DREAMERS
355
can psyche." Yet in the end, the spades who cannot keep her in life
do her in; the friends of the hipster whom Rojack has earlier defeated,
humiliated, in effect,
killed,
destroy our poor Cherry. And Rojack,
guiltless of that murder,
is
released from the burden of actual love–
releasing
his
author at the same moment from all obligations to
realism: liberating him into the world
if
not of pure myth, at least
of Pop
Art
fantasy.
As
the book closes, Mailer asks us to believe Rojack has stopped
at a disconnected phone booth in the middle of the Great American
Desert; and when he dials (sleeping or waking, we are not sure) the
voice of
his
dead beloved answers--and why not, after all. "Why,
hello hon, I thought you'd never call.... Marilyn says to say hello."
At
this
point, Mailer's personal fantasy becomes once more our com–
mon fantasy,
his
dream girl ours, as Cherry blends into our own late,
perhaps too much lamented Marilyn Monroe; and somehow we are
supposed to be, somehow we
are
at peace. It is a long way from the
beginning of Mailer's book to the end: from
his
evocation of the
dead Dream Boy of us all (the novel opens, "I met Jack Kennedy in
November, 1946. We were both war heroes and had been elected to
Congress"), whose death one crazy Jew,
himself
now dead, thought
he was avenging-to the Dead Dream Girl of us all, of whose death
another saner Jew has written a play to prove himself guiltless. But
it is a way which leads from madness to sanity, from falling asleep
to waking up; from the lunatic wish to be President and screw all
the women
in
the world, to the modest hope of finding someone to
love and the resolve to take time out for thinking things over.
"But in the morning," Stephen Rojack ends by saying, "I was
something like sane again, and packed the car and started on the
long trip to Guatemala and Yucatan." Maybe
this,
too,
is
only one
more fantasy, the last madness of believing oneself sane; or maybe
Joseph
is
sane again, at least as Mailer has reimagined, reembodied
him; maybe, in exorcising himself of the American Dream, the Amer–
ican version of the flight from Potiphar's wife, Mailer has healed
himself-demonstrating that artist and doctor can inhabit the same
head. Didn't Freud himself assert (apropos of his own attempt along
the same lines, the very book with which we began) that successful
self-analysis is possible to one who is "a prolific enough dreamer"?
But even granting all
this,
we are left with the final question:
