When Sam and Sergius Meet

...In Presidential Papers he writes: "The characters for whom I had the most secret admiration . . . were violent people...

...The allegorist uses characters to advance his ideas...

...Rusty's "secret is that he sees himself as one of the pillars of the firmament...

...This is the book's climactic scene...

...Communism, church, working class, crime, homosexuality and mysticism...

...Nor are the adult males in his novels independent characters who live out complex and ambiguous destinies which can help us define our own...

...If history is a nightmare, great novels are written on the morning after a great novelist awakens from it...

...The Jew cannot...

...The allegorist portrays the Fair Maiden and the Dark Lady as fleshed out symbols of Chastity and Lust...

...He had in fact learned to live in the sarcophagus of his image—at night, in his sleep, he might dart out, and paint improvements on the sarcophagus...

...If, as Sergius says in "The Time of Her Time," 'God is like me, only more so," then man has a starring role to play, for God's ultimate victory depends on him...

...He recognized the animal vitality and grace of his fellow soldiers, just as he came to appreciate the spiritual strength of the Polish Jews they confronted...

...Stephen Rojack in The American Dream, Mailer's purest Sergius, goes unopposed, but then the product is clearly labeled a dream...

...His career...

...Man, says General Cummings, is a being "in transit between brute and God," and his deepest urge is to "achieve God...

...For the first time in a book by Mailer it is clear that Sam is doing the dreaming...

...it is an indication of spiritual health, one's place in that larger scheme...

...In Presidential Papers he argues that "the form of society is not God's creation, but a result of the war between God and the Devil...

...He needn't worry...

...This is the meaning of Mailer's ethic of power...

...taken together they represent a kind of 20th century Book of Hours?again like Sam's dream...

...a coast-to-coast tv hookup will do even better...

...God is certainly not dead in Norman Mailer's universe, but then He isn't His old Self either...

...The second part of the book...

...yet at the end of one story, when he is unable to shoot a badly wounded soldier who begs to be put out of his misery, he asks fate to "grant me the simplest of proficiencies—the ability to kill my fellow men...

...Once the action begins, Mailer wrings some wonderful comedy...

...Well, Cal," Mailer answered Lowell, "there are days when I think of myself as being the best writer in America...

...A generation and half a world later, the Cossack has become irrelevant as an historical reality—the American white Protestant never really replaced him as the symbol of repressive Authority—and the Jew is no longer an alien element in the dominant culture...

...As he watches students and faculty turn in their draft cards that afternoon, "a deep gloom began to work on Mailer, because a deep modesty was on its way to him, he could feel himself becoming more and more of a modest man as he stood there in the cold with his hangover, and he hated this because modesty was an old family relative, he had been born to a modest family, had been a modest boy, a modest young man, and he hated that, he loved the pride and the arrogance and the confidence and the egocen-tricity he had acquired over the years...

...The Cossack was the traditional enemy of the Jew...

...He gets drunk at the liberal academic party, and later at a rally in the Ambassador Hotel shocks the other "notables" on the platform by delivering an outrageously obscene speech—replete with fake Irish, fake LBJ and fake Norman Mailer accents...

...The Sams and Sergiuses of his novels are presented as opposing pairs of characters: Hearn and Cummings in The Naked and the Dead...

...They have never been fresher...

...The Sergius of Sam Slaboda's dream is "capable of sin, large enough for good, a man immense," while Sam himself "seeks to live in such a way as to avoid pain, and succeeds merely in avoiding pleasure...

...AU of Mailer's novels have been marred by a tug-of-war between the artist and the moralist, the novelist and the allegorist...

...Few of us are Jews or Cossacks, most of us are Jews and Cossacks...

...The Novel as History"—presents a detailed reconstruction of the events of the four-day anti-Vietnam protest held in Washington in October 1967...

...McLeod and Hollingwood in Barbary Shore...

...Sex is neither for pleasure nor for babies...

...Instead of creating characters who are representatives of conflicting principles, he has let these principles represent the conflict within his own character...

...Marion Faye in The Deer Park is a pimp who "follows sex to the end, turns queer, bangs dogs and sniffs toes," yet Mailer writes that "he was religious (in a most special way to be sure...

...In the guise of a very personal account of the March on Washington, Mailer has created—is constantly creating—his only character worthy of a great novel, Sam (the writer) and Sergius (the fighter) united in the complex personality of the author himself...

...In his most explicit version of the Jewish dream of the Cossack, a short story entitled "The Time of Her Time," Sergius O'Shaughnessy says, "when you screw too much and nothing is at stake, you begin to feel like a saint____ I was the messiah of the one-night stand...

