Reply #12: On dicks and their books

[Voltaire99]

My dear Psephos,

Yes, we are indeed fellow progressives, and if in the rough and tumble of arguing about Mailer I have insulted you, then now let me step back and extend an olive branch.

You think Mailer is a dick. Well, I agree. Initially you sent others on what I saw as a gossipy errand to read about his terribleness. That did irritate, obviously. I asserted that many artists have been dicks, but that we can still value the work. This is a critical philosophical difference between us. I do not care to inquire about an author, "Is she a good or bad person?"

So in the spirit of a less caustic exchange, let me suggest that Mailer's worst failings--from stabbing Adele to head-butting Vidal to helping uncage Abbott--are more than sufficient for condemning the person. And in the work of one so self-referential and indeed egotistical, the self is not easily separated from the work! And the self in this case is somewhat ridiculous, as acknowledged hilariously in the jealous essay on doing the Cavett Show with Capote.

While it is the puritan instinct to expunge all traces of the heterodox, I should acknowledge that you find some value in "Cannibals and Christians." I would send those less familiar than are you with Mailer to "Miami and the Siege of Chicago," "Armies of the Night," and shorter works like "Superman Comes to the Supermarket" for examples of his usefulness to understanding 20th century America. He especially illuminates the role of corporate power, the imperial project, the rise of the security state, the prizing of artifice, the authoritarian mind, and our annihilating religiosity. Anyone conversant with his books will not have been taken by surprise by Bushism; he charts its decades-long rise, its sour perfecting of old tendencies.

For his eye's keenness on matters that follow his heyday, one should see things like the 90s interview with Patrick Buchanan or his essay on Brett Easton Ellis. (Note I am not recommending the fiction, not because it isn't valuable, but because it is so much less valuable than the New Journalism.)

In short, the failed man can still diagnose the failing society, just as a leprous doctor can still take a pulse.

A last thing. You hate Mailer's prose. I surely don't. It bridges a more lush 19th century diction and syntax and the leaner 20th century style, and there are pleasures in complexity. But more important than the surface effects is the metaphorical power. The evocation of a plastic America, forever pitched between poles of profit, prayer and murder, has been persuasive to millions of readers on the left the world over. Take it or leave it--to each his own!

Yours,

V99