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moment's vitality. At the end, again jaded and dull, the central
figure "enters the universe of sleep, a man who seeks to live in such
a way as to avoid pain, and succeeds merely in avoiding pleasure.
What a dreary compromise is life!" Reading once more this admir–
able story, I can't help wondering whether Mailer's recent decision
to choose extreme states of being for his central subject is, in liter–
ary
terms, a wise one. Perhaps his true gift is to be a recorder of
"the flat and familiar dispirit of nearly all days." But I don't sup–
pose he will appreciate being told this any more than Bellow would,
and both of course are right to go their own, necessary ways.
At the heart of Mailer's recent literary and intellectual ad–
ventures lies a fear which he shares with many reflective people:
the fear of stasis, of an historical period ruled by functional ration–
ality and increasingly deprived of the hunger for utopia. All of his
recent writing seems to ask, Is it possible that "the smooth strife–
less world" in which most cultivated Americans now live will prove
to
be
the world of tomorrow, a glass enclosure in which there will
be
a minimum of courage or failure, tests or transcendence? It is a
prospect invoked by the rise of mass society, and for those of us
raised, or ruined, by the ethic of striving, dissatisfaction and renew–
al it is a very disturbing prospect.
Mailer shows certain signs of an ideologist whose ideology has
melted away. Without succumbing to the genetic fallacy or being
scornful of a dilemma which in some ways I share, I can't help
seeing a touch of truth in Jean Malaquais' criticism that in "The
White Negro" Mailer was searching for a new "vanguard" to re–
place the slumbering proletariat, a new self-propelling force to jog
history. What the socio-economic position of the working class was
supposed to do for or to it, the hipsters' drive for self-gratification,
unbroken
by
convention or morality and acted out in life rather
than piddled away in psychoanalysis, would now do for them. But
some qualifications are needed. Mailer's search probably began in
the political terms Malaquais suggested, and partly it may remain
that; but by now it has become something else, a concern with the
orgasm in its own right, a quest for a free-floating state of being in
which desire satisfied -and desire forever expanded become the
measures of life. Some conflict seems to
be
involved here, between
