POLITICAL BOOKNOTES

...Perhaps Jones would agree...

...She had made him into a “tot of destiny,” (to use [Robert] Linder’s description of the psychopath’s mother, who imbues her child with a grandiose self-image...

...This has gone on so long that there will be no end to it until there is an end to Mailer...

...At the Prairie Pebble Company, only blacks found their paychecks docked for “medical insurance...

...Collier attributes the triumph of the sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll ethic in part to the prosperity that followed World War 11...

...The moral incoherence of the book, however, is reflective of Mailer’s lifelong, naive obsession with violence...

...Big city dwellers who vote for such candidates are making it certain that murderers will be released back onto the streets from overcrowded prisons...

...In 1940, a rural sociologist wrote, “The labor problems of the two races have more or less converged...

...Simple momentum accounts for part of the Mailer legend...

...The distinction is an important one, and she does not make it...

...Driven by alimony and child-support payments, Mailer was forced to put fiction aside for a time for what he regarded as mere journalism-producing under terrific deadline pressure his two best books, The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago...

...Shifting, however, proved futile...

...The story of the South’s small farm owners in the late 19th century represents the intersection of the freedpeople’s climb out of slavery and the poor whites’ descent into tenancy,” points out Jones...

...Never a consistent thinker, Mailer tended toward highly idiosyncratic versions of all three...

...He was at his best during the great coming-apart of the late sixties, when his personal nuttiness and the nation’s briefly became one...

...He also blames television, the humanpotential movement, and the sapping of American morale in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate...

...Oxford, $24.95...

...Has the man ever created a protagonist who wasn’t essentially a fantasy version of his already fantastic public persona...

...Jones traces their route from the hollows of West Virginia and Kentucky to Ohio industrial towns, quoting one woman who described what they were after: “Our own land . . . where we can keep every bite we raise an’ don’t have to be a moven ever’ year...

...After sketching pastoral, pre-industrial Jeffersonian America, he goes on to document, through the rise of the city and waves of immigration, a broad, slow movement “towards increasing permissiveness in sexuality, wider acceptance of the consumption of alcohol as a human norm, greater involvement with the entertainment media, and in general, a continued insistence on the primacy of the self...

...Is it possible to imagine weeping over a Mailer novel...

...Besides which, Jones’s scholarship seems to be at odds with her argument: Considering their history of illwill and enforced competition, how easy will it be for poor blacks and poor whites to unite...

...If Abbot played Mailer like a violin,” Rollyson comments shrewdly, “it was because Mailer had taught him to use the instrument...

...Jones never fully answers this question, though she documents abortive efforts...

...Jacqueline Jones...

...The longest-lived efforts she cites came from the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations...

...By 1930, more than 60 years after Emancipation, 80 percent of all black farmers were still working somebody else’s land...

...And why, dear reader, are you reading this a Christ0 of the psyche, a rock star without a guitar...

...Why is The Washington Monthly bothering to review it...

...He is a boozing, brawling, womanizing, self-infatuated Balzac or Dostoyevsky for post-World War I1 America...

...Alongside signs saying “no colored” were those that said “no Southerners...

...Yet thanks to the breadth of Jones’s scholarship, it is full of revelations-chief among them its examination of why poor blacks and whites have been unable to forge a permanent coalition based on their considerable collective interests...

...With political radicalism more or less a given for a would-be artist whose early models were John Dos Passos and James T. Farrell, Mailer’s literary personality coalesced around the three great, and now mostly defunct, “-isms” of the period: existentialism, Marxism, and Freudianism...

...Whites usually came out aheadparticularly when they moved off the farm to take wage jobs in phosphate mines, lumber camps, textile mills, and turpentine stills...

...Even so, Mailer remains a fascinating and enigmatic figure in spite of himself...

...Why has Rollyson, who teaches art at the City University of New York, written the third biography of Mailer in 10 years (a mostly scissors and paste jobRollyson himself never got an interview...

...If Milli Vanilli wrote books, we’d be reading their confessions today...

...POLITICAL BOOKNOTES The Lives of Norman Mailer...

