GEORGE STADE
619
neither the love of God nor of the Cosmological I is a substitute for the
love of a mother. Henry's mother, "a pterodactyl in human flesh" who
left him "crying forever at the doorstep of his mother's womb" (as he
says elsewhere), did not love him, or anybody else: "I never felt any
warmth from her. She never kissed me, never hugged me. I don't
remember going to her and putting my arms around her. I didn't know
mothers did that till one day I visited a friend at his home. We were
twelve years old." A man who has never been loved by his mother has a
tough time loving himself or anybody else. He is hard on his women;
he punishes them both for what they are, types of his mother, and what
they are not, his mother. They become elusive to him, unstable, shape–
shifters, a succession of roles played by a ghost, because he only sees
them as tangents to the void left in him by the first negation of a rutted
need. And such a man has a loose grip on material actuality, because he
has never learned through the ministrations of his mother's body how
to send libidinal prongs out into the body of a world worthy of
affection, knowledge, and trust. Mother is the first other. And no
human grip holds unless currents of libido flow through the coupling.
Hence Henry's surrealism, the melting instability of his world. Hence
the flood of words sucked out of him by the vacuum whose center is
wherever he looks and whose circumference is nowhere to be found.
Hence, also, the many boons to his readers. We will come to them in a
minute.
Norman Mailer's protagonists are more various. But since
The
Deer Park,
all of them, whether O'Shaugnessy, Rojack, D.]., Aquarius,
the Reporter, the Director, or the Prisoner of Sex, have had a family
resemblance. Let us call the system of resemblances among them
Norman. Norman has his moment of conception in a strenuous
delivery from the protective cover of "the one personality he found
absolutely insupportable-the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn" who
"had the softness of a man early accustomed to mother-love." Norman
chose consciously to be a Henry; Henry longs to be a Norman, but
doesn't know it, and in any case, never had the choice. Henry showed
Norman what it is like to be unburdened of the softening civility with
which the women of American writers have cursed their men.
It
is
something he could not have learned, for instance, from Cooper,
Hawthorne, and Twain. Norman has been trying to show us how to
war with the mama's boy in oneself without losing either your nerve
or your mind.
It
is something we cannot learn from Hemingway, alas.
For these reasons Henry and Norman are right now most inspirational
protagonists-if you are a writer and a man.
