Mailer has been taking on America in this way since the 1940s. His ongoing confrontation with the country he loved (and did not love) was always in the spirit of productive intellectual engagement that would, ideally, lead to a further freeing of the American spirit. Mailer wrote, “Our noble idea of democracy was forever being traduced, sullied, exploited, and downgraded.” Every fiber in Mailer’s being fought the onslaught of assaults against the country that he served throughout his life, as in his lifelong critique of government and governmental abuse of authority. From his criticism of the devastating failure of the Vietnam War to his late essays attacking America’s war acts in Iraq, Mailer tried to live a life of affirmative rebellion.
Mailer’s acute political consciousness is explicitly connected to his view of art and the artist. In his mid-1950s essay “What I Think of Artistic Freedom,” Mailer describes the social responsibilities of the artist: “It is the artist, embodying the most noble faculty of man—his urge to rebel—who is forever enlarging the walls.” A cornerstone of Mailer’s approach to restructuring the political and social landscapes was the strategic use of productive conflict. A politically sensitive artist cannot be aloof and uninvolved. Mailer followed this prescription his entire adult life. Never was a public intellectual so intimately interconnected with his audience through constant appearances in print and electronic media, especially television. There were other celebrated novelists who commented publicly on events (James Baldwin and Gore Vidal, for example), and there were other public intellectuals, like William F. Buckley, Jr., who were consistently in the fray of controversy, but no single person rose to Mailer’s stature, and certainly no one has filled the void left by his death. Mailer established a complex persona that, I would argue, performed public service at its very best.
In these pages, a previously unpublished essay on Sigmund Freud gives sharp insight into Mailer’s conception of public responsibility. Freud is described less as a pioneering theoretical psychiatrist than as a public doctor, one who administers to the generic ills that plague twentieth-century society. According to Mailer, Freud, more than his findings, was the antidote to the vast range of threats to contemporary living. Society, with its wars and poverty and hypocrisies, was sick and barbaric and threatening to become even worse without Freud’s ameliorating contributions, especially his emphasis on the importance of a civilizing culture. Mailer obviously felt a strong kinship with Freud, whom he describes as “a lower-middle-class middle-European Jew who rose in bourgeois society.” His description of Freud’s mental acuity could easily be a description of himself: “[H]e was capable of the finest intellectual distinctions.” Freud and Mailer were interlocutors, mediating the tense, ongoing negotiation between cultural values and their representatives. Mailer often spoke for (and of) himself, of course, but he also felt a responsibility to speak for us all in his investigation into the collective remembrance of time and change.
This characterization is not to say that Mailer was a narrow ideologue. He was, first and foremost, an interrogative intellectual for whom the cast of a question was even more important than the reach of its answer. Foremost among his identities is that of a probing, hectoring teacher—the very best kind of educator. Mailer never fully lets go of either his reader-student or his topic. A common mode in his writing-teaching included an unrelenting questioning of his subject matter, infused with an unceasing challenge to the status quo, as we see in his probing analysis of the existential minority as part of his theory of violence in “The White Negro.” In Mailer’s view, the existential minority comprises individuals who are neither inherently good nor bad but who represent a series of divergent perspectives (such as feeling superior while also doubting this sense of superiority). In other words, individuals might appear to exhibit contradictory thinking or actions when in actuality they are reflecting different views that they hold at different times because they are deeply conflicted—a tension that reveals itself as existential angst. Mailer was keenly aware of the rich texture of contradictions that make up human beliefs but believed that these contradictions offer considerable flexibility in one’s choices throughout life. In posing these possibilities, Mailer promotes a sensibility that recognizes the importance of divergent thought and behavior.