...In this stoutly ideological work, Jones aims to explain who the poor are, and how they got there...

...The book starts by focusing on the primacy of land in American politics, beginning with the period immediately following the Civil War, a time when patterns of land ownership could have changed drastically but didn’t...

...In lumber camps, blacks performed the heaviest work but were not allowed to cut railroad ties: “It is not well,” explained one owner, “to encourage them to use the broadax...

...On plantations, abuse of blacks lowered wages and standards for both races...

...The psychopath murders-if he has the courage,” he argued, “out of the necessity to purge his violence, for if he cannot empty his hatred then he cannot love...

...He devotes a few hundred words of Dick and Jane to the victims and hundreds of thousands to the creep...

...Poverty is also white: In 1990, poor whites outnumbered poor blacks two to one, and black recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children were a minority...

...Nor that the New York press delighted in ripping the author to shreds after his protege, jailhouse author Jack Abbott, knifed a young waiter to death on the eve of his own book’s publication in 1981...

...For four decades, each new [Mailer] work has been greeted with great anticipation and skepticism...

...Yet, Jones charges, Americans persist in directing their pity and fear at the urban black “underclass,” a monster largely of their own imagination...

...Maybe that’s part of the reason the book reads like nothing Mailer’s written before or since...

...From The Deer Park and Barbary Shore in the fifties (derided in The New Yorker for their “monolithic, flawless badness”) to ponderous monstrosities like last fall’s Harlot’s Ghost, Mailer’s novels often read like parodies for scores-and sometimes hundreds-of pages...

...If Collier sounds vague at some points, criminally obvious at others, and frequently like an Ayn Randian reactionary, he reveals himself in the final chapter to be a disciple not only of Jefferson but also of John Kenneth Galbraith...

...But blacks weren’t the only ones dispossessed and displaced by the war...

...Not finding a world co-extensive with his will, the child, as in Mailer’s case, “acts out” in infantile ways, not having learned to cope with society at large...

...One thing, however, is for sure: If there remains anyone who believes in the universal accessibility of the American dream, this book will serve as a powerful tonic...

...Poverty in America is not mostly urban: A majority of the poor live outside central cities...

...The arguable exception, The Executioner’s Song, a 1,000-plus-page “nonfiction novel” about Utah murderer Gary Gilmore, turns out to have an odd pedigree indeed...

...Some of the bitterest strikes in southern history,” Jones points out, “pitted free men against convicted coal miners...

...Once enough readers are persuaded (or bullied) into thinking an author is important, they tend to keep buying...

...Whites were also lynched, though Jones does not mention this...

...Whites, too, were subject to “transportation charges” that plunged them into debt before they reached a work site...

...The same held true in the industrial sector...

...Suburbanites who vote down town budgets . . . are guaranteeing that the problems of the inner cities which they fled will presently come out of the ghettos and camp on their doorsteps...

...Here Jones begins her examination of the countless ways in which white labor was pitted against black...

...Jay Mclnemey...

...Yet her analysis seems incomplete and a little unclear, as is her conclusion that what America needs, now more than ever, is a politics based not on race but on class...

...Suffce it to say that both intellectually and imaginatively, Mailer was shaped by the fifties, that oft-maligned period extending from 1946 until roughly 1968-not coincidentally his own creative annus mirabilus...

...How did a prudish, hardworking, God-fearing country become, in a mere half-century or so, a republic of hedonists and narcissists addicted to drugs, alcohol, television, sports, vacations, gossip, fast cars, and slow work...

...So what’s this all about...

...In retrospect, it wasn’t surprising that Mailer got taken for a ride by a murderer with a fancy prose style...

...If morally grotesque, Mailer’s ruminations also proved grotesquely prophetic...

...Has he added a phrase, image, or metaphor to the language...

...Fortunately the rest of us can’t hear because we’re watching “Monday Night Football” or “Entertainment Tonight...

...Gene Lyons The Dispossessed: America’s Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present...

