Jack
Kerouac in 1960 was fleeing from being famous. On the Road, published 3 years before, has reporters knocking on
his door and pursuing him for interviews wherever he goes. Everyone in the
literary bookshops in San Francisco recognizes him, and his secret visit to the
bars and skid row hangouts is no secret at all, and ladies come in wanting a
real beatnik for her party, so there is no way to deal with it except be rude and
drink more and more, and finally he gets a cheap bus ticket to Big Sur where a
hip friend has a cabin he can use.
(I
will pause for breath even though Kerouac rarely does, just a nonstop stream of
words in the present tense.) Jack
digs the ocean and having no people around and he is going to get down to
writing another novel but first he will have a drink. Then he is walking in the
canyon where the wind roars and the ocean has a voice and then the bottle is
empty and he goes to bed. He wakes up in the morning without any food, but
first he would rather have a drink but the bottle is empty. So he hitch-hikes
up the mountain to the nearest tavern, where he has several drinks including a
Manhattan with a cherry in it for nutrition, and he starts feeling like writing
again, but this time makes sure he brings a couple of bottles back to the
cabin. After three weeks of this, he can’t stand it any more, so he goes back
to San Francisco, where everything is just like it was last time. So he rides
50 miles down to the farm country to see his old buddy Cody who drove back and
forth across the country with him stoned in his last book and they do some
drinking and driving around. Then it’s back to San Francisco and then Cody and
a bunch from Los Gatos all pile in a car and go to the cabin at Big Sur where
they get in each other’s way. Jack gets into a really long binge which goes
like this: every day he drinks until he feels sick. Then he gets up in the
morning and starts drinking to ease the hangover. He doesn’t feel like eating
so when he’s hungry he drinks to get some energy in his body. This does
something to his metabolism so after a while he can’t sleep. So he is
hallucinating and wandering around and quarreling with people until something
happens that pulls the plug on him and he sobers up for a while--
There’s
more. We haven’t touched on the Zen/ beat theme and the literary movement and
their drop-out trip and why the beats are different than the hippies that came
after them. The point here is only that a writer has to have something to write
about and a style in which to write it, and Kerouac got both of them by seeking
intoxication. He’s not the only one, which is why Kerouac is a good entry-point
for a whole movement. For another pointer-reading, take Norman Mailer.
Mailer
and Kerouac are about the same age, in fact Mailer was born a year later (in
1923), but he became a best-selling author in 1948 for his war novel, The Naked and the Dead, while Kerouac
was still trying to get his book published about bumming his way across
America. The theme of intoxication is not important in Mailer’s earliest
novels, but it looms more centrally into the 1960s when Mailer is a celebrity,
a self-appointed political guru, an obnoxious drunk, and one of the most
extreme self-promoters of that counter-culture decade. Mailer also happened to
be a writer with flashes of excellence-- clear and easy to follow, a sharp eye
for how things look and an ear for the way people talk, energetic writing that
moves you forward on the page. For the sociology of creativity, it is very
worth explaining how one acquires these skills, and the fact that Mailer is
good at some aspects of writing and fails at others makes him useful for
dissecting what makes a writer tick.
Here
is Mailer in one of his most successful books, The Armies of the Night, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968. The
topic is a big anti-war demonstration in Washington D.C. to shut down the
Pentagon, or at least dramatize opposition to the Vietnam War by the tactic of
non-violent resistance and getting arrested. Mailer puts himself in the center
of the narrative, which is legitimate enough since he was one of the celebrity
intellectuals invited by the organizers to make speeches and draw attention to
their cause by their willingness to emulate Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
Mailer is both participant and observer, and he uses his tell-it-like-it-is
style to include backstage preparation for speeches in leftist political
meetings and what it is like to be thrown into a police van. Mailer thus
acquired literary acclaim for breaking down the boundaries between
novel-writing and news reporting, becoming known as an exemplar of “the new
journalism” along with Tom Wolfe and (on the heavily drugged-out side) Hunter
Thompson.
