The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer/7. Advertisements for Myself, The Presidential Papers, and Cannibals and Christians

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Advertisements for Myself (1959), The Presidential Papers (1963), and Cannibals and Christians (1966) have been referred to in earlier chapters when they provided material directly relevant to Mailer’s novels. They are also significant as stages in the development of Mailer’s non­ fiction voice, which is to reach its finest expression to date in The Armies of the Night (1968).
Advertisements for Myself, the richest and most varied in content of the three, is also the most interesting in that it provides direct insights into the state of Mailer’s mind in the late 1950’s. The “advertisements” themselves treat personal experience with candor and perception reminis­cent of Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up.” And the situation in which Mailer found himself at the time is parallel to that of Fitzgerald in his slump. Early in the book, he tells us:
This is a painfully candid admission for a thirty-five-year­ old writer who has, a few pages earlier, confided the enormous extent of his ambition:
This is a book, then, not of ambitions unfulfilled, but of ambitions yet to be attained; just as Fitzgerald was to go on to a new affirmation of his talent in The Last Tycoon, Mailer was eventually to go beyond the fragmentary state of his work in 1959 to new and valid artistic forms. Advertisements for Myself serves an important function in the drive toward those later works. Mailer remarks, in “A Note to the Reader,” that “one of the purposes of this collection is the intention to clear the ground for [his next] novel.” The process of establishing an ordered form within which to present the various pieces which make up Advertisements was a project intended to provide Mailer with a clearer view of what he had done and what he wished yet to do in his writing. It provides the reader with an insight into Mailer’s artistic intentions. But some­thing else is given concrete form here: the flamboyant public image which, since the publication of The Naked and the Dead, had served to spotlight Mailer’s career, and which tended (and still does) to obscure rather than eluci­date the literary value and intentions of his work. Perhaps no writer since Hemingway has had a public image so attractive or repulsive to so many people, and so unfortunately influential in the critical reception of his fiction. To an extent, this notoriety was forced upon Mailer after the publication of The Naked and the Dead, as he laments in Advertisements:
But to a greater extent, it is clear, Mailer lived and wrote in such a manner as to create a public personality charac­terized by excesses. Within Advertisements for Myself, we get a view of these excesses telescoped together like a two-hour movie of a man’s life. Thus, within a few pages, Mailer can both affirm the enormity of his ambition and confess his fears that he may already have burned out his talent. Later in the book, he makes clear why he feels it worthwhile to risk the death of his talent in the gamble to increase it through deeper self-knowledge:
After The Deer Park, Mailer was at an impasse in his struggle to become a man and a writer. Ridden with doubts at his failure in the decade following The Naked and the Dead to write the great novel he still aspired to, befuddled by his own confused mind and the drugs he had used to explore it, he found himself unable to write at all:
It was under these circumstances that the events which prompted Mailer to write “The White Negro” occurred. Encouraged by Lyle Stuart, Mailer wrote a few paragraphs about his theory that the integration problem in the South had as its basis the white man’s fear of the sexual potency of the Negro. The piece was printed in Stuart’s monthly newspaper, and copies sent to a number of people, includ­ing William Faulkner, who dismissed it with a short note which ridiculed Mailer. Despite the fact that he answered with arrogance, Mailer was disturbed, and this led to the writing of “The White Negro.”
If Advertisements for Myself lies at the heart of the development of Mailer’s ideas between the 1950’s and the 1960’s, “The White Negro” is indisputably the heart of Advertisements. As has been stated at the outset of this book, “The White Negro” begins with a more sophisti­cated and more clearly articulated statement of a theme which Mailer rendered well in The Naked and the Dead: that after the Second World War man was forced to look at his society and to recognize not only that it was a sick and perverted one, but that something in each of us was responsible for its creation, and thus that we were sick as well. In a world which reeked of totalitarianism (which, Mailer maintains, was by no means totally destroyed in the war), each man must choose whether to die a slow and anonymous death at the altar of conformity or to strike out into a bold search for individual selfhood:
He goes on to state that the reason the Negro is the source of Hip is that he “has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries.” The resultant life style of the Negro, the functional paranoia which enables him to survive and commits him to the present more than the future, have been adopted by the American existentialist, the hipster or White Negro.
