Mailer: His Life and Times
Manso, Peter
MAILER: HIS LIFE AND TIMES Peter Manso/Simon and Schuster/$ 19.95 Andy Stark I In her New York review of Mailer: His Life and Times, a new "oral biography" by Peter Manso, Rhoda Koenig remarks...
...One finds this affliction, if it is an affliction, all too often in Mailer's prose about sex...
...I know all that∔I've been through it...
...one violates private property, one enters into a new relation with the police and introduces a dangerous element into one's life...
...it tones up the whole person in terms of pain and danger and elicits that ability to overcome whatever resistance there is in yourself to writing" well and truly...
...I It is hard, though, not to note one imbalance between life and art in Norman Mailer...
...As with Kundera's "no," so with the Bible's "know...
...is not likely to prove therapeutic, for the victim is not an immediate equal...
...he uses that one word to carry an unmistakable understanding of sexual relations...
...the thumb-wrestling (or headbutting) champ in the room, but these things always seemed to me to be a type of veneer∔poses, guises...
...Yet over its six-hundred-odd pages, the book under review (which is a compendium of personal reminiscences about Mailer) sounds a recurring, disturbing demur-ral about both the wisdom and the success of Mailer's voyage: Maybe he wanted to be a great prizefighter...
...Arguably, then, Norman Mailer's life has been inauthentic as experience, and consequently his fiction has been inAndy Stark is policy advisor to the Prime Minister of Canada...
...I would like to propose a neoclassical unity of time for fiction analogous to the classical unity of time for drama: A description of, or an allusion to, a given act should not take longer to read than the act takes to perform...
...To Philip Roth, on the marriageability of sexuality and Jewish heroes: Anybody could, in 1969, have created an erstwhile yeshiva-bokher who ploughs through shiksa after shiksa...
...On violence: While Alfred Kazin has been busy grieving over the postwar migration of the Jew from the cowardices and courages of the victim, to the cowardices and courages of the violent, Norman Mailer has been end-running him...
...E/veryone has his own agenda in these discussions, of course, which accounts for the contradictions in criticism...
...It has to do with time: I had a friend in graduate school whose dissertation was on a particular historical event...
...Koenig then expresses her wish that Mailer, and men in general, settle on some point in between...
...the dissertation takes longer to read than the event itself took to happen...
...ferior as art...
...But before one can draw this conclusion, it is necessary to come to grips with this so-called and obviously widely assumed gulf between Jewish experience and literary sensibility on the one hand, and the life and art of sex and violence on the other...
...What of the memoirists and reviewers of Mailer, Howe and Koenig, who deny such an integration, who either lament the fact that Mailer has not written from his experience as a Jew, or who laugh at the false and stylized masculinity in his writing...
...But we all come from somewhere, and Norman Mailer, obviously, does not come from ancient Egypt...
...Significantly, though, Mailer is not attacked only by those who see the two worlds as irreconcilable...
...To ignore "Jewishness," and to concentrate on those aspects of American life that Jews have long quested after and are now winning, is to be keenly faithful to postwar Jewish experience...
...Norman Podhoretz Some of his closest friends, apparently, suspect that Norman Mailer has never actually negotiated the passage from intellectual, bespectacled, cautious Jew to violent, head-butting sexual adventurer...
...It is part of the discipline of writing...
...Here is Jew as believable object of goyische lust, not subject∔I can't think of one by Philip Roth...
...The hoodlum is therefore daring the unknown, and so no matter how brutal the act, it is not altogether cowardly...
...But the big change in the last few years is that Jews themselves have become killers...
...Because his knowledge of Jewish culture is also extremely spotty, and the way in which his personality is composed may be more in accordance with my ignorance than a cultivated Jew's immersion in the culture...
...Lawrence, as well, used only one word, so that while Mailer offers us an endless cascade of words which drown and disfigure and distract from the act he is describing, Lawrence made that one word into a jewel reflecting every reader's experience of the act back to him...
...CRAMPTON HODNET Barbara Pym/E.P...