Armies of the Night is Mailer’s breakthrough
performance. He is very self-conscious about his rank in the American literary
pantheon; thus he is pleased to write about himself marching next to “America’s
best poet?” (Robert Lowell) as “America’s best novelist??” But not to follow
traditional decorum. He gets
roaring drunk the night before the demonstration, when the big names are
supposed to make inspiring speeches at a rally. Just before going on stage,
Mailer urgently has to take a piss, but he can’t find the light switch in the
bathroom so he pisses on the floor. This gives him the idea of confessing he’s
the one who did it so the hostile press can’t accuse the demonstrators of being
slobs. He loves the idea because it will bring existential reality into the
artificiality of public speech-making, and when he finally gets on stage he
makes it the main point of his obscenity-laden speech. This tells you something
about Mailer’s judgment, and how his worst ideas come from his belief that
intoxication is writer’s satori.
The
other side of Mailer’s method gets his book back on track. Once the march
starts moving, he delivers perceptive details of the soldiers guarding the
Pentagon (mostly small-town boys, like those he knew in the Army) and the
demonstrators (mostly urban and educated) who clash with them. Mailer continues his own
preoccupations. He had planned to attend an exclusive party in New York that
evening, and he grows impatient that the march is taking so long. So he makes
himself one of the first to cross the open grass, accosting a military guard to
arrest him; then he mingles details about being held in the same paddy wagon as
right-wing counter-demonstrators, with his urgent need to get booked, bailed
out, back on the plane and on the way to his Manhattan soirée. Honesty, egotism, political relevance, mix with not a
little drunken recklessness to power the book to its conclusion. (Which is that
he has indeed succeeded in writing The Novel as History, plus a sermon on how
America lost its mojo.)
Intoxication as topic or as
method
Intoxication
is writer’s capital in two senses: a topic for a writer to write
about; or intoxication as a method
of writing, writing while drunk or stoned.
Intoxication
as topic was explored by naturalistic writers like James Joyce describing the
taverns of Dublin (later he did a riff on drunkenness as stream of
consciousness). Hemingway had his impotent narrator watch his companion exiles
from Prohibition America drinking and coupling in 1920s Paris. The genre goes
back at least to De Quincey’s Confessions
of an English Opium Eater (1821), and medieval student-monks wrote Latin
poem/songs about drinking.
Intoxication
as writing method has been extolled since antiquity, but it clashes with the
general pattern that most writers are disciplined and at least partly
methodical, using notebooks, outlining, drafts, revising, putting in long
months or years to see projects to completion. Historically some writers were
heavy drinkers (and more recently, drug-users) but many were not; some carousing authors alternated
respites of intoxication with long hours of literary concentration. If and
where intoxication was actually a creative method needs ferreting out in the
details of how authors spent their time while writing.
The Cult of Intoxication
What
makes intoxication important for a particular ecology of writers is that both
kinds of capital overlap in a cult of intoxication. The writer is inspired: by
the sheer act of creativity, of words in flight through one’s head and one’s
pen, by the lyrical desire to sing what is in your heart, by echoes of pagan incantation in The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Zen monks in medieval Japan had to produce as
evidence of Enlightenment a poem that conveyed their experience. Baudelaire
epitomizes the modern cult of the writer, simultaneously the free spirit
unchained from social convention, the aristocrat of taste and perception, and
the energized professional who can meet journal deadlines with a music review,
an art exhibit criticism, or a serialized novel. Those were the social
conditions for the writer’s cult of the 1850s; Baudelaire’s expression of it
was the artist as magician in a world of bored readers.
