Private Mailer Re-Enlists
Bone, Robert A.
Every Army psychiatrist is familiar with the strange phenomenon of re-enlistment. On Monday the rifleman hates the Army with a bitterness bordering on homicide. On Tuesday he signs up for a...
...But buried wishes aside, Mailer's intellectual attitude toward Hip is roughly that of Marx toward early capitalism: it is brutal but progressive...
...Gratification, if it comes at all, is a matter of the weekend pass and the one night stand...
...Like Hemingway before him, Mailer tends to blur ethical and esthetic categories...
...As in all forms of greed, the more they gorge the emptier they become...
...Under combat conditions, a soldier becomes morally desensitized...
...If it becomes a habit, one is rendered incapable of love...
...Here is a passage from "The White Negro" which is pure Guadalcanal: "Go" with its sense that after hours or days or months or years of monotony, boredom, and depression one has finally had one's chance, one has amassed enough energy to meet an exciting opportunity...
...Here is a world in which, like the world of Madison Avenue, one is not permitted to grow old: It is not granted to the hispter to grow old gracefully—he has been captured too early by the oldestdream of power, the gold fountain of Ponce de Leon, the fountain of youth where the gold is in the orgasm...
...Maybewe are in a sense the seed, the seed-carriers, the voyagers, the ex plorers...
...a typical adolescent demand...
...Hence Mailer's admiration for Paul Bowles, whose pioneer con tribution to Hip is a short story which features the seduction of a father by his son...
...It is neo-Romantic in essence, existentialist in its philosophical pretensions, and Reichian in its sexualpolitical emphasis...
...Life is a war, and its characteristic atmosphere is hostility...
...The essay continues in a more explicit vein: Knowing in the cells of his existence that life was war, nothingbut war, the Negro [read "soldier"] could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization, and so he kept for his survival theart of the primitive, he lived inthe enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of themind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body...
...If he wants his art to grow, he must come to terms with his castration fears...
...Life is an athletic contest in which the split-cheek formation affords a slight competitive advantage...
...It is a view which would commend itself at once to a guard in a concentration camp...
...In a brilliant review of "Waiting for Godot," Mailer presents an existentialist interpretation of the deity...
...V1 So boundless an appetite eventually devours its possessor...
...Putnam...
...Poetry, it would appear, is for sissies...
...For such a relationship has no past and no future, and few financial or emotional complications...
...Not unknown in the American Legion, this attitude is something of an innovation on the political left...
...The element of danger is essential, and is assured by recourse to drugs or some other criminal act...
...And a fresh suicide is promised in his parting "Prologue to a Long Novel...
...Clearly the impending transition to civilian life is more painful than the institutional adjustment which, however disagreeable, has become a habit...
...God, he suggests, does not have it made...
...they do not quality for the club...
...In sexual terms, it is an attempt to reproduce the intensity of the wartime love affair, "hopped up" by the proximity of death...
...Hip is "a language most adolescents can understand instinctively...
...It is readily apparent from his new book* that his emotional range has not transcended the rifle range...
...they pursue what Wright Morris has called "the love that has no appeasement, the quest that has no resolution, the hunger that has no gratification...
...antithesis, Hip...
...He observes in the hipster, as in the soldier, "that incandescent consciousness which the possibilities within death have opened...
...IV The closer a soldier comes to combat, the more he finds himself in an allmale world...
...This weakness is evident throughout the body of Mailer's work...
...This is the combat virtue of courage...
...The problem with pure appetite is that it becomes jaded...
...er has encountered in civilian life because it corresponds most nearly to * Advertisements for Myself...
...In his discussion of the hipster idiom, he betrays his basic attitude: to goof, to flip, is to lose control, to "reveal the buried weaker more feminine part of your nature...
...Yet in widening the arena of thepossible, one widens it reciprocally for others as well, so that the nihilistic fulfillment of each man's desire contains its antithesis of human cooperation...
