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PARTISAN REVIEW
time, so he had to go through a period of revolutionary fervor and
ideological rigidity before beginning to yearn (as so many former ra–
dicals had done before him) for a breath of fresh
air
and a supple,
open-ended point of view. Unlike the great majority of his literary
contemporaries, who knew all about the deleterious effects of ideo–
logical commitment without ever having tasted the accompanying
passion, Mailer was able to experience both the passion and the ri–
gidity on his own pulses, and when he finally turned against ideology
it was with the roar of a man betrayed, not with the complacency
of the wise at one remove. And again-as in the case of his shift
from liberalism to revolutionary socialism-he followed a wholly
unexpected path in making his escape from the constrictions of ide–
ological commitment.
In the Hipster (whom he calls the American existentialist)
Mailer believes he has found an effective mode of rebellion against
the terms of the given neatly combined with the flexibility and open–
ness to life that were lacking in revolutionary socialism. In contrast to
Lovett-who had nothing to do once he accepted the "little object"
from McLeod but drift from one back alley to another while waiting
for the apocalypse to come-the Hipster has developed a strategy for
living fully and intensively in the present. He too refuses to have any
truck with the world around him and he too recognizes that collec–
tive death is the goal toward which our society is moving, but he
differs from Lovett in the further refusal to pin his hopes on the
future. Having no future, he cares nothing for the past and there–
fore he is totally consigned to the fluctuating dimensions of the
"enormous present." In effect, the Hipster as Mailer describes him
in "The White Negro" is a man who follows out the logic of the
situation in which we are all presumably caught: a man who, faced
with the threat of imminent extinction and unwilling to be a party
to the forces pushing toward collective death, has the courage to
make a life for himself in the only way that conditions permit-by
pursuing the immediate gratification of his strongest desires at every
moment and by any means.
The full consequences of this new position for Mailer's work are
yet to emerge, but several results have already become visible in
The Deer
Park-which,
though written before "The White Negro,"
belongs to Mailer's Hip phase-and in the completed sections of the
ambitious novel on which he is currently engaged. The most impor-
