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PARTISAN REVIEW
Paleys , and Allen Ginsbergs apparently were in there eating caviar
like the other rich folk. They weren't picketing the exclusion of the
PEN base membership from
that
party or boycotting the support
of PEN by these financial buccaneers that the American press has
dubbed "greenmailers."
My hunch is that Mailer had some model like Malraux in his
head; you can't get board approval for secret dreams, and Stendahl
never ran
The Red and The Black
through the local PTA. Mailer is
obviously keenly aware that American writers and artists have a
hard time with the third act of their private and public lives: witness
the fate of Fitzgerald, of Hemingway who killed himself at sixty-two,
witness Mailer's obsession with the self-destructive Marilyn Monroe.
Who better to resurrect as an antidote to his nightmares of the
dark side of American success than Mailer's old, original ideal of
a writer from his Harvard days - Andre Malraux? Rolled into one
person you get warrior novelist, activist, literary figure,
homme en–
gage,
philosopher, and statesman. But Malraux had the real power of
De Gaullist France behind him . So with steely aplomb he could re–
main at the political epicenter of France, and, from his vantage point
of Stendahlian entitlement and tangible position, in superbly
cadenced style, he could mesh his personal destinies with those of
France, while at the same time managing to write his
Anti-Memoirs
dedicated to Jacqueline Kennedy. Also, the French left wouldn't
dream of ever interfering with official protocol.
The first official warning Mailer gave his public that he was
about to leap into a new style - Minister Without A Portfolio–
occurred when he introduced Woody Allen in French at the last of
the Royale Theatre Celebrations, and then kept right on going in
French: he talked about "grandeur" and set the stage for an inter–
national meeting between East and West with writers presiding as
statesmen. For the French to contemplate "L'Etat" may make some
sense: in English we have only the government and a concept of the
constitution. Ironically, though French was one of the two official
languages at the congress , other than a last minute post-Nobel invi–
tation to Claude Simon, the French were oddly invisible. France,
Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, and Greece had only three panelists
combined : Western Europe simply vanished.
It
was rather a pity the
French weren't present: their feisty intellectuals would have given
the Germans-who hogged the conference complaining about their
victimization - a rough political battle . Grass, with almost deliberate
mauvaisefoi
turned on its head Bellow's criticism of America - that we
