Black Jacket
NORMAN MAILER'S critical overdraft is becoming enormous. In the end, like Joe Louis, he may be able to do no better than settle the tax on it. Last time out, in Advertisements For Myself (1959), he warned us that he was 'imprisoned with a perception which will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time,' and critics, by and large, agreed that though the performance in Advertisements was uneven, the threat was real.
Since then Mailer has written a piece for Esquire, 'An Evening With Jackie Kennedy,' that suggests he has the makings of a Hedda Hopper with guts. In this Essay in Three Acts, Mailer lets on how an earlier essay of his helped JFK squeeze past Nixon into office; he complains that Jackie is a witch because she won't answer his letters or see him. Furthermore, she has Bellow and Salinger to the White House, but not William Burroughs, Alan Ginsberg or Mailer. 'What special good would it do,' he writes, `to found an Establishment if the few who gave intimations of high talent were instinctively ex- cluded?'
More recently, Mailer turned up in Sonny Liston's dressing-room after the big fight. Ac- cording to Red Smith, sports columnist for the Herald Tribune, Mailer said, in camera, that he could still prove that Patterson had won by a knockout in the sixth round, just as he had predicted the night before. Other journalists suggested that Mailer sit down. But Liston said, 'Let the bum speak.'
`Did you call me a bum?' Mailer asked.
`Yes,' Liston said.
Now all got up in a sinister black jacket, just like Lennie Bruce, Mailer offers us a book of non-poems, or, as he puts it, 'a run of poems, short poems, very short poems, and turns of prose entitled more formally.' As a matter of fact some of the shots fired in Deaths for Ladies are very, very accurate. Others are funny. Take, for instance: If Harry Golden is the gentile's Jew can I be- come the Golden Goy But there's a lot of dead weight, repetition, and sophomoric silliness in this book, and even the thought nice use a knife. to Saying It riches of Mailer's short poems would come over better if offered conversationally at a party (pre- ferably late). Committed to print, to be read when sober, they make for a pretentious book.
What must be Mailer's favourite little poem, for it is to be found at least three times among his expensive, unnumbered pages, runs : So long as you use a knife there's some love left.
Well, no. At the risk of being I must say I think it's rotten to Neither is it the only alternative With Flowers.
MORDECAI RICHLER
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