Minor Mailer
GEWEN, BARRY
General Motors The future of transportation is here Writers ckWriting MNOR MAILER BY BARRY GEWEN I ?n his new book, Pieces and Pontifications (Little, Brown, 448 pp., $20.00), a volume that...
...He can be as hyperbolic as any battle-scarred super-patriot...
...a dizzyingly circular discussion of the CIA and Watergate demonstrating that there may be no truth in the world of spies, since everyone is watching everyone else(G.K...
...At best, we think we know what we are against without being sure what we are for...
...Nevertheless, what is valuable about his views and most valuable, I believe, about Pieces and Pontifications is the attempt he is making to come to grips with a very real problem...
...Don't take his word for it, Mailer says...
...sometimes they seem to teeter on the brink of incoherence...
...c W^ex is not the only thing discussed in Pieces and Pontiflcations...
...The statement is interesting in at least two respects...
...Overstated, to be sure, but not without its hard kernel of truth...
...The appearance of the censor, in crew cut or denim skirt, brings out the verbal street fighter in him and, walloping away, he writes that the new feminism "succeeded in wrecking the Democratic Party...
...One suspects that after the Jack Henry Abbott affair, Mailer may no longer be capable of writing such a piece...
...Instead of two articles on Henry Miller, I, for one, would have liked to see Mailer take on Saul Bellow, in many ways his natural adversary...
...He also has problems with birth control, abortion and homosexuality...
...Chesterton did it better in The Man Who Was Thursday...
...Part of the totalitarian is to make an absolute out of the prevailing tendency of the time...
...Some of the interviews in particular read like a conversation one might have with an especially intelligent and imaginative, albeit somewhat fanciful, friend at five in the morning, after inhibitions have fallen away...
...Whatever his opinions about so murky a subject as sex, Mailer demands the right, for himself and others, to think freely, to follow an idea to its breaking point unhindered either by the hick repressiveness of the Moral Majority or the billboard dogmatists of the Women's Movement...
...If the hunt is gone...
...The danger...
...The first and most obvious is that it demonstrates Mailer's ongoing assault against the taboos surrounding sex...
...This father of the Sexual Revolution is no permissive liberal...
...Nobody wants to go down in history alongside the Puritans and Victorians...
...Thus, about permissiveness: "There are two ways a technological society can weaken sex, through huge puritanism like the Russians, or...through huge license pornography, a sexual revolution, androgyny, gay lib, women's lib I mean, what's the use of being able to make love to anyone, any man or any woman, if finally your incentive is taken away altogether...
...Along with most of us, he inhabits the area between the two extremes of traditional moral strictures and total liberation...
...He is nothing if not a professional, and his remarks on literature are always worth reading...
...When he wants to be, Mailer is a first-rate critic...
...Then they can observe what happens, watch her at parties, get a private detective, check up on her...
...By now they're more...
...About swingers: "These people are as totalitarian as the ones who say chastity is the only good on earth...
...Generally, we try to avoid being dogmatic, in part because we understand that many of our notions are baggage from generations past...
...Mailer's passion for free thinking does not, however, translate into a passion for free love and that is the second and more striking aspect of his statement on sodomy...
...It is as if he sought complete freedom of expression in order to condemn more harshly and more precisely practices that, before, he was not allowed to describe...
...Readers should judge for themselves...
...His ideas on sex are unpredictable, even maddening...
...In this volume, as elsewhere, he speaks experiential-ly, not clinically...
...Throughout his career, he has fought to expand our range of expression in the sexual realm, what he has called literature's last frontier...
...General Motors The future of transportation is here Writers ckWriting MNOR MAILER BY BARRY GEWEN I ?n his new book, Pieces and Pontifications (Little, Brown, 448 pp., $20.00), a volume that combines his most important articles of the '70s with interviews spanning the 23-year period 1958-81, Norman Mailer says of sodomy: "It's very dangerous____It tends to make them [women] more promiscuous...
...But for the difference in style, many of his thoughts would fit comfortably into harangues by Jerry Falwell, Anita Bryant or Phyllis Schlafly against writers like Norman Mailer...
...the beer commercial that told us we only pass this way once bespoke one of the foundations of contemporary morality...
...They remain his ideas, and readers must be thankful for that...
...In part, too, we fear missing out on something...
...Marriage, on the other hand, now seems to him a heroic enterprise, a gamble against the odds for a transcendent vision...
...During the '70s, Mailer found new enemies within the Women's Movement...
