees as the arid tyranny of establishment formalism and to rekindle our appreciation for those energies in literary texts that are often released fitfully, in local instances, rather than in the total structure of the work.

In the new book this honorable if not entirely persuasive argument is elaborated to an extreme, and Poirier's shrewd but also limiting focus on Mailer's richly metaphoric and extended sentences encourages him to disregard or to minimize the larger context that encloses them. In his eagerness to value Mailer the performer Poirier is even willing to relieve him of the obligation to say anything at all: “To treat [Mailer's] writing as a series of opinions on subjects makes no more sense than to treat one of Sugar Ray Robinson's dazzling performances as if it were adequately summarized in a KO.” Or, again: Mailer's “language is, then, not a reference to experience. To read Mailer as if the language were a series of referential signs is wholly to misread him. . .”. To dissociate an author's style so entirely from its content is surely to achieve an odd freedom from the alleged narrowness of the New Criticism.

Poirier is not consistent, however. And the obverse of this excessive formalism is his insistence on Mailer's relevance. For Poirier, Mailer is “easily the equal . . . of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, potentially of Faulkner” because the “pace and movement of his writing” embody “the central incoherence of the way we live now.” Because he shares, finally, in Mailer's apocalyptic and (for me) radically simplifying view of American life, Poirier allows himself to grant visionary substance to what in Mailer is actually mere assertion, easy rhetoric; he doesn't require his author to supply the concrete, real evidence for his grandiose maunderings about our malaise.

Poirier's confidence in Mailer's vision of our psychic impoverishment is clarified—and exposed—in this revealing sentence: “The reason why most thoughtful and literate young readers prefer Mailer to, say, Updike or Roth or Malamud is that his timing is synchronized to theirs, while the others move to an older beat.” Leaving aside the question of how Poirier has identified these “thoughtful” youths and of how objectively he has inquired into their literary preferences, we must surely doubt the usefulness of such a standard of judgment. The young at all times, and especially in the present moment, have an insatiable hunger for apocalypse and a rich but also debilitating impatience with the complexities of the quotidian and the real. The passion of America's young for such moral simpletons as Vonnegut or Brautigan or, even, Kahlil Gibran—the Pablum Romantics, we might call them—scarcely inspires confidence in their judgment.

If Mailer has won over our youth, thoughtful or otherwise, it is not necessarily cause for rejoicing. For the great strength and value of the earlier Mailer—vestiges of whom survive in The Armies of the Night, though rarely later—had been to awaken even in his older readers an authentic sense of spiritual endangerment but also at the same time to complicate and frustrate it: so that he was then able to dramatize not only the spirit's yearning for transcendence, its ache and discontent, but also the self-deceptions and simplifications such yearning encourages. This Mailer, who has absented himself from the later work but whom I would wish still to honor, was the enemy of psychological or political simplicity. He tried, as he said in an interview reprinted in Advertisements for Myself, to penetrate “into the nuance of things.” If he succeeded imperfectly, still he gave promise then—most impressively in the tangled political agonies of Barbary Shore, in the moral complexity and generosity of “The Man Who Studied Yoga,” and in the encompassing ironic candor of “The Time of Her Time”—that he might become almost as rare and precious to us as he imagined himself to be.

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St. George and the Godfather, despite some genuinely fine moments and a restraint surprising in the author of The Prisoner of Sex, illustrates the sorry distance Mailer has traveled in recent years and demonstrates how rigid and reductive, how hostile to nuance, he has become. Early in the book, during an account of the debate on the floor of the Democratic convention concerning various radical platform planks, Mailer writes:

[A] plank supporting the rights of homosexuals was political suicide. For it had the power to mobilize votes against you. Out in America, far beyond Miami, lived a damp dull wad of the electorate. They often did not vote. It took no ordinary issue to fire their seat. But the right to condemn homosexuality (and abortion! and welfare!) was a piece of their cherished rights: woe to the politician who would deprive them of rights. Homosexuality had to go.

