A Reader's Notebook

...The idea, therefore, of quick popular sanctions would appeal to him directly...

...Khrushchev, by temperament—and he has given voice to the feeling several times—has always had a basic distrust of lawyers...

...Chairman: "We still have not a few cases of violation of public order, and they must be resolutely com-batted...

...No bounds are meaningful...

...Stanley Rinehart, Mailer's publisher, did not want to publish it, asked for changes, reluctantly agreed to bring it out, and at the last minute broke the contract...

...The culture has been ruled by "the critics...

...Principles of administration, set up through courts, the specification of penalties, and all the other cumbersome guarantees of legality are clearly inadequate to deal with the frictions and strains and violations of labor discipline...

...He is saying that the early version that he wanted printed was false...

...As fiction, much of this is liberating...

...The long trudge along Publisher's Row seems to have been the trudge of disenchantment...

...He became, in his own words, an outlaw...

...The Oneida Community of John Humphrey Noyes, one of the few successful experimental Utopian colonies in the U.S., practiced a system of "mutual criticism" in which, each evening, all the colonists would assemble and criticize each other freely...

...Where Lawrence savagely attacked the class system, its snobbery and its conventions, the "new Lorenzos" want to "opt out" of society itself...

...All sensations are lawful...

...A new "scarlet letter" is thus appearing in the Soviet Union...

...The Deer Park, arraigns the publishing world, and by direct extension...

...The paradox is that the act of rejection, which he bitterly condemns, made him into the outlaw he now regards with self-pride...

...In Marxist theory, one of the hallmarks of Communism is the elimination of formal law and of the courts, and the rise of "people's" justice where morality alone prevails...

...The idea for such "comrades' courts" was actually proposed by Premier Nikita Khrushchev himself at the 21st Soviet Party Congress less than a year ago...

...1919) to "establish proletarian self-discipline and to root out the ideology of . . . the petty bourgeois philistines...

...As life and experience, it is only self-defeating, for the egocentric drive toward sensation—and destruction—can only be self-immolating or cruelly exploitative of others...

...The essay, relating the difficult circumstances surrounding the publication of his third novel...

...This is the mark of the rough and ready man...

...Ruthless self-exposure often passes for honesty in writing when it is only an act of exhibitionism: for honest writing is not complete disclosure, but the choice of those revelatory elements of autobiography which are germane to the image that one feels is genuine...

...It is a generation that wants to be angry simply because it has never been angry, and feels cheated of the experience...

...American society itself...

...and with them the writers and intellectual leaders of those decades...

...And this is the danger of the new nihilism...

...Now, as the population growth has slowed because of war manpower losses and the lower birth rate which usually accompanies the first wave of urbanization, new gains can only come from increased efficiency...

...Root and branch, the last three decades have to go...

...It is also the history of Utopias and revolutionary sects...

...The "received virtues" of irony, social criticism, dispassion...

...Said Mr...

...The Hashomer Hatzair, the extreme egalitarian Zionist Socialist movement, regularly held sessions of self-scrutiny and open criticism...

...The time has come for more attention to be paid to comradely courts, which should mainly forestall various types of violation...

...Gossip, public obloquy, and ostracism have always been the weapons of a group against its members...

...they have established the grounds of the literary game...

...Mailer, emotionally exhausted by the writing effort, dragged himself to eight different publishers before he found one willing to take it as it stood...

...But the regime cannot go back to the system of open terror, deportations, administrative sentences by the NKVD...

...The novel is an exploration of the sex habits of the Hollywood tycoons and their kept women—hence the title from the French court of Versailles—and the degradation of a Hollywood writer before the House Un-American Activities Committee...

...And the Party will try to deal with these recalcitrant elements by the informal sanctions of shaming and public obloquy...

...But Mailer goes beyond Lawrence, who first insisted on the primacy of feeling...

...of a writer so egocentric that he reads contemporary novels only to see how good is the competition, and so hungry for attention that he lavs open every last recess of his ego...

...the temper of being anti-ideological, are now rejected, even when these attitudes are critical of contemporary society—simply because even as criticism these "virtues" form one pole of the society itself...

...The "legitimacy" of the comradely courts in the history of revolution may afford a clue to another of Khrushchev's motivations...

...In the past, the striking increases in Russian production were achieved through tremendous transformation of the peasantry into an industrial labor force...

...comradely courts" were set up (by a decree of November 14...