...Certainly, whatever it was about Stingo that allowed him to see the romantic, the outlaw, and the literate Brooklyn Jew all combined in the psychopathic Nathan, has been lost on those who tax Mailer from the postwar literary convention that "Brooklyn Jew" and "romantic outlaw" signify different worlds...
...This is not because the suggestive is necessarily more exciting than the explicit...
...Stingo is a Southern writer, which means that he is an indigenous American writer, who slowly realizes that the power of the fiction his own experience can sustain is being dwarfed by that of the postwar Jew...
...This is the substance of one of Alfred Kazin's reminiscences in Mailer...
...A lusted-after Jew...
...In his own mind, at least, Mailer has not fled from Jewish experience...
...Such a gulf was not always apparent...
...It's another thing to have created, as Norman Mailer did in 1959, a frigid nineteen-year-old Jewish girl who becomes the ultimate object of the lust of a blond blue-eyed Catholic Greenwich-Village bull-fighting instructor...
...Dutton/$14.95...
...What he sees as the masculine qualities∔ courage, love of danger, relentless-ness∔are necessarily first and foremost those of the artist, not of the man...
...To Irving Howe and George Plimpton, by contrast, he has failed to observe their uneasy divorce...
...On Jewish experience, for example, Mailer himself has written, "If I, as a Jew, am writing about other Jews, and if my knowledge of Jewish culture is exceptionally spotty, as indeed it is, I am not so sure that that isn't an advantage in creating a modern American Jew...
...It's one of the reasons people like me are not friends of Menachem Begin...
...It is because the symbolic is more powerful than the literal and belabored...
...But it's still extraordinary that someone who regards himself as a fearless spiritual adventurer avoids and evades what is perhaps the most relevant spiritual adventure of his life...
...At this stage, then, if we judge Norman Mailer on criteria against which he would want to be measured∔not by the fidelity of his art to his life, but by the light his art shines on life itself∔ he is good...
...This is why Lawrence is a far greater writer about sex than Mailer...
...In the realm of sex, in the realm of violence, and in the realm of literacy, he is the inferior of the Jewish "hero...
...When you see Norman reading from his work, explaining what he's up to, with those little spectacles on, that's another Mailer entirely, and the true and the best one...
...According to this unity, that writer approaches perfection in conveying his particular vision of the acts of sex as he manages to capture them in fewer and fewer words...
...MAILER: HIS LIFE AND TIMES Peter Manso/Simon and Schuster/$ 19.95 Andy Stark I In her New York review of Mailer: His Life and Times, a new "oral biography" by Peter Manso, Rhoda Koenig remarks on the vast voyage Norman Mailer has undertaken in order to get from "nice Jewish boy" to "romantic outlaw"∔the point from which he has always operated as a writer...
...When Milan Kundera reports that in the experience of all the male friends of the hero of one of his books, the one word women most frequently utter during lovemaking is "No...
...Mailer's masculinity is practiced and stylized precisely because it is a practice, it is a style...
...For Mailer has spent much of his time questioning almost every accepted connection between courage, cowardice, violence, and victimhood...
...There is a perception that Mailer has been oblivious to a postwar convergence of the two, and has consequently chosen to embrace violence and renounce his Jewishness...
...As far as his stylized masculinity is concerned, Mailer's first use for it has been neither as substitute for real experience, nor as subject of his art...
...Thus Philip Roth, who has taken repeated pride in having disgorged from his mind a "lusting Jew, [a] Jew as sexual defiler, an odd type in recent fiction, where it is usually the goy who does the sexual defiling," disparages Mailer for having failed to effect a merger of his own between Jewishness and sexuality: "It is [always] the Jew," Roth writes, "that says 'No, no, restrain 44 yourself [against] . . . grandiose lusts and drives...
...A defiled Jew...
...Rather, it has rested between the two: He views it as a discipline conducted in everyday life as part of the craft of writing...
...Yet it is as the latter, and with the latter's assumed experience, that Mailer has always written...
