TONY TANNER
tive men to seek out new uses of words, new metaphors, in an attempt
to convey their apprehensions of the new horrors around them and to
project their intimations of doom and apocalypse. Ruskin made the
point clearly: "the peculiar forces of devastation induced by modern
city life have only entered the world lately; and no existing terms of
language known to me are enough to describe the forms of filth, and
modes of ruin" which are endemic to that life. When the young Kingsley
explored the slums of London he could only transmit his response by
describing it as hell, and its occupants as cannibals and victims. Dickens
(in
Bleak House)
saw that same London as a foggy darkness permeated
with a fatal pestilence which the city itself had nourished. In our
time Norman Mailer seems to have made it a practice to expose himself
to everything the modern city offerS', or imposes, and he is echoing an
older tradition when he selects as his key metaphors for modern Amer–
ican life cancer (or plague) and cannibalism. Mailer himself is very
conscious of the importance of his quest for metaphors. Near the end
of his latest book he says: "the argument would demand that there be
metaphors to fit the vaults of modern experience." Modern man is being
systematically dulled to the possible meanings of his environment and
Mailer's contention is that "a future to life depends on creating forms
of an intensity which will capture the complexity of modern experience
and dignify it, illumine-if you will-its danger."
"Forms" is a word we might pick on to suggest one of the problems
that Mailer has encountered. His insights are as idiosyncratic and inter–
mittently brilliant as ever; his uncompromising willingness to expose and
anatomize his own inner life (from cerebration to bowel movement) is
still compelling; and his ability to feel his way into the mood of occa–
sions of power (boxing matches, political conventions), and to empathize
with the men who meet in the arenas of American life, remains remark–
able. He offers endless diagnosis ("the country was in disease"); warnings
of doom ("Apocalypse or debauch is upon us"); appeals to the latent
panic in all sensitive men ("the legitimate fear we feel is vast"). It is
vivid stuff, even if some of it is familiar stuff. But where are the new
forms? Mailer has tried to provide a form for this collection by dividing
it into four stages-Lambs, Lions, Respites and Arena-but it is a pretty
arbi.trary arrangement brought to a somewhat theatrical
conclus~on
with a
story about the end of the world. Essays, book reviews, poems, speeches,
occasional stories, interviews-these are what make up the book and
it would take more than an introductory assertion to metamorphose
them into a new form. Instead, certain obsessions, worries and images
provide a sort of febrile continuity, and Mailer offers one kind of justi-