...As he states in one of the earlier interviews, "I am now to the right of the Catholic Church...
...Attitudes do not seem to mesh with ideals...
...The rebellion...
...This is a wide, gray, shapeless space in which we struggle with few guides or firm beliefs...
...About masturbation: "I happen to believe, just like the 19th-century preachers, that the ultimate tendency of masturbation is insanity...
...On issues like adultery, divorce, homosexuality, adolescent sex, suggestive advertising, our opinions are soft at the center, blurry around the edges...
...And then, in one of those Maileresque flights of fancy that infuriates many people: "They can test it out...
...Though his arguments with the more vociferous feminists had some basis in philosophical differences, the real casus belli, as Pieces and Pontifications makes clear, was Mailer's perception of the dictatorial element lurking in Women's Liberation, its impulse to restrict ideas to a party line...
...As a result, despite its virtues, it does not measure up to being a major work...
...Mailer told one of his daughters to lose her virginity when she couldn't help herself, not because she decided in her head to do so and he thinks she didn't listen to him...
...His language is graphic, charged, unsentimental , the opposite of prurient...
...William Burroughs, hesays, "changed the course of American literature" in expressing the inner nature of the sexual climax...
...The achievement...
...It treats an unorthodox subject unorthodoxly, contrary to expectations...
...He is probably the only serious critic who found the movie Last Tango in Paris too coy, insufficiently explicit because it failed to show Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider coupling, and so did not "re-embody life...
...Half a dozen other obvious topics are similarly missing from the book...
...Time and again in Pieces andPontiflcations he speaks out against the all-is-permitted sexual ethos of our time...
...A surprisingly large amount of the book is given over to the craft of writing, recalling Mailer's comment in Advertisements for Myself: "My adolescent crush on the profession of the writer had been more lasting than I could have guessed...
...Does sodomy cause women to become more promiscuous...
...and an irresponsible article that sentimentalizes the hoodlums who vandalize New York City's subways with graffiti...
...Still, what should a parent tell a young daughter about sex...
...And sooner or later, unless he forsakes nonfiction altogether to finish the monster novel he is working on, Mailer is going to have to get around to discussing Israel, the Jews, and himself as a Jew...
...There is much chaff, too an overlong essay on television in the style of Armies of the Night, funniest when it reproduces the transcript of Mailer's encounter with Gore Vidal on the Dick Cavett show...
...One needn't act on Mailer's advice, though, to appreciate his effort at sorting things out, seeking answers not according to archaic religious formulas or hedonistic cliches, but through unfettered thinking and the truth of personal experience...
...Because it brings forward for reflection subjects normally banished from thought, it is exhilarating, lighting up dozens of darkened corridors in the brain...
...we draw arbitrary lines in the sand at incest or child pornography or streetwalkers moving into our neighborhoods and call these our absolutes, the outer limits of our permissiveness...
...Valuable apercus about his contemporaries are strewn throughout, and in the reminiscence on Jean Malaquais, he offers a moving description of writer's block...
...A veteran in a war that is far from over, Mailer continues to fight on several fronts...
...Mailer is eager to celebrate that lonely endeavor, yet for all his admiration, he perceives Miller's limitations??his obsessiveness, his repetitiousness, his inability to get beyond the simple immediacy of sex...
...It is too piecemeal, too idiosyncratic, not really on top of the decade...
...Nor does Pieces and Pontiflcations display the "grasp on its period" that Mailer, in his Preface, says it should have...
...In a remark that might stand as an accurate summary of the novelist's one-sidedness, Mailer states that Miller never succeeded in writing about sex with love...
...Call it a minor work by a major writer...
...On a more restrained note, Mailer lauds the work of Henry Miller in two pieces that, if they overstate Miller's importance, manage to pinpoint not only his good points but his bad ones as well: "The last great American pioneer," Miller heroically charted a territory others refused to approach...
...Those who are scientifically inclined can immediately approach their mate and tool her, if they're able...
...These diminish the book, dropping it below some of the earlier collections...
...Mailer has taken a great deal of abuse for these ideas, and I doubt he has a single reader who would not, in some way, find him too strait-laced...
...Ever since the Women's Movement came along, there hasn't been a Democratic politician who's dared to open his mouth and let anything more forceful than oatmeal come out...
...Ina field crowded with experts and where all claims to expertise are to be distrusted, he offers dialogue, something to chew on, the views of a fallible man...
Vol. 65 • June 1982 • No. 12