...many members, so shamed, would then confess further sins and express their devotion to the cause...

...One of the most fascinating sociological developments in the Soviet Union is the move to create ''comrades' courts'"—in effect, impromptu "kangaroo" tribunals—to deal with a slew of "anti-social'' offenses, such as the violation of labor discipline, leading a "parasitic" existence, or the desecration of apartment houses or public parks...

...Mailer's account of this violent, rending effort is written at the unendurable pitch of a fingernail madly scratching traceries across a blackboard...

...Yet Mailer, standing psychologically naked, and by the sheer power of the writing and the intensity of his conviction, compels acknowledgement of the seriousness of his intentions, if not the validity of his charges...

...This is the history of the small town...

...Yet the mounting fury of his writing, the pain of rejection and his insistence that he had something new to say, gives one pause in making such easy and simple dismissals...

...Mailer turned in savage anger against the community which refused to give him his due...

...Some observers have suggested that the move is an expedient to relieve the pressure on the courts, which are unable to handle with sufficient dispatch the cases resulting from the drive against "hooligans," juvenile delinquents, speculators and other "anti-social" elements in Soviet life...

...What Khrushchev, in effect, has done is to give the Party committees on the lower levels greater authority to deal with malcontents, speculators, goof-offs, drunks and similar "non-conformists...

...The new movement wants to establish only "feeling" and "sensation...

...In its own terms, Mailer's essay would be worthy of great attention...

...BACK to the Underground...

...much as Khrushchev may promise the Soviet worker that in the next two decades he will catch up with and surpass the consumption of the American worker, there are few tangible rewards that he can offer the Soviet worker now, as an incentive...

...Self-conscious, as most Communist leaders are, of his "place in history," Khrushchev seems intent on proving that the decisive step toward the future Communist society is being taken during his regime...

...Hence the emphasis on dope, on drugs, on hallucination itself...

...They should examine not only cases of a production nature, but also those which concern society, morals and incorrect conduct by those who deviate from the norms of communal order...

...The new movement stands, first, against the "idea" of criticism...

...criticism involves appraisal, the explication of meaning, the rules of reason, the intellect...

...But what makes the episode even more important is that Mailer has recently become the avatar for a growing number of young writers and critics who, seeking a generational identity, find it in Mailer's credo of merde...

...The current Esquire—to turn to a different kind of non-conformity—carries an article by Norman Mailer which is a section of his new book...

...The motivation, which Mailer explains explicitly and at length, would seem to be, in cold summary, merely the tantrum of an adolescent who would not accept the "judgment of the wise...

...Khrushchev is engaged in a desperate drive for higher productivity...

...The feeling of betrayal caused Mailer to re-examine the novel anew, and in page proofs to rip the novel apart feverishly, roughen the prose and break the "porcelain shell" which had encased it...

...Unable to use a club, and having few carrots, the regime is resorting to the technique of public shaming...

...and similar devices used by Stalin to maintain labor discipline in the factories...

...The new comradely courts and the "social organizations'' that will now administer justice quite obviously will take their cues from the Party...

...While this may be an element in Khrushchev's calculations, there seem to be much more profound reasons for the surprise use of this new technique of informal coercion...

...One sees this, for example, in Norman Podhoretz's belated appreciation of Mailer's Barbary Shore in the recent issue of Partisan Review...

...This drive has gathered steam in the last years...

...Advertisements for Myself...

...in about 20 years, 50 million persons were moved from the farms into the factories...

...The functions of maintaining order and security should be performed by social groups, as well as the militia and the courts...

...And in the early days of the Bolshevik Revolution, in the first blush of "raw Communism...

...If the community is a cohesive one and it can make its sanctions stick, this can be a powerful weapon...

...Apart from such ultimate considerations as Khrushchev's image of his place in the pantheon, it is quite clear that the Communist party needs to have maximum flexibility in manipulating the society at the present critical time when demands for higher consumption, a greater thaw and other aspects of relaxation are becoming more vocal...

...Frozen by the thought that he might never find a publisher, gripped by the fear that that novel might never be a bestseller, and thus he would lose the mark of fame which a writer must have in America...

...A law authorizing factory bodies, housing committees and other non-Party groups to set up such courts was placed before the Supreme Soviet two weeks ago...

...It is an extraordinary piece of self-revelation...

...The irony is that the viewpoint which Mailer now projects was not in the original version of the novel, but was a result of the rejections...