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TONY TANNER
the caretakers of art for two thousand years. But now art is a heart pill
-nitroglycerine-it binds shattered nerves together by shattering them
all over again with style, with wit, each explosion a guide to building
a new nervous system.... We live, remember, in a time which
interrupts the mood of everything alive. . . . A people deadened by
interruption go mad." What are the chances of creating new forms
in
such times, under such pressures and with such distractions as these?
Mailer himself gives the impression of not being able to get beyond
the interruptions long enough to develop those new forms he thinks are
so necessary. He is constantly engaging in rhetorical clashes with the
chaos of modern life which as constantly besets and interrupts
him.
In
his sustained passion, tinged with madness, there is, oddly, a touch of
Carlyle about him. He is a prophet of the Age of Interruption.
Like many prophets he is not too good on short-term predictions
(Goldwater did not become a great power; Lindsay did get elected) and
he can be irritatingly irresponsible. For instance, he continually utters his
loathing of contraception as a sign of our modern sickness, but he has no
comment
to
make on the more terrible problem of overpopulation; and
for a man who sets so much store by the seed well planted, Mailer is
unusually silent on the subject of children. Still, looking back at his
previous collections, one readily concedes
him
the gift of being able to
catch and articulate the general inner mood of certain key moments
in
postwar America: wrong about surface facts, he is often right about sub–
terranean feelings. It is thus disturbing to note that although all his
books have been frenetic, this one is more deeply pessimistic than any
previous one.
"If
one's country lives like a woman in some part of the
unconscious dream life of each of us, if beneath all our criticisms and
detestations of America's vulgarity, misuse of power, and sheer pompous
stupidity there has been still some optimistic love affair with the secret
potentialities of this nation, some buried unvoiced faith that the nature
of America was finally good, and not evil, well, that faith has taken a
pistol-whipping in the last months. The romance seems not even tragic
or doomed, but dirty and misplaced." It would be quite out of place
for someone writing from England to pronounce on the current state of
America; but judging from the depressing symp.osium on the sub–
ject in the last issue of
PR,
Mailer's antennae are picking up many
bad vibrations which are indeed in the air. One knows that Mailer is
fairly committed to a rather comminatory tone, and it would probably
be quite possible to find a foolishness or an exaggeration on every other
page of this book. The fact remains that I would be a lot less worried
if Norman Mailer were a lot less worried.