...The irony is that just at the moment when this state of mind seemed universal, when American Jewish writers were pressing their claim for the Jew as the most representative American in the '50s—the only possible hero of an urbanized and mechanized society—Mailer has transformed an older historical reality into a Jewish dream, nightmare and wish fulfillment both...

...Eitel and O'Shaughnessy or Marion Faye in The Deer Park...

...In The Armies of tiw Night Mailer for the first time rejects these alternatives...

...But only Norman Mailer could have seen the connection between the two...

...The idea is as true now as when Karl Marx first thought of it, but unlike Mailer, Marx could afford to remain unaware of a corollary notion: It is the sentiments of men...

...Mailer may call himself an American existentialist, but he has little in common with the modern existentialist's view of man as a pitiful extra in the cosmic drama...

...Here the allegory thickens...

...like the ambiguous event he is reporting, the moment we judge this Don Quixote tilting at the Pentagon a fool, he shows us his heroic side...

...a fatal taint, a last remaining speck of the one personality he found absolutely insupportable—the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn...

...Although Red Cavalry and The Armies of the Night could hardly be more different stylistically—Babel's prose is taut and laconic, Mailer's sentences tumbersault to a full stop like enthusiastic but overweight gymnasts —their authors describe the same battle, between the Jew and the Cossack, and achieve a similar resolution by internalizing the struggle within themselves...

...But this extraordinarily honest self-portrait of "a simple of a hero and a marvel of a fool" is already well past the point where much damage can be done to it...

...the novelist uses ideas to delineate his characters...

...This ambitious plan was eventually scrapped, but not before the prologue became Mailer's most successful short story, "The Man Who Studied Yoga," and the eight-part novel, weakened and loose-skinned from loss of weight, metamorphosed into The Deer Park, an interesting failure by a writer who until now has made that literary genre his own...

...And in The American Dream Stephen Rojack thinks of his alternation between anal and vaginal intercouse with Ruta the maid as "a raid on the Devil and a trip back to the Lord...

...And when one considers that for Mailer sex is orgasm, history is revolution and religion is Apocalypse, Sam's dream—all of Mailer's work—becomes a succession of related metaphors of power that form a single comprehensive vision of the world...

...Something in his adenoids gave it away?he had the softness of a man early accustomed to mother-love...

...Because Mailer contains these polarities in his own personality, those who view his public image merely as press agentry miss the point...

...he was a figurehead, and therefore was expendable, said the new modesty—not a future leader, but a future victim: there would be his real value...

...In an early chapter of The Armies of the Night, Mailer confesses that "he had been suffering more and more in the past few years from the private conviction that he was getting a little soft, a hint curdled, perhaps an almost invisible rim of corruption was growing around the edges...

...But Babel's acquaintance with Cossacks led him beyond this animosity...

...It is as objective and controlled a piece of writing as the author has ever done (partly of necessity, since he was in jail during most of the goings-on) and shows us what we already knew?that Mailer wears many hats and, were he content with a by-line in eight-point type, could remain exactly what Robert Lowell calls him, "the best journalist in America...

...Sam Slaboda, fortyish and balding, a failed husband, father, lover and novelist, is only one-quarter Jewish, "yet he is a Jew or so he feels himself . . . the Jew through accident, through state of mind...

...The dialectical conception of existence that he expounded most fully in "The White Negro" abstracts ultimate alternatives from life and then connects them: ". . . incompatibles have come to bed, the inner life and the violent life, the orgy and the dream of love, the desire to murder and the desire to create...

...And yet we laugh off Norman Mailer at our peril...

...Children are excluded altogether from Mailer's fictional world, where life begins at puberty (not surprisingly, two of his chief characters, Mickey Lovett in Barbary Shore and Sergius O'Shaughnessy in The Deer Park, are orphans who suffer from amnesia), and women are reduced to biology's stick-figure symbol for the female...

...A Jew from the Odessa ghetto, Babel served as the supply officer of a Cossack regiment during General Budenny's 1920 Polish campaign and wrote about his experiences in the autobiographical stories of Red Cavalry...

...From The Naked and the Dead to Why Are We in Vietnam?, the true heroes of Mailer's novels understand their role...

...Mailer detected that he was secretly comforted by the thought there would probably be no violence today...

...As Rojack remarks on his tv program, "God's engaged in a war with the Devil and God may lose...

...The eight novels were to be eight stages of his dream later that night, and the books would revolve around the adventures of a mythical hero, Sergius O'Shaughnessy, who would travel through many worlds, through pleasure, business...

...There is a sense in which all novels are sentimental journeys, with the combination of internal and external experience that phrase implies...

