Victim & Analyst

Cannibals and Christians.
by Norman Mailer.
Dial. 420 pp. $5.95.

More eloquently than Burroughs or Genet, with perhaps something even of the jubilant nausea of Kierkegaard, Norman Mailer has advertised himself over the years as a man of lacerated ego and exhausted sensibilities. His confessions have all sounded one dismal note: self-betrayal and public betrayal and their fatal consequences to the will, the continued ability to function. His sickness unto death has provided rhetoric for a whole new hypochondria of psychic ills: the suffocation of brain tissue by seconal and benzedrine; the repression of lusts that can send cancer cells running wild in the blood; the odor of defeat in the stool after the ingestion of food without soul. The cost of his compensatory belligerence shows, he has told us, in the waste and wreck of his novelistic career, in the hostility of publishers and critics, in his failure to make it big in that Hollywood of stars which stands in his mind for the higher literary life of America. Over and over again we have heard him propound his sadly exogenetic philosophy of courage founded on the approval and support of others, and watched him agonize over the refusal of the public to provide him with a sufficient charge of admiration to invigorate his drive toward the major reputation he feels to be rightfully his.

Yet, through it all, one has slowly come to recognize that while there obviously has been nothing un-genuine about the quality of Mailer's anguish, there has been something very naive indeed about the conception of failure on which it is based. For the truth is now clear that nothing about Mailer has succeeded so brilliantly as his sense of failure, that his gifts are never more vigorously on display than when he is trying to describe the pain of it and the cost of it, and that he is today the most intact, confident, and intellectually robust writer of vanquished self-esteem and foiled creative prospects there ever was or conceivably could be.

The reason, of course, is that it is precisely his sense of failure which has kept Mailer alive as a writer and prevented him from relaxing into a publicly acceptable image of himself or settling, as some of his contemporaries have, for a single proven style of engagement. Since he has never been secure in any of his several images or styles, he has had constantly to improvise new ones, test them for viability, and then fight for them, even contrive to make them so outrageous that he will be obliged to fight for them. For Mailer is still very much engaged in making himself, and engaged to the point where his self continues to surprise him, hence to surprise us. And one of the essential steps in the process is submission to the test of opposition from others. As Leo Bersani suggested recently in Partisan Review, Mailer's sense of himself may very well depend on his ability to provoke, and withstand, attack—or, to repeat a phrase I have used elsewhere, Mailer has made his private paranoid revision of Descartes: I offend; therefore, I am Certainly, it is no accident that he still feels something very close to idolatry for Hemingway, for the appeal of Hemingway stems from just that part of his nature which has caused him to become Mailer's instructor in the jungle warfare of modern existence. By a temperamental necessity, which Mailer also recognizes as his own, Hemingway could find his courage only by putting his life constantly on the line, so that each of his personal risks, each of his vicarious or surrogate dyings, enabled him for a little while to repossess his life and his creativity free from the fear of death. This same effort, carried out in the arena of controversy rather than big game hunting and war, has helped to keep Mailer in a constant state of hyperesthesia. He has retained the reflexes and taut alertness of the besieged rifleman. He has been forced to stay preternaturally awake in order to stay alive and prove his life, and he has had no choice but to rely absolutely on his own instincts and perceptions because they alone are trustworthy in a world in which every road and ditch is very probably mined. Thus, his compulsions and stances are naturally and necessarily existential. They are the provisional, dialectical, and finally apocalyptic modes of his engagement of the enemy, and they have held him in a condition of perpetual writhing nakedness before experience, so that there has never been the remotest question of his succumbing to that fatness of soul of which he accuses William Styron, or dying into an identity like the older Hemingway.

