382
PARTISAN REVIEW
tality, however, is only superficial, the air of abundance about her
is a lie, and she lacks the wherewithal to deliver on her vast promise.
Given
all
this, I would suggest that she figures in the allegorical
scheme as an image of the life outside politics, the attempt to live
by and for self, the purely private life, and that she is Mailer's com–
ment on the sorry possibilities of such a life in America today.
Hollingsworth's role is easier to formulate, since it is described
explicitly by McLeod in an analysis of the forces that make the Third
World War inevitable. Today, he says, "the aim of society is no
longer to keep its members alive, but quite the contrary, the ques–
tion is how to dispose of them." This is "the first stage of cannibal–
ism" in a process leading inexorably to the destruction of the world,
and it expresses itself initially
in
the rise of a class of bureaucrats who
come to power "at the very moment they are
in
the act of destroying
themselves." Far from being strong and purposeful, then, Hollings–
worth is the creature of conditions he neither controls nor compre–
hends and the victim of inner compulsions he neither respects nor
recognizes. Sick with greed and with homosexual longings, he can
only find relief in outbursts of petty sadism and in the symbolic seduc–
tion of McLeod (whose crimes, Lannie declares at one point, were
responsible for his very existence). Mailer, however, gives him a mo–
ment of genuine self-consciousness in which, like a character
in
poetic
drama, he is suddenly permitted to enunciate the principle of his
own being with force and conviction:
More modesty. We ain't equipped to deal with big things.
If
this fellow
came to me and asked my advice, I would take him aside and let him
know that if he gives up the pursuits of vanity, and acts like everybody
else, he'd get along better. Cause we never know what's deep down
inside us . . . and it plays tricks. I don't give two cents for all your
papers.
A
good-time Charley, that's myself, and that's why I'm smarter
than the lot of you.
This is the doctrine by which the disease being investigated through
Guinevere and Hollingsworth calls itself health and by which the
blindness to reality that is one of its major symptoms claims the
right to be known as "realism."
At the center of
Barbary Shore
stands McLeod, the incarnation
of the revolutionary spirit itself. His biography amounts to a moral
history of that spirit-its early achievements, its subsequent crimes,
its temporary abdication, and then its agonized attempt to find new
