378
PARTISAN REVIEW
must be the sole American example of a liberal who responded to
the cold war by rushing to embrace revolutionary socialism. There
was nothing "nostalgic" about Mailer's new radicalism; only a man
who had been affected by Marx and Trotsky down to the very core
would have been capable of writing
Barbary Shore,
and it is because
he was so profoundly affected that he could blithely ignore
all
the
good arguments against Marx and Trotsky that were in currency at
the time. It would be impossible to guess from a reading of this novel
that the case it constructs with such loving care had ever been chal–
lenged or refuted or in the least damaged. Nor would it be easy to
guess that objective conditions played their own imperturbable part
in the break-up of revolutionary socialism as an active political move–
ment. Everything in
Barbary Shore
seems to hang on the will of the
people involved, and in this sense Mailer is right to describe the
book as "existentialist" in spirit.
In Marx and Trotsky, Mailer found a system that brought the
courage, vision, and uncompromising determination of Cummings
and Croft into the service of freedom and equality rather than
cl(l$
and privilege, and consequently there is no conflict between idea and
feeling in
Barbary Shore
of the kind we have seen operating
in
The
Naked and the Dead.
But if
Barbary Shore
exhibits an almost per–
fect internal coherence, it also suffers from a certain straining for
effect, a certain shrillness and melodramatic solemnity of tone often
verging on the pretentious that contrast very sharply with the flaw–
less pitch of
The Naked and the Dead.
The source of this trouble
seems to be Mailer's unwillingness to make any use whatever of the
techniques he learned to handle so well in
The Naked and the Dead
and his attempt to write in a completely new style. Here again we
see him beginning from scratch, repudiating the help of his own past
as vigorously as he repudiates the help of everyone else's. But there
is more to Mailer's desertion of realism than that. To write realistic
fiction a novelist must believe that society is what it seems to be and
that it reveals the truth about itself in the personalities it throws
up, the buildings it builds, the habits and manners it fosters; all the
writer need do is describe these faithfully, selecting whatever details
seem to him most sharply revealing and significant, .and the truth will
be served. But Mailer's point in
Barbary Shore
is precisely that our
society is
not
what it seems to be.
It
seems to be prosperous, vigorous,