Balzac
contributed to the emerging cult by fueling himself through all-nighters with
50 cups of café noir, as he penned
endless revisions directly on printer’s proofs. (He produced 85 novels in a
spurt of 20 years, before dying, not too surprisingly, at age 50.) Downstream
from Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud
deliberately engaged in “a reasoned derangement of the senses” by means of
absinthe, hashish, whatever was available; and succeeded in writing memorably
gnomic poems:
A
noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles,
Je
dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes:
A,
noir corset velu des mouches éclatantes
Qui
bombinent autour des puanteurs cruelles,
Golfes
d’ombres; E, candeurs des vapeurs et des tentes,
Lances
des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frissons d’umbelles;
A black, E white, I red, U
green, O blue: vowels,
I will tell some day your
latent births:
A, black corset hairy with
brilliant flies
That bulge around cruel
stenches,
Gulfs
of shadow; E, artlessness of vapours and booths,
Launched by proud ices, white
kings, thrills of umbrella-shapes;
I,
poupres, sang craché, rire des lèvres belles
Dans
la colère ou les ivresses pénitentes;
U,
cycles, vibrements divins des mers virides,
Paix
des pâtis semés d’animaux, paix des rides
Que
l’alchimie imprime aux grands fronts studieux;
I, crimson, spit-up blood,
laugh of beautiful lips
In anger or drunken penitence;
U,
cycles, divine vibrations of heaving seas,
Peace of meadows scattered with
animals, peace of wrinkles
That alchemy prints on great
studious foreheads;
O,
suprême Clairon plein des strideurs étranges,
Silences
traversés des Mondes et des Anges:
--O
l’Oméga, rayon violet de Ses Yeux!
O, supreme bugle full of
strange shrillness,
Silences traversed by Worlds
and Angels
-- O the Omega, violet ray of
His Eyes!
Rimbaud
still writes formally conventional verse, rhythm and rhyme; the stylistic break
is in the shock of word associations. Does it have a meaning? It was not
written to express a preconceived idea; the method itself creates striking
phrases that readers must parse for themselves. Much in the same way rock bands
of the 1960s gave themselves names like Strawberry Alarm Clock.
Where
can you go after this, if you are a writer at the beginning of the 20th
century? Several places. Balzac
was a caffeine freak but his method was naturalistic word-pictures of all
corners of French society, propelled by melodramatic plots. These genres
prospered for another century in novels of society and popular adventure, the
invention of the detective story, and several other niches where an abundance
of writers could find work. Not
everybody took the Fleurs du mal / Bateau ivre route. Why then does the cult of intoxication
come back so strongly in the 20th century, from the 1920s through the 60s?
The Partying Scene of the 1920s
The
obvious thing would be Prohibition. The underground drinking scene of
speak-easies and bootleggers gave American writers something new to write
about, and they could be ironic or moralizing about what the change in American
manners meant. But it wasn’t just an American phenomenon. American writers
flocked to Paris where they wrote about the easy drinking and easy sex among
the expatriots. But the expats were also British and other nationalities, who
had no Prohibition but were mixing in the same scene, which they variously
interpreted as loss of values, disillusionment from WWI, but also attraction to
the center of action in literature, painting, and modernism generally.
In
fact there was a new social phenomenon in the Roaring Twenties. Superficially
it was the wild and crazy parties of the younger generation, thumbing their
nose at the stiff formality of the older generation-- which, they could add,
had disgraced themselves with their stupidity in promoting a devastating and
pointless war. Fitzgerald became famous for writing about the partying scene in
the U.S., but the same kind of
scene provides the materials for Evelyn Waugh’s and Aldous Huxley’s early
novels of youthful high society in England. Germany has it too, reflected in
Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin novels and Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf (the name of
a Berlin bar that is the entrance to an alternative reality, more drug-flavored
than alcoholic). Underneath the ideological blaming was a structural change:
the breakdown of the traditional marriage market controlled by adults, and its
replacement by a courtship scene where young people picked their own partners
in affairs that began in fun parties. Love used to be sentimental but led to
socially sound matches; now love is fun and excitement, leading to marrying the
really fun guy or gal. If you were rich enough on your parents’ money, or had a
good job in the booming Twenties, you could keep up the partying scene after
you were married, full of fun couples like Scott and Zelda and the hilarious
stunts they were always cooking up. (Evelyn Waugh gives a more sardonic picture
of this than Fitzgerald, who is always sentimentalizing his alter-ego heroes,
then bringing them down with a romantic/tragic crash like his bootlegger hero
Gatsby who can’t get the rich girl after all, even though he does give better parties.)