Certainly Mailer cerebrates so intensely that he goes far beyond the intuitive values of the hipster. In “The White Negro,” he articulates a series of nice distinctions which clarify precisely the nature and limits of his own existential philosophy, one which shares certain basic assumptions with other thinkers but which, in its entirety is unique to Mailer. His basic premise is that one must combat totalitarianism by a commitment to constant growth through experience. The threat of totalitarianism is not merely an external one, but internal as well. At the same time that he must guard against the deadening of his individuality by the pressure exerted by a conformist society, the existentialist must beware of becoming static himself, of committing himself permanently to any idea or habit which is momentarily valid, and thus becoming, himself, totalitarian. The key idea is that the existentialist must be always dynamic, and that he must act in order to develop, rather than accept experience passively.
Mailer draws a clear distinction between the atheistic existentialist and the mystic, and himself embraces the values of the latter. The central difference lies in the attitude towards death. Where the atheist rejects any appreciation of the proximity of death because he refuses to romanticize it, the mystic sees the awareness of the presence of death as a meaningful experience.
Certainly this concept is recognizable as one of the primary motivations which inform the character of Rojack in An American Dream, as he makes repeated excursions to the edge of death in the attempt to define himself and to grow as a man.
Another distinction which Mailer goes to great lengths to draw is that between the psychotic and the psychopath. The latter term is very definitely not a pejorative one to Mailer, since he feels that the American existentialist is, by the very nature of his commitment to his own needs and his rejection of societal restrictions a “philosophical psychopath.” Further, this is a condition which must be maintained by the White Negro if he is to survive as an individual. The concept of the psychopathic state as a positive good ties in with Mailer’s idea of himself as a “psychic outlaw,” and certainly Rojack assumes this role.
Because Mailer considers the term psychopath so central to his definition of the White Negro, and because his understanding of it can be so easily misapprehended when removed from the sophisticated context within which he uses it, the salient points of his definition should be presented:
Mailer goes on to show that while the psychotic may move in and out of his insane state, the psychopath maintains a constant, long-term, antisocial attitude and is not charac­terized by the hallucinations and other dramatic symptoms displayed by the psychotic. The distinction, then, is one of rationality and of voluntary choice. That is, the psycho­path is a sane man, living rationally in the real world, but motivated by an antisocial attitude. The “philosoph­ical psychopath,” Mailer’s White Negro, goes a step beyond the more conventional psychopath, whose selfish needs are pursued in an antisocial but socially conditioned (hence rather trite—almost conventional) manner (such as rape). Rather, the hipster’s actions are motivated by a conscious desire to “codify . . . the suppositions on which his inner universe is constructed.” While his actions are not always rational (he is “incapable of restraining his violence”), the underlying philosophy which informs and encourages them very definitely is. He may not be able or willing to control his psychopathic state, but he does wish to understand it. Although it is not socially acceptable, it forms for him a personal “inner universe”; a dynamic system of values to which he subscribes in place of externally imposed societal values. Thus, Mailer himself and his more recent fictional protagonists, Rojack and D.J., attempt to establish their own inner worlds, by means of which they can survive on the outskirts of society.
The idea that “the psychopath at his extreme is virtually . . . incapable of restraining his violence” makes it clear that Rojack’s murder of his wife is intended by Mailer as more than a mere expression of desperate rage. It is the index of his psychopathic state, one which Rojack must struggle to understand through seeking further dynamic experiences, no matter how fearful. Rather than take the easier path of allowing society to define him within its terms by confessing his guilt and accepting society’s evaluation of him, its prescribed punishment, and, implicitly, its forgiveness, Rojack elects to take the fright­ening trip into his own soul and to come to terms with his psychopathic state by defining it in his own terms.
At the beginning of An American Dream, Rojack is not particularly courageous, nor does he have a clear idea of the state of his own psyche. What is it that prompts him, after some vacillation, to avoid societal judgment after the murder? Perhaps the answer lies here:
As a psychopath, then, Rojack murders Deborah because he has reached one of those crucial points to which Mailer refers. Afraid and empty, tied to the habit of Deborah and reduced by her power over him to a passive and negative life which he is on the verge of ending, he instinctively acts, and thus begins to change his life. And it is this act of murder which, as Mailer has prescribed, purges his violence and hatred and unfreezes his being so that he can love Cherry. The very act of murder gives him the added courage he needs to lie to the police, and thus to commit himself to the series of further actions which will lead him to self-knowledge and salvation.
