PARTISAN REVIEW
19
it or revere it as Culture) finally not simply irrelevant but perhaps
actually a quixotic imposition that further exhausts the spirit of the
writer and reader alike? Hints of exhaustion are evident, I fear, in
Of a Fire on the Moon
and
The Prisoner of Sex.
In these, more
simply than in any other of his recent work, Mailer seems, in a
crochety and sentimental, an aggressively petulant and self-pitying
way, to encamp himself as a Defender of the Imagination in an Age
of Technology. Perhaps this explains why some of the best parts of
both books are about other artists and writers, other "defenders" of
the faith, as in the exquisite discussions of Cezanne and Magritte
in the moon book.
Where he has faced the question of creative impotence less ex–
plicitly, where he seems rather to get entangled with it against his
will,
he displays something even more profitable to his writing than
are his admirations for other artists, however much they reassure him
that it is still possible, in Empson's phrase, to learn a style from a
despair. I am referring to the passionate energy with which he
dis–
plays his mastery, perhaps unequalled since the parodic brilliance
of Joyce in
Ulysses,
of those expressive modes which threaten to
obliterate his own expression, those contemporary styles that provide
us too abundantly with images of what we possibly are in our public
and in our private selves. And he can do this while simultaneously
demonstrating the greater inventiveness, inclusiveness, plasticity and
range of his own modes. Nowhere is this more impressively evident
than
in the most dazzling and perhaps the most incomprehensibly
slighted of his novels,
Why Are We in Vietnam?
The novel's answer to the question raised in its title fits none
of the schemes of cause and effect that dominate nearly all "respon–
sible" social and poliical thinking. And "responsible" it has proved
to
be -
for the war. Vietnam is mentioned once, and then only in
the last sentence. Imtead Mailer is attempting, with a vitality akin
to the Circe episode in
Ulysses,
to register the fevered mentality of
which this atrocity is not so much a consequence as a part. So natural–
ly a part, that no one in the book needs consciously to
be
aware
of the existence of Vietnam as in any way unique. It
is
not espe–
cially worth mentiooing. We are in Vietnam because we are as we
corporately are. We are all of one another. And for that reason
Mailer makes the voices that speak to us in the book, in the various
