Cultural Amnesia (62 page)

But the mind is where it is. Even when the body finds its satisfaction, the mind does not find rest. We know this was true
for Lichtenberg himself, whose own sexual history was a thing for wonder and pity. A cruelly crippled hunchback dwarf, he found love and marriage, but on a crooked path. Yet he found out enough
to become a student of the passions. If he had not been such a student, he could not have composed this aphorism. From the way it is written, we can tell he was
a step ahead
of its apparent conclusions. He was always a step ahead. He was one of those people who have every excuse to tell us that life is valueless, and yet who love life so much that they can even
forgive, if not forget, the fate that condemned them to their long anguish.

There is no surer sign of a great writer than when whole books
could be made out of his passing remarks. Each in his way, Tacitus and Sterne are both masters of this quality.

—LICHTENBERG,
Aphorismen

When Lichtenberg wrote this, Sterne was practically his contemporary, so by yoking Sterne with Tacitus
he was perpetrating a deliberately shocking boldness, as if we were to say that same lessons could be drawn equally from the letters of Madame de Sévigné and the diaries of Bridget
Jones. It is an attention-getting way of promulgating a truth, but the truth had better be true. This truth was. Making marks in the margin of his Shakespeare, Keats noted the quality of
Shakespeare’s “bye-writing”: the local intensities that were better than they needed to be. The awkwardness of Lichtenberg’s principle—and really all his principles
are awkward—is that it subverts any idea of artisitic unity. Ideally, nothing in a written work should show signs of wanting to hive off and start another work. Practically, it happens all
the time, and not always in expository prose, although naturally a discursive argument is more likely to provide instances of a subsidiary statement that asks to be followed up. In
The Gulag Archipelago
, there is a great moment when prisoners are sweltering in a black Maria while Jean-Paul Sartre is standing a few feet away on the footpath
proclaiming the wonders of the Soviet Union. It could conceivably be the start of a different book about the stupidity of philosophers, but in fact it fits. There is another great moment,
however, that doesn’t. On a prison train, Solzhenitsyn is jammed into the floor of a compartment with about an inch of air to breathe in, and suddenly realizes he is happy. It doesn’t
fit at all: it is the start of another work, about mysticism—a work that could have been written by the mystical philosopher Nikolay Berdyayev. It could be said that if Solzhenitsyn had not
been capable of such moments,
The Gulag Archipelago
would not be one of the great books about lost possibilities, so it fits after all: but it dangerously
leaves the way open to
the thoroughly misleading conclusion that extreme conditions have a justification in mystical experience.

The problem of the passing remark crops up most often in novels, and especially in the greatest novels. Theoretically, a
great novel should meet a poem’s standard of containing nothing extraneous. In practice, great novels are always sinning against that standard, and are usually the better for it. In
Madame Bovary
, the socially aspiring Emma, invited to the grand ball at the country house, notices that aristocrats are glossier than ordinary people. The
observation begs to be the starting point for a sociological treatise on differential nutrition, but it just doesn’t sound like her conclusion: it sounds like Flaubert’s. If he had
said that she
didn’t
notice, and had made the observation his, he would have been telling us more about her. In
The
Great Gatsby
, the scene where Gatsby shows Daisy his beautiful shirts fits as perfectly as the shirts. Gatsby has nothing else to woo her with except the proofs of his wealth: flaunting
the shirts, he makes the material spiritual—the key to his character, and the clue to how Fitzgerald can get poetically interested in the Philistine he has chosen as a hero. (The putative
mystery of Gatsby’s identity is no mystery at all: he is what Fitzgerald would have been if he had had no talent.) When Daisy’s coldly amoral friend Jordan Baker moves her golf ball,
she tells you everything you need to know about her character. But Fitzgerald was also capable of the passing remark that doesn’t fit at all. His narrator Nick Carraway’s gift for the
aphorism makes you wonder if he was studying Pascal when he was learning to sell bonds. “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures,” Nick says of Gatsby,
“there was something gorgeous about him.” It was the first line of the book I learned, but I learned it because it broke off from the book. Similarly, Nick’s avowal that
“Any display of complete self-assurance draws a stunned tribute from me” is a bit too good, because the man who says it is displaying complete self-assurance. None of this means that
The Great Gatsby
is less than what it is: a masterpiece. But it does mean that one of the characteristics of a masterpiece might be its composer’s
ability to get in extra stuff without us noticing the strain of the shoehorn. Even in
The Great Gatsby
, you can tell that Fitzgerald was a notebook writer.
Things would go into the notebook that were too good to leave unused, and one way or another he would get them into the novel. Hemingway worked in the
other direction. A
really good Hemingway short story is an episode from the novel he did not make the mistake of trying to pack around it. By extension, a really bad Hemingway novel is the accumulated sets of notes
for short stories he did not write.

