NORMAN MAILER
379
sure of itself, and purposeful, whereas in fact it
is
apathetic, con–
fused, inept, empty, and in the grip of invisible forces that it neither
recognizes nor controls. To write about this society as though the
truth of it lay embedded in its surface appearances would be to en–
dow it with a solidity and substantiality that it simply does not
possess. The only hope of making any sense of such a society is with
reference to the invisible forces that work in and through it and
that cannot be described but that can be talked about abstractly
and pictured allegorically. In delineating the world of the cold war,
then, what Mailer tries to do is convey a sense of the strangeness of
the way things are and to evoke a feeling for the overpowering reality
of the invisible forces that supply a key to this strangeness.
Since an extremely bad press and a climate unfavorable to po–
litical radicalism resulted in a tiny readership for
Barbary Shore,
let
me summarize its plot briefly before making any further observa–
tions. Most of the action takes place in a rooming-house in Brooklyn
Heights which turns out to be the refuge of a man calling himself
McLeod, who--we eventually learn-had once been notorious
throughout the world as the "Hangman of the Left Opposition."
M–
ter breaking with the Communist party on the signing of the Nazi–
Soviet pact, McLeod had come to the United States to work for
the State Department and had subsequently run off again, this time
to devote himself to a Marxist analysis of why the revolution went
wrong.
An
FBI agent, Hollingsworth, is also living in the rooming–
house under an assumed identity, and the plot centers around his
ef–
forts to recover a mysterious "little object" which had disappeared
from the State Department along with McLeod. Neither Hollings–
worth nor anyone else knows what the "little object" is, but he as–
sumes that it must be worth a fortune and is planning to steal it
himself once he gets it away from McLeod. The landlady, Guinevere,
a former burlesque queen secretly married to McLeod,
is
in league
with Hollingsworth, and he also has the help of a girl named Lannie
Madison who had literally been driven out of her mind by the assas–
sination of Trotsky and who hates McLeod because he
is
the "under–
taker of the revolution." The story is told by another tenant, Michael
Lovett, a would-be novelist who is a victim of total amnesia and
so can remember nothing whatever of his past but who, it develops,
had been almost as deeply involved in the Trotskyite movement as
