The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer/2. Barbary Shore

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Barbary Shore (1951) is of more interest as a stage in Mailer’s development than as a artistically effective work in itself. Certainly it fits easily into a treatment of the five novels, dealing as it does with the two basic issues with which Mailer always concerns himself: the state of Ameri­can society and the problems of the individual in it. But the second novel, for several reasons, marks a faltering in Mailer’s progress. This is not to say that it is a retro­gression, for though it falls short of the artistic success of The Naked and the Dead, Barbary Shore represents a step in the direction of an increasingly nonderivative art.
Perhaps Barbary Shore can be better understood in light of the circumstances under which it was written, and of Mailer’s own retrospective understanding of the book. In Advertisements for Myself, he tells of the several years following the publication of The Naked and the Dead, during which Barbary Shore was written:
There is much in what Mailer says to help us under­stand Barbary Shore. To begin with, there is a good deal of Mailer himself in his protagonist/narrator, Mikey Lovett. Like Mailer, Lovett is deprived of a past and committed to the present, but in his case the situation is more drastic, and therefore more symbolically significant. For Lovett has literally no past: he is an amnesia victim, a product of the war who is thrust with no emotional connection whatever into a nightmarish postwar world. The tone of the novel and of his personality is set in the very first paragraph of the book:
The reader is immediately presented with a wealth of fairly standard symbolic leads. A classic product of the war, Lovett has not merely been deprived of his past, but literally, physically, scarred as well. His identity is irre­coverable because his face is not his own. He stares out at a strange world from behind a mask which is artificial, the “art of a stranger” at that. Although he has not returned from war physically impotent (as does Sergius in The Deer Park)It is worth noting that war is a central experience for the protagonists of each of the novels. Sergius of The Deer Park and Rojack of An American Dream are each profoundly affected by war experiences which they relate early in their stories. D.J. of Why Are We in Vietnam? goes off to war at the end of his narrative. his scar is “unfertile flesh.” Finally, his preoccupation with the mirror will be echoed later in a tendency to psychic narcissism.
Lovett, forced into a commitment to the present, is the embodiment of Mailer’s preoccupation with his own existential situation at the time. Because of the admitted paucity of external experience upon which Mailer could draw, the novel is set in a vacuum of psychic experience, within which the painfully obvious symbols of alienation and emotional bankruptcy are garishly highlighted. Yet the novel, in drawing its characters and locale from the real world, in taking for its central message the very real political problems of a real country, purports implicitly to treat human life in realistic terms, and cannot therefore be accepted simply in terms of allegory. It is in the attempt to deal with such problems as alienation in bald symbolic outline while simultaneously developing credible charac­ters and also presenting a lengthy political diatribe, that Mailer overreaches himself. The structure and tone of the novel are inconsistent and ineffective because of a lack of integration, and finally Barbary Shore is neither successful allegory, successful fiction, nor successful polemic.
Mikey Lovett, armed with five hundred carefully hoarded dollars and the desire to be a novelist, seeks the opportunity to live, as Mailer did while writing The Naked and the Dead, “like a mole.” To this end, he is led by an acquaintance to a shabby boarding house in Brook­lyn Heights, where he becomes enmeshed in a nightmarish set of relationships with the five other inhabitants of the building.
Showing foresight similar to that he used in The Naked and the Dead, Mailer limited himself, in the second novel, to a narrow physical setting and a small number of characters. But two elements of the conscious self-limita­tion which helped make the first novel effective are absent in the second. First, Mailer was admittedly unable to draw his subject from an area he knew well from personal experience. Although the sense of being cut off from the past, the awareness of existential choice, and the involve­ment with contemporary politics are part of Mailer’s personal experience, they had not yet been thought through when he wrote Barbary Shore. Consequently, deprived of the benefit of unhurried retrospection, Mailer seems to deliver these thematic preoccupations to the reader only partially assimilated, with the result that the book is lumpy in style, structure and resolution.
The second (and possibly more significant) departure from the successful formula used in The Naked and the Dead involves novelistic structure and narrative voice. The clearly derivative qualities of the first novel in this regard have been pointed out in the preceding chapter. Yet one of the most striking characteristics of Mailer’s fiction is the novelist’s progression towards an increasingly indi­vidual art. Barbary Shore, no matter what its shortcomings, is a first step in this breaking away from previous influ­ences. Abandoning the comfortable devices available to the omniscient third person narrator of his first novel, Mailer chose to write Barbary Shore in the first person. This decision was a necessary one. Feeling cut off from his past, Mailer could not express himself in the idiom and form of that past. The considerable difficulty he ex­perienced in creating a credible first person voice which would fit his prose style becomes centrally important in understanding The Deer Park (in which it reaches a peak) and An American Dream (in which it is momentarily re­solved). This is one area in which, as Mailer himself realizes, Barbary Shore casts light upon the work which follows it.
Mikey Lovett sets out, as did Mailer, “to begin life again . . . to force [himself] to step into the war of the enormous present . . . setting out by [himself] to cut a track through a new wild.” Although he remains essen­tially alone, he is not by himself for long. The series of intertwined relationships into which he is drawn begins with the landlady, Mrs. Guinevere. Mikey’s initial concep­tion of her is that given him before he has seen her, by Willie Dinsmore, the casual acquaintance who has occu­pied the room Lovett is to live in. He is the only character in the book besides the six inhabitants of the house, and after performing the function of introducing Mikey into the house, he leaves and does not reappear. He is so patently a device that even Mailer, through Mikey, re­marks on it:
Dinsmore is a leftist playwright who sees the world in terms of a simplistic understanding of the class struggle. He is equally simplistic about people:
It is a measure of Mikey’s naïveté (which is accentuated by his diminutive first name and the pronunciation of his second, “love it”) that despite his recognition of Dins­more’s shortcomings as a character analyst, he accepts the man’s simple evaluation of Guinevere: “Guinevere’s a nymphomaniac.”
