2<42
NORMAN MAILER
ment that a frank discussion of one's feelings about one's own
success, or lack of it, invariably causes in polite company today,
I
ambition (itself a species of lustful hunger) seems to be replacing
erotic lust as the prime dirty little secret of the well-educated
American soul. And since the natural accompaniments of a dirty
little secret are superstition, hypocrisy, and cant, it is no cause for
wonder that the theme of success rarely appears in our discourse
unattended by at least one of these three dismal Furies inherited
from ,Victorian sex.
The thesis stated in the first pages,
Making It
then goes on to
d~scribe
the adventures of the protagonist.
If
they are in the main
intellectual, they are nonetheless novelistically interesting, because they
partake of. the most basic American tale of them all- the young man
, fx:om the provinces who moves to the city and succeeds.
If
the trip is
here only from Brooklyn to Manhattan, the character, quite aware of
his universality, remarks, "One of the longest journeys in the world
is . . . from certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn to certain parts of
Manhattan. I have made that journey...." Since the real, as opposed
to the fictional Norman Podhoretz, is a man with a firm sense of
neighborhood, he is doubtless quite aware that he has in life moved from
Brownsville to West End Avenue-which is not quite up to the claims
of his fictional journey; a look at his neighbors would remind
him
that
the literal physical move is not an empire superior to jumping from
Brownsville to Eastern Parkway. But this is the trouble with the book
from its root. As a fictional character, Podhoretz would already be
absurd - a pompous man, full of snobbery, but so blind to any true
v:ersion of snobbery that he would palm off his address as superior. In
life, as the real Norman Pod, he is of course speaking metaphorically.
Those "certain parts of Manhattan" are not where he lives, but rather
are enclaves of society where he, unlike his West End Avenue neighbors,
has entree. But he has already, unwittingly, like a novice novelist driven
a separation between the real life of the detail and its inadequate
fictional manifest. His book is thus from the beginning of its first chapter
two books, one for readers who know him, another for readers who
don't. And the reason is simple. The art of the novel begins with a
primary demand: the novel must be in its fashion literal. Since it is
not life, its life depends on the scrupulous accumulation of its details.
To make a fine phrase, Podhoretz took a shortcut with the novelistic
facts. That need not be fatal in criticism, but such shortcuts, particularly
at the onset, distort the magnetic field of the nove}. Already, to readers
who do not know him, he is living in a fancier neighborhood than in
