America's No. 1 Disc Jockey

...He takes the crowd emotions and serves them up without any transposition or transmutation...

...It's lively, as I said, but where is the experience of dread...

...has seen his father while D.J...

...I say his talents because I want to start this review by indicating what makes him lively and interesting...

...is, naturally, a boy genius, a strapping, robust, handsome fellow who wonders, deep in the heart of Texas, whether he isn't some crippled, underprivileged Negro in the thick of Harlem...

...The novel is composed of this sort of modish gabble, some of it rather gorgeous, but all of it fatally undercut by the fact that Mailer has nothing but generalized sensations and emotions to contribute...

...And does Mailer want to show us what he means by this...

...These wonderings are supposed to add an element of profundity to the characterization of D.J...

...From this point of view, the decision to make the mouthpiece of his new novel a disc jockey, that is, a kind of spout or conduit through which the gabble of fad passes, is the first and last creative act in his book: The first because by this Mailer recognizes the forensic quality of his talent...

...That's a little thick there...

...Does Mailer's hero, the young DJ...

...The words level him out, disfigure his features into a common grimace, rob him of even the least possibility of creating a tone and gesture of his own...

...Now the bear are out digging roots in the brush...

...is "up tight with the concept of dread" because he hates Rusty, his father, who, in his mind's eye he can see in bed with his mother making him what he is today...

...In the last reckoning this is a formal, esthetic matter, though it starts, at least with Mailer and many of his imitators, in a rather banal setting: Mailer is the heir of Celine's anguish, which he got from reading the right books, but he is an heir who can't live up to the demands of his heritage...

...You ass...

...On the bear hunt, which is the main action of the book, the guides talk like lame-brained Indians in some tv western series: "Was a berry blight in August," says Big Luke...

...Unable to choose between surface reality and subterranean truth, the author has decided to draw the surface, down with him helter-skelter into a subway of his own invention, one that makes no stops and that, accomodating all experience, transports it on rails that are not straight...

...The slapstick is merely a cover for the fact that Mailer can't get the emotion down on the page...

...If you want it to look straight you have to break it slightly—or bend it, you might say...

...Putnam, 204 pp., $4.95) Norman Mailer has sunk his talents deeper into the Pop Art swamp...

...These bent rails by which he approximates emotive truth are comparable to a stick in water...

...An octave of farts...

...he is the Zeitgeist, a walking embodiment, and his prose is a consummate time capsule of what certain people are saying and thinking...

...Mailer has entombed it for them...

...This latest novel certainly proves the point, yet it also demonstrates that Mailer's art, such as it is, depends primarily on his forensic relation to his particular audience...

...Celine's language is an effort—often successful, and when it is, dazzling—to take crowd emotions, run them through his mind, and transpose them into a perfectly individual and personal artistic medium...

...he posed about death, dread, anguish, the filth of everyday life, the absurdity of existence...

...Nothing simpler...

...Mailer is the sort of man who reads the newspapers and magazines and not only remembers every word but believes every word...

...Instead of being pursued by the phantoms and ghosts that hounded Celine, Mailer is pursued by the desire to own a few of Celine's obsessions...

...It is not merely that Celine invented his own language—the language of hatred, as he called it— out of Parisian argot, soldier's slang, and his fertile wit and fantasy...

...In a review of another Mailer book, I made the point that he was being smothered by his audience, that their uncomfortably close propinquity to his writing arm forced it often to deviate into fashionable nonsense...

...the differences are enormous...

...Yet Celine was his pose, completely and utterly, whereas Mailer would like to make the grade in the death-and-anguish department but does not quite find it in him...

...Mailer's latest novel is one huge joke that does not come off and effectively buries him under its slick avalanche...

...One can't talk about responding to the Zeitgeist when writing about Mailer...

...up high on pot, and face of Rusty goes through chord changes then...

...Contemplate that...

...Or anyone's, for that matter...

...Neooccult chromatics...

...The rest of them talk like goops who have been in close contact with their author, who has in turn been in contact with everything that is recent and faddish: "You can tune in on the madness in the air, you know where a pine tree is rotting and festering somewhere out there, and red ants are having a war in its muck, and the bear is listening to those little ant screams and smelling that rotten old pine...

...Celine was a poseur too...

...This is what comes from being a living incarnation of the Zeitgeist, the perfect newspaper reader...