Sexuality is to play an important part in the relation­ship between Guinevere and Lovett, as it does with all the relationships in the book, but it is significant that these two never sleep together. Appearances are never proven true in this book. Between Dinsmore’s statement and Guinevere’s surprisingly attractive initial appearance, Lovett is caught in his first external involvement (a uni­lateral one at that):
And later, he thinks of her as:
Mikey is, finally, the only resident of the house (ex­cept Guinevere’s little daughter, Monina) who does not take her to bed. In a series of vulgar, but knowledgeably coy confrontations, she teases and refuses him, ultimately proposing that he spy on the other boarders for her. Lovett’s indignant refusal places their subsequent dealings on a cooler footing, but by this time he has become in­volved with the other boarders.
McLeod, Lovett’s next acquaintance, is perhaps the most important character in the book. A wry, cynical man who works in a department store, he describes himself as a self-educated “Marxist-at-liberty,” claims never to have travelled beyond New Jersey, and leads a life of monastic isolation:
In everything he did there were elements of such order, demanding, monastic. He was unyielding and sometimes forbidding. Dressed in the anonymous clothing of a man who buys his garments as cheaply as possible. . . . And his room, clean as any cell could have been in our aged mansion. . . .
He is ultimately revealed to be, first, Guinevere’s husband, and second, a former high-ranking international commu­nist operative sought by the American government.
McLeod is primarily significant in terms of Mikey. In their talks, as mutual distrust very gradually fades, McLeod assumes the role of tutor to Lovett's tyro.This relationship is echoed by the Sergius/Eitel situation in The Deer Park. It is through him that Mailer is able to introduce long passages of Marxist theory, but it is more important that after much confused vacillation Mikey’s loyalties are directed entirely to McLeod. It is Mikey’s progress toward under­ standing and embracing McLeod’s theories (and finally of accepting the responsibility of carrying them on) which represents the central movement of the novel.
The two thematic levels of the novel, individual and social, are focused almost exclusively in Mikey’s two major preoccupations: sexual communication and Marxism, re­spectively. The first part of the book deals primarily with the former, the last part with the latter; and it is the shift from one to the other on Mikey’s part that embodies what resolution the novel offers.
Just as Guinevere and McLeod are not what they first appear, Leroy Hollingsworth, secret policemanThis is the title by which Mailer refers to Hollingsworth in Advertisements for Myself. and grand inquisitor, presents a very deceptive first impression. Invited casually into Hollingsworth’s room for a beer, Lovett finds it “unbelievably messed.” In contrast, Hol­lingsworth himself is so neat that Lovett observes, “He seemed to have no relation to the room.” The fact is that Hollingsworth seems to have no relation to the situation and setting at all. He is described in terms of the Norman Rockwell vision of the typical American boy, and it is significant that at no point in the subsequent revelation of his true role is it suggested that his appearance or man­ner are falsely assumed:
In light of Hollingsworth's later role in the novel, this description is significant. Mailer seems to be saying, as he does repeatedly in the later books, and as he did in The Naked and the Dead, that the primary threat of totalitarian takeover in this country lies in internal fascism. His choice of Hollingsworth, a blonde, blue-eyed boy/man whose features are “without distinction” suggests that secret policemen do not spring full blown from the ground, bearing fangs and truncheons, but appear naturally from the ranks of the populace when governmental policy requires them. The physical characteristics of Hollingsworth are in themselves slightly chilling, for they conform not only to the American stereotype but to that of the Nazi “master race” as well.
Hollingsworth is lacking in intellectual distinction as well as physical. Though cunning in his tenacious hound­ing of McLeod, he betrays no real understanding of politi­cal or moral issues, is aggressively anti-intellectual, and sees both international and personal issues in terms of black and white. His ultimate commitment is to expedi­ence, and towards the book’s end he is ready to desert his country for personal gain. He is, finally, despicable be­ cause he is so unquestioning in his assurance that what he does is right. This attitude is early demonstrated in his attitude towards sex. In his sexual dealings with Guine­vere, with Lannie (a female boarder who moves in after Lovett), and with a waitress he picks up while drinking with Mikey, he is vulgar and sadistic. In his first conversa­tion with Lovett, he reveals an offensively lewd preoccupation with sex:
Even were he truly what he purports to be, a minor clerk in a large Wall Street firm (a cover whose fitness for a representative of reactionary interests is obvious), the character of Hollingsworth would be a devastating indict­ment of the “average” American, with his stag-film view of sex, his unquestioning dedication to the status quo, and his comfortable Christianity, which demands nothing of him but token commitment to outward show. The symbol of this (a strikingly effective touch which prefigures Mail­er’s later preoccupation with “plastic” falsity in the American material culture) is the “phosphorescent cross printed on cardboard,” which “would glow in the darkness when the lights were out.” Even the universal symbol of selfless­ness and brotherly love is, in Hollingsworth’s world, a shoddy, mass-produced ornament, perhaps as significant to him, but certainly no more so than a hand-painted novelty tie decorated with a phosphorescent nude. The cross, one must assume, glows mute witness to every act of unfeeling seduction and self-righteous persecution which its owner perpetrates.
Enter Lannie, directly into Mikey’s room, seeking someone who can rent her a room. She, like Lovett, pro­ceeds to become involved with the other residents. But it is Mikey to whom she comes first, and he becomes imme­diately involved by finding Guinevere and interceding on Lannie’s behalf with the fiction that she is a friend of his.