Mailer’s intellectual opponents, who included James Baldwin; Norman Podhoretz; William F. Buckley, Jr.; Gore Vidal; and Irving Howe; did not always acknowledge the suppleness of the Mailer mind, but his debates with others (and with himself) for more than six decades reveal a man fully capable of being persuaded. Mailer’s detractors routinely disagreed, oftentimes with exceptional fervor, with his interpretation of events and the inferences he drew from those interpretations. Above all else, Mailer had a mind guided by reason. His well-known political self-designation (often taken as oxymoronic) was “left conservative,” and Mailer’s unwillingness to entrench himself in hard-and-fast alliances is demonstrated by this early identification in “A Credo for the Living”: “I feel myself to the left of the Progressive Party and to the right of the Communist Party.” This sentiment from the 1940s echoes a later Mailer quotation that provides a glimpse into his sense of the complexities of the fierce, unceasing political struggle of his time: “It may yet take an alchemy of Left and Right to confound the corporate center.” Mailer’s stances are necessarily fluid and constantly under pressure from within for critical reconsideration, reformulation, and rearticulation, which is where the inevitable inconsistency comes in.
This inconsistency—a valuable, fascinating by-product of the forces at work within Mailer’s intellectual matrix—is reflected in his shifting attitude toward homosexuality. In “The Homosexual Villain,” Mailer describes his early representations of homosexuality: “I have been as guilty as any contemporary novelist in attributing unpleasant, ridiculous, or sinister connotations to the homosexual (or more accurately, bisexual) characters in my novels.” Mailer had earlier felt that “there was an intrinsic relation between homosexuality and ‘evil,’ ” and does not spare himself from tough criticism as he accuses himself of bigotry: “I had been acting as a bigot in this matter, and ‘bigot’ was one word I did not enjoy applying to myself. With that came the realization I had been closing myself off from understanding a very large part of life.” Mailer was willing to change his mind publicly when warranted, no matter the consequences to perceptions of his personal consistency.
This ability to adjust his beliefs continually reminds the reader of the ethical texture of Mailer’s thinking. His ethos is strategically important because it requires the reader to be aware of his or her own ethical stance on issues. If a reader is in conflict with Mailer’s positions, he or she shares an obligation with Mailer to base any resistance on ethics. Mailer’s writing, throughout his career, is founded upon considerations of what is “right” under the present circumstances. Further, Mailer subscribed to Fitzgerald’s belief that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” For Mailer, contrariety was a necessary condition of any intellectual activity, whether thinking, speaking, or writing; it is a catalyst for debate as well as lubrication for honest thinking and writing. Mailer well understood the importance of paying attention to the machinery of discourse. When he assumed contrary positions, as he did throughout his life, he knew that one of its effects would be to enrich the debate. This sensibility is most evident in Mailer’s engagement with feminism, which resulted in occasional stormy confrontations with hecklers while on lecture tours or planned face-to-face conflicts on television. Mailer knew that theatricality and rhetorical performance were integral nourishments to his role as an intellectual outlaw, but it should also be pointed out that he maintained long-term, close friendships with feminists, including Gloria Steinem and Diana Trilling. Mailer was an intellectual performer of staggering proportions, and it was no surprise that he would rely on theatricality to generate emotions and interest in his audience.
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What is the state of the expository Mailer in his later years? As always, he was engaged as fully as possible, carrying the responsibilities of a public person fighting for progressive humanist ideas. Indeed, his antiwar sentiment continued until his final breath. A book written weeks before the beginning of the Iraq war, Why Are We at War?, was published in his eightieth year. Yet despite the tens of thousands of pages he left us with, a mystery about Mailer remains, a sense that the public intellectual is ultimately irreducible and indefinable. F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that “[T]here never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.” For the same reason, no preface to the essays of Norman Mailer could ever hope to capture even a fragment of his complex and intertwined personalities. Mailer, surely by volition, repels reductive, singular definition. He is an outlaw public intellectual who can only be understood, however insufficiently, as a complex plural construction. Mailer demands a great deal from himself, and if you engage with this collection, he demands much from you, too. Yet readers who approach the essays with a Maileresque energy and intellectual flexibility—and readers who have a bit of the outlaw in themselves—will finish this book challenged and rewarded.
