BOOKS
To dispatch a summary of Mailer's topics and opinions from Eng–
land to America would be to send rockets to Cape Kennedy. But seen
from a distance his recent work does reveal a pattern which may be
worth mentioning. Let me start with a tiny symptom, from this current
book. Asserting, improbably enough, that he has learned more of his
fictional technique from E. M. Forster than from any other writer, he
quotes a sentence he particularly admires from
The Longest Journey,
thus -"Gerald was killed that day. He was beaten to death in a football
game." Now, the sentence actually reads: "Gerald died that afternoon.
He was broken up in a football match." Anybody can get a quotation
wrong, but the transformation which Forster's sentence has undergone
in Mailer's memory is revealing. What was originally seen as an unex–
pected accident has become a thuggish and murderous assault. Beaten
to death, indeed! (Even allowing that Mailer is probably thinking of
American football and Forster most certainly was not.) Mailer's imagina–
tion inhabits a world of extreme violence in which hostile forces threaten
the annihilation of the individual at every turn. In this connection it is
significant that Mailer feels a good deal of sympathy with the work of
William Burroughs and his vision of a possible world to come. (One
of his telling asides is:
"If
World War II was like
Catch-22,
this war
will be like
Naked Lunch.")
Take this statement, for instance: "Life
may now be intolerable to some other conception of Being-I would not
know what else to call it but a plague---which is different from our–
selves, more powerful perhaps, some conception so antagonistic to the
Vision by which we try to discover our life that its presence has invaded
our world, perhaps even our universe. The intent of such a plague is
to deaden the soul of all of us, invite it to surrender." That could stand
on the jacket of
Nova Express
summarizing the main dread in Bur–
roughs' apocalyptic vision. I offered some comments on the demonism
in Burroughs' work in a recent issue of
PR'
and it is interesting to note
that Mailer, in his own way, is also undoubtedly a demonist in as much
as he sees existence as a battleground between superhuman forces. The
paranoia and sense of proliferating invisible threats which seems endemic
to life in the modern city ("the power of all surrounding them for evil,"
in Ruskin's words), rises to a crescendo in Mailer's writing. "New York
is ill beyond relief. There are forces in the city, Left, Right and Center,
which are out of control ... their only logic is to grow by themselves."
And the forces which are seen as gradually bringing death to the
modern world with malevolent purposefulness are ultimately "mysterious"
(again, as Ruskin said they would strike the city-dweller). Underneath
Mailer's specific political concerns there is a feeling that "the war