Lannie is somewhat mad, living within a nightmare world of her own. She is tormented, inconsistent, railing, nearly incomprehensible but often frighteningly percep­tive in her visions of human brutality and betrayal. After a brief sexual contact with Lovett, unsatisfactory to either and conceived in terms of vainly attempted communica­tion on his part, Lannie consciously and eagerly seeks abasement at the hands of Hollingsworth in an episode which is not presented to the reader but left to be inferred from her later mutterings. Late in the novel, she is re­vealed suddenly as the aggressor in a sexual affair with Guinevere. The sexual alliances in this novel are without exception sordid, one-sided in motivation, and significant primarily in terms of negation rather than affirmation. There is no enjoyable sex, no sex for love, no real com­munication between sexual partners. Further, the several revelations of previously accomplished sexual contact to which neither the reader nor Lovett have been witness (such as Lannie and Guinevere, Lannie and Hollings­worth, McLeod’s role as Guinevere’s husband) lend a further sense of surreptitious mystery, making the sex seem more sordid and increasing the sense of intricate machina­tions beneath the surface.
It should be obvious at this point that Guinevere is a sort of hub about which the other characters revolve on the sexual level. This is not to say that she is in control of them except on occasion, but that she represents a pivotal point which they all touch at some time. Her name may assume some significance here. Although, as we are to dis­cover, her last name is legally McLeod and her given name is Beverly, she is referred to always as Guinevere, and only occasionally as Mrs. Guinevere. She explains at one point to Mikey:
The symbolic value of the name Guinevere is underlined not only by her previous profession of burlesque “queen,” but also by such devices as “. . . the hem of her purple velvet wrapper swished luxuriously along the floor.” It is an indication of the sordid state of our times and our society as Mailer sees it, if Beverly Guinevere is to repre­sent our royalty.
With very little difficulty, other Arthurian parallels fall into place. Guinevere’s lover is Lannie, too close to Launcelot to be ignored as coincidence. And finally, who is to be Arthur? The role is assigned by Mailer, not to McLeod the husband, but to Leroy, the king, Hollings­worth, inheritor of a new world where mediocrity, ex­pedience, and narrow-minded ignorance rule. And if the point is not yet clear enough, we have Guinevere’s state­ment about Hollingsworth, whom she takes as a lover and with whom she agrees to betray McLeod and seek a new life: “Sometimes I think he’s the son of a prince, now I don’t mean that exactly, but you know, a magnate, or a . . . a potentate, and that he’s living here in disguise.”
For Guinevere, sex is a marketable commodity. Not only does she use it to play upon Lovett and the other boarders, but she has made her living displaying herself as a sexual object in the past. Her ambitions for the future hinge upon a simple, cynical, and perhaps frighteningly accurate conception of the American dream. Like many ignorant, cynical people who feel they have seen much of life, she feels she has something important to tell the world. At one point she proposes to Lovett that he per­form the necessary but mechanical (as she sees it) task of writing up a semi-autobiographical love story which she feels would be a sure financial success in Hollywood. The story, presented in full by Mailer, is no more than a particularly sordid soap opera, with the emphasis more on lust than sentimentality.
Another of Guinevere’s schemes is to make her daugh­ter, Monina, a child star in Hollywood. To this end, she attempts to keep the child a baby as long as possible; but Monina, despite her lisping baby talk, is perhaps too much her mother’s daughter. At the age of three, she is all too aware of her own sexuality, and attempts to gain male at­tention through a parody of striptease, revealing a body which is “virtually a miniature of a girl of eighteen.” Monina is a perverse child, strangely reminiscent of Hester Prynne’s daughter Pearl, in The Scarlet Letter. Not only does she embody the sins of her mother and threaten to duplicate them, but she calls attention to certain of Guinevere’s indiscretions by perversely parroting private and revealing exclamations she has heard from her mother. Again, it is Monina who, like Pearl, reveals to the reader the identity of her incognito father, McLeod.
If most of the human relationships in this novel are informed by a tawdry sex without love that underlines the distance our culture has travelled from the ostensible nobility of the Arthurian age, not all the characters are satisfied with (or unaware of) the lack of meaning in it. Unlike the other characters, Mikey Lovett is truly desirous of sex as a means of communication. In this aim, he is continually frustrated. The abortive encounters with Guinevere and Lannie will be seen later to acquire some symbolic import when, late in the book, it becomes clear what these characters represent. At this point, however, they serve the function of throwing the discouraged Mikey back into the isolation of his own mind. Repeatedly, he drags up visions from his murky past, some of which may be vague memories from before his accident, some merely fantasies. Several of these are sexual in nature, and one, presented early in the narrative, is of particular significance in understanding the nature of Mikey’s character and quest:
Mikey’s alienation, then, is not merely a function of his amnesia or any other scar of war, though the former is certainly a symptom and a symbol of it. Nor is complete alienation a state which he chooses to embrace, for his statement makes clear his need to relate to his fellow boarders.
Other memories and fantasies, less explicit in signifi­cance, are related by Lovett periodically, and it is never clear even to him which of them are rooted in actual his­tory and which proceed from sheer subconscious inven­tion. All are somewhat nightmarish, and one particularly Kafkaesque scene, related in the first chapter, is worthy of mention:
This passage is significant to Mikey’s understanding of the events of the novel, as he relates them in retrospect. The realization that history is a vehicle, one which moves so rapidly as to make men strangers in their own world, is central to Mikey’s movement towards understanding what the future demands of him. The plump, middle-aged traveller has been left behind by history, and in this re­spect he may be seen as representative of most men in this era of rapid and complex historical development. More particularly, considering the time the novel was written, he may be representative of the returning veterans of every country, who find that the society and ideals they fought for are really unfamiliar to them, no longer the clear-cut things they were represented as during the war. Mikey Lovett, understanding the nature of history, becomes the voice of these men, who themselves cannot comprehend and articulate.
In this role, Lovett is unhampered by ties to a life prior to the war, and the various clouded memories and visions he drags up serve to reinforce the universal nature of his jumbled experience. For example, he vaguely re­members himself as a faceless part of the American Army in Europe:
Mikey’s recognition of the fact that he has been a faceless component in a national machine renders more significant his literal loss of his face and his identity; and his separa­tion from that machine is the first in a series of experiences and realizations which lead him ultimately to exercise his individual will.
