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PARTISAN REVIEW
tive failure of nerve. " The men of the fifties prided themselves on a
moral depth beyond the duplicities of politics, yet their period will
surely be known for its ultimate moral cowardice, as a time when, in
Mailer's words, "one could hardly maintain the courage
to
be indi–
vidual, to speak with one's own voice . " Yet only after three groping,
questing, fascinating novels did the young writer manage
to
break
through into
his
own voice.
Mailer's emphasis on courage does not primarily refer to the
courage to oppose what we now think of as the most specific vices of
the fifties: witch hunts, blacklists, and union purges, the cold war
and the jailing of supposed Communists. Beleaguered liberals were
caught between fighting these abuses and joining them
to
prove their
own purity. Mailer asserts that the collective opposition has failed,
that "the only courage, with rare exceptions, that we have been wit-
ness
to,
has been the isolated courage of isolated people." Mailer
himself, a celebrated young author, had made his debut in politics
campaigning for Henry Wallace and the Progressive party in 1948.
In a sense, all three of his early books were political novels. But he
insists that by 1957 "the years in which one could complacently ac-
cept oneself as part of an elite by being a radical were forever gone . ' ,
't
Instead the courage that Mailer honors-his totem is Heming–
way-is the courage
to
be, the strength to face up to death and vio–
lence, including the death and violence in oneself. The Mailer of
"The White Negro" is nothing if not a man of his time. For him too
the political nostrums have failed, the only salvation is individual and
religious. Every age has a tendency (as Hegel and Plato demonstrated)
to cultivate its own principle of decay, to foster the spirit that will
eventually ovenhrow it. The hipster figure who stalks through Mailer's
manifesto is a typical product of the existentialist brooding of the fifties.
The hipster cuts through and exploits the hypocrisy of the period, the
rampant cynicism about honor and social role-playing that lies just
beneath the surface of its official pieties. The Organization Man of
the fifties, like the con-man intellectual living off the foundations,
knows that the old dreams and ideals are finished, that it's all a game,
just as Mailer's hipster knows from Hemingway that "in a bad world
there is no love nor mercy nor charity nor justice unless a man can
keep his courage . . . that what made him feel good became therefore
The Good."