...the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives ofthe self...
...Writing of the hipster's instinctive preference for movement, Mailer resorts to the language of combat: "In motion a man has a chance...
...In running Hemingway for President in The Village Voice, he cites his war record as a prime political virtue...
...This appears on the surface of Hip as an accent on adolescence...
...The act of self-destruction, it would seem, engages Mailer's deepest instincts...
...Mailer himself is partly at fault, for the intrusion of repressed desire has not contributed to clarity...
...394...
...But the right to unrestrained physical violence which Mailer demands is imprisoning, not liberating...
...This dialectical conception gives him the advantage of pre senting, in tentative fashion, certain ideas for which he can at any time disclaim responsibility...
...The soldier's adolescent years have been consumed in becoming a man, as the Army understands manhood...
...He must learn from Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs, that a writer can be feminine without being effeminate...
...As Wright Morris observes, "An infinite craving finds its resolution in a craving for the infinite...
...All desire is lost," Mailer confesses, "for talking to readers older than oneself...
...Mailer also follows Hemingway in making a secondary virtue the center of his moral universe...
...He is at the mercy of man's fate...
...Under the circumstances, his attitude toward women becomes openly hostile and contemptuous...
...Prongsman First Class...
...But Hip was spawned in war...
...The only successful female character in Advertisements for Myself is Yuriko of "The Paper House"—perhaps because an exGeisha is a particularly feminine kind of whore...
...that is, combat-ready...
...Sexual relations assume an obligatory character...
...Confronted with a de clining rate of profit, he resorts to exoticism...
...This calculated risk with the cops serves to separate the hipsters (crack divisions) from the squares (civilians...
...Mailer's flirtation with psychopathic violence is further evidence of his psychic war wound...
...Otherwise he will be remembered not as the healer he hopes to become, but as just another casualty...
...The world of Hip is of course thoroughly male chauvinist...
...They have adopted a life style based on danger, without having reached the front lines...
...The disease persists (it is the central disease of our time) as an absolute ethical relativity...
...His language gives him away: "In 'The White Negro' we began a patrol through the theme of Hip which will continue through the rest of this book...
...Norman Male-er...
...Yet this is preferable to the painful changes which await him...
...To re-enlist is fatal...
...Hence strange fruit, whether interracial or bisexual...
...Their only danger is from flying semen...
...As for Mailer, the hero of his early story, "A Calculus at Heaven," is in search of the ultimate ecstasy of the death orgasm...
...Once again his attitude derives from his Army days...
...Since each or gasm must be more apocalyptic than the last, the hipster swings faster and faster to a stepped-up tempo of self destruction...
...Since we all live in the shadow of atomic incineration...
...Out of what is no doubt a fault in me, I do not seem to be able to read them...
...It can produce, for example, a great war novel...
...Familiar landmarks are in sight, but his early concern with death and courage has given way to a variety of new themes...
...But keeping cool, after all, is only a few degrees from frigidity...
...To these must be added a religious note, almost mystical in character...
...The intellectual core of Advertiseinents for Myself is contained in the from the embattled lower-class Negro, duced to its essentials, Mailer's argument runs as follows: against a background of official violence symbolized by atom bomb and concentration camp appears the hipster, the American existentialist...
...With the right partner (see Mailer's prospectus for his new novel), you can not only make time, you can make Time stand still...
...To be sure, he takes target practice under new auspices, having joined a hipster outfit as Pfc...
...The hipster derives his life style as well as his language from the embattled lower-class Negro, who subsists on the margin of danger...
...V Mailer's compulsive search for the apocalyptic orgasm can best be understood in terms of the sexual deprivation of the combat soldier...
...guage God gave our tongues...
...If a writer hates what is feminine in himself as much as this would sug gest, he cannot create female characters who are more than men in disguise...
...Coming out of the orgy of war," Mailer writes, "our sense of sex and family was torn in two...