What strikes one in reading Mailer's earlier non-fiction, and strikes one with even greater force in this new collection, is precisely this quality of exacerbated, nerve-end responsiveness to every shade and color of experience. To read Mailer in almost any of these essays is to learn all over again, if one has ever learned, just what it is like to possess the whole courage of one's perceptions, and to be willing to offer them as the final proof and reference of judgment. D. H. Lawrence had something of this quality, and so did the other Lawrence. Thomas Wolfe had it in unrefined form. Swift had it to excess, and in the end it broke his mind. But perhaps because they were spared the psychic dislocations that have been peculiar to our world, these men lacked in one degree or another what Mailer possesses in abundance: a sophisticated and radically skeptical intelligence, a tough sanity of self-valuation which is an adjunct of his creative vision rather than the repressive schoolmaster of it. For Mailer's gift is not merely his ability to feel or his capacity to think, but his capacity to feel his ideas as if they were passions, and to endow his passions with some of the practical force and symmetry of ideas.

This is a powerfully offensive gift, and Mailer has sought and taken much punishment for it, especially from those who are afraid to learn who they are and how very much they are not alive. But he carries his scars well, or perhaps it would be truer to say that they carry him well, for as souvenirs of enemy action they support and reaffirm his identity. He is older now in this new book than he was in Advertisements for Myself, but he is triumphantly no wiser, only more in command of the polemics of his wisdom. Here as always we find him patrolling the territories of maximum risk, gambling his nerve on a crotchet or a quick round of insults, shooting it out with the bad good guys, sounding the old blast of defiance and doom, and moving without sourness into the world, his senses as charged as on any day set aside for his execution.

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There are, to be sure, certain changes. Mailer is less preoccupied now with his favorite obsession, less interested in campaigning against himself. In fact, one of the disappointments of the new book is just that confessional materials are so largely missing from it. Hence, the power of his critical language to register every nuance of his outrage, that power which for the first time became visible as a style in Advertisements, is now seen under an entirely different aspect. Where in the earlier book the language had behind it the anguish of a decade of self-loathing for talents wasted and misused, now Mailer's hatred has been directed away from himself and outward upon the country and the times as a whole. Cannibals and Christians is, above all, his angry journal of the plague years. All the losses and short fuses of this black era burn within it: our ugly rape of the natural and architectural landscape; the poisoning of our food with chemical additives; the sickness of the sexual scene; the violence behind the eyes of Barry Goldwater fans; the moral erosion caused by the assassination of John Kennedy; Lyndon Johnson's sinister motives for supporting the civil rights movement (to divert public attention from the war in Vietnam); and his sinister motives for escalating the war in Vietnam (to divert public attention from the civil rights movement). The essay, for example, on the Republican Convention of 1964 is brilliant to the point of incandescence, not only in its style and rhetorical energy, but in its witchlike sensitivity to the moods and weathers of the candidates, and the relation of these moods to the neurotic forces at work within the collective unconscious of the people.

It might even be argued that Mailer's move away from the novel—and I consider An American Dream, since it is more metaphysics than fiction, to be an illustration rather than an interruption of that move—is at least partly the result of the very intensity of his response to the violence done to the imagination by the events of the last ten years. It is possible that he has found the contemporary scene too exhilarating and too preposterous to be imaginatively rendered, and that it comprises experiences which are so very real to him, and at the same time so shockingly nightmarish, that to write about them in fiction would be to cancel out their immediacy and relegate them to the safe remove of illusion. For their whole point and horror is that they are happening here and now and not in any novel. Weird as it may seem, Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson actually exist in our world and could not conceivably be imagined as any more unbelievable than they are. Then, too, it becomes obvious when one considers the drift of Mailer's interests in recent years that his conception of his role has radically altered, and that he is no longer content with the relatively passive position of novelist, but has ambitions to take a more active and influential part in the public life of his time. It would appear that he has shifted from a desire to revolutionize consciousness in the novel to a desire to revolutionize opinion in the areas of politics, sexual morals, and international affairs.

But of course his move away from the novel is open to a very different interpretation. There are sure to be readers of Cannibals and Christians who will consider its angry polemics, irreverent speeches, obscene poems, and endless interviews to be simply another collection of rubble from a bombed-out talent. But it is becoming more and more evident as the years go by and the rubble continues to pile up that Mailer's talent is above all for being bombed out, and for registering in a manner nearly miraculous the impact of psychic and public catastrophe on a man who is at once its most eager victim and its most articulate analyst.