PARTISAN REVIEW
On The Road,
Tennessee Williams's
Camino Real
and other plays,
the books of essays that Henry Miller has published from California,
Allen Ginsberg's
Howl.
What puts all these works together in my mind
is the fact that this essential lack of feeling, of direction and point,
is accompanied by the same extreme yet abstract violence of sexual
activity and description. I am reminded of the Marquis de Sade,
that famous sexual rebel, that supposed martyr to the cause of sexual
freedom-when one actually opens his books, he turns out to be not
a rebel at
all
but a fantasist whose idea of sexual pleasure is always
something so extreme, perverse and complicated that only the mind
can imagine it-as only the mind can stage it. This is the situation in
Norman Mailer's
The Deer Park,
a book that was acclaimed by
some left-wing critics as an indictment of Hollywood, and is based in
part on the enforced exile from the industry of Communist directors
and writers who would not give the names of party members to the
investigating committees. One discovers very soon in reading
his
book
that Mailer is not interested in the political significance of his material,
though he feels that he
should
be; he is concerned with sex as an
ultimate expression of man's aloneness.
The Deer Park
takes place
mostly in a famous desert resort, and despite the urbanities of luxurious
American living, I had the sensation that these people really were
in the desert, and with nothing to talk about, nothing to think about,
nothing to feel, they were like Eskimos whiling away the eternal
boredom of the igloo with unending sexual intercourse.
The sensation of claustrophia, of something profoundly cheerless
and inhuman, that I got from Mailer's book was intensified by
his
article in
Dissent-"The
White Negro: Superficial Reflections On
The Hipster." Mailer's theme is that the Negro has been forced by
discrimination into an outlaw state in which he has developed the
primitive and uninhibited sexuality that white men are not allowed
to indulge. As modern capitalist society becomes inwardly more
demoralized, certain advanced sectors of white society-the more
naturally rebellious, intelligent and unafraid-become white versions
of the Negr(), seek to become hipsters (spiritual outlaws) rather than
"squares" (conventionally conformist men and women). On the
model of the Negro, they can find in the sensations of unprecedented
orgasm that direct, blazing, ultimate contact with reality of which
so many people are deprived by conventional, inhibited middle-class
life.
