376
PARTISAN REVIEW
just as it provokes Cummings to feats of military brilliance. But it
is also what establishes the two men as the
natural
heroes of
The
Naked and the Dead.
If
life is truly what
The Naked and the Dead
shows it to be-a fierce battle between the individual will and all
the many things that resist it-then heroism must consist in a com–
bination of strength, courage, drive, and stamina such as Cummings
and Croft exhibit and that Hearn and Valsen conspicuously lack.
Moreover, Cummings and Croft are the only characters who point
to anything like an adequate response to life as we see it in the
novel. They are, of course, reactionaries, but they demonstrate (as
reactionaries often do) the workings of the radical spirit-which is
to say that the principle of their behavior is a refusal to accept the
limitations inherent in any given situation as final, a refusal stemming
from the conviction that the situation itself need not be regarded
as final in advance. The trouble with Hearn and Valsen is their ina–
bility to transcend the terms of the given; they know perfectly well
that these terms are intolerable, yet they cannot envisage any condi–
tions other than the ones before their eyes, and therefore they are
reduced to apathy, cynicism, and despair. Croft and Cummings also
know that the terms are intolerable, but the knowledge acts as a
stimulus to their energies and a goad to their imagination. Though
the laws of nature seem to prohibit a man from climbing to the top
of Mt.
An
aka, Croft, who cannot bear to remain imprisoned within
the boundaries of what has already been accomplished, dares to at–
tempt the climb, while Hearn and Valsen shrug helplessly at the
sight of the peaks: like liberalism itself, they lack the vision and the
drive to push toward the top of the mountain. All this being the case,
Mailer either had to give up his liberalism or forcibly prevent Croft
and Cummings from running away with
The Naked and the Dead
altogether. Because he was not yet ready to write liberalism off and
because it seemed impossible to find virtue in Cummings and Croft
without also finding virtue in fascism, he had no alternative but to
violate the emotional logic of his novel by destroying them as best
he could. The destruction of Croft is spread thin throughout the
novel, but the disposal of Cummings is only effected at the end,
when Mailer contrives by a shocking twist of plot to rob him of
credit for winning the campaign.
The Naked and the Dead,
then, shows an exceptionally gifted
young writer in the years immediately after the war discovering what