Again, he imagines another, earlier past for himself:
Perhaps because Lovett is not committed to any definite personal past, he belongs to any and all of them, and is as much a product of the serene Midwestern streets as of the shabby orphanage. He is a representative figure, grown to young manhood in all regions of America, responsible for the victories and brutalities of all American soldiers. Finally, he is the spokesman for all postwar cripples, a man of his generation, cut off irrevocably from the past.
The visions and dreams, memories and fantasies, re­lated to us by Lovett are to continue periodically through­ out the book. But by the middle of the narrative, he has begun to fall under the influence of McLeod, and con­sequently these passages become colored almost exclusively by Marxist theory and preoccupation with the history of the communist movement. Immediately after a talk with McLeod, Lovett returns to his room and imagines or remembers himself as a youthful, idealistic follower of Trotsky:
Lovett’s reaction to McLeod’s disturbing political talk is significant. He resists the influence it has on him, attempts to regard it as “pointless.” He is exhausted because the effort has been “demanding” upon him; and finally it must be obvious to the reader that concern with the social problems presented by the communist movement has not been pointless to him in the past, and that he wishes to retain his protective cloak of amnesia and unconcern. He is unable to do so, and it is no accident that he uses the phrase, “the labor of parturition,” to describe the painful process of bringing to light this new memory. McLeod is not a mere gadfly to Lovett, but the midwife attending the painful birth of a new conception of self, a new social involvement, in the younger man.
Realization piles upon realization, as Mikey spends increasingly more time lying on his cot, which seems to function as an analyst’s couch for his self-probings. He is too painfully honest with himself, too concerned with find­ing some truth and therefore some true conception of his own role in the world, to cling any longer to his blanket of darkness, and so he plumbs his mind ceaselessly. In a long passage which occurs almost at the exact center of the novel, he relates a series of thoughts which culminate in a major breakthrough. He remembers an incident of the war, in which, having crossed into the “enemy’s country” as part of the invading army, he shared with the rest of his squad the willingly sold favors of a farmer’s daughter. The incident is related in terms of the utmost dehumaniza­tion:
This episode marks the lowest point of dehumanization to which Mikey Lovett had been brought by the war. Part of a massive war machine, he had become himself mecha­nized, “making love“ mechanically without love or even passionate hatred. He is shown as an appurtenance of his machine gun, and it dwarfs him in its greater importance and potence, as it rises “above my head in magnification of myself.“ The impending victory over the enemy is implicitly robbed of moral significance by the fact that the bovine farm girl whose face he never sees responds to the invaders without hatred, fear, or any other emotion. An act which, were it accompanied by gratitude or passion, might be romanticized into a reaffirmation of the basic humanity of all people is instead shown as a matter of cold economic trade, and thus the insignificance of individual human emotion in the shadow of grinding international movement is made clear.
The fact that Lovett believes that he sustained his wounds in the action following the incident with the farm girl is symptomatic of the ultimate depth of dehumaniza­tion to which it brought him. The wounds may be real, physical ones, but the amnesia which accompanies them is obviously similar to the repression of memory experienced in cases of severe neurotic trauma. His ability to face the memory marks the turning point in a sort of auto-psycho­ analysis in which he has been aided by McLeod‘s prod­dings, and from this point on, Lovett‘s mind moves progressively (though stumblingly) toward human commit­ment. Immediately, his thoughts move upward from that lowest point, touching again the intermediate plateaus to which we have already been introduced, the girl of the week-long idyll and Lannie:
But this time, in his painful reverie, Lovett comes to a crucial knowledge:
Lovett’s concern with the past has, finally, yielded up the inner kernel of his personal alienation from humanity and its problems. Having achieved this much, Lovett recog­nizes the limitations of the past, and for the first time be­comes truly committed to the present as he has claimed to be from the outset. The forward movement of his now un­fettered mind will not let him rest, however, and his pre­occupation with present issues is ultimately to lead him to think of the future, and finally to assume the responsibility of his own role in that future.
It is interesting to note that the farm girl episode, so central to Lovett’s switch in commitment from the past to the future, is rendered in terms of the two primary preoccupations which govern his mind throughout the book: sex and international politics. In the wartime episode, sex is shown to be not an act of self-definition or even a temporary refuge from the dehumanizing regi­mentation of war, but a final proof of the extent to which the impersonal forces of national interest can stifle the individual personality, rendering the act of love and pro­creation a mere mechanical function.In this respect and others (notably the terror evoked by the state spying on citizens) the novel is reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984 (published 1949). The memory of the seashore resort girl is recognized as an irrecoverable dream, as pleasant but as insignificant to the present as the out­moded Midwestern city of Lovett’s fantasy. Mikey dwells no longer on that girl, nor does he attempt any further sexual liaison with either Guinevere or Lannie. It is at this point, the structural center of the novel, that Lovett turns from the sexual preoccupation of the first half of the book, to the devotion to political issues which drives him thereafter.
Lying on his bed, Mikey reviews the present world situation and faces the fact that the Russian Revolution and the communist movement have changed nothing for mankind:
The knowledge that larger forces in the world rob men of their power to exercise individual will does not, this time, cause Lovett to despair. He has come some distance from the state of mind he held scarcely twenty-four hours earlier when the conversation with McLeod seemed “pointless” and the world situation without hope. Mikey has begun to enter into a sense of his own potential power, as a thinker, to exercise free will and influence the world. His novel, always in the far background of the plot, no longer seems the proper vehicle for his personal mission. He has begun to understand that he must define himself through his own actions, and in this respect he begins to embody certain values of postwar existentialism as Mailer saw it.Like Sergius in The Deer Park, Mikey Lovett wishes to exercise his will actively, and therefore both protagonists go a step further than the passive resistance of Red Valsen. But although the conclusions of Barbary Shore and The Deer Park show Mikey and Sergius looking to the future in the determination to forge a new life, their success or failure in doing so is not a part of
either book. It is in An American Dream that Mailer presents a protagonist who demonstrates the capacity to act positively and existentially within the author’s own highly individual conception of existentialism.