...even worse, he was comforted by the conclusion that the best police in Washington would be at the Department of Justice to maintain order...

...a dark, i'omantic, and yet undeniably dynamic view of existence for it sees every man and woman as moving individually through each moment of life forward into growth or backward into death...

...Furious at his reaction, Mailer decides to get busted as soon as possible...

...violence, murder, sexual perversion and the fear of death can be religious acts for him, more life-giving than life-denying...

...Reviewed by RICHARD M. LEVINE In Advertisements for Myself Norman Mailer describes waking up one morning with an idea for a huge eight-part novel, "the prologue to be the day of a small frustrated man, a minor artist manque...

...Saturday afternoon at the Pentagon wears on and neither Mailer nor his companions, Robert Lowell and Dwight McDonald, succeed in getting arrested ("He had a picture again of three notables, silly to themselves, walking about with a candle, looking to be copped...

...Mailer seems literally to believe in a kind of Manichaen vision of the cosmic battle between God and the Devil, with the winner still very much in doubt...

...At a party he attends on his first night in Washington, where most of the guests are liberal academics—Sams to the core —Mailer explains his hostility to them in personal terms: "His deepest detestation was often reserved for the nicest of liberal academics, as if their lives were his own life but a step escaped...

...The curious fact is that in this crucial area of the relationship between ideas and character development, Mailer's latest work of non-fiction is closer to a novel than his previous works of fiction...

...By emphasizing the extremes of existence and scorning the middle way, Mailer has schematized the life of his novels, melodramatized it...

...In Advertisements for Myself Mailer says of himself, "sex was the sword of history to this uncommissioned General...

...the novelist in Norman Mailer is in complete control of the hero of history...

...The times, not Mailer, have narrowed the gap between confessions and True Confessions...

...At the very beginning of The Armies of the Night, Mailer writes of his public image in words that could as easily describe the relationship between Sam and Sergius: "Mailer had the most developed sense of image...

...General Cummings' wife in The Naked and the Dead sums up the impossibility of mature relations between the sexes in Mailer's novels when she discovers that her husband "is alone, that he fights out battles with himself upon her body...

...Mailer doesn't mix his metaphors carelessly...

...Of course, the change of battlefield has affected the outcome of the battle...

...As Mailer rhetorically asks the reader, "is he finally comic, a ludicrous figure with mock heroic associations...

...the novelist must be concerned more with particular women...

...his idea of himself—were they stale...

...He sprinted a few steps, looked over his shoulder, stepped in a drainage trough where the parking lot concrete was hollowed, almost fell with a nasty wrench of his back and abruptly stopped running, sheepishly, recognizing that some large fund of fear . . . lived in him like an abcess quick to burst now at the first mean threat...

...Mailer sees America wandering lost and bewildered somewhere between Frontierland and Technologyland, and this national schizophrenia mirrors, or is mirrored by, the schizophrenic division within himself...

...Salvation is no longer a purely private affair...

...One does not confess to a priest but to a national audience in books and the pages of Esquire and Harper's...

...But the value of the Jew and the Cossack as indications of contrasting life styles is undiminished...

...Sergius blusters and Sam whimpers in a vacuum...

...Sam and Sergius play out their assigned roles very close to the center of the Jewish—and specifically the East European Jewish—imagination...

...Hung over the next morning, he finds that his bravery has evaporated with the liquor: "Revolution-aries-for-a-weekend should never get hangovers...

...Looking like a "banker gone ape" in a dark pinstripe suit, regimental tie, and a vest that strains to cover his middle-aged paunch, he steps gingerly over a rope separating the parking lot from the lawn in front of the Pentagon, skirts one startled MP at a jog and weaves between the troops until finally stopped and led away by two burly marshals...

...Perhaps other novelists could have written equally fine self-portraits and other social critics perceived the significance behind an event which had a surreal quality, as if co-directed by Cecil B. DeMille and Walt Disney...

...Try as he might to make the Jew the hero of his novels, Mailer's sympathies are with the Cossack...

...his aimless violence and cruelty was contrasted to the Jewish self-image of humaneness, pacifism and rationality...

...After 20 years of public and private imagery, it should be clear that Mailer is in the process of working out his own salvation in stages that closely resemble the progress of Sam Slabo-da's dream of Sergius O'Shaughnessy...

...Only the Cossack in Mailer's novels can accept these incompatibles...

...I do not mean to imply that Mailer comes across as Sam Slaboda in The Armies of the Night, for Sam without his nighttime alter ego is clearly Bellow, Malamud and Roth country, and Mailer has a keen sense of literary property rights...