...A blend of social, cultural, and economic history, The Rise of Selfishness reads like a kind of mournful survey of the triumph of modernism, a sort of inverse replay of one’s introductory liberal arts courses where the heroes -see Joyce shatter the tyranny of Edwardian social conventions and Victorian narrative conventions-are cast as unwitting villains, contributors to the decline and fall of the American character...

...Either that or he never again found the right topic...

...One was the Populist Party of the 1890s, which briefly united black and white small farmers...

...The money is there for cleaner air, more reliable subways, larger drug rehabilitation programs, and all the rest of it-if we want these things...

...The bulk of the book is devoted to a study of “shifting”: poor folks’ habit of packing up and leaving one plantation for another in the vague hope that things might be better down the road...

...Sure, he’s made an ass of himself on national TV-as Rollyson duly notes -but he also appeared there early and often...

...A researcher named Jere Herzenberg appears to have done the organizing and outlining...

...As for lynching,” said one 19thcentury Georgia populist, “I am opposed to it except in extreme cases...

...Like Galbraith in The Afluent Society, he calls for a more active government and a far higher ratio of public spending to private consumption...

...Two 18-year-old punks who beat to death a candy store owner, therefore, cannot be called cowards, “for one murders not only a weak 50-year-old man but an institution as well, one violates private property, one enters into a new relation with the police...

...given this, are we to ignore the lingering impact of race-and racism-ntirely ? Surely not...

...Ubiquitous yet ignored (in Dixie’s Forgotten People, J. Wayne Flint calls him “the invisible poor”), the poor white offers sad proof that blacks had no monopoly on poverty...

...Or both...

...An authority on the history of jazz, he is more illuminating on the development of popular music and dance than he is on literature and the visual arts...

...Liza Mundy The Rise of Selfishness in America...

...The mass-market cult of MTV has made it all seem a bit pass6 anyway-just so much play-acting with disastrous personal and cultural consequences...

...As long as this ambivalence lives on in whites, it’s hard to envision a just politics (or policy) that discounts race...

...Meanwhile, another study found cocaine and marijuana use doubled among 12- to 17-yearolds between 1972 and 1974...

...Unfortunately, Mailer seems never to have given himself enough credit for what he accomplished in those books...

...If only his publisher could bribe him away from those God-awful novels...

...White landowners attributed shifting to unreliability-“niggers rove from place to place,” sniffed one Texas cotton planter-but Jones strongly insists that to shift was not to be shiftless...

...Certainly, by the mid-seventies, the midwestern construction worker who was beating up hippies in ’68 had grown his hair out, donned bell bottoms, and started smoking Kalamazoo Gold on his lunch break...

...In his broad survey of the fine and popular arts, Collier occasionally and understandably forgets which side he’s on, exulting, at one point, at the way in which Manet’s blatant Olympia “ripped the skin from Victorian prurience...

...Mailer’s unexpurgated autobiography could yet make him the Samuel Pepys of his age...

...Poverty also has a color and a place...

...Has he ever created a female character who was anything but a collection of orifices or a punching bag...

...Can’t think of one...

...Rarely did sharecroppers acquire land or even a measure of independence...

...Mailer had spent a lifetime asking for it...

...This, Jones says, led to the ultimate shift: the Great Migration of southern blacks to the cities of the North...

...At the same time that blacks’ movement was limited, it was also compelled...

...At this late date, anyway, that’s pretty much the only case that can be made...

...That is, he became famous partly by acting famous...

...Laughing...

...If subtle competition existed between the two groups before the war, it was the postwar economy that brought them face to face in the labor market...

...It’s hard to know...

...Up from slavery, blacks became sharecroppers -dependent on whites for housing, land, food, even farm tools, and physically proscribed by Jim Crow laws, Klan-type terrorism, and an annual contract system that kept cash out of their hands...

...Ever told a story that can be summarized with a straight face...

...About half of surveyed Americans at that time believed that premarital sex was wrong under any circumstances...

...An indefatigable self-promoter, Mailer is the Madonna of American letters...

...From this moment on, Collier traces the demise of Victorian morality as embodied in such ideals as conformity to community standards, self-denial, temperance, and the work ethic...