Lovett has already begun to sense in what arena his will must be exercised, and it is no idle impulse that leads him again to seek out McLeod:
McLeod, too, has returned to his past in one sense, by returning to the household of his wife. But this change has been precipitated not by a domestic reconciliation so much as by a new stage in the Hollingsworth situation. The secret policeman is ready to begin questioning in earnest, and McLeod’s room will now function as in­terrogation chamber. In the long and closely spaced inter­views which follow, McLeod is forced to relive his past, to admit his true identity as a high party official, and to agonize over the more brutal acts he has perpetrated in the name of his former cause.
At all of these interrogation sessions, both Mikey and Lannie are present, and because the latter figures as a sort of assistant persecutor, for reasons vastly different from Hollingsworth’s, her motivations should be mentioned. From the beginning, her ravings have been colored by a rented room for the first time,
And later, she tells Mikey:
She lives in a world of strange visions, and she is unable to distinguish fantasy from reality, fiction from real ex­perience. Mikey realizes this when she tells him the story of Wing Biddlebaum from Sherwood Anderson’s Wines­burg, Ohio as though it were part of her own past:
From the beginning, it is clear to Mikey that Lannie is distracted, “not wholly aware of herself,” but the extent of her madness becomes clearer in several garbled memo­ries she expresses of time spent in a mental institution. For example:
Despite her incoherence, Lannie is often frighteningly perceptive, rounding out the gallery of horrors presented by the novel with the nightmarish visions of human brutality she seems compelled to relate, such as an execu­tion scene in a Nazi concentration camp.
In some ways, Lannie is at first similar to Lovett. Like him, she is rootless, cut off from her personal past by the cloudiness of her mind; and like him, she is compelled to recount visions in which the line between fantasy and memory is rarely clear. But unlike him, she finds it unnecessary to distinguish between the two, and thus is will­ing to live in her own world, rather than attempt to con­nect it with reality. She will be seen later to cling to the values of a static political past rather than change her out­moded values and move forward to the future as he ulti­mately does. In her loyalties within the boarding house, she takes a directly antithetical position to that of Lovett. Where Mikey has rejected the shabby sexuality of Guinevere, she embraces it; and where Lovett grows to disdain Hollingsworth and respect McLeod, she aids the govern­ment man in persecuting McLeod. The logic of these antithetical commitments becomes valid within the struc­ture of the novel when certain patterns of allegory begin to emerge, with each of the characters seen as representa­tive of a particular ideology.
I have suggested earlier that Hollingsworth represents the unquestioning, narrow-minded fascism of the postwar era, and that Lovett is the spokesman for a confused and naive postwar liberalism. As the novel progresses, it be­ comes clear that the politically sophisticated but worn-out McLeod is representative of the expedient prewar com­ munist movement. Guinevere, defined as she is by vulgar, commercial sexuality, and committed to the grasping, ma­terialistic values of a society whose capital is Hollywood, is all too representative of the majority of the population of that society. Mikey, in a confused groping after something to commit himself to, has attempted a union with Guin­evere, only to find that what she offers is a false and shabby reward, a worthless tinsel mock-tip of love which must be paid for with one’s integrity.
If Hollingsworth and Lovett are the two possible versions of the new, postwar American, the choice open to America is a frightening one. For Hollingsworth is chosen by both Guinevere and Lannie, and the path he leads them down is a dead end, immoral, destructive, closed to any­thing that is good. McLeod’s ultimate rejection of Hol­lingsworth in favor of Lovett, and the latter’s decision to follow the guidance of the older man provide a hope which is frighteningly slender, for it is obvious that the power is with the Hollingsworths.
Why does Lannie reject Mikey but grasp eagerly what Guinevere offers? Why does she seek out Hollings­worth and oppose McLeod? The answer lies in what Lannie herself comes to represent. Lannie has been deeply involved, in the past, with the communist movement, but she is now disillusioned by the amoral inhumanity of its policies. She embodies the views of the idealistic prewar American Left, who tried to rationalize and condone Soviet domestic and foreign policy in terms of conven­tional humanistic morality and, finally unable to do so, re­nounced it. She sees McLeod as the symbol of the worst expedience in the movement, and wishes to help destroy him in retribution for the death of a utopian dream. The idol and spokesman of that dream was Trotsky, and he (although his name is never used) is a crucial pivotal point in the loyalties and hatreds of Lannie, Lovett and McLeod, and of the three distinct segments of the Left they rep­resent. We know already that Lovett followed Trotsky’s teachings. And at the point we meet him, Mikey has lost his passion because, we may assume, of the disillusioning events following the death of the Trotsky dream.
For Lannie, Trotsky was even more important than he was to Lovett, and his murder was the unforgivable sin which has prompted her renunciation of communism and her hatred of McLeod. Revealing herself clearly for the first time, she shouts at McLeod:
The accusation is more valid than she realizes, for McLeod later admits that he has not merely been guilty of tacit consent but that he actually played a small part in the bureaucratic paperwork which led to the assassination. What is at issue is not McLeod’s guilt as stated by Lannie, for his later admissions reveal still greater complicity in political murders. Rather, what is central to the political resolution of the novel is the difference in reaction between Lannie and Lovett.
