BOOKS

Cat in the Ring

By MORDECAI RICHLER YEARS ago, a very young, earnest F. Scott Fitzgerald told an embarrassed Edmund Wilson that he intended to be the best writer ever to have come out of America. Later Hemingway stepped into the gym to claim the American championship belt and declare he had fought Stendhal to a draw but would not climb into the same ring as Count Leo. Today, fighting out of Hipsterville, NY, honourably battle-scarred and unquestionably talented, we have a new con- tender: Norman Mailer.

The sour truth is I am imprisoned with a perception which will settle for nothing tess than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time. Whether rightly or wrongly, it is then obvious that I would go so far as to think that it is my present and future work which will have the deepest influence of any work being done by an American novelist in these years. I could be wrong, and if I am, then I'm the fool who will pay the bill. . .

In Advertisements For Myself,* Norman Mailer, with a back of the hand for Ernest H., establishes that he, too, has cojones as well as a colossal, perhaps even ruinous ego, but he comes no nearer to the championship belt. At the moment he is certainly swinging, swinging all the time, but his aim is off. All the same, I really hope you will read Advertisements For Myself. For Norman Mailer is, all at once, a truly gifted, reckless, sometimes infuriating but always lively writer. His book deserves to be read by anyone interested in the contemporary American scene.

You have to admire Mr. Mailer's guts. He can be candid about 7'he Naked and the Dead and the too-swift success it brought him when he was only twenty-five years old.

My farewell to an average man's experience

was too abrupt; never again would I know, in the dreary way one usually knows such things, what it was like to work at a dull job, or take orders from a man one hated. . . . I travelled scared, excited and nervous, ridden by the ques- tion which everyone else was ready to ask and

which I was forever asking myself : had this

first published novel been all of my talent?

If nothing else, the most recent of the short stories in Advertisements (one, 'The Language of Men,' is superb) prove that any time he wants to Mr. Mailer can write another big conven- tional novel. He has skill to spare. But he has consistently refused to take the slick way out. He would not follow his first success with The Naked and the Dead Go to Japan. Instead, he wrote a surprisingly different novel, Barbary Shore. An honourable, intelligent failure, it was savaged by American reviewers. Part of the trouble, Mr. Mailer feels, was that the book appeared at the worst of all possible times (a Socialist novel during the'lays of the red scare), whereas The Naked and the Dead came out when America was ripe for the big war book. But for a writer whose avowed purpose is highly serious, Mr. Mailer seems suspiciously susceptible * ADVERTISEMENTS FOR Mysrt.r. By Norman Mailer. (Deutsch, 21s.)

to the fevers of the market-place, the good seasons and the bad, and how nicely his product is turning over on the retail counter. More, I'd say, like a dress manufacturer than a cool cat.

Anyway, after Barbary Shore came The Deer Park—a wild, fitfully brilliant book—and now Mr. Mailer is trying to make the scene as the spokesman and philosopher of hip. Well, as a parlour game, what's hip and who's square can be fun, like the what's-in-what's-out fad of the Fifties. But it's embarrassing really, for no matter how much you tart up its basic concepts hip still sounds stale. The idiom is entertaining, but in the end you're left with the good guys and the bad, Wagon Train with one difference —instead of black sombreros, the villains wear Brooks Brothers' suits.

The hipster's response to soul-killing America is the most flattering one possible—imitation. Stripped of their mystical T-shirts, Messrs. Ginsberg, Corso, Kerouac and Krim look like nothing more than young men anxious to get ahead. They are the obverse side of the adman's world they claim to aespise, the unhappy half of the deodorant ad, but still in the picture. Like the latest GM product, each hipster sets out to be a sales leader. For being 'well-liked' substitute 'well-known'; for nice, diggable; for the Junior Chamber of Commerce Award, the Mike Wallace interview; and in place of the free- mason's secret handshake, the cat's private lan- guage. On the one side, Main Street; on the other, main-lining it. In Westport they may represent Madison Avenue; in the Village, Grove Press; but both teams root for a graph-busting sales record. The hipsters have made no revolutionary reply to the gone American dream, they are merely taking a different route to 'making it.' But as self-promoters, I must say, the hipsters are unequalled in recent American literary history.

