518
PARTISAN REVIEW
end of the rainbow has not yet occurred, nor do I know what would
happen
if
it did.
Life
goes on in the old way. I suspect even ado–
lescents suffer in the old way, despite the evident new freedoms .
Today when I read "The White Negro" or
Ltfe Against Death
I can
recall how much excitement I once felt, and feel
some
of it again,
but it's distressingly hard to know just what the excitement was all
about. Mailer's orgasm to end all orgasms, his hipster-psychopath's
decision "to try to live the infantile fantasy," Brown and Marcuse 's
attack on the "tyranny of genital organization" and their paean to
the "polymorphous perverse" sexuality of the infant, along with
their fascination with Freud's death instinct: I find it difficult to
imagine what these things meant to
me,
who had scarcely attained to
the tyrannized state that they were attacking. To
me
they meant not
some
ontological breakthrough for human nature but probably just
plain fucking, lots of it-in other words, just the opposite of what
they said. I was sexually starved, though I hardly knew it, and these
men
seemed
to promise that good
times
were just around the corner.
Under the cover of grand ideas grand needs were making themselves
felt. To recapture completely my feeling for these books would
be
to
recapture my adolescence.
It
would
be
something of a sham. The
sixties coincided with my own coming of age; I cannot depersonalize
them; I cannot extricate them, try as I might.
v
I certainly don't mean to reduce enormously complex books like
Life Against Death
or
Eros and Civilization
to moments in my private
history, but surely it was ctucial for
me
that their exploration of "the
ambiguities of sublimation" appeared at the time I was sublimating
most ferociously-above all in the passion with which I threw myself
into books like theirs. Nor can it
be
forgotten that their animus
toward Freud's notion that civilization must inevitably
be
founded
on repression came toward the end of one of the most repressive
periods in American history, which both of them as old Marxists must
have experienced with special force. Marcuse's allusions to the domes–
tic cold war are veiled but unmistakable, and in a sense the whole
social model he analyzes is a generalized form of American society in