The sexual revolution isn’t yet full scale, compared to what happens later in
the century, but the partying scene of the 20s is not only flirtation for the
young but adulterous affairs later on and the growing acceptance of divorce
(reaching even the King of England in 1936); in short, on the way to modern
serial monogamy.
All
this was great material for novelists, who at their best are sociologists of
the moving social frontier. It also fed the modern cult of intoxication. Fun
parties and zany antics were best engineered with a heavy dose of alcohol, but
mixed with the excitements of flirtation, and a mild amount of sex (the real sexual
outburst, as Kinsey, Laumann and others have shown, came decades later). Above
all, making the scene, being present at the really cool party is more important
than anything else. (Not for nothing does Norman Mailer waver between stopping
the Vietnam War and attending a high-status party in New York.)
As
further proof that Prohibition (repealed in 1933) was not the cause, the
partying cult continued into the WWII years and after. Drinking was a big part
of seeing it through, especially in London during the blitz, along with singing
and rolling home in the arms of your buddies. This was mass-participation
drinking, with nothing specific to intellectuals. Why does there emerge a
full-scale intellectual cult of intoxication in the postwar era? This time the
U.S. is the center, already in the late 1940s, when Jack Kerouac is trying to
hitch-hike his way out of New York City (although the term Beats does not catch
on until the late 50s). The timing is a puzzle, since this is the period of
postwar economic boom, and America has vaulted to Top Nation in world
geopolitics. But the intellectuals are bailing out, not just ideologically
(they aren’t as far Left as they were in the 30s), but in lifestyle; just when
everyone seems to be becoming middle-class, the beats are going in for lumberjack
shirts and fisherman’s dungarees, trying to find their soul downward and
outward as far as possible from the upscale world of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The crucial
development is a new form of intoxication, a scene, a philosophy and a status
that trumps everything anyone else can do.
Heroin-fueled jazz and the
hipster
Syncopated
popular music, AKA jazz, had existed since the ragtime of the early 1900s. In
the late 1940s it morphed into an esoteric version, modern/cool/jazz/bebop. The
social scene was different. Instead of
loud audiences and dancing, it was more cerebral, dim-lit clubs where
you concentrated on the music, and clapping or snapping your fingers showed you
were not with it. Just being able to follow the way-out sounds was a secret
code, and drugs unlocked the code. Booze made you sloppy, but the musician on
heroin felt they could concentrate on the intellectual patterns of the music,
creating new riffs for hours on end. A woman described a jab of the heroin
needle in her leg as “an incredible exhilaration, as if an electric current
flashed through her body, leaving her detached yet connected to the music and
everyone in the room.” (Schneider, 31).
The cult of musicians and jazz fans were a secret society, with their
own clothing, gestures, their own rhythm of walking and their own talk. (“I
ain’t hep, to that step, but I dig it.”-- song lyrics from the 40s) They were
cool and hip; everyone else was square.
Heroin
wasn’t the only drug, and it had its problems. Hipsters also used morphine,
cocaine, anything you could get your hands on if you were addicted enough.
Marijuana was popular in the same circles, although advanced musicians looked
down on it as “for kids,” too light to get the really far-out insights (that
would come a dozen years later with LSD). But heroin addicts became unreliable
band members, easily forgetting to show up for a gig. Teenage gangs, which
appeared in New York around the same time, had the same problem; heroin was
popular (as was bebop) but the really heavy users were useless in fights
and tended to wander away from the
gang looking for a fix, so that after a few years the tough gangs became
antagonistic to junkies. William
S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959)
gives a brilliantly surrealistic picture of the junkie’s life and fantasies.
(Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg helped get it in shape and find it a publisher.)