One of the latest hip books, Seymour Krim's Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer, carries a fore- word by Mailer (the Hip Housekeeping Seal of Approval, this) and a jacket which promises 'SEX, SUICIDE, HOMOSEXUALITY, SPORTS- WRITING, JEWS, NEGROS, JAZZ, GENIUS, INSANITY, NEW YORK: LOWER LITER- ARY DEPTHS.' Add six mini-cars for lucky readers this week, and you no longer have even a pretence of literature, but a copy of to- morrow's Daily Sensation.

Because Mr. Mailer is so obviously superior in talent to these sideshow figures I cannot understand why he would be their spokesman. And surely if hip, as he says, is living in the present and rejecting past and future, then Mr. Mailer is necessarily from Squaresville himself. As a writer he is constantly putting the past to his own (sometimes remarkable) uses, and as for the future? He tells us that he has embarked on a major novel which may take ten years to complete. (Like that's planning ahead, baby.)

The beat and hip phenomena represent, to a large extent, the funny, highly publicised rebel- lion of some Jewish middle-class boys in New York, as opposed to the more solid achievement of, say, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and

Philip Roth. Mr. Krim (the child of our time, Mailer writes) is so fearfully upset about his Jewishness that he has had his nose bobbed and can't face a girl until he has shed his Jewish- intellectual glasses. Like Mailer, Ginsberg and the rest, he, too, has adopted the Negro—the one race American Jews are free to patronise.

Mr. Mailer's quest for non-Jewishness runs even deeper. One is tempted to guess that under the cool cat's exterior he believes, like George Babbitt, that Jews are physical cowards. Again and again, in Advertisements, he collars us with accounts of his boxing feats, his physical tough- ness and how he was a regular rifleman. Of Hemingway, he writes: Let any of you decide for yourself how sillY would be A Farewell to Arms or better, Death in the Afternoon, if it had been written by a man who was five-four, had acne, wore glasses, spoke in a shrill voice and was a physical coward. That, of course, is an impossible hypothesis. . . .

Has Mr. Mailer never heard of Isaac Babel? He wore glasses, looked about five-four and pos- sibly had acne, but his stories of the Red Cavalry are masterly and at least as tough as big Ernie's.

But where Mr. Mailer is most worrisome is in his choice of a hero for his projected novel. speak here of Sergius O'Shaugnessy, the incom- parable six-foot-and-some Irishman adored by chicks everywhere ('girls and ladies would try me on off-evenings like comparison-shoppers to shop the value of their boy friend, lover, mate or hus- band against the certified professionalism of Sergius O'Shaugnessy), a former trapper in Alaska, chauffeur for gangsters, officer in the Foreign Legion, labour organiser and analyst, who comes on more like a self-conscious Jewish intellectual's dream of a hero than anything I have ever come across since G. A. Henty. Any- way, in 'The Time of Her Time,' the highly praised and certainly well-written blow-by-bloW account of a sexual main bout (actually, an ex- cerpt from Mr. Mailer's novel-in-progress which was unfortunately cut from the English edition), our Goy-boy superman takes on a little Jewish chick who hitherto was unable to have an orgasm (her sneaky Jewish boy friend digs only the oral perversions) and leads her over the hump. How? At the crucial moment, he tells her, 'You're 3 dirty little Jew.' She makes it, man. But I'M afraid Mr. Mailer doesn't. Not this trip, anyway' A novel is one thing and a pot-dream another.

It's worth noting, though, that hipsters (just like the square Odeon round the corner) noW go in for trailers. Mr. Mailer informs us that his forthcoming novel will include a queer, 3 cop, a crook, a movie star and a bull-fighter. Advertisements is an easy book to ridicule, but the fact is Mr. Mailer has a large, a very large talent. Today he seems to have assumed a riskY, naïve stance between two camps. The world of best-seller charts, headlines and championship belts —and the office of a serious writer. He can settle right now for being one of the more entertain' ing and provocative characters on the American entertainment scene or write his novel. I doubt if any man has time for both. But if he opts for the former the loss will certainly be ours. One thing more. The best piece in Mr. Mailer's book, a short novel, The Man Who Stud" Yoga, is in fact so very good and con- trolled that I'm willing to believe that Norman Mailer is capable of writing a great novel. Nest time out, though, why doesn't he write the book and leave the advertisements to his publisher? Each according to his ability, you know.