PARTISAN REVIEW
39
rence must be made less so. Lawrence, he there claims, is so senti–
mental about lovers that he misses their desire to "destroy one another;
lovers change one another; lovers resist the change that each gives
to the other." This
is
of course not what Lawrence
misses.
It is what
he insists on. Not Lawrence but Mailer is deficient in imagining
such relationships between a man and a woman. When the sexes
meet in his novels it is either for frantic sexual experiences or for
conferences about manners and role playing that never significantly
modify either one. When he tries to get beyond
this,
as in
An Amer–
ican Dream,
he surrounds the relationship with portents and cir–
cumstances that prevent it from ever becoming more than an alliance
for some mutual escape to an imagined ordinariness never to be
achieved. Perhaps the reason for this is that the conflicts that might
bring about a change in the relationships between men and women
actually take place only
within
the nature of all the men in
his
works,
within
his
own nature. Mailer is finally the most androgynous of
writers. Perhaps that is why, of what are now eighteen books, only
five are novels, a form where some developed relationship between
the sexes is generally called for, and the rest, except for a quite good
volume of poems entitled
Death for the Ladies (and Other Disasters)
and
the scripts for his play
The Deer Fark
and his film
Maidstone,
is
a species of self-reporting.
And yet for all the self-reporting what do we know about him?
Very
little. Nothing to do with his childhood, his schooling, very
little about his love affairs, not much more about
his
friends or
his
wives. Though there are bits of incidental intelligence about drinking
and drugs
in
Advertisements for M yself
and about his fourth mar–
riage in
The Armies of the Night
and
Of a Fire on the Moon,
and
though we learn in
The Prisoner of Sex
that for part of one sum–
mer he kept house for six children before an old love, who was
to
become the mother of a seventh, arrived to rescue
him,
most of
what we get from this presumably self-centered, egotistic and self–
revealing writer are anecdotes about his public performances. Even
these prove to be not confessions so much as self-creations after the
event, presentations of a
self
he makes up for his own as much as
for the reader's inspection.
This
is not said critically but rather to suggest that Mailer's
genius is excited by those very elements in
him
and
in
the nation
