ALFRED KAZIN
95
after year. Baldwin doesn 't seem to have recovered from the onslaught
against him by black nationalists. Political anger is hardly his natural
turf, and of course he has never had an audience in the black commu–
nity anyway. But novel by novel Baldwin, who is actually an expatriate
and a very elegant writer, writes novels of an unforgettable family
situation that afford him no catharsis that seem to get bigger and
windier with each reiteration of the fraternal tangle.
His old sidekick and rival Norman Mailer
is
a political imagina–
tion. Whatever may be said of Mailer's career as a whole-I admire him
because he really gives and destroys with himself each hallucinating
subject-it is a fact that while fascinated with outlaws, murderers,
criminals, people broken on the wheel of American disorder, he knows
that his characters are
not
powerless and spiritually indigent. They are
alive and fighting. It revolts me to sit in a New York subway car
mucked up from floor through seats to ceiling with graffiti so thick on
the windows already crusted with dirt that you cannot see where to get
out. But only Mailer had the solidarity with the unknown vandals
working through the night in the subway barns to imagine what they
felt, what they wanted, what in their secret writing they are dreaming.
What Mailer recognizes, especially in the context of destructive
and ferocious New York, is that Americans are drunk on a sense of pow–
er, induced by good money and the wars that bring in the good money
and the cars they drive without listening to the drivel on the radio.
The good life is their idea of freedom. Mailer, secretly obsessed with
the ancestral idea of God as the only lasting power, has made this
duplicitous American freedom the obsessive theme of his work.
It
is the
labyrinth of his own guilt as a moralist in this profane world; pent–
up maddened New York is the symbol. He has not been afraid to look
ridiculous, reeling like a possessed man from one dispossession to
another, from subject to subject, book to book. The excessiveness, the
unreality, the violence and the
Dreck
that weigh on my battered
sensibility in the big city-Mailer has made these his preoccupation,
has turned himself into an urban laboratory. I admire and envy his
recklessness. These days it may indeed
be
necessary to plunge into a
book as into a jungle, not knowing what you will meet-or whether
you will come out at all.