The series of confrontations with hostile people which is the means by which Rojack grows in strength and understanding has been dealt with at length earlier. But some further understanding of how central such a path of development is to Mailer’s view of life (and of how long he has felt thus) may be gained by his statement in “The White Negro” that:
Rojack is the victor in a series of crucial collisions with other people, and this is why he grows throughout An American Dream and emerges as a whole man. But the most recent of Mailer’s books will show that he has not developed this view of human conflict only in his fiction; ii is applicable to his own life as well. In The Armies of the Night, Mailer, as narrator and protagonist, will be shown to undergo a series of confrontations with other people and with his own fears which parallels that of Rojack.
I have emphasized earlier that Rojack’s greatest strength grows out of his love for Cherry, a love character­ized by a fertile sexuality which is described in heavenly terms. The idea of “good” sex as an ideal to be sought by the existentialist figures in “The White Negro”; and since Mailer’s emphasis on this ideal has been attacked by some critics,This issue has been treated in my chapter on An American Dream. it may be fair to quote his statement:
Mailer goes on to stipulate further that the hipster must “find his courage at the moment of violence or equally make it in the act of love.” This is the “good time” of which Sergius speaks at the conclusion of The Deer Park (N) as the source for new hope in human life. The concept is more clearly defined in “The White Negro” than it was in The Deer Park, but even here it is only the embryo of the far more hopeful idea which takes form in An Ameri­can Dream: that the good time and the good orgasm are only momentary goals which are transcended by the passion and fertility of a courageously selfless love. Thus it is clear that while many of the themes Mailer develops in An American Dream are the direct products of his definition of the American existentialist in “The White Negro,” he has continued to develop and refine his personal phi­losophy. The mature statement of An American Dream that love for one mate can represent the greatest single positive hope for the individual brave enough to earn it, is a significant departure from the more cynical theory of the apocalyptic orgasm expressed in “The White Negro.”
It has repeatedly been emphasized here that Mailer’s psychopath/existentialist/hipster is antisocial and selfish in his actions and aims. Stephen Richards Rojack, a some­ what more mature version of the White Negro, has been held up as an example of Mailer’s hope that the individual can survive in a corrupt and hostile society; but An American Dream criticizes that society without holding out any hope for its improvement. Perhaps a muted note of optimism may be seen towards the end of “The White Negro,” when Mailer states candidly that although the hipster, bent on releasing his hatred and violence, could easily be an elite storm trooper, it is as probable that he might recognize the necessity to work for all men’s freedom in order to gain his own:
The crisis in individual freedom of which Mailer wrote in 1957 is primarily represented by the plight of the Negro. That crisis has deepened, and Mailer has con­tinued to speak out for individual human rights. But an additional crisis besets us today, in the division of America over the war in Vietnam. In the context of his statements about personal growth through the expression of violence, Mailer states in “The White Negro” that “. . . individual acts of violence are always to be preferred to the collective violence of the state. . . .” Mailer’s theories of violence are applied fictionally to the psyche of the American male in Why Are We in Vietnam? (in which he suggests that the personal need for violence, usually stifled by society, has been turned by that society to the more socially acceptable arena of war).
Each of these issues is to be dealt with at length in The Armies of the Night, a book which comprises an informed and sophisticated analysis of the state of Ameri­can society in 1968. The narrator/protagonist is Mailer himself, a voice who articulately clarifies national problems within the context of his own theories (of violence, free­dom, totalitarianism) and a character who personally faces a series of crises which help him to grow dynamically. The Mailer of The Armies of the Night is not a hipster. Like Rojack, he lives by the code of the White Negro, but does so within a somewhat more mature and sophisticated lifestyle. But unlike Rojack, he does not merely survive the experience of American society and then leave. Rather, he takes the step of personal involvement, in the desire to effect a change in that society. Recognizing as he felt the hipster might, that “if he would be free, then everyone must be free,” Mailer continues to cerebrate and to act in his own behalf; but he chooses to act on behalf of his fellow citizens as well, and in so doing ties his own destiny to that of his society. It may be, then, that hope for the individual means hope for society as well.
“The White Negro” is a piece which is central to the abiding moral and intellectual values which inform all of Mailer’s work. Its significance looms still larger when it is considered in conjunction with the works which follow it, especially An American Dream and The Armies of the Night. These books are important because they embody the structured morality by which one man lives. An American Dream does so in the experiences of a man who is one of Mailer’s most successful creations; and The Armies of the Night goes beyond this to use Mailer’s own experience without the shield of fictional distance. What is important is that this philosopher, Mailer, does not present a theory through abstractions which are reinforced only by generalized analogies to human life. Rather, he realizes his theories in his own life and performs the difficult and courageous feat of articulating both the act and the abstraction to his reader. The man of action and the philosopher become one.
