42
RICHARD POIRIER
Truth for Mailer is equivalent to the acceptance, with respect
to any subject, of such a range of diverse feelings that some seem
to cancel or mutilate the others, and there are times when his com–
mitment to truth cannot escape a perverse exaltation of the submerged
at the expense of the humanly self-evident. While he is clearly aware
of this danger, he will not allow the presumed exigencies of the
humanly self-evident, much less the exigencies of literary form or of
logic, to dictate what he puts in or leaves out. This is what
distin–
guishes
him
from his contemporaries in fiction. However different,
they all find it necessary at some point to suppress what I've called
the minority within: those feelings, expressions, possibilities in the
material that are perhaps incommensurate with the effect being
striven for. Mailer's honesty in this is rather more strenuous than
theirs and finally more self-sacrificing.
Unfortunately the most noble of instincts have a way of being
transformed first into self-consciousness, then into habit, and finally
into mechanics. What was once a virtue becomes a tic; what was
once romantic becomes, as Byron discovered, burlesque. Increas–
ingly to the detriment of his work, Mailer often creates divisions
in his material so simplistically extreme as to allow him an un–
earned rest, exonerated, in the middle of it all, freed of choice
or even temptation. Positioned between extremities which he has
himself invented and which are by no means made necessary by
the nature of what he is trying to account for, he reveals at times
"some wistful desires to be less extraordinary," a desire attributed to
Cherry in
An American Dream.
Being among the most self-scrutiniz–
ing of writers and his own best critic, he has come even to wonder
in
The Prisoner of Sex
"if his vision, for lack of some cultivation
in the middle, was not too compulsively ready for the apocalyptic."
"Cultivation" is the important clue here; he thinks of the middle
as a place where
his
imagination does not instinctively move and
where it becomes flabby.
Miami and the Siege of Chicago
and
Of a Fire on the Moon
are the clearest instances, and it is significant
that both involved
him
in events in which for various reasons he
could not directly participate. In the one
his
deadline for the book
prevented him from acting in any way that might get him arrested,
as he was in the Washington of
The Armies of the Night;
in the
other, the very nature of technological enterprise excluded from