In its context this passage might appear to describe not Mailer's own attitudes but those of the political “realists” who forced defeat of the radical platform. But it becomes clear as the book continues and as references to “the wad” recur with the persistence of a leitmotif, that Mailer himself shares this estimate of the ordinary American. Mailer's near total contempt for this undifferentiated mass of people, his reluctance even to conceive that they belong to the human species, is a direct consequence of his need to reduce political and moral questions to the polarities upon which nearly everything he has written in the past decade fundamentally depends. If there is irony or complexity or even a whisper of self-judgment in Mailer's account of “the wad,” it would take someone even more loyal than Richard Poirier to discover it. The Young Voters for the President, Mailer informs us,

are not the most attractive faces he has seen. Hundreds of young faces and not one is a beauty, neither by natural good looks nor by the fine-tuning of features through vitality or wit—the children in this crowd remind him of other crowds he knows well, and does not like. Of course!—they are the faces of the wad!—all those blobs of faces who line up outside TV theaters and wait for hours that they may get in to see the show live, yes, the show that will be more alive than their faces. The genius of Nixon! Has he selected this gaggle of mildly stunted minds from photograph files?

The old irony that readers of satire never imagine they are its object has special application in Mailer's case. For in the two passages just quoted—they can serve as an emblem for all the large, easy divisions to which he yields in his later works—Mailer's polarizing habit creates for his readers a comfortable, morally superior perspective from which to look down upon the antics of this blobbish wad. There is nothing here to unsettle those who buy books or those who review them or those who award literary prizes. On the contrary, there is every confirmation of their sense of literate and politically enlightened superiority. There is dread, there is madness loose in the land, Mailer keeps telling his enlightened coterie. It is in the wad, in their ugly suburbs; its odor comes off those Xerox copiers, that fascist architecture, those plastic toys and utensils. It is out there, external to you and me; we are no part of its cause, indeed we are its enemy, heroes of the resistance, and so can welcome, even exult in that Armageddon whose arrival Mailer has been doggedly predicting for so many years.

“At its best,” Poirier says, Mailer's “writing exemplifies the kind of effort that can and needs to be made by anyone who proposes to make more than submissive sense of the world as it now is.” Mailer, in other words, must be placed in the Romantic tradition, and particularly in the line of major American Romantics that includes Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, and Faulkner, all of whom are invoked explicitly in Poirier's book. There is no doubt that Mailer himself has insisted on such a placement of his work, but as Lawrence said, we are obliged to trust the tale not the teller. The authentic Romantic earns his vision by looking hard at the real world, by acknowledging that world's resistance to the imagination of crisis and transformation. The visionary assertions of such a writer have force and power only insofar as we are persuaded that they have been wrested from a genuine confrontation with the toughness, the recalcitrance, of the ordinary universe. By this essential standard the later Mailer's Romanticism is a feeble counterfeit. For how can he be said to offer meaningful resistance to a world he so resolutely refuses even to see?

The place and time that Mailer affects to transcend has no existence outside the apocalyptic fevers of his own brain. At their urging he will transform virtually an entire population into “the wad” or, alternatively, he will disclose that existential dread seethes within our astronauts. Sometimes, as in the latest book, a single passage will join these related impulses, will show us Mailer driven first to deny the visible nuance of things and then, in a frenzy of contempt and simplification, to labor for the discovery of another, more apocalyptic complexity:

Yes, the loser [Nixon] stands talking to all of his gang of adolescent losers who are so proud to have chosen stupidity as a way of life, and they are going to win. The smog of the wad lies over the heart. Freud is obsolete. To explain Nixon, nothing less than a new theory of personality can now suffice.

That Mailer himself knows, or suspects, the dangers of his taste for such vicious hyperbole merely adds to the bleakness of his situation. St. George and the God-father, for example, contains the usual (minimal) gestures of self-deflation, but there is little evidence that they have restrained Mailer's compulsion to polarize and simplify. Poirier sees such gestures as proof that Mailer is undergoing “a healthy negative assessment” of himself, but this notion seems more generous than reasonable. Over how many years, in how many volumes, will Mailer wryly wonder, as in The Prisoner of Sex, “if his vision, for lack of some cultivation in the middle, was not too compulsively ready for the apocalyptic”? Increasingly these and similar “confessions” look to be cunning acts of self-deception, stratagems by which Mailer convinces himself to persist in and even to escalate his foolishness. Or perhaps they are faint callings from the vestigial artist and truth-teller buried in him, signals whose message is by now desperate: help me, please! demand more of me, stop rewarding what is slovenly and careless and poor in my talent. We as readers do no honor to what is genuine in Mailer by blinding ourselves to the deepening crisis into which his work has fallen.