...but now he wants to know how many of you assholes even knew, forgive me, Good Lord, that Fyodor Kierkegaard has a real name, Soren Kierkegaard...

...Crowns and diadems...

...Because tough Texans really yearn, secretly desire, to submit to homosexual tendencies...

...First of all, he has an amazing journalistic gift for intercepting the psychic whispers and shrieks circulating in certain atmospheres and then getting them down on paper...

...This is the Pop Art wish to merge personality in some public sink of cartoon figures and phrases...

...Maybe," Mailer opines, "that's how Herr Dread gets in...

...Get a thorn in your eye, gun gets tangled, you can be looking at the ground about the time Friend Bear is putting an arm around your neck...

...His art is based on tag-lines which are supposed to do what other novelists, less fortunately (or unfortunately) placed vis-a-vis their audience, do by the hard work of depicting the emotion rather than hoisting a banner with a saliva-producing name or term scrawled across its bright and curiously empty expanse...

...Celine magically achieves individuality through these words...

...Celine also had powerful emotions that he had to conquer by the very process of writing his books...

...Strange sounds, man...

...No, well neither has D.J...

...In that other review I compared Mailer to Louis-Ferdinand Celine, the French nihilist and comic genius who also used slapstick to outwit his own emotions when they became too pressing or uncomfortable...

...It's as plain as apple pie that those rough-tough customers down on their Texas ranches are underneath all the spit-and-gisum talk a bunch of frustrated queers...

...Mailer has no emotions of his own, only the wish to have them and the hope that by writing a book he may discover some depth in himself that was not apparent to his normal consciousness...

...and in this respect Mailer's novel is a prime example of the genre...

...In a recent paperback on Celine by David Hayman, the crucial difference between Celine and his imitators— and this group, by the way, stretches from Allen Gins-burg to William Burroughs—is neatly pinpointed: "In later years," Hayman says, "Celine invented two terms, 'lacework' and 'emotive subway,' to describe his technique...

...There's a fucking nervous system running through the earth and air of this whole State of Alaska, and the bear is tuned in, and Big Luke, and OIlie and the assistant guide packers, and the ants, and Tex and D.J., and the air, man, the air is the medium and the medium is the message, that Alaska air is real message—it says don't bullshit, buster...

...The similarity between them is minimal...

...Fifty years from now, when cultural historians will want to know what intellectuals of disgruntled feelings and vaguely radical views thought and felt in 1967 about the state of the world and the state of their own souls, they won't have to sweat to find out...

...Cause D.J...

...Nietzsche said that a joke is an epitaph of an emotion...

...His talk is up-to-date, alert, sometimes even resplendent with vigorous invective, yet he never for a moment convinces us that he is real, that his feelings should be taken seriously, that he is more than a cartoon figure created and destroyed by Mailer's posing and rhetoric...

...what they do, in fact, is simply emphasize his fragility and nonentity as a character...

...It is all here—the hipster talk, the mass media jargon, and the cliches of disaffected intellectuals...

...Mailer reverses the whole procedure...

...On these last three counts Mailer fails quite miserably—unless, of course, you are the sort of person who gets a bang out of seeing your private ideas and phrases (which are actually public, and this too is a comment on the way things are today) reproduced with great fidelity...

...The language of four-letter words has, in his work, a peculiar function...

...He is archetypical because he has no private emotions, only public ones...

...If one does not get a familiar feeling of warmth on coming across such phrases as "gone ape," "out of his fucking skull," "kid you not," and "better believe it," then half the charm of Mailer's appeal is irremediably lost...

...Oh, I forgot: He has one final observation of his own...

...Why are we in Vietnam...

...But of course Mailer knows he's copping out, so he rounds it out with a rhapsodic cadenza...

...That having been said and duly noted, one can go on to the novel itself as a piece of imaginative fiction that, besides giving us a peep-show of the passing scene, should involve us, move us, make us think...

...A little too thick to bring a party in...

...Mailer becomes frighteningly like all the people who use them...

...the last because he wants more from his disc jockey than that poor, denuded personage could ever give him...

...D.J...

...from Dallas, experience the emotion of dread...

...He told Robert Poulet that the writer should leave accurate reporting of life to the newspapers and omit 'even from his imaginings' the insipid details of what the reader already knows...

...Mailer flashes a few well-chosen names, like this: "Ever read The Concept of Dread by Fyodor Kierkegaard...

...All we have is the tag-line, guaranteed to produce the requisite reactions in certain limited quarters...