1940s
A Credo for the Living
(1948)
I MUST ADMIT that I enjoy this opportunity to write a word or two about my own politics. In the thirties it was common enough for authors to send out a barrage of credos and countercredos, but today—because, perhaps, this is a period of less hope and greater concentration—the tendency has been to pool our efforts in the Progressive Party, and to leave the refinements, the definitions-of-position, to those authors who have deserted the Left to create political parties of three or four members.
A long sentence, the above. My apologies.
Now my own politics, naturally, have a certain relation to The Naked and the Dead.
The Naked and the Dead was a parable. It was a parable about the movement of men through history, and how history operates; and specifically it was a novel about America’s destiny and the historical paths America was to follow after the war. (I was a very ambitious young man at the time I wrote it.) It was not a bitter book. It tried to explore the outrageous proportions of cause and effect, of effort and recompense, in a sick society, and in that sense it is a book with a certain grim humor. Its function was not to seek for affirmations, but meanings, and for that reason perhaps it has been called a novel without hope.
I think actually it is a novel with a great deal of hope. It finds man corrupted, confused to the point of helplessness, but it also finds that there are limits beyond which man cannot be pushed, and it finds that even in man’s corruption and sickness there are yearnings and inarticulate strivings for a better world, a life with more dignity.
I have written these words about “hope,” because hope moves people politically. Although I do not think that “hope” has anything to do with the merits of a novel, I think it has a great deal to do with an author’s political activity or lack of it.
Thus, with a delay or two, we come to the credo. I suppose that politically I am an ignorant Marxist. I mean by that a confession that I cannot in all honesty call myself a Marxist when I have read so few of the basic works of Marxist theory. But politically in terms of specific objectives, of specific legislation and specific projects, I am in agreement with a great many tenets of the Left. To focus it more finely I might say that I feel myself to the left of the Progressive Party and to the right of the Communist Party.
I have come to this station by way of certain basic assumptions. I feel, and this is most directly important, that the need today is to approach “issues and questions”—those ponderous words which are the bane of all leftist writing—with an attitude that problems are complex, and their solutions are complex. Out of the swill and the honey which has been strewn over the Soviet Union, it is rarely stated that the USSR is an immense country, and that evaluations of it must be as many-faceted and various as evaluations of the United States.
A book which saw America through a Negro chain gang in Georgia, or from a nightclub on Fifty-Second Street or from a peaceful farm in Iowa, would be hardly a definitive work on the United States. By the same token almost every approach to the USSR has been that limited and that special. It is my diffident opinion that Russia is neither Arcadia nor a black police state in which every man slaughters his brother. It is an immense nation with wonderful things and bad things, and it is a state which like all states is in the midst of a historical process, and is moving and changing.
But when the last war ended, it was not Russia which sought to take over Europe by force. It was the United States. A deep revolutionary movement that was spontaneous and natural, and came to being out of the miseries and lessons of the Second World War, was created in Western Europe. Communism was the answer for Western Europe, and it would have been a more satisfactory answer than the mangle of present-day political life there. We opposed it as a nation not because Communism in Europe would have been a threat to America’s existence, but because it would have been a threat to the present economic organization of America.
It is perfectly ridiculous to assume that if Europe had gone Communist, Russia would have engaged in a war with us. Both Russia and the countries of Western Europe would have had their own crucial problems of reconstruction. It would have taken decades, as it may now take centuries, to have restored those countries to healthy productive societies. In the process America would have been influenced by what was occurring in Europe, might gradually and peacefully have oriented itself toward socialism.
That would have meant the end of the present ruling society in America. And in the instinctive appreciation of a dangerous problem that ruling societies always exhibit, the campaign to identify the Soviet Union with the worst ogres of a nightmare was begun. Its success was a reflection of the neurosis of America.
America is in a moral wilderness today, torn between a Christian ethic now enfeebled, a capitalist ethic, and a new sexual ethic whose essence is sadistic. When one contemplates the staggering frustrations and animosities of American life, I think there is hope to be found in the fact that there is resistance, and that there is a political party, the Progressive Party, which will poll millions of votes, millions of protests, against the campaign to make America fascist in preference to letting it move socialist.
