Mailer's Violent Dream: Murder, Sex, Madness

A perennial embarrassment for CRIMSON reviewers--the treatment of work already hailed or roasted by professionals"--comes over me now with unusual urgency. I must report that a novel that has, for a solid month, been crapped all over by a score of literateurs more authoritative than I, struck me as a grand, wondrous, exciting effort of imagination.

That embarrassment is easily trebled as I marvel at the clarity, the wit, the gay dispatch with which critics have flayed the hide off poor Norman Mailer (who cares so terribly much what they think--even the ones he most despises) and left him in paunchy, shivering nakedness, his eyes to the ground, his hands over his genitals, like some pugnacious locker-room bull artist exposed as a virgin in front of the whole damn team.

O.K., I say, maybe Norman has taken me in with his book, with his mophead bragadoccio, with his bullying megalomania, with his shouting, roaring "Look at me! Look at ME!" O.K., I say, I'll stand there and shiver with him rather than step out into the crowd and point, and laugh, or look a bit bemused and tut-tut to my neighbor. Because some big gas is building up in Mailer's chest, straining against his rib cage, straining to explode out any orifice into a dazzling fireworks of vision, or prophecy, or whatever those fireworks are that naked writers with gaseous insides hope to release in testament to their genius.

Genius? Is that what may erupt from all that awful pressure? Or break through leaving a hole the size of a cannon ball? Or escape only in little flatulences, never hinting at the megatons of helium inside, until the jeers melt to chuckles and the crowd moves off to new amusement?

Then I say, maybe it is only hatred in Norman's chest. Maybe it is only a stockpile of frustration--the frustration of an ego that grows hungrier with every feeding, of a heterosexual in an era of pan-sexuality; frustration with language too meager to ciutch at ideas his mind is shaping, with mind too meager to clutch at ideas he'd like to shape, with creative ambitions that far exceed what greatness he can hope to claim, with material that will not yield its secrets, like rocky soil intractable to a battered plough.

A Bad Joke?

Come, I say next, how can you take Norman seriously? This man who declared himself a candidate for Mayor of New York, then stabbed his wife in the stomach? Who claimed credit for Kennedy's election? Who hollered drunk insults at Sonny Liston and was carried from the press conference? How can you take this man seriously? It's so unfashionable.

His book is a pot boiler--implausible, silly, absurd. The critics, more patronizing than venomous, they were right. It is a joke. A good joke, and even Norman knew we would laugh, with its superhero hero, outrageous farce situations. Or a grotesque joke, so ugly with violence and incest and morbid broodings and salacious psychopathology; a joke in bad taste.

Then I say, Uh-uh. I am tired by this time, and not altogether sure, with such impressive weight on the other side. But I say at last that it is almost a great book. It is wildly flawed, too big for Mailer, unbelievable, confused, without humor (though with much wit), not a thriller (though it might have ben a smashing thriller), not a psychology, lacking in characterization. But finally, An American Dream has immense proportions--almost, one might say, mythic proportions--and the relentless pace of carnivore running hunted through a modern jungle to feast and keep from being feasted upon, to smell, to taste, to explode at last, to be killed and take, hopefully, a few of the enemy with him.

The Oceanic Orgasm

The publishers advise us that Mailer has dramatized the unthinkable. Rather, he has dramatized the supremely thinkable, demonic fantasies of fear and courage, of ambition, of aggression and virility that serve as fodder for the dreams of futile men. He tells of suppressed obsessions, impulses not acted out quite, but lived on the edge of, destruction of the malignant in oneself, in what one loves, suicide and murder. Mostly, perhaps he tells of intercourse, intercourse with oceanic climax, coming in waves not of love, but of something between lust and pure aestheticism. All of the sex is magnificent, art, but written with the bristle of one who has also known bad sex.

More specifically, the story concerns Stephen Rojack, a war hero from Harvard (the "one intellectual in America's history with a Distinguished Service Cross"), ex-congressman, T.V. personality, professor of existentialist psychology with voodooish overtones, author, boxer, and stud non-pareil.

Rojack murders his wife (an emasculating Great Bitch), tangles with cunning police, staggers into involuting imbroglios with an opportunistic fraulein, a southern chanteuse, a negro singing idol and, through them, with larger or vaguer or uglier forces--the Mafia, haut society, the Muslims, dirty politics, high finance, television, university intelligencia, the CIA.

Litcrary Brinksmanship

Yet Rojack (like Mailer?) knows so many worlds that he is never an insider. Rojack is in limbo, always a familiar face, always tuned in on the less guarded secrets, but always a floater on the periphery, always a nose pressed against the glass. This is Rojack (and Mailer his shadow), much too hip to swing with the squares, but too close to power to call himself an outcast; doomed to a netherworld of liberal intellectuals, never in the back rooms with Mr. Big nor safe on a midnight street in Harlem.

But no again. How can we call him (either of them--we forget now who is the celebrity, who the shadow) a liberal intellectual, with all the puny impotence that implies? Rojack is a dilettante across the board of his life, all right, suspended lonely between anarchy and the Establishment, but he's roaring down the canyons of danger as well, whipping his own naked back with fevered thongs.

For Rojack (like Mailer?) con- ducts his life as if it were some black experiment, he needs the battle even when life itself has almost been kicked out of him, needs the action, the booze, the orgasm--that inescapable moment--even with the fetid breath of murder and suicide and madness congealing in his nostrils. Even dizzy on the parapet, exhausted in the desert, he pushes on, tracking the devil, hunting out a more ultimate disaster; ready, even on the precipice of collapse, to go the very depths of possible experience.

Daring this literary brinksmanship, Mailer catches more than a glimpse of the abyss below. "How poor to go to death with no more than the notes of good intention," he wrote six years ago, in Advertisements. Every scene is almost over the edge, compressed with the tension of a man who may slip from his foothold on his own sweat; so is Mailer's prose--sometimes straight narrative riding on the sheer power of events, but sometimes inflated, rhetorical, once or twice embarrassing.

What is Mailer's "American Dream?" It must be a whole horizon of dreams gone sour, not into nightmares but into that phantasmagoric horror of hallucinogens, where one feels the vomit recede back down the throat through massive pressure from neck muscles. The Valentino Dream of sexual power gone wild as Rojack somersaults with the maid while his wife's corpse empties its intestines on the upstairs rug; the Dream of the Heiress polluted by Deborah's guileful malevolence; The Alger Dream of self-made empires gone rotten in her father's diabolic machinations; The Westerner Dream of the loner on the borderlines of society perverted now by the company he must keep; The Dreams of the Con Man, The Urban Gangster, The White Negro (a myth Mailer helped himself to make) all corrupted, immeasureably soiled by the evil of our national life until there are tenable dreams no longer but only the will, and the courage if not the strength to escape to Guatamala or Yucatan.

". . . I had leverage, however, I was one of the more active figures of the city--no one could be certain finally that nothing large would ever come from me." Rojack writes of Mailer, of course. An American Dream is large; we know Mailer had in mind something a great deal larger. The critics are I think too certain that it will not come