NORMAN MAILER
15
book so empty of the novelistic riches of his life, that I was in a fury as I
read. I had wanted something I was not receiving.
The Joker
seemed
bizarre and unloveable-a tract on the bureaucratic horrors of the
future written in a nineteenth century style, an inconglomerate, an
incondominium
of Kafka, Alice in Wonderland, some TV afternoon
laugh-snort, and Mission Impossible. I thought it indigestible; worse,
some of the dialogue was guaranteed to grate your teeth. Perhaps it was
the fault of the translation I suggested in desperation. No , it was a fine
translation, Malaquais insisted . He had worked closely with the trans–
lator, a most intelligent woman.
What was one to do with passages like this?
''I' m called Bomba," he said, "and she's called Kouka .
What's your name? "
I took his hand absent-mindedly and said nothing .
He
had a
grip of iron.
"You're a oner!" he said.
A radio was blasting away on the mantel of a dummy fire–
place. Mistress Kouka unstoppered one of my jars and plunged
her nose into it with delight.
" Oner, punner," she said.
No , Malaquais liked it fine . Nothing wrong with "You're a
oner."
It
was obvious this intellectual conquistador had no feeling for the
little rhapsodies of the English tongue . I told him what I thought of his
book-he had hardly been gentle in his earlier turn on
The Naked and
the Dead
and
Barbary Shore
whose imperfections were left forever
mortal to me by his critique. What unconscious anger must have been
stored then in my own reactions ; with what an unwitting hostility I
must have gone through his pages. The recognition that Malaquais was
not one of the world's greatest living writers exploded in me a critical
response akin in judgement to a slave rebellion. Kill all the masters–
slavery is built on the continuing existence of even a single one . I was
obviously trying to forge my escape from all influence; Malaquais took
it like a master. Indeed , it was his turn: if I had been one attentive
student through every severity he visited on my work, so he absorbed
everything I had to say on the faults of
TheJoker ,
listened with a half–
smile on his face, that painful touch of merriment we feel when good