My hope for the future depends upon more than those millions of votes. It is heartening for us to remember that the economic rulers of America have their problems too. They have satisfied temporarily the spiritual frustration of America life by feeding Americans upon anti-Russian hysteria. But hatred, except in rare cases, is only a temporary food. The basic problems of Americans, the spiritual problems, remain unsolved, and there is no way short of fascism or war for the present ruling groups to solve those problems.
There is resistance to fascism, and there is resistance to war. I think it is childish of us to assume that it is impossible for Americans to move toward the Progressive Party. History is filled with waves and counterwaves. My hope and my belief in America is that unlike Germany, there will be more and more resistance created as we move closer to the solution of the fascism and war that the reactionaries will present us.
In the meantime I will act politically for those things in which I believe. If it will take courage so much the better. We shall all find our courage. The beauty in man is that under the press of circumstances he develops what he must possess.
1950s
Freud
(circa mid-1950s)
FOR FREUD IT WAS UNTHINKABLE not to have a civilization—no matter what price must be paid in individual suffering, in neurosis, in the alienation of man from his instincts,* the alternative—a return to barbarism, to the primitive, was simply beyond the cultural shaping of Freud’s life. As a lower-middle-class middle-European Jew who rose in bourgeois society, he was not only the mirror but finally the essence of German cu
lture. It could be argued that the nature of the Jews, the meaning of the Jews, is not to find themselves as a people, but to re-create within themselves, as works of art, the models of a culture which is forever alien to them. So it is possible that the finest understanding of manners, of snobbery, of power, or equally of bourgeois stability can be grasped only by an outsider who can never take such values for granted but must acquire them by imaginative exercises of will, talent, and social courage. Freud was not born to become a respected young neurologist in Viennese medical society at the age of forty; it took the application of his early ambition, the subjugation of a good part of his more rebellious instincts, to acquire the training, the habits, and the manners of a Viennese doctor. No surprise, then, if at the moment of engaging his second career, with that long heroic passage through the underwater currents of the dream, at whose end he was to create no less than the most pervasive religion of the twentieth century, the rational gloomy ethic of psychoanalysis, it was enough to ask of him that he be ready to turn the foundations of Western society into a new view of marriage, family, and man. One could hardly ask for more: that the view be revolutionary, that the search be not for foundations but dynamic. Freud was ready to endanger his security in the bourgeois world [he had attained] in order to save that world—his unadmitted love was always for the middle class, but it was simply not within the bounds of one hero to wreak two upheavals upon thought. Society was sick, Freud could see it, but of necessity the answer for him was to redefine the nature of man in such a way as to keep society intact and Freud in his study and consulting room. If civilization was top-heavy in its structures and institutions, and instinct was therefore crippled in its expression, and able to achieve beauty (melancholy beauty, be it said) only through sublimation, then so it must be. Man, for whatever reason, and the ultimate reason was mysterious—Freud had no flair for the mystical—man for whatever reason must accept himself as a crippled being who could become less crippled but never whole—in return his civilization would presumably evolve and become less tragic. But it was a spartan view. In return for austerity, and pure psychoanalysis was austere, severe, unrelenting (as opposed to the more amiable and friendly varieties which proliferate in a pleasure-loving America today), man would at least be given the dignity of maintaining his civilization. How middle-class and Jewish this is can hardly be exaggerated. Part of the paradox in Freud’s style of mind was that he was capable of the finest intellectual distinctions, and the subtlest engagements of the opposite point of view in debate, while possessing almost no original capacity as a philosopher. At a very high level, he is the Jewish businessman raised to apotheosis, [even to the cigar,] and the sum of his philosophy in a depressed state could come to not much more than the heavy sigh of: “I’ve never had a particularly good time in my life, and the world is dog eat dog, but I’ve raised a family and I’ve taken care of them, and who knows, the kids never listen to the parents anyway, but maybe they’ll make a better world, although I doubt it. The big thing is to do your duty, ’cause otherwise it would all be chaos. I mean, where would we be if everybody went around doing what they wanted to do?”
Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays Page 2