NORMAN MAILER
377
he did not know he knew-that American liberalism is bankrupt be–
cause it cannot provide an answer to the challenge with which history
has presented it. Not only does liberalism confine itself to the terms
of the given at a time when there can be no hope of working within
these terms, but it is animated by a vision of the world that neither
calls forth heroic activity nor values the qualities of courage, daring,
and will that make for the expansion of the human spirit. In the
"absence of anything else," however, and out of his awareness that
it was impossible to "get by on style" as so many intellectuals of
his
generation were trying to do, Mailer held on stubbornly to his liberal
views, even as he was beginning to recognize that his real values
tended in an anti-liberal direction. So little, indeed, did liberalism
affect his deepest judgments that the most compassionate writing in
The Naked and the Dead
is devoted to the tribulations of the patho–
logical anti-Semite Gallagher when he receives the news of his wife's
death in childbirth. Fascist or no fascist, Gallagher is a violent, pas–
sionate man, and this was enough to turn the balance in his favor,
just as the timidity and mediocrity of Roth, Wyman, and Brown
are the decisive factors in the adverse judgment Mailer passes on
them. Ultimately what Mailer was looking for-and has continued
to look for- is not so much a more equitable world as a more excit–
ing one, a world that produces men of size and a life of huge
pos–
sibility, and this was nowhere to be found in the kind of liberalism
to which he committed himself in the earliest phase of his literary
career.
It is characteristic of Mailer-and, I believe, of the essence of
his strength as a novelist-that he never pays much attention to in–
tellectual fashion . In 1948, when everyone of any sophistication un–
derstood that Henry Wallace had been duped by the Communists,
Mailer was campaigning vigorously for the Progressive party, and if
this amounted to a confession of political naivete, it also exhibited
a healthy reluctance on his part to be guided by the experience of
others. He must always work everything out for himself and by
himself, as though it were up to him to create the world anew over
and over again in his own experience. He abandoned what was then
being called "unreconstructed" liberalism only when he could see at
first hand why it was wrong to support it, and even then he did so
in
his
own good time and for his own special reasons. Certainly he
