14
RICHARD POIRIER
interests of merely formal resolutions. There is no satisfactory form
for
his
imagination when it is most alive. There are only exercises
for it. Of course any particular exercise can, in the long run, be–
come equivalent to a form, and when that happens Mailer is least
interesting to himself or to us, as in those parts in
Of a Fire on the
Moon
that boringly reduce everything to favorite categories, or in
some of
his
extended demonstrations of what a smart boy he can
be in his self-interviews.
Why Are We in Vietnam?
and
The Armies of the Night,
along
with parts of
Advertisements for Myself
and
An American Dream
put Mailer easily in the company, it seems to me, of Fitzgerald and
Hemingway, conceivably of Faulkner. His accomplishment deserves
comparison with theirs precisely because it is of a different kind
and because it takes account of the varieties, evolutions, discontinu–
ities and accumulations of style since World War II. He could not be
to our time what they were to theirs without being in many im–
portant respects radically unlike them in the way he writes. No other
American writer of this period has tried so resolutely and so success–
fully to account for the eclecticisms of contemporary life when it
comes to ideas of form, of language, of culture, of political and
social structures and of the self.
The reason why most thoughtful and literate young readers
prefer Mailer to, say, Updike or Roth or Malamud is that his
tim–
ing is synchronized to theirs, while the others move to an older beat.
Which is to say something not only about Mailer's taste for certain
situations but also about a taste for Mailer, for the pace and move–
ment of
his
writing. I suspect that an enthusiasm for
his
work means
that one shares his partiality for those moments where more is hap–
pening than one can very easily assimilate. By and large the other
contemporary writers I've mentioned will not allow more to happen
than can be accounted for in the forms they have settled upon. They
work away from rather than into the ultimate inconsistencies, the
central incoherence in the way we live now. Mailer, on the other
hand, is always looking for the stylistic equivalent for that move–
ment of "the ego in perpetual transit from tower to dungeon and
back again." It is no accident that
An American Dream,
which in–
cidentally seems to move rather frequently between the Waldorf
Towers and police headquarters, finds its most appreciative audience
