204
PARTISAN REVIEW
interchangeable. Funhermore, the quest will surely be thwarted
if
society becomes a vast structure of illusion and duplicity, and hence
treats us as even more interchangeable and manipulable than we neces–
sarily are. One effect of Vietnam and Watergate was that the official
organs of our society lost much of the respect and credence they had
commanded. Even middle Americans began to live with less of a mysti–
fied and paternalistic sense of Authority. The disillusionment and
ruthless skepticism-really, spoiled idealism-of
Catch-22,
outlived
the sixties to become the ever more pervasive mood . With Celinean
cynics and paranoids installed in the White House, people at large
became that much more cynical and paranoid themselves. And the
paranoia had some base in fact , for in a highly polarized society,
where the self-imposed limitations of tradition and civility have been
cast away, it's likely that somebody really is out
to
get you, by any
means fair or foul.
Yet black humor began its great efflorescence during the Ken–
nedy years, in apparent contradiction to the idealism, optimism and
high style that we like to attribute to that period . Mailer's
An Ameri–
can Dream
can be read as a testament about the Kennedy years,
better than all the tendentious memoirs and eulogies that were pub–
lished after the assassination. When I first came upon the references
to Kennedy in the opening pages I thought them meretricious: one
more piece of megalomania for Mailer to associate his all-too-Mailerian
hero with the dashing, fallen President. But Mailer's identification
with Kennedy had come much earlier and ran much deeper. His first
major piece of journalism had been about Kennedy's nomination. A
would-be courtier and counselor, he'd addressed a whole book of
essays to Kennedy as President. Sexually rivalrous , he'd written an
open letter to Jackie, half-scolding her but implicitly trying to woo
her away. Like others, Mailer saw Kennedy as some kind of union of
style and power-both Irish and Harvard, moneyed and macho–
whose classy imperial court had a use for the arts. But in the novel
his hero Rojack complains that
The. real difference between the President and myself may
be
that I ended with too large an appreciation of the moon, for I
looked down the abyss on the first night I killed : four men, four
very separate Germans, dead under a full moon-whereas Jack,
for all I know, never saw the abyss.
