Norman Mailer
UP THE FAMILY TREE
The book was the event of the season. Not, of course, as a
huge best seller, or inspirative of awe or celebration - no suggestion in
publishing ranks that Princess Margaret was doing her memoirs - this
was more like the fraternity initiation of the year. A medium plump,
very rich, and very late Freshman, bastard son of a founding family,
was actually going to submit himself to an all-out hazing, and against
all the advice of his furious family, furious to the point of biting their
white icy lips (accustomed for years to no kisses but the most per–
verted! ). One kissed the devil indeed, but no member of the family
submitted to a hazing conducted by yahoos and muckers with names like
Richler, Fuller, Bermel, Puso, Beam, or Predictable Hicks - what a
squalid yard of humpty-beaters and hard-ons. No fate could prove
undeserved for Norman said the family in thin quivering late night
hisses. (For like every family which had kissed the tail of satan's cat–
say it on! - the hole! they spoke after midnight in voices like snakes
and beetles and rats, hiss and titter, prick and sip.)
Yet the hazing, while brutal - coarse, intimate, snide, grasping,
groping, slavering, slippery of reference, crude and naturally tasteless–
was still on the side of charity! if one compared the collective hooligan
verdict to the earlier fulminations of the Inner Clan, yes, even if one
had to face up in the reviews to such models of pig-sweat in aspic
as the following: "a career expressed as a matchless 360 page ejacula–
tion" - Bermel,
New Leade
r; "The Egghead (I use the slightly dated
term to lock Podhoretz in the persona he is so much at pains to dis–
card)" - Raphael,
Sunday T imes;
or Richler in
The Nation
-
"deplor–
ably inbred ... intolerable show-biz characteristics ... grubby details
... careerist adventures. . .." Yes, if pig-sweat, envy, anaemic sniper-hots
and spite stand out in many a review as obviously as a Watusi shaking
his feathers, the fact remains that the public reception of
Making It
with
all its suffocating air, since no review was ready to call the book evil, or
