PARTISAN REVIEW
43
participation anyone not expertly tooled into it.
An
unwanted self-pity
has become the sign of such moments ("no revolution had arisen in
the years when he was ready - the timing of
his
soul was apo–
calyptically maladroit"
[Miami and the Siege of Chicago],
he tells
us
while watching the Yippies from the nineteenth floor of his hotel),
along with a hectoring, envious tone with respect to persons and a
stylistic failure to engage himself except through easy hyperbole. Are
we really to think that the vibration of Yippie music in Lincoln
Park "was the road of the beast in all nihilism"
[Miami and the Siege
of Chicago],
or rather that the sound reminded Mailer that his own
voice simply could not be accommodated to it?
Though there are some stunning exceptions, like the last chapter
"A
Burial by the Sea" in
Of a Fire on the Moon,
there is disturb–
ing evidence that Mailer's imagination of himself is becoming dan–
gerously rigid and circumscribed, particularly when he indulges in
rather simple and fashionable concerns about the future of the
imagination in an age of science and technology. Where before there
was a marvelously supple, intimate and daring search within
his
schematizations for pressures that would unsettle them, there is at the
moment a tendency to insist that the events or persons he writes about
should fit the scheme.
Now at a crisis in his writing equivalent, I suspect, to the early
period
of exhaustion after
The Deer Park,
Mailer is uniquely situat–
ed
to escape the entrapment that often turns American writers into
imitators and finally into unconscious parodists of themselves. His
situation is unique because some of his most brilliant work is literary
self-criticism. In
The Prisoner of Sex
there are already hints of a
healthy negative assessment of where he is, of boredom with charac–
teristic and familiar ways of doing things. Finally, he is even at
"war" with
his
own achievement, and out of this may emerge still
other, different forms for himself, for contemporary life and for our
language.
