PARTISAN REVIEW
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in manhood. The iron and the coal had eaten into the bodies and
souls of the men." Only by keeping off to the side of onrushing
industrial and technological momentum is it possible to escape
that internalization of external mechanization which is implicit in
Lawrence's metaphor and what will later be expressed in the meta–
phors of "armoring" in the works of Wilhelm Reich. Mellors is as
rare a type in Lawrence's England as are White Negro Hips in
Mailer's America. Indeed Mailer's description of the hipster,
which occurs in
The White Negro
soon after a citation of both
Lawrence and Wilhelm Reich as intellectual antecedents, involves
the same complications that attend Lawrence's description of
Mellors. Mailer first places the White Negro in a doomed class,
only then to insist on a measure of difference which both clinches
the value of the type and makes it the more precarious within the
whole culture:
It
may be fruitful to consider the hipster as a philosophical
psychopath, a man interested not only in the dangerous im–
peratives of his psychopathy but in codifying, at least for
himself, the suppositions on which his inner universe is con–
structed. By this premise the hipster is a psychopath, and yet
not a psychopath but the negation of the psychopath, for he
possesses the narcissistic detachment of the philosopher, that
absorption in the recessive nuances of one's own motives
which is so alien to the unreasoning drive of the psychopath.
In this country, where millions of psychopaths are developed
each year, stamped with the mint of our contradictory pop–
ular culture (where sex is sin and yet sex is paradise), it is as
if there has been room already for the development of the
antithetical psychopath who extrapolates from his own con–
dition, from the inner certainty that his rebellion is just, a
radical vision of the universe which thus separates him from
the general ignorance, reactionary prejudice, and self-doubt of
the more conventional psychopath ... for Hip is the sophisti–
cation of the wise primitive in a giant jungle, and so its appeal
is still beyond the civilized man.
If
there are ten million
Americans who are more or less psychopathic (and the figure
is most modest), there are probably not more than one hun–
dred thousand men and women who consciously see them–
selves as hipsters, but their importance is that they are an
elite with the potential ruthlessness of an elite, and a language
most adolescen ts can understand instinctively, for the hipster's
