Rabbit Punches

...Weatherby Mason/Charter 217 pp $9.95 Reviewed by Raymond Rosenthal Critic translator, "Simone Well A Life" We in the age ot stars-stars of every shape and magnitude-whose doings and nondoings are everyday provender for people of all classes Of course in this clutch, out foremost writers, unless they turn hermit or migrate to the Arctic Circle, are preempted by the media machine, and slightly mangled in the process James Baldwin, a prime victim, put it quite well when talking to the author of this book-focusing in large part on the aims of the black movement in the '60s about his touchy, antagonistic relations with Norman Mailer "Being black, I knew far more about that kind of extreme outlaw experience he [Mailer] was pursuing than he would ever know We were trapped in our roles - the roles we had created to help us survive and express parts of ourselves we wanted to make public It's a dangerous business, the world lets you create a role and then makes you a prisoner in it " Change "world" to "media" and you have a capsule account of the hazards a writer must face in normal pursuit of his profession In another statement Baldwin was even sharper Today's audiences, he said, "demand that one be-not seem-outrageous, independent, anarchical That one be thoroughly disciplinedas a means of being spontaneous That one resist at whatever cost the fearful pressures placed on one to he about one's experience For in the same way that the writer scarcely ever had a more uneasy time, he has never been needed more " Weatherby agrees, passionately believing that writers are needed, not only for their art, their imagination and their wisdom, but also as catalysts of opinion He is old-fashioned enough to hope that if two literary figures as important as Baldwin and Mailer clashed over a crucial question, they would actually air their differences in public, to the public's benefit The fact is, however, that what they have indulged in is a long bout of infighting, composed of sly body blows and rabbit puches, most of it invisible except to the main contestants and Weatherby, who gives us the kind of cultural reportage that is all too rare For Squaring Off is crisp, frank and to the point, without the least suggestion of melodramatic hype or professorial jargon Moreover, since he believes in the value of the artist's integrity, Weatherby actively opposes the disguises authors use to more easily reach their audiences In his view, the chief enemies of imaginative promise in America are academicism (which shields the writer from a too rough reality), playing the politician and, most important, playing the wily crowd-pleaser One can argue with the author's overly pure standards Academic life, after all, didn't spoil A E Housman or J R R Tolkien, Disraeli's novels were enhanced rather than marred by his political experiences Still, there is no denying that the two heroes of this saga have often donned the Weather-by-identified disguises, and in the process damaged their creative energies Successful people, though, whether movie stars, baseball players, or writers, having tasted power, want to hold on to it at all costs Indeed, power of various kinds seems always to be on these writers' minds, goaded as they are by an enormous ambition that has little to do with the lonely job of writing Mailer, met in London shortly after he had stabbed his wife and suffered his greatest public setback, seemed to Weatherby more of an Irishman than a Jew, with his "combination of boyish, self-deprecating humor and a wary look around the eyes," his characteristically Celtic "blend of charm and aggression " And though he still longed to run for Mayor of New York, despite the recent scandal, Mailer continued to turn "everything back to his role as an extremist of experience " The trouble between the two men began in the early '60s, when Mailer published his famous essay, "The White Negro," most likely as an attempt to break through what he called, in his talks with Weatherby, "the psychic sound barrier"-the point at which "extreme experience becomes quite logical " The essay caused a fuss, and Baldwin, a good friend of Mailer's at the time, regarded it as a rather crude attempt to get into the act of the then ever-expanding black movement "My objection to 'The White Negro,'" Baldwin told Weatherby, "is that it seems to me such an old-white view of the black It was written in a prose I found impenetrable and also seemed to be borrowing fashionable Beat attitudes from writers who were much inferior to Norman, like Ke-rouac What I couldn't understand was why Norman was slumming Was he embarrassed that he had been born lucky'' He is a first-rate talent who should deal with what he is and not what he would like to be Why borrow from the Negroes' Deal with your own problems, your own sense of panic " Over the years, as Baldwin and Mailer each became more famous, the gap between them grew larger, widened by their differing personalities Mailer had long posed as the heir to Hemingway's mantle of male pugna-ciousness, while Baldwin, who probably did more actual fighting as a kid growing up in the Harlem slums, understandably aspired to a more peaceful world where violence would be taboo Then there was Mailer's Jewish-ness, a subject Baldwin had treated with his usual mcisiveness in an early article, seeing the two legends of Negro inferiority and Semitic greed as myths the white majority used to divide the minorities and rule Finally, the two were separated by their sexual biases, Mailer having admitted his lurking prejudice against homosexuals He wrote, with an obvious reference to such matters, that "Baldwin was too charming a writer to be major " Yet with all these incentives to open battle, the real encounter never took place Intellectual and social life in America suffered as a consequence, for I agree with W J Weatherby's conclusion These upholders of the American spirit let us down because of a complicated mrx of vanity, ambition and sheer shortsightedness...