246
NORMAN MAILER
Well, of course one may say this is merely Mailer's view of The
Family, not Podhoretz' - the author of
Making It
is entitled to his own
view. 'No argument. -It is just that his view cannot be developed in any
direction. What is one to make of an Establishment which is so kind and
splendid in its personnel? The sum of the individual portraits Podhoretz
offers of this Quality Lucifer Lit Biz Clan is thus full of sugar that one
cannot begin to comprehend his abstract portrait which in contrast
presents the Family (in
ge~eral
terms so vague one cannot perceive a
single relation in the fog) as no better than any other Establishment.
Truth, if 'The Family adds up to the kind sum of the specific charitable
parts Podhoretz gives them, then the demand on him is to write a novel
of insuperable difficulty (or even a sociological analysis of the same
difficulty) which is to say - an Establishment composed only of the
kindest folk: into their ranks enters an ambitious Provincial- what
a novel!
No, one does not recognize Plimpton, and Silvers, and Rahv, and
Epstein, and Phillips, no, nor Mailer, and Trilling, and Sontag, and
Kristol. It is not that they are despicable all, nor mean, nor even full of
rapine - it is that they are complex, as unendurably complex as our
century is complex, 'and so
Making It
ceases to be a novel just so soon
as its protagonist enters the climax of his narrative; we are projected
right out of that rare aesthetic vineyard where autobiography dares to
become that special and most daring category of fiction which is its
inner necessity, and instead we are now forced to jog along on the
washboard road of a memoir. Characters come in and out, observations
are made, names file through, Podhoretz suffers, becomes an editor,
thrives, we do not care - the novel has disappeared - the interplay
between ambitious perception and society which has been the source of
its value now gives ground to the aesthetic perplexity of the author who
must flounder in the now novelistically alienated remains of his hypo–
thesis - that success is the dirty little secret. Now he has no novel on
which to work it, only sketchy anecdotes, abortive essays, isolated
insights, and note of the drone - repetitions. A fine even potentially
marvelous book gets lost in a muddle, finally finishes itself and
IS
done. No joy in closing the back cover.
One must wonder. How does a man who has the simple guts to
begin such a work in the first place lack the nerve to hump it through
to the end? And the answer if
on~
is to ignore such natural motives
as impatience, overwork, or general anxiety, is that the instinctive fear
of a sophisticated writer at attempting to explore an Establishment is
even greater than the well-established fear of the ridicule he will know
at presenting himself as a character. A wliter as forceful and well-geared
