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PARTISAN REVIEW
Lannie. In the end, Lovett decides to devote his life once again to
the hopes that had been shattered for him by the wartime collapse
of revolutionary socialism, and this decision makes it possible for
McLeod to pass the "little object" on to him instead of surrendering
it to Hollingsworth, as he had finally agreed to do. In a rather hasty
climax, McLeod commits suicide, Hollingsworth runs off with Guine–
vere before the police arrive, and Lannie is taken into custody. Lovett
is left alone with McLeod's will and the "little object," charged with
the responsibility of keeping the flame of "socialist culture" alive
while he waits for the apocalyptic war that is inevitably to come,
hoping against hope that out of the conflagration a new opportunity
may arise for realizing the goals that were betrayed in the first great
revolution of this century.
Barbary Shore
is obviously an allegory, but of what? Most of
the reviewers in 1951 took it to be an extravagant view of Mc–
Carthyism, but McCarthyism as such is actually a negligible ele–
ment in the book. Mailer's real subject is the effect on modem life
of the failure of the Russian revolution, and
if
there is an extrava–
gant assumption at work in
Barbary Shore,
it is that
all
our diffi–
culties (political, spiritual, psychological, and sexual) are directly
traceable to this failure. "The growth of human consciousness in this
century demanded-for its expanding vitality-that a revolution be
made," Mailer wrote some years later, and in this sentence, I think,
we have the key to
Barbary Shore.
The Russian revolution figures
here not as one important historical event among many but (in the
words of Lovett) as "the greatest event in man's history," the cul–
mination of an evolutionary process dictated by the inner necessities
of the human spirit. The race, in Mailer's view, must either grow
into greater possibilities or retreat into less; there can be no stagna–
tion. But the retreat into less is not merely a matter of shrinking or
cowering; it involves a disruption of the whole organism, a radical
dislocation-it is a disease that infects the life of individuals no less
than the behavior of nations.
Barbary Shore
is an investigation of
this disease, a pathology of the modem spirit.
The two characters in the book who have been most directly af–
fected by the failure of the revolution are Lovett and Lannie. Mter
his first political discussion with McLeod, Lovett begins to recall
his days as a member of a Trotskyite study group, and he describes
them in a remarkably evocative passage:
