38
RICHARD POIRIER
All they will produce is a competitive effort which will affirm the
mastery of an unmodified masculinity, a narcissism of masculinity
which becomes homoerotic from the desire to engross the masculinity
of an equally obsessed man. They are Mailerian boxers
manque.
For Mailer, a masculine nature that denies the minority claims
within it of feminine feeling - which is how he might account for
a masculinized sensibility like Kate Millett's - chills the imagination,
prevents it from encompassing even such admission of feminine in–
clination, or the need of masculine support, as D.J. might have had
to make in order to recall his desires for Tex. That is why Mailer,
at the appropriate point, has to imagine these desires for him, and
for the book, even if it means that the book doesn't become "crys–
tallized." Mailer's commitment to dialectics means that he includes
materials which threaten the symmetry of any possible form. His
is
the art of not arriving. In this case, and throughout his work, dia–
lectics is equivalent to imagination, and imagination evolves from
his
acceptance in himself of a feminine nature.
It
is probable that he
associates being a writer with being a woman, and
his
remark
in
The Prisoner of Sex
about Henry Miller and Kate Millett, even to
the feminization of the males he alludes to ("dances," "curves")
is
a telling instance: "His work dances on the line of
his
dialectic. But
Millett hates every evidence of the dialectic. She has a mind like
a flatiron, which is to say a totally masculine mind. A hard-hat has
more curves in his head."
If
writing, creativity, a personal style as
opposed to an imposed one, could all be associated with femininity,
then Mailer's selection of subjects, like war, boxing, politics, moon·
shots and his own brawling activities, about which he writes with
a boyishly self-approving apology, can be taken as counterbalancing
attempts to affirm his masculinity.
In some such way it is possible to understand a central con·
tradiction in him: there is on the one hand the marvelously fastidious
stylist, a writer almost precious in his care for phrasing and cadence,
and, on the other and seemingly at odds, the boisterous, the vulgar
actor. More often than not
his
style will sound like Faulkner or
James, like Proust or Lawrence, even while he is pushing Papa
Hemingway as a model and precursor. As recently as
Cannibals and
Christians
he misreads Lawrence out of what I would guess is an
anxiety to appear tougher than he really is, which means that Law.