...perhaps He is trying to impose upon the universe His conception of being against other conceptions of being opposed to His...
...Something of this sort has happened to the art of Norman Mailer...
...this is perhaps the historic function of expressionism in the arts...
...Mailer says of the psychopath, .. the fundamental decision of his nature is to try to live the infantile fantasy...
...To be "beat," by way of contrast, is to be sexually drained (combat fatigue...
...Yet something remains to be said...
...if he has seen combat, he is perhaps a good deal more than half dead...
...If the Squares are civilians, the Beats are non-combatants...
...In a word, it is adolescent: all gratification and no responsibility...
...In the Army he leads a half-crippled existence...
...He exists as a warring element in a divided universe...
...It is only fair to add that Mailer is fully aware of the psychopathic potential in the hipster personality, with its tendency toward the unrestrained expression of violence and sexuality...
...And so it is in Mailer's literary world, a bleak landscape which for all its sexuality is curiously without women...
...There is no room for atrocities in this scheme, but for Mailer there are no atrocities except those committed by the State...
...Hence marijuana...
...It is worth observing parenthetically that Mailer, who is thoroughly Whitmanesque in temper, has written very little verse...
...All of it is given form, in retrospect, by the unifying vision of Hip...
...If human history progresses, in Mailer's phrase, from melodrama, farce, and monstrosity," it will be precisely to the extent that the individual is freed from the tyranny of arbitrary violence...
...To smoke a cigarette or kill a man —c'est egal...
...But perhaps it will be well to survey the terrain before taking up battle positions...
...Where he does make contact with civilian populations, his characteristic sexual outlets are rape and prostitution...
...Closely related is the sexual orgy, which promises a healing release from the encroachments of machine technology on the human ego...
...His conception of Hip is not static but dialectic: thesis, Square...
...It is his central metaphor...
...with a new synthesis in process of becoming...
...Given the appropriate Square taboos, his apparent advocacy of Hip has been widely misinterpreted...
...As he surveys the literary talent in the room, for example, his female contemporaries remain invisible: I have a terrible confession to make—I have nothing to say about any of the talented women who write today...
...Indeed I doubt if there will be a really exciting woman writer until the first whore becomes a call girl and tells her tale...
...To pursue his argument to absurdity, we should have to recognize good and bad lampshades made of human skin (crazy, man...
...From these and similar examples it is clear that combat was the shaping experience of Norman Mailer's life...
...It is learned under fire, when the emotion to be mastered is fear...
...What is this man but a soldier on patrol...
...Knowing the man, knowing his anarchist inclinations, it would be a mistake to make too much of his militant veteranism...
...Getting your kicks" is a matter of thrill...
...Foremost among them is the split in Western consciousness between mind and body, which has produced "a cancerous alienation of the senses...
...Not since Adam Smith, however, has unrestrained aggression been regarded as an instrument of the greater good: .. , to be engaged in one primal battle: to open the limits of thepossible for oneself, for oneself alone, because that is one's need...
...Whether the increasing ideological weight can be carried on the slender shoulders of the hipster is a question that must await the appearance of his forthcoming work...
...Beginning with his discovery of Hip, Mailer's explorations have led him in the direction of a comprehensive world-view...
...a he-man wants his prose...
...Mailer's attitude toward the Beats is instructive: he sees them, with rare exceptions, as poets and pacifists, not really macho...
...Thus in Mailer we find good and bad rapes, good and bad pimps, and so forth: But the Negro, not being privileged to gratify his self-esteem with the heady satisfactions of categorical condemnation, chose to move instead in that other direction where all situations are equally valid, and in the worst of perversion, promiscuity, pimpery, drug addition, rape, razor-slash, bottlebreak, what-have-you, the Negro discovered and elaborated a morality of the bottom, an ethical differentiation between the good and bad in every human activity...
...Not content with halfway measures, "Hip proposes as its final tendency that every social restraint and category be removed...