Music
and popular culture continued to evolve in the 50s and 60s. More up-beat music
became easier to understand, dancing and partying came back in, youth gangs
expanded and created a fringe of wannabees and look-alikes, youth movements
both black and white became more political. Through it all one basic marker
continued: the distinction between the hip/cool and the square. This was the
essence of literary movements like the Beats (who tried to make their poetry
readings sound like jazz), non-literary movements like the hippies, and celebrity
writers like Jack Kerouac and Norman Mailer.
Intoxicated by writing vs.
writing while intoxicated
The
cult of intoxication is one way of capturing the high point of a writer’s life.
As the image of the writer as a higher being spread in the 19th century, even
very straight-laced writers like Emily Dickinson could express it:
I taste a liquor never brewed,
From tankards scooped in pearl;
Not all the vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an alcohol!
Inebriate of air am I,
And debauchee of dew,
Reeling, through endless summer
days,
From inns of molten blue.
Till seraphs swing their snowy
hats
And saints to windows run,
To see the little tippler
Leaning against the sun!
If you
get into Emily Dickinson there is no pitying her solitude; she is genuinely turned-on,
tripping out on her own word-play and the shadows angling across the lawn.
Intoxicated
writers, full of the lyric impulse, are not necessarily users of intoxicants.
Walt Whitman, drunk on words as anyone could be, was more of a teetotaler.
Ezra Pound, at his best in summoning up the spirit of tripped-out writers from
the galleries of world history, conveys the downside of addiction to writing:
O God, O Venus, O Mercury,
patron of thieves,
Give me in due time, I beseech
you, a little tobacco-shop,
With the little bright boxes
piled
up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragrant
cavendish
and
the shag,
And the bright Virginia
loose
under the bright glass cases,
And a pair of scales not too
greasy,
And the whores dropping in for
a word or two in passing,
For a flip word, and to tidy
their hair a bit.
O God, O Venus, O Mercury,
patron of thieves,
Lend me a little tobacco-shop,
or
install me in any profession
Save this damn’d profession of
writing,
where
one needs one’s brains all the time.
Getting
intoxicated from writing can be an antidote to heavy drinking or doping, since
one is competitor to the other.
Nevertheless,
there have been great writers who were intoxicated most of the time. Some of
them, like Scott Fitzgerald, made drunkenness their writer’s capital throughout
their career. All his novels, from The
Beautiful and Damned to Tender is the
Night, follow somebody like
himself and Zelda, giving it a high-tragedy seriousness by making the pursuit
of intoxication into a noble flaw, the hubris of the modern age. In his
personal life, Fitzgerald’s drinking in pursuit of gay-zany episodes mostly
alienated his friends, and kept him from getting his work done until he was no
longer in fashion. Kerouac was
pretty much a one-note writer but he kept himself going by reporting each
segment of his life in a new novel. Unlike Allen Ginsberg, he made no
transition to the upbeat 60s, and died in 1969 at age 47. Other writers who
drank themselves to death at an early age were Dylan Thomas -- an intoxicated
poet in every sense-- and Flann O’Brien, who was an inventively good-humored
drunk and a tremendous mimic of the voices of Dublin saloons and newspaper
writers. For some of these, their topic and their style was so close to the
world of drinking that they couldn’t avoid it; they lived in the groove that
killed them.
In vino veritas?
The
phrase goes back to folk proverbs, meaning no more than a drunk cannot keep a
secret. If taken to mean anything deeper,
why would anyone believe it? Drunks mostly are sloppy, clichéd talkers,
repetitive and boring. A good analogy is the way Dr. John Dee, an
Elizabethan-era occultist, summed up his life of magic calling up spirits: I have heard their voices for forty
years, he said, but never learned anything from them but gibberish.
In
vino there is little veritas, although a group of like-minded drunks may
convince themselves that the only worthwhile truth is their happy solidarity.