Her illusions destroyed, Lannie is devoid of hope for the world, and rejects any possibility for the individual to change it. She is thus in direct contrast to Mikey, who at this point has begun once again to believe in the potential of his own will, and looks to McLeod for guidance. For this she derides him:
In her militant hopelessness, Lannie does not feel it sufficient to renounce the communist movement. In addi­tion, she embraces (figuratively) a reactionary ideology and (literally) its representatives, Guinevere and Hollings­worth. These alliances are somewhat perverse for an erst­while idealist and the sexual unions which symbolize them are therefore also somewhat unnatural (lesbianism with Guinevere, brutal abasement at the hands of Hol­lingsworth).The implication of a passage she writes and later shows to Mikey is that she has performed fellatio upon Hollingsworth. The act in itself is not considered perverse by Mailer in light of sexual attitudes clarified in the later works, but the passive acceptance of harsh, loveless sexual exploitation certainly is, and this is clearly such a case. Further, Lannie intentionally assumes the role of a passively adoring object of exploitation to each of these partners, thus fulfilling her belief that the will of the individual has no place in this world. This passivity is given symbolic depth by at least one of several metaphori­cal patterns which attach to her, that of the mirror.The others, which are somewhat confused, include her momentary function as a Christ figure (dealt with briefly below), and
her part in several symbolic father/child patterns, notably in relation to Lovett and to Trotsky. Lan­nie tells Guinevere late in the book:
This emphasis upon the mirror may suggest another, less obvious Arthurian parallel. Lannie is a submissive figure whose love is unrequited, and who is ultimately deserted. This situation, combined with her ambiguous sexual identity and the sound of her name, may suggest that Lan­nie performs a dual role in the Arthurian pattern: not merely that of Launcelot, but also that of Elaine, the Fair Maid of Astolat, particularly as represented by Tennyson in “The Lady of Shalott.”
Another echo of the mirror motif occurs after the second and final episode of lovemaking between Lannie and Lovett, when she calls him Narcissus. The partial truth of that accusatory label, as well as the nature of the abortive sexual affair between the two, leads to a clearer distinction between their values.
The fact that Lannie and Lovett turn to one another at first, in an attempt to escape the pain of alienation, is no mere accident of proximity. Rather, it may be seen, on a less literal level, as the final attempt of the splintered forces of the prewar idealistic Left to reunite in some valid basis for common belief. It is a desperate attempt:
And it is doomed to be a vain one as well, for neither can offer what the other needs. They are proceeding in op­posite directions, drawing further apart as the novel pro­gresses. This polarity is made obvious the second time they are together sexually. Groping for some feeling outside
himself, Mikey attempts to convince himself that he loves Lannie:
Not out of desire, but in an attempt to convince both of them of the truth of what he has said, Lovett makes love once again to Lannie, and “. . . she lay beneath me stiffly and suffered it with a smile, her face calm and patient, sweet suffering Jesus upon the cross.” The reference to Christ occurs more than once in regard to Lannie.The Christ imagery in the novel (as I have suggested above) is inconsistent and confusing. It applies most often to Lannie, but occasionally to McLeod, and even to Lovett (whose hand is raked by Lannie’s nails at the novel’s end). Al­ ready she has spoken in terms reminiscent of Christ (see quotation above: “They hated me and I loved them for their sins.”) and this seems to be the basic characteristic of her commitment to Hollingsworth and Guinevere. Be­cause Mikey is not sufficiently selfish, harsh and insensitive, she cannot be a martyr with him, and so she attacks him. When he repeats, with less assurance, that he loves her, she replies:
Certainly, this is a partial truth, but it is no more than that. Mikey’s self-involvement is one from which he hopes to escape. His involvement with his own mind is, finally, a constructive preoccupation, out of which will grow his new capacity to become involved again with mankind. Lannie is a rather perverse Christ surrogate, for in her determination to become the footstool of the most selfish reactionary elements, she cannot countenance a man who aspires to goodness and to the humanitarian ideals which have so disappointed her. In her next, unjust accusation, she even uses the terms and values of Guinevere and Hollingsworth. She tells Lovett, “You came to me because I was easy, and you thought it would not cost you any­ thing.”
Lannie's rejection of Lovett is mild, however, in com­parison to her vitriolic attack on McLeod,The two are parallel, however, as though Lovett receives a portion of the hatred Lannie feels for McLeod and the communist movement, in proportion to his involvement with them. This is one of several parallels between Mikey and McLeod. in which she consciously rejects all Christian mercy in favor of an in­satiable vengeance:
This attitude is not, however, to be her final evaluation of McLeod. As the interrogations proceed, much is con­fessed that justifies and reinforces her condemnation of the man. But soon, mitigating and even selfless actions in McLeod’s career are revealed, and she frantically refuses to accept them as true, in her determination to cling tenaciously to the black and white system of moral values she has adopted. She is incapable of understanding the necessity for a dynamic rather than a static ethic within a history which itself is dynamic and outstrips old ideals. This is what Mikey learns from McLeod. But it is not until the very end that Lannie forgives McLeod, and by then it is too late for her to play a part in the future.
The actions, fears and fates of the inhabitants of the rooming house are symptomatic of those of mankind in this postwar world. Guinevere, asked by Hollingsworth where they should flee together after deserting both Mc­Leod and the American government, replies, “Anywhere. To the ends of the earth. To Barbary—I like the sound of that.” And this is no idle choice, for having betrayed both personal and national loyalties, the two are stripped to their essential barbarism, with not even the flimsiest of pretensions to disguise their absolute self-interest. The title of the novel is echoed one further time, when Mc­Leod, prophesying the series of endless wars which must inevitably be brought about by present economic systems concludes:
This, then, is the significance of Mailer’s title. Mankind is on the shore of barbary, ready to plunge in. It is a fear­some and depressing vision.