In Anthony Powell’s
A Dance to the Music of Time
, there is a
tremendous moment just after the lumbering anti-hero Widmerpool, at the height of his pomposity and power, has delivered a boring lecture about an immensely valuable vase. The beautiful but
dangerous Pamela comes along and vomits into it. You need to have followed both characters through several novels of the sequence to see the perfection of the coincidence. It fits together like
the components of a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine from two different shadow factories. But I can remember a line from the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins: something like “Nothing beats the feeling
of an interesting woman being interested in us.” I thought it sounded like an aphorism from one of Powell’s notebooks. I have searched the novels and can’t find it, and I
can’t find it in the notebooks either. Perhaps I heard him say it. I knew Powell well enough at one stage for us to have talked about such things. He was terrific on the mechanics of his
craft, but it should be remembered that he found almost everyone clumsy except himself. He has been mocked for that. The truth is that most writers feel the same, because they read other writers
professionally and are always on the lookout for a muffed trick.

In
Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis is consistently wonderful at separating Jim’s
particular viewpoint from the narrative. The French have a term,
style indirect libre
, for the narrative prose that is coloured by the character’s
viewpoint because the character is in the scene; but the trick of the technique is that the writer’s frame of reference must not get into the character’s head. In the tour de force
comic scene near the end of
Lucky Jim
when Jim, if he is not to lose Christine forever, must get to the railway station and everything conspires to stop the
bus, we are laughing too hard to notice that Jim makes the wrong conjecture about why the bus driver is apparently slumped at the wheel. Had he been struck, Jim asks, by the idea for a poem? Jim
does not write poems and so would not know that getting an idea for a poem can render a poet catatonic. It is something only the narrator would know. But at the time, for one reader at least, the
anomaly didn’t matter, and indeed it still doesn’t. I
think it is probably the funniest scene in all of literature, so if there is a blemish, it must be part of
the beauty. Written works of art aren’t perfect. They create the air of being so, but they are too full of life to keep all their own implications within the perimeter. Lichtenberg was
warning us against a Procrustean ideal of perfection. No writer, not even Chekhov in his short stories, can be Vermeer. A painter can leave you with nothing left to say. A writer leaves you with
everything to say. It is in the nature of his medium to start a conversation within you that will not stop until your death, and what he is really after is to be among the last voices you will
hear.

Norman Mailer

Nadezhda Mandelstam

Golo Mann

Heinrich Mann

Michael Mann

Thomas Mann

Mao Zedong

Chris Marker

John McCloy

Zinka Milanov

Czeslaw Milosz

Eugenio Montale

Montesquieu

Alan Moorehead

Paul Muratov

NORMAN MAILER

Norman Mailer was born in Brooklyn in 1923, educated at Harvard, saw action in the Pacific, and
returned to write one of the three American novels that made the war the subject of a serious best-seller, with the word “serious” used in both senses. James Jones wrote
From Here to Eternity
, Irwin Shaw wrote
The Young Lions
, and Mailer wrote the book that was most commonly, and
correctly, greeted as a modern classic,
The Naked and the Dead
. The unarguable stature of his novel established him immediately in the twin roles of
media celebrity and literary hope: an inherent conflict which it suited his personality to dramatize, and which it suited his talent to make a subject, thus opening up a whole new avenue of
creative expression that can be summed up by one his titles,
Advertisements for Myself
. Ever since his dazzling beginnings, for a half century and more
of unceasing fame, Mailer the holding company and corporate brand-name has mainly been in competition with himself, pitting Mailer the novelist against Mailer the anti-novelist, whose
principal incarnation is the writer of non-fiction. The novelist Mailer, as if in flight from his own talent, has always made a point of writing barely readable books—from
Barbary Shore
to
Ancient Evenings
, they
stretch out in a line that only a tenured academic could
love—but he occasionally re-emerges from disaster with a substantial new success:
Harlot’s Ghost
was the fictional effort most like a
complete return to form. If there had been a whole row of such completely worked-out novels he would have ranked unquestionably with Philip Roth, John Updike and Saul Bellow among the
novelists giving us the imaginative account of America’s post-war emergence as the world’s dominant cultural power. It could be said that he chose to do something more
interesting, although it is possible that burgeoning alimony requirements chose his course for him. For whatever reason, he preferred to extend the career of the other Mailer, the journalist.
Unlike his television sparring partner Gore Vidal, he has never—to his loss and ours—bothered to master the standard set form of the pointed and reasonably brief essay. But he has
invented other forms in profusion, some of them running to volume length. In his books of non-fictional prose, such as
The Armies of the Night
and
Of a Fire on the Moon
, are to be found some of his most astonishing stretches of imaginative prose. Tom Wolfe, in his entertaining book of essays
Hooking Up
, is within his rights to contend that his own novel
A Man in Full
, which took him ten years of
research, well deserved its commercial success, the hit parade result that the average, dashed-off novel or glorified think-piece by Mailer fails to achieve. But Wolfe is on dangerously
yielding ground when he supposes that the assiduous fidelity of his own social observation is automatically a more interesting quality than Mailer’s irresponsible extravagance.
Wolfe’s diligent reportage is good at observed detail, and he knows how to dress it up with exaggeration, invective and mimesis, but Mailer’s prose, even at its most slipshod, has
access to moments of poetry beyond the ken of a busy dandy in a white suit. Everything that the cult of celebrity in America can do to destroy an artistic gift has been done to Mailer. Much
of the damage he has either connived at, or else has taken an indecent pleasure in recording, as in the wonderfully awful
The Prisoner of Sex
. But the
fame machine is right to recognize him as a talent, as if talent
can exist as a potential, without solid achievement. It can. As when Orson Welles sat on television doing
nothing except reminisce about films that were never even made, the creative imagination can prove it exists merely by suggesting itself. Literary talent, especially, will out even when its
owner goes nuts. It might come only in flashes, but without the flashes there was never a true fire. It must be firmly said, however, that the hints demand to be followed back to their
source: every student should be familiar in detail with
The Naked and the Dead
, the book in which an abundant gift fulfilled its duty to history, at the
precise moment when American cultural imperialism became, for good or ill, the world’s most pervasive political fact.

