BOOKS
IN THE LION'S DEN
CANNIBALS AND CHRISTIANS. By Norman Mailer. Dial Pre". $6.95.
"In the meanwhile, 'these are thy works, thou parent of all
good!' Man eating man, eaten by man, in every variety of degree and
method! why does not some enthusiastic political economist write an
epic on 'The Consecration of Cannibalism.''' Norman M:ailer ,on Amer–
ica in 1966? No, Charles Kingsley on England in 1850. And what about
this? "The disgrace and grief resulting from the mere trampling pres–
sure and electric friction of town life, become to the sufferers peculiarly
mysterious
in
their undeservedness, and frightful in their inevitableness.
The power of all surrounding them for evil; the incapacity of their own
minds to refuse the pollution, and of their own wills to oppose the weight,
of the staggering mass that chokes and crushes them into perdition,
brings every law of healthy existence into question with them, and
every alleged method of help and hope into doubt. Indignation, without
any calming faith in justice, and self-contempt, without any curative
self-reproach, dull the intelligence, and degrade the conscience, into
sullen incredulity of all sunshine outside the dunghill, or breeze beyond
the wafting of its impurity. . . . And thus an elaborate and ingenious
scholasticism, in what may be called the Divinity of Decomposition, has
established itself in connection with the more recent forms
of
ro–
mance...." The sentiments could be Mailer's, but the prose is Ruskin's,
from a brilliant lecture in which he shows how the conditions of modem
urban living conspire to produce a fiction which is preoccupied with
violence, madness, disease and death. One can almost see Mailer taking up
this point when he suggests, in an interview, that the modem condition
may be "psychically so bleak, so over-extended, so artificial, so plastic ...
that studies of loneliness, silence, corruption, scatology, abortion, mon–
strosity, decadence, orgy, and death can give life, can give a sentiment
of beauty." Where Ruskin speaks of "Decomposition" Mailer talks about
the "endless expanding realities of deterioration." I am not, of course,
suggesting any direct links. But to appreciate Mailer's particular rhetoric
it is worth recalling that from the start the modern city provoked sensi-