Viewed as an allegory of the postwar world situation, the novel’s tortuous plot and symbolism become clearer. Lovett is unable to return to the past or to be satisfied with the present, unable to remain alienated from man­kind but unwilling to embrace the values of Guinevere, Lannie or Hollingsworth. Rejecting the vulgar materialism of American popular culture, the static idealism of the old line Left, and the methods and values of the hard Right, as they are respectively represented by those three charac­ters, Lovett turns to McLeod, hoping by an understanding of the mistakes of the past and of the nature of history, to influence the future. From total self-involvement and a preoccupation with the superficial human contact to be found through loveless sex, he progresses to a profound involvement with mankind. The novel carries the prophecy of postwar American fascism introduced in The Naked and the Dead a step further, evincing an even darker view of American society. But Mikey Lovett, in his movement toward positive action, represents a step towards the posi­tive character of Rojack in An American Dream. The final commitment which Lovett makes, in accepting the respon­sibility of carrying on McLeod’s ideas where the older man leaves off, is brought about only at the very end of the novel, as a result of the series of formal interrogations carried out by Hollingsworth.
Once the series of formal interrogations begins, events proceed rapidly toward their resolution. Ready to un­burden himself, McLeod responds with little hesitation to Hollingsworth’s prodding. The personal history which unfolds shows McLeod’s rapid rise in power and in the scope of his influence, from local to international affairs. This increase in power is paralleled by a progressive de­humanization, an increasing commitment to expedience at the expense of personal morality. The tacit acceptance of betrayal and assassination gives way to sins of com­mission: the physical murder by McLeod, first of an in­ conveniently idealistic young subordinate and then of a personal friend who becomes unable to accept the methods of the party. The degree of ruthlessness of these acts in­creases in direct proportion to McLeod’s own disillusion­ment with communist policy, prompted by a stated belief (which Hollingsworth quotes): “It is better to carry through a blunder with all one’s energy, than attempt to halt midway and retrace one’s steps.” The culmina­tion of this philosophy is reached in McLeod’s role in the murder of Trotsky, as he painfully relates in a confession reserved for Lovett’s ear alone:
And shortly afterwards, in a decision further motivated by the pact he mentions, McLeod leaves the Party. His subsequent history is related in his first brief autobio­graphical summary to Hollingsworth:
It becomes apparent at this point that it is McLeod’s activity as a U.S. government employee and the circum­stances under which that employment terminated which are of primary interest to Hollingsworth. McLeod goes on to elaborate:
Although McLeod denies it, Hollingsworth is con­vinced that he is in possession of the “little object,” and it becomes the central objectThe ambiguity of this word seems to reflect the ambiguity of the “little object’s” nature. It may be a material object, but it may
also be the abstract object of everyone’s desire. of both Hollingsworth’s and Guinevere’s ambitions. In the hope of acquiring it for personal gain, Hollingsworth makes no official report of the progress of his interrogations. He eventually offers Mc­Leod a deal in which the latter is to be allowed to escape in exchange for giving up the object. Hollingsworth en­lists Guinevere in his cause, offering to take her away with him in exchange for her aid in convincing her hus­band to come across. Guinevere’s capacity for treachery and greed surpasses that of Hollingsworth. She is intoxi­cated by the dream that if they can deliver the little ob­ject to a foreign power, “They’d make us royalty.”This statement echoes the earlier Arthurian pattern, and there is particular irony in that today’s “royalty” achieve their position not through courage and nobility, but through greed and treachery. But like Hollingsworth, Guinevere is loyal only to her own desires, and she soon proposes to McLeod that he sell "The thingamajig" and flee with her, leaving Hollingsworth behind. McLeod has, at this point, been flirting momen­tarily with the temptation of making a last attempt at a reconciliation with Guinevere, of renouncing moral re­sponsibility in favor of the anonymity of an average Ameri­can family man. The crass bluntness of her offer makes this course impossible for him to accept, and it is finally to Mikey that McLeod passes on the object and the moral mission that goes with it, after the younger man has shown himself willing and worthy to accept them.
What, then, is the “little object”? The question is never resolved. It is so very secret that no one knows what it is, and this ambiguity magnifies its mysterious signifi­cance. In this age of atomic secrets and spy stories (which, in a sense, this novel is) it could indeed be a material object: a microfilmed blueprint, a formula, or even a cru­cial component part. Hollingsworth and Guinevere ob­viously believe that this is the case (to her, it is a “thing­amajig”) because both are so rooted in a simplistic sys­tem of materialistic values that they are incapable of con­ceiving abstractions.Early in the novel, Mailer has wryly shown Hollingsworth’s inability to understand even a simple metaphor. McLeod has stated, figuratively, that “poison may only be met with poison,” and Hollingsworth jots down on the list he keeps of subversive beliefs admitted by McLeod, “Advocates use of poison.”
Close to the end of the novel, Hollingsworth, in the passage perhaps most representative of his opinions and character, self-righteously rejects those things most valued by McLeod and Lovett: theory, individuality, and the de­sire to influence the future:
Hollingsworth is the corrupt and shoddy instrument of McLeod’s confession, and finally it becomes clear that the secret policeman is being used by his victim, rather than vice versa. McLeod, confused, weary and guilt-ridden, finds it necessary to confess and reevaluate his life; and so he speaks, nominally to Hollingsworth, actually to Mikey, heedless of whether Hollingsworth can or will understand the theoretical and moral issues involved. But Mikey understands and profits from the experience of McLeod, and as his conversion to these teachings becomes apparent and his loyalty to McLeod deepens, it is Mikey alone to whom the older man confides the greatest of his sins (the Trotsky episode) and his hopes and fears for the future. Finally certain that the past is significant only in what it can teach for the future, McLeod states:
But this time McLeod has been quite literal in his mean­ing, for he knows now that he must die in order that his ideas may live, and it is to the mind of Mikey Lovett that he entrusts them for the future. The night after the final interrogation, in which he has agreed to surrender the object to Hollingsworth, McLeod instead leaves an enve­lope with Mikey, goes to confront Hollingsworth with his refusal and is killed by the latter. He thus serves as a decoy, enabling Lovett to escape just as the house is raided by government agents.