“The White Negro” shows Mailer as a contemporary existential philosopher. The Presidential Papers is the application of his philosophy to topical situations. What is most immediately striking about this book is Mailer’s repeated application of the term existential to aspects of the Kennedy administration. He writes of “existential legislation,” and describes John F. Kennedy and his wife as existential hero and heroine. Mailer does not, in this book, express unqualified admiration for the Kennedys. What he does admire greatly is a dynamic quality in the personal style of President Kennedy and his wife.
The existential element which Mailer saw as a major hope for the nation in Kennedy’s leadership was a capacity for dynamic action combined with humanistic compassion. Possibly the clearest expression of Mailer’s view of John F. Kennedy at its most hopeful is in a short story entitled “The Last Night,” printed in Cannibals and Christians. The central character of the story is an American Presi­dent, “perhaps not only the most brilliant but the most democratic of American Presidents,” faced with the massive moral responsibility of preserving a segment of humanity as the end of the world approaches. The story is one of courage and tormented decision, and finally of hope, for the President possesses the moral insight to make the right choice, the strength to act decisively, and the charisma to succeed “in engaging the imagination of the world’s citizens with his project,” a project which calls for the cooperation of all of humanity in sacrificing them­selves to save a small representative group of survivors.
In his introductory remarks to this story, Mailer explains that:
This difference is the central difference between Mailer’s political writings in The Presidential Papers and those in Cannibals and Christians.
If Mailer was critical of certain aspects of the Kennedy administration in the former book, it was always criticism infused with the hope of helping to stimulate progressive action. But the more hostile tone of Mailer’s attitude toward the Johnson administration in Cannibals and Christians is set as early as the dedication to that book, which reads:
The sardonic reference is to a speech Mailer made in Berkeley, California in May, 1965, opposing Johnson’s Vietnam policy.
The President in “The Last Night” (and, by implica­tion, John F. Kennedy) is portrayed by Mailer as a man constantly concerned with the question of whether his decisions and actions are good or evil. Mailer’s treatment makes it obvious that the former is true, but it is significant that the fictional President cares deeply about such moral considerations. Although it is the capacity to act existen­tially and to capture the people’s imagination with his style which Mailer sees as the most essential quality for a President, the commitment to humanistic ideals adds to the man’s greatness as a leader. This order of priorities established by Mailer is central to an understanding of the several stages in his attitude towards President Johnson.
Early in Cannibals and Christians, Mailer presents us with a review (written in 1964) of Lyndon B. Johnson’s book, My Hope for America. After a brief but incisive discussion of the content and prose style of Johnson’s book, Mailer seizes the opportunity to make certain observations on Johnson’s suitability for the Presidency. Simply stated, Mailer’s opinion at that time was that although Johnson was certainly better than Goldwater, beyond that he was less than might be desired, since his personal style and his vision of contemporary American problems were rather colorless and simplistic in comparison to those of his immediate predecessor. Feeling that Johnson might be unequal to meeting the challenge of the twentieth century and making America a truly great nation, Mailer makes a specific comparison of Presidential styles. He suggests that since John F. Kennedy’s death we may have:
With the passage of time, and the escalation of Ameri­can participation in Vietnam, Mailer’s view of the John­son administration shifted from disappointment to active opposition. By May, 1965, Mailer could say:
Mailer’s attitude towards Lyndon B. Johnson underwent, in 1968, another shift, one which is easily understood in terms of the importance Mailer assigns to a President’s ability to act dynamically and imaginatively. After Presi­dent Johnson’s dramatic announcement in March, 1968, that he would not seek reelection and that he would immediately call a partial bombing halt, Mailer stated:
This theory, elaborated upon in The Armies of the Night, becomes part of a highly sophisticated and comprehensive examination of the state of American society under the Johnson administration in that book.
Neither The Presidential Papers nor Cannibals and Christians deals exclusively with political issues. Both in­clude some poetry, most of it published earlier in Deaths for the Ladies. Both include, as does Advertisements for Myself, reprinted interviews with Mailer, in which he goes over many of the ideas developed in his books. Canni­bals and Christians, like Advertisements, includes several short stories. The two areas of Mailer’s interest represented in these books which remain to be mentioned are literary criticism and sports writing.
