Spectator's Journal/Norman Mailer Turns Victim

...In the past Mailer's merest efforts, even when they were self-proclaimedly vehicles for making money, had met with a respect they hardly deserved...

...In partial reference to Egyptian fascination with the dung beetle, Mailer's Menenhetet is also known as Meni-Ka, the second part of which stands for "feces...

...Mailer's aspirations were those of the classic modern works that, starting with The Waste Land, attempted to probe ancient mysteries through Frazerian and other modern paradigms...

...The novel is set in the Egyptian Pharaoh's court and its environs...

...Eliot Fremont Smith in the Village Voice likened the sex to National Geographic's sanctioned voyeurism, while the reviewer for New York magazine, picking up a quip once made by Gore Vidal, offered H.P...

...As for the ideas relating excrement and sex, these derived from D.H...

...They have narrow hallways...

...On the other hand, if Ancient Evenings was a failure it remained a serious work...

...Frazer's The Golden Bough...

...Then, in July 1981, it became known that Abbott had killed again, savagely stabbing to death a young actor and part-time waiter in Greenwich Village...

...Soon afterward, as chance would have it, a New York City judge, fearing for the safety of a slightly built, 36-year-old first-time drug offender, ordered that he be held separately from other prisoners in protective confinement...

...First it was reported that Mailer had testified in court to the character of yet another friend-his handyman and joint house owner, Richard Stratton- who was accused of conspiracy to smuggle marijuana and hashish...

...As Ancient Evenings appeared, two newspaper stories recalled the connections between Mailer's ideas and reality...

...In the face of such reminders as these of Mailer's ideas, it was no wonder that his new novel was treated as something less than a purely literary document...

...But this time it had been challenged by an example-that of Jack Abbott- that not even the fuzziest of literary intelligences could any longer ignore...

...Perhaps it's stunted and philistine of me," wrote James Wolcott in Harper's, "but I just don't have any great fascination for the subtleties of shit...

...The incestuous and anal passions of the gods are enacted by their human counterparts for whom these profane matters become the objects of religious and metaphysical speculation...

...But something besides this revolt had taken place since Mailer's last major work: namely, his involvement in the Jack Abbott affair...

...For some his self-justification proved to be more shocking than the murder itself...

...Yet most newspaper and magazine reviews did not hesitate to reject the book out of hand...

...Now his most considered meditation inspired extravaganzas of derision...

...Its invented, portentous language of no time or place...

...When asked for an example of violence worse than Jack Abbott's murder of an innocent young man, Mailer suggested to Dick Cavett, the talk show host: Take these very dull housing projects...

...For the Boston Globe the whole undertaking was so much "rubbish," while for Time magazine it was of "utterly invisible significance...

...Lawrence's Women in Love and Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death...

...Pharaohs commemorated themselves in golden icons of this tiny creature that rolls up its freshly laid egg in a ball of dung...

...When the Corrections Department ignored the judge's order, the man was "raped by four or five men in a receiving cell...

...The reviewers were vastly amused to report that Ancient Evenings thereby came down to being a treatise on ca ca...

...Now, confronted by an outraged press after the killing, Mailer would not admit that he had been wrong to help set the murderer loose...

...After all, over the years no one had done more than he to break down the separation between literature and life...

...Yet one could not help feeling that if these developments had to occur, it was fitting that Mailer should be their casualty...

...They're built very cheaply...

...that's going to increase it...

...For once public outrage was matched by outrage in the literary community-and much of the resentment quite properly came to rest on Mailer...

...its ponderous, decorously salacious renderings of unusual sex acts...

...His hero's life spans some hundred and eighty years and permits a view of every level of Egyptian society...

...Stratton was found guilty and sentenced to 15 years in jail...

...This new attitude, whose source evidently lay outside literature, was in some ways more interesting than Ancient Evenings itself...

...Abbott was the convicted murderer whose release from prison Mailer had helped to secure...

...Lovecraft as a model...

...That reviewers felt free to denounce the subject matter in just these terms, and with self-confessed philistinism at that, was a measure of the present revolt against high modernism...

...Previously not even Mailer's own stabbing of his wife had fully brought home the possible consequences of his ideas about violence...

...Most shocking of all, he offered a heroic presentation of the male dominance by anal rape that had been Jack Abbott's prison legacy...

...Benjamin De Mott in the New York Times Book Review found the characters "ludicrous blends of Mel Brooks and the Marquis de Sade...

...The book undeniably lays itself open to parody...

...In Ancient Evenings Mailer made the mistake of continuing, albeit in a high-toned manner, his celebration of violence and brutality...

...and above all Mailer's projection onto his characters of his favorite macho conceits are transparent failures...

...He was, he explained, working for Mailer: "doing research on hieroglyphics for his new novel on Egypt...

...Over the course of his long career, even Mailer's slightest maunderings had been received with respect, not to say solemnity...

...And later in a television interview he maintained that violence by an individual is as nothing when compared to the organized violence of the State...

...This had to be evident even to those reviewers who failed to note that its model for approaching the ancient world was Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers...

...The literary world began by adopting Abbott, greeting him at parties and praising his book of scattered prison impressions...

...The mythology, moreover, appears to have come straight from J.G...

...SPECTATOR'S J0URNAL NORMAN MAILER TURNS VICTIM by Peter Shaw Norman Mailer's 700-page Egyptian epic, Ancient Evenings, is a work so heavy and convoluted that one would have expected a reluctance among reviewers to assess it fully on short notice...

...The prelude to Menenhetet's story, which concentrates on the reign of Rameses II (the Ozymandias of Shelley's poem), describes the marriage of the gods Isis and Osiris, who were brother and sister, and the three-day, hand-to-hand battle between their son Horus and his uncle Set...

...Now his most serious and ambitious work, written over a ten-year period (during which he published three other books), was greeted with an unprecedented, easy condescension...

...Apparently convinced that illusion and reality were indistinguishable for the ancients, Mailer attempts to capture the period's mystical spirit...

...As Frazer himself wrote in the section of his book on the mutilated and reborn god Osiris: "It would be to misjudge ancient religion to denounce as lewd and profligate the emblems and ceremonies which the Egyptians employed for the purpose of giving effect to [their] conception of the divine power...

...Of course this was a regrettable outcome, for it demonstrated not only how far modernism had declined in prestige, but also a widespread impatience with the modulations and interventions of literary discourse itself...

...Not only is the State more violent than the individual, in other words, but it bears the responsibility for violent acts committed by the individual...

...Mailer's well-known ex-cremental ponderings are here based on the Egyptian use of the scarab or dung beetle, which was the hieroglyph for creation...

...The theory was not new...

...They-if you have a lively kid who's 14 or 15 or 16, and you have him waiting for an elevator on the 12th floor for 12 minutes . . . that's not going to reduce his violence...

...Ancient Evenings was compared to the Hollywood epics of Cecil B. De Mille and others (Wolcott mentioned Land of the Pharaohs...

...I'm willing to gamble with a portion of society to save this man's talent," Mailer declared...

...Menenhetet I, who narrates much of the book, has risen from peasant origins to the army, the aristocracy, and the inner world of the Pharaoh's court...

...He has also experienced the mysteries of death and rebirth...