...Translated into Hip, this wartime sexuality is reflected in such terms as "go," "beat," "getting your kicks," and "keeping cool...
...But if he wants to grow, he must transcend his war experience, which represents an arrested development...
...By destroying the stability of love relationships, the war promoted infantile modes of sexuality...
...The power of this vision—its usefulness in structuring experience—cannot be denied by anyone responsive to Mailer's best prose...
...Like children," he adds, "hipsters are fighting for the sweet...
...Hip provides Mailer with an outlet for his violent fantasies...
...5.95...
...there is only so much time to "score...
...What Mailer admires on an individual plane would have disastrous consequences as an organized political force...
...On Tuesday he signs up for a new hitch...
...This view flows naturally enough from the military situation in which, for an individual soldier, moral choice is not really possible: "Hip sees the context as generally dominating the man, dominating him because his character is less significant than the context in which he must function...
...On furlough from death, he must discover life...
...A myth so confining can perhaps give structure to certain kinds of human experience...
...Life is war, nothing but war, even for God: But most certainly, He is not allpowerful...
...A case in point is Cara Beauchamp of the "Prologue to a Long Novel": "She still had the masculine mind of a whore or a hostess—she was a businessman—she searched for synthesis, the big view...
...The male alone, as Mailer reminds us in "The Time of Her Time," is capable of plain or fancy rape...
...his conception of truth as formed under combat conditions...
...The suicidal tendency of Hip is nowhere more apparent than in the career of the late James Dean, hipster idol of the postwar generation...
...Mailer is right about the modern world: our century puts Barbary Shore to shame by its commitment to total war...
...The trouble is that Hip, as myth, is too narrow in scope to sustain a fully serious art...
...What follows (I am quoting from the "Advertisement for Games and Ends") is a portrait of the artist as squad leader, escorting his troops through a difficult and danger...
...A good deal of the material in Mailer's new book stems directly from his war experience...
...But the tag "adolescent" does not do justice to the depth of the regres sion...
...it is a symptom, not a cure for our malaise...
...It is a ruthless competition for pleasure, but there is not nearly enough to go around: "And so the sweet goes only to the victor, the best, the most, the man who knows the most about how to find his energy and not to lose it...
...Metaphorically speaking, Mailer is in danger of becoming an Army career-man...
...To be cool is to be equipped...
...ous terrain...
...Consider the following passages from "The White Negro": Any Negro who wishes to live must live with danger from his first day, and no experience can ever be casual to him, no Negro can saunter down a street with any real certainty that violence will not visit him on his walk...
...In an essay on obscenity he comments: "I would like to express myself properly, and the true communication of soul to soul is speeded on its way, as every soldier and ex-soldier knows, by the foul lan...
...Their appetite for or gasm is voracious...
...The hipster, in short, is a squad leader on patrol for the great General...
...In his next long novel, he intends to explore this theme...
...Now he is reluctant to begin again, on civilian terms...
...Hence Mailers recent work in the vein of "The Man Who Studied Yoga" and "The Time of Her Time...
...If suicide is the ultimate tendency of Hip, and combat its beginning, what could be more damaging to its claims on the literary imagination...
...Mailer has undertaken such a journey in the pages of his recent book...
...But it cannot provide the foundations of a mature art...
...the rest derives more tortuously from the same source...
...Its projection on the international plane would do us all in...
...II It is time now to examine Mailer's values in the light of his war experi 390 ence, and to discover, perhaps, the limits of his art...
...He speaks of the inhibition upon violence which civilization exacts of us—a restraint relaxed on behalf of the combat soldier, and no doubt reimposed at the cost of a stormy emotional conflict...
...Mailer is treading on dangerous ground in his concept of a battle tested elite...
...Hip is the "truest" experience Mail...
...The cult of courage leads in turn to Mailer's militant veteranism...
Vol. 7 • September 1960 • No. 4