Intoxication works best when it is social, producing collective effervescence
in the group, and thereby the feeling of deep, uninhibited bonding. One of the
literary expressions of this is in James Jones’ From Here to Eternity (another cult-of-intoxication book from the
1940s, published in 1951). The book’s two protagonists, tough Sgt. Warden and
soulful bugle-player Pvt. Pruitt, get falling-down drunk outside the Enlisted
Men’s Club, and play out their comradeship in a parody of saluting each other.
Alcohol encourages expressing deeper masculine bonds than anything else; and these
are two soldiers in love with the Army, with Pearl Harbor about to happen.
Shared
intoxication is good for temporary solidarity, but bad for action, planning, or
self-control. Shakespeare depicts drunks as low-comedy buffoons. Marlowe’s Dr.
Faustus seeks the devil’s path of intoxication but he ends up selling his soul
for little more than drunken hi-jinks, and the plot peters out without any
great breakthrough on the wisdom front. Other drugs, like Charlie Parker and
Dizzy Gillespie’s bebop heroin, are more cerebral but their creativity is
short-lived and self-liquidating. The only one who kept up a long career along
this route was Burroughs, who would break his heroin habit from time to time by
taking a cure, but then let himself get back on heroin for his next book; he
knew he was on a life-long cycle. It helped that he was the heir of a big
business fortune, always had an income, and could flee to foreign countries
when things got bad, such as when he accidentally killed his wife while playing
William Tell with a pistol in Mexico City in 1951.
And
this brings us back to--
Mailer’s method of literary
intoxication
Mailer’s
pissing incident at the Pentagon rally is ludicrous, except from his own point
of view. Mailer is no humorist, and he explains very seriously the key to his
own creativity, as he sees it:
“He
was fond of speaking in public because it was close to writing... a good half
of writing consists of being sufficiently sensitive to the moment to reach for
the next promise which is usually hidden in some word or phrase just a shift to
the side of one’s conscious intent. (Consciousness, that blunt tool, bucks in
the general direction of the truth; instinct plucks the feather.) ...
speaking-in-public (as Mailer liked to describe any speech that was more or
less improvised, impromptu, or dangerously written) was an activity like
writing; one had to trick or seize or submit to the grace of each moment, which
were usually occasions of some mystery. The pleasure of speaking in public was
the sensitivity it offered: with every phrase one was better or worse, close or
less close to the existential promise of truth, it feels true, which hovers on good occasions like a presence
between speaker and audience. Sometimes one was better, and worse, at the same
moment; so strategic choices on the continuation of the attack would soon have
to be decided, a moment to know the blood of the gambler in oneself.” [Armies of the Night, 28-29]
Mailer
then describes what went through his mind while he decides that he will make
the pissing incident the high point of his speech; later he describes how he
tried to play the audience, getting a combination of laughs, hostile jeers, and
embarrassed silence. Nothing fazed, Mailer both acutely reports his own stream
of consciousness, and concludes that it was a great speech.
He has
behaved far worse. Back in 1960, he stabbed his wife with a knife and almost
killed her. Mailer had decided to run for mayor of New York, on a third-party
ticket of hipsterism and existentialism. The idea seems to have come from
petition campaigns that Mailer was involved in to change local cabaret
licensing laws that prohibited drug-convicted musicians from performing. It was
also a time when liberals and lefties were coming together to support the Civil
Rights movement growing in the South. After John F. Kennedy got the Democratic
nomination for president, Mailer wrote an Esquire
magazine article called “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” extolling Kennedy
as a hipster, like Mailer himself. The article was successful in the literary
world, and Mailer got a thank-you letter from Jacqueline Kennedy, whereupon he
replied that when they next met he would explain his ideas about rehabilitating
the Marquis de Sade. Mrs. Kennedy did not write back nor invite him again, but
after the election Mailer started claiming partial credit for Kennedy’s
victory. He began to drum up support among his lefty and celebrity friends for
his campaign for mayor. His wife, sister, and friends mostly think the idea is
bonkers, but Mailer is running around to meetings, doing literary readings, and
writing letters to famous people. A big party is planned for his apartment two
weeks after Kennedy won, where Mailer plans to announce his candidacy.
