PARTISAN REVIEW
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me but I was never able to complain afterwards that they didn't read
me; I never felt neglected. Also, this attack from certain Jewish critics
and readers, along with personal difficulties I was having during
those years, made me begin to understand that admiration for me
and my mission on earth was, somewhat to my surprise, going to be
less than unanimous, and probably hardest to win closest to hearth and
homeland. Above
all,
I came eventually to realize that my way of
taking myself seriously was more at odds than I ever could have
imagined with what others believed "seriousness" to
be.
In time
(more time probably than it should have taken), I became aware
of enormous differences of
sensibility
between my Jewish critics and
myself - a good deal of the disagreement, I realized, had to do with
somewhat antithetical systems of aversion and tolerance, particularly
with respect to subjects that are conventionally described as "dis–
tasteful."
In brief, the opposition was instructive - partly because oppo–
sition wasn't all that my early work aroused. However, one shouldn't
conclude that a friendly, or enthusiastic, readership functions as a
kind of countervailing soporific, or "ego trip," for the writer. The
greatest value of an appreciative audience may even be the irritant
that it provides, specifically by its collective (therefore simplistic)
sense of the writer, the place it chooses for him to occupy on the
cultural pecking order, and the uses it wants to make of selective, dis–
connected elements of his work and of his own (imagined) persona.
Like antagonistic opposition, the amiable irritant is useful insomuch
as it arouses, in the service of the imagination, whatever is stubborn
or elusive or even defiant in the writer's nature, whatever resents be–
ing easily digested. Almost invariably one's reaction
against
will ex–
ceed the necessities of one's work (certainly as they might narrowly
be defined) and, in fact, the relationship with an attentive audience
may even come, as in the case of J. D. Salinger on the one idiosyn–
cratic extreme, and Norman Mailer on the other, to shape one's con–
duct, not only as a writer, but as a friend, a husband, a citizen, a
colleague, etc. "Fame," Rilke wrote, "is no more than the quintes–
sence of all the misunderstandings collecting around a new name."
"Mailerism" and "Salingerism" are vigorous, highly conscious re–
sponses to that kind of misunderstanding: the first by assaulting the
misunderstandings at their source, challenging their timidity and con-