The role which Mikey must play in the future had been explained by McLeod. The hope for mankind is that both of the corrupt systems presently existing, Western Capitalism and Eastern Communism, fail, and that a new, just society be established. But for this to happen, it is essential
Thus, what hope there remains for mankind resides primarily in the individual intellectual theorist who can teach his fellows. Finally, the future rests upon the synthesis of the experience of McLeod and the youthful dedication of Lovett. The parallels between them lay the groundwork for their union at the novel’s end. Both have been dehumanized by involvement with international forces and each has withdrawn from the world, cut himself off from his past, attempted to avoid moral responsibility. It is only with each other’s support that the two men each regain a sense of faith in humanity’s future. Without Lovett to pass the object and quest on to, McLeod might easily have succumbed to Hollingsworth’s or Guinevere’s temptations. Without McLeod to present an alternative, the confused and groping Lovett might have listened to Lannie when she said, “Come with us. There’s no place else to be.”
The extent of McLeod’s renewal of faith in humanity’s future is made explicit in his will, contained in the envelope which he gives Lovett before going to his death:
The commitment to humanity which McLeod instills in Lovett, and which is exemplified by the feeling of selfless friendship he expresses toward the younger man, forms the basis for some hope. It must be emphasized, however, that what McLeod teaches Mikey is not a rigid commit­ment to static systems or values, but a sense of the dynamic principle in human history. The loyalty he is to embrace is to mankind, but not to any country or political party or even any single political or economic theory. This is where Mikey, in his capacity to understand that history is a vehicle which allows for no stagnation but demands constant revision of one’s ideas, is truly worthy of McLeod’s trust. He is the man of the future, capable of carrying out the mission entrusted him, because unlike Lannie, he is able to realize that there is no static good and evil: that the movement of history renders these values either totally irrelevant or at best temporarily valid in relation to a specific context.In this sense, a parallel exists between Barbary Shore and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1941). More specifically, McLeod is
reminiscent of Koestler’s Rubashov in that novel, in his revelation of a ruthless personal past, his final recognition that the future belongs to a new generation, and his willing acceptance of death after that realization.
The concluding passage of the novel makes evident the circumstances under which Lovett relates the story:
The final sentence of the novel is a repetition of the final sentence of the first chapter. It is clear, then, that Lovett recounts the story in retrospect, some time after it has taken place, and is thus aware of the significance of his experiences even in his first chapter. This impression is reinforced by other information presented in the opening chapter:
Mailer’s statement that Barbary Shore is set in an “imagi­nary future” is understandable in light of this passage. It is clear that Lovett writes in a future governed by the repressive State Capitalism predicted by McLeod, a totali­tarianism in whose fearful shadow men must contrive names and carry false papers. The crumbling system forces men to work a fourteen hour night shift and live in rooms where electricity is no longer available. In this society, Michael Lovett is an outlaw, recounting the events of the novel as he waits to disseminate his knowledge of political theory. Ironically, Lovett is, in a sense, a singularly credible narrator for this book, in that the interminable passages of Marxist theory which are its single greatest weakness are to be expected from the mind of an avowed theorist. Nonetheless, the book is difficult to read, involved in plot, often confused and confusing. Several overlapping but nonintegrated systems of symbologySuch as those mentioned in footnotes . . . add to the diffi­culty without ever emerging into a clarity which might add to the novel’s effectiveness.
Finally, Mailer’s own stated intention gives us a key to where he failed, when he describes Barbary Shore as “an agonized eye of a novel which tried to find some amalgam of my experience and the larger horror of that world which might be preparing to destroy itself.” It must be concluded (and Mailer himself might concur) that the amalgam was at best a lumpy one, that he did indeed overreach himself, and that while his own psychic experience and the external reality of the world he describes each have a validity of their own, they are never smoothly blended within the novel.
In a comparison between Mailer’s first two novels, it must be admitted that the political views with which both are colored are better expressed in The Naked and the Dead, where they are often implicit and almost always integrated with the characters and situations involved, than in Barbary Shore, where they are expressed primarily in lengthy, explicit, polemical passages. Despite its glaring weaknesses, however, Barbary Shore does show evidence of some thematic progress in the direction of Mailer’s later views. The dehumanization experienced by both McLeod and Lovett because of their use as instruments of national military machinery is parallel to that de­humanization by war which Mailer showed in The Naked and the Dead. But where the first novel left such men as Red Valsen permanently bludgeoned into submission by the system and no longer hopeful of the potential of the individual, Barbary Shore suggests that if men learn from their experience, no matter how sordid, there can be purpose in it, and hope. Where Lieutenant Hearn was fated to die a pointless death, Mikey Lovett is destined to devote his life to a positive cause; consequently, McLeod’s life and death have not been purposeless. Where the first novel left the future in the hands of the Major Dallesons, Barbary Shore shows that it has been held by them and their successors, the Hollingsworths. But there is a new, distant future to look forward to for Mikey Lovett, in which they may be deposed, and if this is a flimsy vision of hope, it is better than none.
It is easy for critics and fans of Mailer alike to wish that Barbary Shore had never been published. But an informed reader could never wish that it had not been written. The novel shows Mailer at his worst: confused, lacking control and fictional discipline, often simply boring. Yet the discrepancy between his narrator and his own prose style became all too clear to Mailer through this book, and in those that followed it would narrow. The conscientious and fearful concern with America’s cultural and political shortcomings and with the dangerous and lonely path open to the individual would be expressed more cogently and powerfully. Mailer’s voice may be muted and sometimes unintelligible at this point, but it is not yet hushed.
===Notes===
===Works Cited===
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* Paperback edition published 1953 by Signet (New American Library of World Literature, New York). All page references are to the Signet edition.