...Too great a concern with salvation can be a problem lor a novelist...

...An allegorist can be judged by the originality of his ideas, a novelist only by his use of them...

...There is plenty of sex in Mailer's novels but very little sense of the prosaic psychological intricacies of sexual relations...

...One no longer cares that most of Mailer's metaphysics is shoplifted from the five-and-dime store of fashionable thinking, nor that his politics—however dressed up in phrases like "Constitutional Nihilism" and "Left Conservatism" —is pretty much Founding Father liberalism at heart...

...This Jewish dream of the Cossack, like Sam's dream of Sergius, moves through many worlds in Mailer's novels, but these all reduce to his principal concerns—sex, history and religion...

...in addition and often in contrast to their actions, which make novels...

...Salvation, for Mailer, is not the broad road of official religion...

...Tex and Rusty in Why Are We in Vietnam...

...A few pages further on he accepts Sergius not as image or dream but as one aspect of his personality: "But as Mailer had come to recognize over the years, the modest everyday fellow of his daily round was a servant to a wild man in himself: the gent did not appear so very often, sometimes so rarely as once a month, sometimes not even twice a year, and he sometimes came when Mailer was frightened and furious at the fear, sometimes he came just to get a breath of air...

...Mailer's latest work, 1 he Armies of the Night—significantly subtitled "History as a Novel, The Novel as History"—is an interesting success because it is a record of that awakening...

...Once Mailer has been carted off to the detention center, he no longer has the comic irony?the tension between action and reflection—going for him to sustain the narrative...

...or is he not unheroic, and therefore embedded somewhat tragically in the comic...

...Sergius, the Cossack in Mailer, fearlessly enters the fray, while Sam, the Jew, watches from the sidelines in terror: "For a warrior, presumptive general, ex-political candidate, embattled aging enfant terrible of the literary world . . . champion of obscenity, husband of four battling sweet wives, amiable bar drinker, and much exaggerated street fighter, party giver, hostess insulter—he had...

...They are, instead, representatives of conflicting principles—the rational and the instinctual, the contemplative and the active, the spiritual and the physical...

...The difficulty is that the minds of the allegorist and the novelist work in opposite directions...

...Like those Disney characters in drag, the Hippies who tried to levitate the Pentagon, Mailer has a fine sense of history as spectacle and of politics as the exorcism of both public and private demons...

...Mailer's special genius is the realization that in the age of mass and mixed media, one does not have to go to the mountaintop to save one's soul...

...pie-in-the-face comedy as opposed to the wit often found in his novels —from his "monumental disproportions...

...In the first and longer part of the book?History as a Novel"—Mailer calls his own bluff and emerges the Cassius Clay of letters—a better writer and weaker puncher than we thought...

...In the story Sam Slaboda makes a statement—repeated word for word by his counterpart in the novel, the film direotor Charley Eitel—that seems to me the explanation for both the interest and the ultimate failure of much of Mailer's work: "It is the actions of men and not their sentiments which make history...

...Sex and history become religious rites for Mailer, expressions of God's enormous destiny...

...The first violent encounter between the demonstrators and the MPs throws Mailer into a state of panic: "He didn't want Mace...

...Not for Mailer the first feints of desire or post-coital languor...

...Mailer is a figure of monumental disproportions," he writes in this third-person narrative, "and so serves willy-nilly as the bridge—many will say the pons asinorum—into the crazy house, the crazy mansion, of that historic moment...

...In The Armies of the Night Mailer successfully joins together these fragments of himself, and the result is a self-portrait more complete and imaginative than any of his fictional characters...

...This may be press agentry, but it is not merely press agentry...

...In the war between God and the Devil, great saints are great sinners, for one must learn the Devil's stratagems in order to do service for the Lord...

...In a beautiful phrase, the narrator of Red Cavalry describes himself as a man "with spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart...

...The Jew and the Cossack, contemplation and action, are false alternatives for the novelist, since he can only change the world by understanding it...

...His novels are devotional exercises...

...it is the mythical hero's trip through hell and the mystic's faith that "the way up is the way down...

...Examples of the conflict could be taken from Freud and Kafka—the ego and the id, K. and his assassins—but it is most explicitly presented in the work of Isaac Babel, perhaps the most talented writer to emerge from that artistically extraordinary decade following the Russian Revolution...

...Orgasm is all, and even orgasm is only a metaphor for the apocalyptic scheme of Mailer's own Big Bang theory of the universe...

...It is as if the two stages of Tolstoy's career were chronologically merged, and the author of Anna Karenina forced to write with the restrictions and proscriptions of What Is Art...