NORMAN MAILER
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split into the amnesiac Lovett and the madwoman Lannie. The loss
of the political faith that would have sustained him in the 30's was
now seen by Mailer as worse than simply a sign of spiritual inade–
quacy-it was a sickness of the mind and a disease of the soul. But
his brave attempt to recapture that faith proved to be only a drama–
tic gesture in the face of a dramatic situation; when the situation
lost its drama and settled into the dull round of aimless anxiety that
has marked the Eisenhower years, the gesture lost its .air of glory,
as all apocalyptic gestures inevitably do when the apocalypse itself
takes too long in coming. Under these circumstances, Mailer turned
back to the old Hearn and began to cast about for hidden resources
of creativity where before he had seen only the emptiness of mere
style, and for stature where before he had perceived only a well–
intentioned mediocrity. In identifying himself finally with Hearn,
he has in effect acknowledged his kinship to the intellectuals of his
own generation-that generation of whose failings he has always
been the most intransigent critic and whose qualities he has always
tried so hard to extirpate from his own character. His espousal of
Hip indicates that he is still trying-for what else is Hip as he defines
it but a means of turning away in despair (as most of his contem–
poraries have done) from the problems of the world and focusing all
one's attention on the problems of the self without admitting that this
must automatically entail a shrinking of horizons, a contraction of
the sense of possibility, a loss of imaginative freedom?
One can only sympathize with Mailer's latest effort to maintain
a sense of huge possibility, even
if
one is totally out of sympathy with
some of the doctrines he has recently been preaching. In my opinion,
his great mistake is to attribute direction and purpose to the Hipster
(and I think that the weakness of Sergius and Marion as imaginative
creations indicates that the novelist in Mailer is once again resisting
the commands of the theoretician). Hipsterism, it seems to me, is a
symptom and not a significant protest, a spasmodic rather than an
organized response. The Hipster is the product of a culture (exem–
plified beautifully in the Hollywood of
The Deer Park)
whose offi–
cial values no longer carry any moral authority, and he reacts to
the hypocrisy, the lying, and the self-deception that have contaminated
the American air during the cold-war period by withdrawing into
a private world of his own where everything, including language, is
stripped down to what he considers the reliable essentials. To this
