NORMAN MAILER
17
good Marxist, full of his own paradox, proceeded to teach me: that
there were more important things than vanity or self-expression. One
of them was art. Critical standards were the pretorian guard of that
most perishable majesty, art. It is, as an original insight, equal to the
claim one has discovered the wheel, but then every artist may have to
discover this wheel for himself, and I never knew another writer who
was as impersonal about his own work and the work of others, friends
or enemies, than Malaquais. If we are buddies we must naturally be
ready to die for one another on the barricade was his unspoken
premise, but do not ever ask me to approve of a literary performance I
cannot respect. Could anything be less American than to be ready to
die for friends if they do not agree with you? No, it is European, and if
that part of Europe is also being covered over by the One World tech–
nologies ofGlobal Village, well, the elegiac tone is always dependably
at hand for a preface .
3.
But there is no need for elegy. I discovered on reading
The Joker
once again that it was more alive than when created. A string of book
reviewer's good words might follow-characters vivid, action more
significant-the difference was that I now enjoyed reading it. Now, on
the other side of two decades, I could discover what there was to learn.
For Malaquais had done a book which came out twenty years too soon,
a novel about a world we are now all but ready to perceive on the
horizon, that awful world of high-rise, unisex, computers, and dis–
embodied flamboyance, everybody his own superstar, while the air
smells of plastic whose molecules seem bound to circle forever in the
coils of the air conditioning, all that stale gloom of tortured materials,
deodorant and fluorescent light.
Yes, now, on re-reading, I came to see that Malaquais was writing
of a city which was not so different from all the cities we have almost
become, a megalopolis whose boundaries could not even be found. At
one point, the hero, trying to describe his city through metaphor, sees
it as an immense skyscraper large as the world itselffor it is all the world
he knows . It is a total state and the impact of that state is in the very
architecture of its building.