...Poverty has a history,” writes Jones in her sweeping examination of poverty and its handmaiden, landlessness, in the United States...

...There may even be a way for him to achieve the literary immortality he seeks...

...It remains one of the great paradoxes of the war that these slaveless whites fought and died for a system that oppressed them rather than banding together with blacks against the planters...

...Increasingly, Jones writes, the relationship between poor and wealthy whites was not neighborly, but contractual...

...The immediate problem, of course, is that for all the millions of words Mailer has churned out since The Naked and the Dead made him an instant literary celebrity in 1948 at the age of 25, even so fervid an admirer as Rollyson is hard put to name one entirely successful work of fiction...

...Today, most Americans would tell you that color is black and that place is the urban North, a broadly conceived territory that embraces not only Philadelphia, New York, and Trenton, but also Chicago, Detroit, and Washington, D.C...

...Judging by Rollyson’s concise second- and thirdhand accounts of Mailer’s various friendships, feuds, marriages, love affairs, fist-fights, political campaigns, bad movies and assorted minor felonies, he can be charming, he can be a monster, and he can be an unmitigated clown...

...Literary notoriety, once achieved, is harder to lose than other kinds...

...He idealizes the small, rural villages of the last century, with their communal ethic, and wonders how we might begin again to put the public good ahead of the private...

...When she proposes a classbased politics, is she arguing for a Rainbow Coalition-or siding with conservatives who would make college scholarships and affirmative action programs dependent on class...

...The sudden acceleration of self-interest putatively occurred in 1973, signaled by the first appearance of pubic hair in Playboy (Marilyn Chambers in the tub, in a pose that hinted at autoeroticismtwo taboos for the price of one...

...The temptation for most is to think of Norman Mailer as a sort of heroic flop: the last autodidact, if you will, the novelist as philosopher kingsupreme arbiter and embodiment of the history, culture, and politics of his age...

...Collier’s date is actually not as arbitrary as it seems: He marshals a good deal of data to support the notion that the social, sexual, and pharmacological revolutions of hip sixties youth were adopted by the masses in the seventies...

...While blacks became sharecroppers, whites became tenant farmers who were viewed as mildly superior to blacks, but not by much...

...She had indulged him, taken possession of him in such an absolute way that he would always be her boy...

...These are ambitious goals, and they make for tough going...

...Like Virginia Woolf, Collier thinks that human character changed sometime around December 1910, although in the case of the American character he comes up with a pivotal year of 1912 by factoring in such events as Freud’s lectures at Clark University in 1909 and the 1913 Armory Show in New York...

...Throughout this ugly history, why didn’t blacks and whites turn on their employers...

...What may have been Mailer’s philosophical nadir was the infamous essay “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster” in the 1957 book Advertisements for Myself...

...The poor white man is crucial to Jones’s argument...

...When the time was right, it hopped into its BMW and went into fifth gear under former actor Ronald Reagan, a divorcC ostensibly committed to religion and family who neither attended church nor doted on his offspring...

...When she deplores a “prevalence of racial politics” in America today, is she referring to the David Dukes or the Louis Farrakhans...

...Two ways, according to James Lincoln Collier: gradually and then suddenly...

...James Lincoln Collier...

...This book sometimes seems as interminable as injustice itself...

...Harsh words indeed...

...The date also suggests that even though the Republican dynasty established by Nixon seemed to signal a recrudescence of “traditional values,” the ethic of selfishness was merely hiding out...

...In the kitchen of his Brooklyn Heights brownstone, writes biographer Rollyson (who has never been there), Mailer has a homemade photo montage of himself and Hemingway, previous American incumbent to the throne...

...Frequently imprisoned for crimes real and invented, black convicts were rented out-cheaply-to do mining and construction work...

...The dog licks his genitals, in other words, because he can...

...A Kinsey Institute study completed in 1970 concluded, “Our data have shown that patterns of sexual morality in 1970 tended to be quite conservative...

...It is a very simple equation: Parents who vote for candidates who promise to hold down taxes are ensuring that their children will have available to them a rich smorgasbord of drugs to choose from...