On the
big evening, Mailer is hyper. He has a couple of hundred guests, but enthusiasm
for his candidacy is mixed, and as the evening goes on Mailer becomes more and
more pugnacious. He follows departing guests into the street and gets into
scuffles and fist-fights. Mailer has been drinking steadily. Around 4 a.m., the
party is down to a handful. Mailer comes back in with a black eye, and his wife
taunts him; he stabs her in the back and chest with a knife, narrowly missing
her heart.
Mailer
beats the rap. His friends arrange for a psychiatrist to admit him to Bellevue
mental hospital. His wife survives and withdraws charges against him; a
sympathetic judge gives him a suspended sentence and probation. During his two
weeks in the mental ward, Mailer uses his time to gather material from the patients
that will go into his next book; particularly interesting to him is one of the
criminally insane who stabbed his brother. Mailer is developing his philosophy
of violence. A year later, Mailer tells an interviewer that the death camp
commander Adolf Eichmann had bureaucratically murdered thousands of people, but
that if he had killed them with his bare hands, “he would have worn the scar of
his own moral wound” and gained “our unconscious respect.” [Lennon 2013: 303] Such is the existential viewpoint of
the hipster philosophy.
Enough.
Mailer had terrible judgment in the kinds of things he would say-- and
apparently believe-- in his own hipster intuition. It is sometimes said that
genius is personality; thank God it isn’t. You don’t have to like someone’s
personality to get the best out of their writing. How could he be so good at
some things and so ridiculously bad at others? Here is an example of what
Mailer is good at, from his 1955 novel about Hollywood:
“Seated
on two couches which faced each other were half a dozen women. They were all
dressed expensively, and their make-up to make up for such faults as thin
mouths, small eyes, and mouse-colored hair, had curved their lips, slimmed
their cheeks, and given golden or chestnut tints to their coiffures. Like
warriors behind their painted shields, they sat stiffly, three and three,
staring at one another, talking with apathy. These were the wives of important
men and men who wanted to be important, the husbands in chase of one another
through the Laguna Room while the women were left behind.
“When
a man went by, they tried to take no notice. They either walked by without a
look, or stopped for a brief but wild gallantry which went something like:
“Carolyn!”
the man would say, as if he could not believe he saw the woman here and was
simply overcome.
“Mickey!”
one of the six women would say.
“My
favorite girl,” the man would say, holding her hand.
“The
only real man I know,” the deserted wife would say.
Mickey
would smile. He would shake his head, he would hold her hand. “If I didn’t know
you were kidding, I could give you a tumble.”
“Don’t
be too sure I’m kidding,” the wife would say.
Mickey
would straighten up, he would release her hand. There would be a silence until
Mickey murmured, “What a woman.” Then, in the businesslike tone which ends a
conversation, he would say, “How are the kids, Carolyn?”
“They’re
fine.”
“That’s
great, that’s great.” He would start to move away, and give a smile to all the
women. “We have to have a long talk, you and me,” Mickey would say.
“You
know where to find me.”
“Great
kidder, Carolyn,” Mickey would announce to nobody in particular, and disappear
into the party.
“All
through the Laguna Room, wherever there was a couch, three wives were sitting
in much that way. Since a lot of the men had come without women, the result was
that men got together with men, standing near the pool, off the dance floor, at
the café tables or in a crowd near the bar. I picked up a drink and wandered
through the party looking for a girl to talk to. But all the attractive girls
were surrounded, though by far
fewer men than squeezed up to listen to a film director or a studio
executive. Most of the girls seemed to like the conversation of fat middle-aged
men and bony middle-aged men. Actually I wasn’t that eager [to join a
conversation]. Being stone sober, the fact was that it was easier to drift from
one circle of men to another.”
[The Deer Park, 69-70.]
