The Last Page
Mclemee, Scott
HIS INVOLVEMENT with Dissent was, so to speak, one of Norman Mailer's more improbable marriages, and by no means the shortest. A member of the founding editorial board, he was on this...
...James, were an oppositional faction within the Workers Party—and Howe, in particular, had crossed polemical swords with them in internal debates...
...It's the old story...
...The effort to synthe1 2 8 n DISSENT / Spring 2008 size them had been unmistakable in Mailer's rather hallucinatory second book, Barbary Shore (1951), a sort of hybrid of Arthur Koestler and Franz Kafka...
...The first half-dozen years or so were the honeymoon phase—a time when Mailer published a number of essays and short items blending antiStalinist Marxism with his own existentialist intuitions...
...so all bonds were dissolved, sans drama...
...Misunderstandings...
...They are part of it...
...Those speeches must have given Dissent's editors-to-be déjà vu...
...The aftermath, of course, was complex— with Dissent shedding the bolshevisant manner for an American idiom, even as Mailer transformed himself into a vanguard party of one (also a very American thing to do...
...Mailer's "The White Negro," appearing in the Summer 1957 issue, managed to imitate the Fanonian theory of therapeutic violence even before Fanon had written The Wretched of the Earth...
...Barely a year later, both Howe and Mailer participated in the Partisan Review symposium "Our Country and Our Culture"—finding themselves among the handful of contributors disinclined to think that American intellectuals never had it so good...
...Irving Howe's landmark essay on "The New York Intellectuals" in 1968 identified Mailer's psychopolitical musings as an important source for countercultural sensibility and New Left sloganeering...
...He sounded no more enamored of Mailer's fictive gauchisme than he had been about its Johnsonite prototype...
...Nor would readers have failed to pick up the allusion when Howe remarked that the adjective "existential" had enjoyed its vogue mainly by communicating "the sensation of depth without the burden of content...
...For years," wrote Mailer in an essay called, "What I Think of Artistic Freedom" (Spring 1955), "I have been alternately attracted to Marxism and Anarchism, and in the tension between the two I suppose I have found the themes for my novels...
...A member of the founding editorial board, he was on this journal's masthead for most of four decades...
...but the relationship had cooled into a formality...
...Mailer's novelistic pamphleteering was at points almost indistinguishable from the ideas of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, which Howe and Lewis Coser had encountered in the mid-1940s...
...The world is a wedding...
...Arguments...
...By the mid-1960s, the couple would still be seen in public together, on occasion...
...The echoes of those arguments in Barbary Shore were no coincidence: Mailer's French translator and sometime tutor in Marxist theory was Jean Malaquais, a close friend of James...
...And yet Mailer was listed as a contributing editor up through the Spring 1991 issue...
...Indeed, it even predated the creation of Dissent itself...
...Reviewing Barbary Shore for the Nation in 1951, Howe judged it a bad novel, though a brave one, given the cold war climate...
...New names were being added to the masthead, and nobody could remember the last time Mailer had attended an editorial meeting...
...His departure generated no public comment, it seems, and was in any case a matter of space rather than of ideological conflict...
...The Johnsonites, led by the West Indian historian and theorist C.L.R...
...Well, so it goes...
...But to revisit those early issues is a reminder of how ardent the connection once was...
...But they were, after all, speaking a common Mandan language...
...One of the characters delivers long, quasi-Trotskyist statements analyzing the violent conflict and convergence between Soviet and American forms of "state capitalism...
...You meet in circumstances that look, with hindsight, like fate and you create together a little socialism of shared meaning, for as long as it may last...
Vol. 55 • April 2008 • No. 2
