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Mr. Mailer's American Dreams

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Benjamin T. Spencer
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Extract

Since the death of Gertrude Stein probably no major author has so consistently and explicitly reflected concern with “the making of Americans” as Norman Mailer. From his early novella A Calculus at Heaven, written while he was an undergraduate at Harvard, through his recent Marilyn, the tensions of his works have generally derived from attitudes that national myths or regional diversity have nurtured in his characters. Thus in The Naked and the Dead he subtitles the Time Machine chapter on General Cummings “A Peculiarly American Statement,” and therein he traces the general's views and conduct to the conflicts during his youth between his philistine Midwestern father and his genteel Bostonian mother, whose aesthetic ideals for her son yield to the image of tough “manhood” imposed by her authoritarian husband. Indeed, a notion of what it might mean to be an American in any inclusive national sense rarely emerges in this early novel; America instead seems to be a contentious aggregate of regional and ethnic cultures. Moreover, Mailer's authorial stance here is neither that of Dos Passos' detached naturalism nor that of Whitman's joyous acceptance of continental diversity within a national character but, rather, that of a sectionally oriented condescension toward those soldiers who lack the sophistication of his own brand of Northeastern urban culture. In fact, by 1952, Mailer had apparently adopted such slanting as a staple of his literary practice by arguing that a literary work should be shaped by the author's “prejudices, instincts, and sensitivity.” Nevertheless, Mailer's interest in American behavior has persisted over three decades as he has probed the quality of life in Hollywood or Texas or Florida or Chicago, seeking as he said of his participation in the Washington march, “to elucidate the mysterious character” of the “quintessential American event.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 2 , October 1977 , pp. 127 - 146
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

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References

NOTES

1. The Naked and the Dead (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1948), pp. 352–64.Google Scholar

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4. Cannibals and Christians (New York: Dial Press, 1966), pp. 98–103Google Scholar. (Hereafter cited as Cannibals.)

5. Advertisements, pp. 228–34, 475–76.Google Scholar

6. Cannibals, pp. 1–2, 5.Google Scholar

7. The Presidential Papers (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1963), pp. 31–32, 95–96Google Scholar; Armies, p. 188.Google Scholar

8. Advertisements, p. 433Google Scholar; Armies, p. 288.Google Scholar

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10. Presidential Papers, pp. 25–26Google Scholar; Cannibals, pp. 71–72Google Scholar; Miami and the Siege of Chicago (New York: World Publishing Co., 1968), pp. 186–88Google Scholar. (Hereafter cited as Miami and Chicago.)

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16. “A Calculus at Heaven,” in Advertisements, pp. 28–29, 41–42, 51, 64.Google Scholar

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19. Advertisements, pp. 94, 106Google Scholar; Barbary Shore (New York: Rinehart, 1951), p. 282Google Scholar. See also Leeds, Barry, The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 54–55, 89.Google Scholar

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30. Existential Errands, p. 220Google Scholar; Cannibals, p. 108.Google Scholar

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37. Partisan Review, 42, No. 2 (1975), 199.Google Scholar

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39. Poirier, Richard, in Lucid, pp. 163–65.Google Scholar

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41. Armies, pp. 47–48Google Scholar; Existential Errands, p. 219.Google Scholar

42. Oates, Joyce C., New Heaven, New Earth (New York: Vanguard Press, 1974), pp. 181, 185–86, 197Google Scholar; Mailer, N., Partisan Review, 42, No. 2 (1975), 207.Google Scholar

43. Lucid, , pp. 274–75.Google Scholar

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49. See Trilling, Lionel, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 95ff.Google Scholar