In the middle classes, the remark, “He made a lot of
money,” ends the conversation. If you persist, if you try to point out that that money was made by digging through his grandmother’s grave to look for oil, you are met with a
middle-class shrug.

—NORMAN MAILER,
The Presidential Papers
, P. 233

I
F HE HAD
never written
a single novel, we would have to call Norman Mailer a great talent, and even a great poetic talent, simply for the richness of his prose. If he had made himself the protagonist of twice as many
embarrassing scenes, we would still have to call him disciplined: because in even the most fatuous of his written opinions he is capable of a phrase that opens up the depths of a subject on which
he seems determined to sound shallow. He couldn’t be trivial if he tried, and sometimes he tries hard. Mailer tried especially hard when he was young, with the result that no considerable
writer sounded young so long. Henry Miller, whom Mailer generously elected as a precursor, was less a case of protracted adolescence than of premature senility. Miller, doddering and drivelling
before his time, drooled much low-flown foolishness but never volunteered himself as a teenage fantasist. Mailer did, and well into what should have been his mature years: when he suggested, in
cold print, that he had met Sonny Liston and seen fear
in his eyes—meaning fear of the physical violence that the coiled Mailer might unleash—there was a sort of
brilliance to it. (There might also, it should be said, have been an element of truth, although not in the way Mailer intended: professional fighters will go a long way to avoid a brawl with a
civilian, because a human skull is exactly the wrong sort of thing to hit with an unprotected hand.)

But there is nothing very brilliant about Mailer’s standpoint in this paragraph: it is the same
blanket rejection of the bourgeoisie that Sartre tried to wish on Flaubert, and is self-refuting in the same way, by the social background of the man writing it. There is everything brilliant,
however, about the comic illustration contained within it. The illustration is not even placed or timed for comedy: it is just thrown in, as if it were being thrown away. (Its introduction is
decidedly casual, and even careless: he could have put “that the” for “that that,” thus avoiding an awkward mouthful that always looks more mistaken than intended.) The
illustration takes off from a cliché: the man who would sell his grandmother is already in the language. But Mailer’s man digs though his grandmother’s grave to look for oil.
You get the sense that Mailer thought of that on the spot—on a flat spot that he saw needed livening up. Somewhere among his many writings about writing—perhaps in
Advertisements for Myself
—he speaks about the delight he felt when he revised a sentence in the last draft of
The Deer Park
and hit on the extra few words that brought it to life. With his usual combination flurry of modesty and conceit (Mailer’s verbal version of the old one-two) he is enunciating a principle.
The principle is simple, but only because its complexity is irreducible. It is the poetic principle. Mailer is no better at analysing it than any other poet who possesses the same gift. All he
can do is tap into it when it comes. When it doesn’t come, he has to wait; and he has said and done some silly things while waiting. But he has never had to wait long.

Randall Jarrell said that a poet must wait to be hit by lightning. Even in an otherwise demented essay, Mailer can be hit
by lightning so often that you can hear his hair fizz. The effect is of brilliant conversation. You are having a drink with him, and he wants to describe someone who will do anything for money.
The standard idea comes into his head of a man selling his mother or grandmother. Instantly he sees that the idea needs improvement. Sell her into white slavery? Not good
enough. What about if she’s already dead? Hallowed ground. Where is the money? Under the hallowed ground. So the man digs through his grandmother’s grave to look for
oil. Like the inspired talker, Mailer can put it all together in a moment. In jazz, the improvisation that most satisfies is the one that comes out better than it could be written. The quickness
of the creative power deceives the intellect. No wonder the young Mailer saw himself as a jazz soloist. Writing like this, he is at his most American, and shows why America is at the heart of
modernity—which would be arid if it were merely a sophisticated development, but is at its most rich when the sophistication returns to the emotions. One never stops writing about Mailer
and neither does he. In both cases, however, the best reason to do so is that he takes us so close to the awkward reality about talent. It does not belong to its possessor. Its possessor belongs
to it, and can find freedom only by accepting that he is a slave.