The most interesting examples of Mailer’s views on contemporary literature appear in two essays: “Evaluations—Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room,” printed in Advertisements for Myself; and “Some Children of the Goddess,” in Cannibals and Christians.Originally published in Esquire in 1964. Mailer’s literary criticism is more intelligent and readable work than are most of the novels written by literary critics. Not only does he discuss his own fiction with per­ception and candor throughout Advertisements, he applies these qualities equally well to the work of his contem­poraries. Mailer discusses the nature of criticism as much as he does the books he treats. In “Some Children of the Goddess,” he disarmingly admits his own subjectivity:
Mailer is always putting forth his own idea of what a novelist should be as a man. In his discussions of con­temporary novels, he deals always with the writer as much as with the book under consideration. He is sometimes admiring, often devastating, never charitable. Thus, he can say of James Jones in Advertisements:
But Mailer goes on to say that he feels Jones has dwindled in his writing because he has imprisoned his anger against society. Of Truman Capote, Mailer writes:
And here, too, Mailer feels that Capote’s major fault as a novelist is that he caters to society. In both of these cases, Mailer ends his remarks with the hope that Jones and Capote will fulfill the potential of their talent by com­bating the falsity of society.
Mailer draws upon the past to illuminate the prob­lems of the present in literature, and he writes with sur­prising sophistication and perception of Dostoevsky, Tols­toy, Melville, James. But he writes of them with a very real personal understanding of their anguish, rejecting what he feels are the bloodlessly cerebral reactions of the academy:
It is this concept of courage which motivates Mailer’s own writing and his evaluation of the writing of others. Thus, he can say of Philip Roth’s performance in Letting Go, “He was too careful not to get hurt on his trip and so he does not reveal himself: he does not dig.”
Mailer’s belief that a novelist must be a brave man, willing to bare himself to a hostile society, is clear in his own books and in his comments on the state of American letters. But the nature of the battle has shifted somewhat in the past decade, with the changing of some societal restrictions in publishing. A comparison of two statements, written almost ten years apart, reflects the change in Mail­er’s view of what problems primarily beset the novelist in America. In Advertisements for Myself he lays much re­sponsibility for the stifling of talent at the feet of society, represented by the publishing houses:
In Cannibals and Christians, Mailer is still aware of much that could be improved in the literary establishment and the society it represents. But he also suggests that much of the battle for artistic freedom, particularly in the realm of sexual description, has been won:
Mailer realizes here that the responsibility for an advance in American letters rests upon the novelist and not upon society. The writer is now limited more by what he is or is not brave enough to dare than by publishers’ restrictions. And the territory which must be dared, as Mailer sees it, is that of the writer’s own psyche. As early as Advertise­ments for Myself, Mailer was willing to brave ridicule in airing his personal fears and hopes. In An American Dream he dared the existential journey into his own psyche and maintained fictional control, structuring his own pre­occupations within the credible character of Rojack. In The Armies of the Night, Mailer will go on to take an even greater risk, presenting his personality to the reader without the protective shield of fiction.
The last piece I will mention before concluding this discussion of Mailer’s three nonfiction collections is a long article in The Presidential Papers, entitled “Death.” It is a report on the first Patterson-Liston fight, but it is much more as well. Mailer gives an exciting and informed account of the fight, and he develops his subject logically and persuasively into a series of perceptive statements about the current temper of the American people. He sees this championship bout as symptomatic of the psychic prob­lems of the people, particularly the Negroes. From this he proceeds to a discussion of boxing itself as an index of our national personality. And then, with no clumsiness in the transition, he moves to detailed discussions of violence, the Mob, voodoo, and various aspects of the human con­dition. Here is an example of the connections of which Mailer’s brain is capable:
The most striking aspect of this fascinating article, simul­taneously so cerebral and so concrete in its subject matter, is the constant presence of Mailer himself. From his argu­ments over the fight with friends and strangers in the Play­boy Club, to his conversations with James Baldwin at ringside, to his climactic confrontation with Sonny Liston himself, Mailer the reporter is physically present as a character. He is brash, witty, foolish by turns, but always interesting. And it is this personal presence, developed to its peak of effectiveness, which will be seen to spark and support the narrative success of The Armies of the Night.
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