...Essentially because Mailer’s one successful character is Mailer himself...

...Next to making it on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry, it’s the surest meal ticket around...

...Basic, $25...

...Instead of handing freed blacks 40 acres and a mule, the federal government gave in to southern Democrats and returned most confiscated land to its original white owners...

...Hardly...

...Poverty is also southern: The South has more poor than the Northeast and Midwest combined...

...Schmoozing has a lot to do with it, too...

...Rollyson’s account of the book‘s genesis makes it clear that most of the researchincluding all of the interviews with Gilmore himself-were done by Mailer’s friend Larry Schindler...

...Still motivated, Rollyson shows, by the need to support himself, five wives, and eight children, his subsequent nonfiction books became as blowsy and selfindulgent as the worst of his novels...

...She herself shows that whites have usually found it easier to hoist themselves out of poverty...

...Indeed, while Rollyson is coy about spelling it out, that’s pretty much how he makes his case for Mailer’s importance: as a literary performance artist, - To find his true identity, Mailer would have to murder that nice young man his mother had taken such pains to raise...

...And if blacks were prevented from voting by literacy clauses and poll taxes, so were poor whites-who, Jones estimates, lost 25 percent of their voting power this way...

...But we will have to give up something to get them...

...Even before the Civil War, whites were pushed onto the South’s least fertile sand flats and clay hills, and deprived by slavery of a host of wage-earning jobs...

...Rollyson writes: fool thing...

...Yet they, too, found themselves mocked and reviled...

...They’d be wrong...

...The findings do not support the contention that a sexual revolution . . . is now occurring in the United States...

...Now, of course, only Pat Buchanan and Pat Boone cling to such a belief...

...By locating the origins of the black underclass in the upheavals wrought by the Civil War and by highlighting other poor groups such as laid-off whites and Mexican migrants, she aims to urge America toward a “class-based” politics instead of one that is founded on race...

...Actually, Mailer’s grandiosity, his often astonishing energy, mood swings, manic charm, occasional paranoia, history of drug and alcohol abuse, and violent outbursts suggest a different diagnosis altogether-one having nothing to do with the pseudoFreudian humbug for which biographer and subject share a taste...

...It’s hard to think of one...

...The only thing Mailer apparently can’t be is dull...

...Jones blames the lasting failure of these initiatives on two factors: the declining power of labor unions, and white America’s abiding belief in the “otherness” of the black poor-its conviction that poor blacks are a subculture unto themselves...

...that paradox is intimately related to the questions posed by Jones in her book...

...Not one...

...It’s no surprise, then, that whites also fled north-though, Jones points out, their move “lacked the political and moral urgency that elevated black migration to the level of myth and allegory...

...There may be merit to this argument, but Jones does not name her enemy...

...Or, as Rollyson puts it close to the end of what is, for all one’s skepticism, a fascinating book: What other American writer approaching 70 is still being asked to prove himself and has actually abetted the question...

...Anti-authoritarian to his core, he also had (and has) a formidable appetite for power that kept him more or less constantly at war with himself...

...racial covenants took the place of pass laws, and, Jones says, the ghetto took the place of the plantation...

...Never...

...To their chagrin, whites often were subject to the same restrictions as blacks: When a white landowner declared that he didn’t want “pistol carriers,” “professional crap shooters,” “quarrelsome men,” or preachers on his plantation, he wasn’t just talking about blacks...

...But even there they were confined to the worst jobs, the worst schools, and the worst neighborhoods...

...By contrast, in the early seventies there was a swing politically to the right, the ending of post-war prosperity, and a dramatic upward surge in selfishness which very quickly became so gross as to effect a qualitative change in American life...

...Shifting, she argues, showed that croppers were industrious, doggedly independent, even idealistic...

...Yet shoddy treatment of blacks often led to the same for whites...

...Mailer treats “Negro” and “psychopath,” as synonyms throughout, although he uses the latter as a term of praise...

...It’s hard for a man Mailer’s age to impersonate a rebel, much less a sexual outlaw, in the age of Ax1 Rose, Madonna, and AIDS...