This
is Mailer being a micro-sociologist, walking around stone sober making mental
notes on the ways people behave. He was in Hollywood for the filming of The Naked and the Dead, and accumulated
enough material for a no-holds-barred portrait of the Biz. It also gave him the
idea he was as fit as anybody to be a film producer, director, writer and
actor, all of which he tried back in New York with his friends. Nothing much
came of it; Mailer’s roll-with-your-intuitions approach did not work in an
enterprise that requires a lot of coordination and planning.
Totting
up his strengths and weaknesses, on the plus side we can put his vivid,
realistic observations, his capacity to make the reader feel like you are
there, and his quality of always being interesting. On the negative side, his
characters tend to be off-putting, especially those based on himself. The
narrator of The Deer Park is an ace
fighter pilot, a near-professional boxer, great poker player, big-handsome-sexy
irresistible to women who resemble Marilyn Monroe, and of course a great
writer-in-the-making. This
adolescent fantasy check-list does nothing to advance the plot, but Mailer uses
it for the main characters in most of his works of fiction. For his new
journalism, he himself is the observation post, but this is his strong point
and these are his best works.
He
intrudes too much of his opinions, which he thinks are brilliant existential
psychology but mostly come down to asserting that what the world needs is more
of his spontaneously macho risk-taking and violence. He admires Hemingway and
has some of his descriptive skill but none of his restraint. He regards himself
as a high-intellectual leader but his ideas are too wacky to influence anybody;
and as we have seen, his practical judgment is terrible.
His
strength is social ethnography, vivid portrayals of cutting-edge scenes in
America. Where does he get his skills? He trained himself to be a writer,
already as a high-school student in New York and an undergraduate at Harvard.
He went into the army near the end of the Pacific war, hoping to get near
enough to the front to write a great war novel. (He had one combat patrol, but
everything he observed went into a convincing picture of the military machine,
especially the previously little-discussed class conflict between officers and
enlisted men.) He has an excellent memory for detail and the sounds of people’s
voices. Some of this is the memory component of high intelligence. One
remembers best what one deliberately sets out to observe, and Mailer trained
his mind to see what messages people are giving off while claiming to be
something else. This is a Freudian-inspired mode of observation, that Mailer
shared with his exact contemporary, Erving Goffman, when the Freudian vogue of
the 1940s and 50s shifted away from deep childhood traumas to the fronts people
are acting out all around us. In action Mailer was usually a jerk, but as an
observer he was focused and on target.
What
makes his writing so energetic? His sentences have flow; often they are long
and strung-together, but without complex grammar or subordinate clauses, the
whole thing rushing forward without a hitch. Whatever he is saying, you get it;
you don’t have to figure it out. Like him or not, he keeps you awake; and
except when he is sounding off on his own trips, his descriptions have the feel
of reality.
With
Mailer and Kerouac alike, the cliché is right, trust the writer’s
reports, not the writer’s ego. Ironically, these are writers who believe the
cult of intoxication gives them their true voice, but it gets in the way of the
idea part of writing, which requires a lot of reflection. For all his claims to
be writing philosophical novels, Mailer’s philosophy is the least impressive
thing about it. Writers who truly have something to say (as distinguished from
something to report), like Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, or Proust, have a calmer tone;
and their writing practice is the opposite of a frenzied rush.
What,
then, does the cult of intoxication really deliver? As a method, it has its Kubla Khan peaks of poetry, but novels
are made for the long perspective, passion recollected in tranquility. There
are not a lot of successfully intoxicated novels. Its successes are all on the
other fork, the cult of intoxication as a topic. It has been increasingly a
central part of modern history, and one whose allure we have yet to fully
understand.
References
Jack
Kerouac. 1962. Big Sur.
J.
Michael Lennon. 2013. Norman Mailer: A
Double Life.
Norman
Mailer. 1955. The Deer Park.
Norman
Mailer. 1968. The Armies of the Night.
History as a Novel, the Novel as History.
Bill Morgan.
2011. The Typewriter is Holy: The
Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation.
Eric
C. Schneider. 2008. Smack: Heroin and the
American City.
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