352
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
house: "Back! You! Naomi! Skull on you! Gaunt immortality and
revolution come-small broken woman- the ashen indoor eyes of
hospitals, ward greyness on skin."
But her post-Marxism madness, the very paranoia which per–
suaded her that she had been shut away at the instigation of "Hitler,
Grandma, Hearst, the Capitalists, Franco, Daily News, the twenties,
Mussolini, the living dead," becomes in her son vision and a pro–
gram fostered by that vision: "vow to illuminate mankind . . . (sani–
ty a trick of agreement)." And when his own insanity fails to sustain
him, he turns to drugs, singing- on marihuana and mescaline, ly–
sergic acid and laughing gas and "Ayahusca, an Amazonian spiritual
potion"-a New Song, appropriate to a new sort of Master of
Dreams, the pusher's pusher, as it were. He does not sell the chemical
stuff of dreams directly, of course (Was this, then, what the Jews
did
peddle in the marketplace of Juvenal's Rome?), but sells the
notion of selling them; crying out in protest: "Marihuana is a benev–
olent narcotic but J. Edgar Hoover prefers his deathly scotch/ And
the heroin of Lao-Tze and the Sixth Patriarch is punished by the
electric chair/ but the poor sick junkies have nowhere to lay their
heads. . ." or insisting in hope: "The message is: Widen the area
of consciousness."
The psychedelic revolution, however, whatever its affinities with
the traditional Jewish trade of dream-peddlery and its appeal to the
sons of Jewish merchants engaged in handling much harder goods,
belongs to a world essentially
goyish:
the world of William Burroughs
and Timothy Leary and (however little he might relish the thought)
J. R. R. Tolkien. For a contemporary Master of Dreams more ex–
plicitly Josephian, which is to say, Jewish, we must turn to a writer
who in his own fantasies is never more than half-Jewish, to Norman
Mailer. Those who have read the successive versions of his
The Deer
Park
(or have seen it on the stage), and who know his most suc–
cessful and impressive short stories, "The Man Who Studied Yoga"
and "The Time of Her Time," as well as the notes on these in that
mad compendium of self-pity and self-adulation,
Advertisements for
Myself,
are aware that Mailer once planned a Great American Dream
Novel in eight volumes.
Each volume, he tells us, was to have represented one of the
"eight stages" in the dream of a defeated Jewish writer (Mailer
