244
NORMAN MAILER
I became a Leavisian - not, perhaps, the most ardent of his young
epigoni at Cambridge, but, in all truth, the others being a singularly
dreary and humorless lot, the most adept . . .
are acceptable precisely because one has come to trust this detachment
through the quiet severity of observation which accompanies less agreeable
insights.
The novel continues well.
It
is an odd novel up to here, dry, almost
ascetic in its details, so sparse indeed in its sensuous descriptions and so
leisurely in its analyses of the protagonist's changing intellectual and
social stances that one admires the courage of the novelist - he dares
to push his novel in the direction of the informed sociological essay
where in order to nail analysis one may even smuggle in a piece or two
of carefully protected personal material. The difference, and it keens our
interest, is that the tone here while close to abstract in its impersonality
is never self-protective. On the contrary, it reveals, then reveals more,
never guards the subject.
This tone continues for more than half the book. Podhoretz returns
to America, has his first entree into circles which are written about as if
they were the equivalent to him of Versailles for Saint-Simon. There
is here a gulf he does not sight completely to the bottom: there is
probably a hint too little irony now in his portrait of the young literary
man, extraordinarily self-made, who is feeling such vast admiration for
purlieus like
Commentary
a nd
Partisan R eview.
There was indeed a
time when
Partisan Review
was the kind of duchess who could cut off
more than one literary head with a stroke - it inspired fear in young
authors which must have been equal to the terror of French courtiers
when they first beheld the palace, but there are still differences to
recognize - Philip Rahv with a mouthful of hot pastrami was not quite
the novelistic equal of Louis XIV showing his knee (and if William
Phillips looked like Richelieu , Richelieu was indubitably wearing his
tweed jacket).
It
is at about this point that the novel begins, most subtly, to falter.
It
has been economical, provocative, near to austere, and all readable
as a narrative up to this point.
If
we still know little about the hero,
what we do know has that tone of authority which suggests hope of a
small classic in the making - we accept the hero, believe him, want to
know more of him, and of his adventures. In fact, the novel continues
thus good for a while - fine chapters in much the same tone carry
Podhoretz through five months in New York while waiting to go into
the Army, then a stretch of two years in uniform. We have at this point
traversed more than half the book, and there has been but one false
