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pects of our common life to which we have become too easily ac–
climatized; it may revive feelings of nausea in too complacent stomachs.
On the other hand, I still maintain that there is a real danger of com–
plete loss of hope and passive despair lying in wait for the man who
refers all the threats he feels and the aids he needs to external non–
human forces. For what can man himself do if he is caught up in some
vast conflict between angels and demons, a victim of voodoo, a sup–
pliant of grace?
Still, Mailer's metaphors, even at their most extravagant, do serve
to give rudimentary outlines to the sensed threats of modern city life.
"Society is a sea," said Wallace Stevens; the image is apt since the sea
is precisely that element the power of which is least amenable to shap–
ing and defining. Its shape is simply itself and all that swarms within it.
Mailer, then, is trying to find metaphors for the sea of urban life in
modern America-and for the beasts of that sea. His way of coping with
the oceanic threats of society is not Stevens' way, and the difference is
instructive. Stevens said: "Resistance to the pressure of ominous and
destructive circumstance consists of its conversion, so far as possible, into
a different, an explicable, an amenable circumstance." Mailer may
want to make the destructive pressures explicable, but he is far from
converting them into amenable circumstances as far as art is concerned.
Stevens, intent on creating works of art despite all external interruptions,
spoke of the artist's need for "a violence from within that protects us
from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the
pressure of reality." Mailer's way-part bravery, part limitation-is not
to press back with the imagination, but to let the violent pressures
goad him to immediate outcry. For this he has an audience in mind,
"that audience which has no tradition by which to measure their ex–
perience but the intensity and clarity of their inner lives" and his con–
tention is that "I have a consciousness now which I think is of use to
them." Take his most recent book, not as a new work of art, nor as a
series of conclusions and prescriptions, but as the record of an unusually
sensitive modern urban consciousness, and it has a great deal to tell us
about the way we live now. Or, perhaps Mailer would say, the way
we die now.
Tony Tanner