...Many postwar critics and writers who have made it their business to effect rapprochements between sexuality and Jewishness, or to note points of contact between violence and the children of Israel, also abjure Mailer...
...To Roth and Kazin, then, Mailer has simply missed out on the postwar wedding of sex, violence, and Jewish literary sensibility that Styron's Stingo mourned as the great loss of his life...
...a little scared (of the wildness and irrationality of the sixties), because, I think, there's always been in Norman a rational, Jewish son who has his wits about him...
...Nevertheless, since no one else is doing so, let me take up the defense of Norman Mailer, first against those who accuse him of having ignored the convergence between sex, violence, and the postwar American Jew, and then against those whose criticism relies on the underlying divergences between the romantic, the outlaw, and the Jew...
...But he has taken the road not chosen by the greatest...
...For example, Mailer wrote in "The White Negro" (1957): It can of course be suggested that it takes little courage for two strong eighteen-year-old hoodlums, let us say, to beat in the brains of a candy-store keeper, and indeed the act...
...And for a writer, one way of coping is by getting into the habit of tearing off your shirt and facing the bullets...
...Perhaps...
...This is an endeavor about which there should be absolutely no question as to its central importance for postwar Jewish selfunderstanding...
...certainly, it was not apparent to the character "Stingo" in Sophie's Choice, situated as he was by William Styron, with the benefit of hindsight, in immediate postwar Brooklyn...
...So in certain limited ways, one's ignorance can help buttress the validity of a novel...
...They attack him, though, not for failing to honor the irreconcilability of the two realms, and so, as a Jew, necessarily writing inauthentically about sex and violence...
...Irving Howe Perhaps he didn't want to be perceived as another Jewish writer...
...Rather, they attack him for the opposite: for failing to honor the unity of the two realms, and so doing the American Jew a disservice by ignoring his darker side of sex and violence...
...His recurring description of the novel as an elusive object of the novelist's seductive powers ("bitch" is the word he uses) is illuminated by E.L...
...To which prohibition Mala-mud adds 'Amen,' but to which Mailer replies 'Then I'll see ya 'round.' " As with the gulf between sex and Jewishness, so with that between violence and Jewishness...
...Tellingly, Philip Roth wrote of this very passage that "these few lines . . . should make it clear why Jewish cultural audiences, which are generally pleased to hear Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud identified as Jewish writers, are perfectly content that by and large Norman Mailer . . . should go forth onto the lecture platform and the television shows as a writer period...
...the spell of Hemingway" is connected to his "work, since writing itself is an act of courage...
...I know he wants to see himself as the existential hero without ties to the past...
...Ideally, one word will make it, and the greatest of all writers about sex have found their word...
...rather, his view is that postwar American Jewish experience has itself been a flight from Jewish experience...
...Doctorow's observation in Mailer that "that aspect of Norman∔his private side of drinking and fighting...
...It's all very well to speak about the Jew being timid and for Norman to say he doesn't want to be a nice Jewish boy...
...that's fair enough...
...Rather, by 45 his own lights, Mailer is a Brooklyn Jew in his experience, which is the experience of a non-experience, and a romantic outlaw as a writer, because that is what a writer must be...
...Again, such attacks are too unquestioning...
...George Plimpton He was...
...Or perhaps Jewish cultural audiences recognize in such a passage not a siding with the violent hoodlum against the Jewish property-owner, but an exploration of the very ideas of victimhood, violence, courage, and cowardice which, however wrongheaded, fully engages them as Jews, because these ideas are central to their experience...
...Mailer thus does not have a false life's experience as a pretended romantic outlaw, nor is he really nothing but a bespectacled Jewish writer...
...Still, courage of a sort is necessary, for one murders not only a weak forty-year-old man, but an institution as well...
...No matter how many books you write, there's a voice that says you're not good enough...
...So much for the writer and the critic, Roth and Kazin, who decry Mailer's inability to discern the sex and violence integrated into postwar Jewish experience...
Vol. 18 • November 1985 • No. 11
