Prophets and Profits
Will, George
"Prophets and Profits" despite the mining of North Vietnamese ports--may well indicate great preoccupation with the Chinese threat. The Middle East relates to the problem of China in terms of what might be...
...If it is not the most important, that is because its intended audience--the western public--is preoccupied with trivialities like Mailer...
...Mailer, who considers himself a radical and a threat to the established order, is, in fact, like most food for base appetites, an enervating opiate...
...At present Soviet naval vessels showing the flag in the Indian Ocean travel from Vladivostok...
...That would get even for the grain deal...
...Mailer, having long ago abandoned literature, hawks his wounded ego on talk shows while promoting a book about a tawdry Hollywood episode that should be trivial in the nation's memory but, alas, is not...
...Norman Mailer works hard to be the most publicized American writer...
...The Middle East, by providing comparatively quick naval access to East Africa and South Asia, is also a valuable geopolitical link in the encirclement of China...
...George Will The Alternative January 1974 11...
...He says T/me magazine's cover made him look ridiculous...
...Mailer is not bashful...
...His writings, now a degeaerate form of "journalism," celebrate the tribulations of the Author as Drunk, the Author Levitating the Pentagon, the Author Solving the "Murder" of the Movie Star...
...9 The Washington Post, Sept...
...Although Solzhenitsyn's fiction bears the mark of his hideous experiences with a sadistic regime, he is almost bashful about it...
...Mailer hangs around prize fighters, brawls on the Dick Cavett Show with Gore Vidal, and fancies himself very brave...
...He is fighting a deadly serious war of nerves and gestures against Soviet tyranny...
...One of Solzhenitsyn's most recent publications is his Nobel Prize acceptance lecture...
...For Mailer, life is real, life is earnest...
...Chinese naval vessels have cruised the Indian Ocean, and Peking is helping Tanzania construct a naval base...
...The Soviet Union and China are competing for influence in most of black Africa...
...Mailer's first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), was superb...
...Mailer, his dignity invested in Marilyn, is simply irrelevant to the course of American society...
...Solzhenitsyn's cry is: "Woe to the nation whose literature is cut off by the interposition of power...
...His running battle against the tyrants is an example of a bravery that can barely be understood by those of us who were born free...
...In The First Circle Solzhenitsyn says: '~Aren't writers supposed to teach, to guide...
...Solzhenitsyn says literature is "the living memory of a nation...
...It is in a nip-and-tuck battle with Jacqueline Susann's latest epic for the reading public's dollars...
...But occasionally there is so conspicuous an incongruity in the rewards of life, so random an apportionment of pleasure and pain, that, try as one might, one cannot wrench the mind's eye away from it...
...But Solzhenitsyn would not leave Russia...
...Alexander Solzhenitsyn is the greatest living Russian writer, a giant in the tradition of Tolstoy...
...To give the devils their due, the Soviet tyrants, their regime based on the denial of human dignity, are correct in considering Solzhenitsyn subversive...
...Mailer's latest work is a sleazy, slovenly, dishonest exploitation of Marilyn Monroe...
...There is a constant whine in Mailer's omnipresent voice...
...His art is rooted in a palpable love of country, a contagious, inspiring love that causes fear and trembling in the regime now in its fiftysixth year of tormenting that country...
...But Solzhenitsyn, devoid of self-pity, has prison to worry about, not Time magazine covers...
...So he conjured up some lurid lies about a dead Kennedy and a CIA plot to "explain" the Monroe suicide as murder...
...It might be nice if, as a kind of cultural exchange, we could trade Mailer and a utility infielder to the Soviets for Solzhenitsyn...
...He reminds us that others who suffered more cannot testify...
...He is a moneygrubber in the Bobby Riggs tradition, but he lacks Riggs' cheerful self-knowledge...
...Solzhenitsyn would not leave Russia because he is committed to using his art to defend the dignity of the Russian people...
...The 1970s have seen the ideological overtones of the conflict deemphasized in favor of a more explicit concern with the traditional political and economic interests which cause disputes among states...
...He raises no awkward questions, offers no troubling visions...
...Diplomatic ties have been maintained with Indonesia, thus fostering good relations with a Chinese rival...
...That's why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones...
...Consider the sickening contrast between the situation of two writers much in the news these days...
...Yes, but Mailer, America's primitive, is doing his best in that direction...
...The Soviets have acquired a series of repair facilities and anchorages stretching from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, India, Ceylon, and Singapore...
...10, 1973...
...He has raised hairy-chestedness to a metaphysical principle: I sweat, therefore I am...
...Melvin Gurtov, a Rand CorporaProphets and Profits Life is unfair...
...I expect some American regime will give him the Medal of Freedom...
...The shift in focus is reflected in an increasing competition for influence among non-Communist governments...
...Mailer, who lusts to be the most public of writers, has no pubIic-spirited purpose, only a frivolous public persona...
...And woe to the nation whose literary lions, strutting and grubbing on television, are nothing more than servants of commercial publishing powers...
...In his Nobel lecture Solzhenitsyn says: "Archaeologists have uncovered no early stages of human existence so primitive that they were without art...
...Saints suffer and sinhers prosper and there is no use brooding about it...
...Mailer's book will make him a million dollars...
...As Mailer said in justifying Marilyn, he needs the money...
...He says the critics should stop using the word "plagiarism" to describe his borrowings from other books about Monroe...
...Solzhenitsyn has been driven against his inclination to have a "public" life beyond his art...
...Isn't it ironic...
...Mailer is a one-shot wonder, like Bob Belinski, the miscreant who pitched a no-hitter in his first game and made the rest of his career a study in self-degradation, substituting bufoonery for achievement...
...Other than that, however, he has not produced a scrap of higher caliber fiction in a quarter of a century...
...The Middle East relates to the problem of China in terms of what might be designated "containment...
...And for a country to have a great writer--don't be shocked, I'll whisper it---is like having another government...
...Everything Solzhenitsyn writes enriches our civilization...
...There is no whine from Solzhenitsyn, risen from the living dead of Soviet prisons: "To reach this chair from which the Nobel lecture is d e l i v e r e d . . . I have mounted not three or four temporary steps, but hundreds or even thousands, fixed, steep, covered with ice, out of the dark and cold where I was fated to survive, but others, perhaps more talented, stronger than I, perished...
...A Treaty of Peace, Friendship, and Cooperation has been concluded with India...
...It is among the most eloquent political statements of the century...
...Article IX of the Treaty stipulates that in the event of "an attack or threat thereof" there will take place "mutual consultations in order to remove such threat and to take appropriate effective measures to ensure peace and the security of their countries...
...Brezhnev, in June 1968, proposed the creation of a Sovipet-backed Asian security system...
...Solzhenitsyn, who knows there is an inherent tension between the private nature of creation and the demands of any public role, is compelled against his artist's nature to play a public role of breathtaking grandeur...
...The Soviets compete with China for influence among the "progressive forces" in the Middle East and elsewhere...
...Mailer would not leave the United States because he is passionately--and, to give the devil his due, candidly-committed to using his skills, such as they are, to line his pockets...
...Alimony laws make the costs of serial monogamy steep, so Mailer wrote Marilyn with an eye cocked on his former wives' lawyers...
...American officials traveling in the Middle Kingdom have reported a pronounced Chinese fear of Soviet encirclement (Evans and Novak, Los Angeles Times, August 4, 1972...
Vol. 7 • January 1974 • No. 4
