238
NORMAN MAILER-
qf
a
disp~sionate
critique, whi<;:h of course is exactly what he did not
get. S.o, let us go to look at
Making It.
Mysteries will confront us there,
not the
leas~
being the exceptional hostility it aroused in the Establish–
~ent
while the book was still in manuscript.
The Establishment has properties, not the first of which we might
suggest,
is
its absolute detestation of any effort to classify or examine it.
(Anyone doubting this last assertion is invited to recollect the out-size
wrath of Jackie Keimedy at the modest inside anecdote or two of her
life as told by William Manchester, a wrath whose overflow was to cost
Bobby Kennedy ten points of national popularity in a year .of great
decision. ) No, any sociologist who would attempt to analyze the Estab–
lishment would do well to begin with the assumption that it is a temple,
and its members are priests and priestesses, its center of worship
is
a
hole, a Holy .of Holies, its altar undescribed. Power which is not material
must dwell in mystery, its most refined codes are best left uncodified–
indeed a scholar might hope to demonstrate that the T almud could not
be committed to writing tmtil hope for the restoration of the Second
Temple was lost; the intimations of such power are rarely verbal–
they exist in the curve of an inhibiting eyebrow, the f.orm .of a line.
2.
P.odhoretz, sch.ooled as a cntlc at Columbia, then Cambridge, was
t.o arrive in the pages .of
Partisan Review
with a full set of preoccupations
provided by Trilling, but his critical stance - solid, d.oughty, auth.orita–
tive, and hugely egalitarian (this last to be explained in an instant) -
owed much to Leavis. Leavis was, .of c.ourse, a veritable m.onster .of
taste, a rabid hanging judge .of the smallest literary pretense - he
derived from a line who would behead the king if the king did not meet
measure - but Leavis was nonetheless egalitarian: he obvi.ously believed
that the critic performing a thorough t.otal work .of sch.olarship, steeped
in the traditions, lore, style, moral filaments and spiritual saps .of the
work he considered, alert
in
every quiver of his senses to the nuances
and defections in the fabrication .of beauty .or power within the poem .or
prose before him was, if ready to make that total effort, a work .of art
in himself, a living critical creation face to face on equal terms with the
work; so, hugely egalitarian.
Such total c.ommitment can come only t.o an Englishman or a
B.olshevik, come t.o them, that is, and remain. A y.oung American can be
steeped in such a discipline for a time, but there is no ballast in America
for joining ideological priesthoods which .offer no unif.orm. The .only
invisible American priesthood with ballast is the Establishment, and that
is never ideological.
