Adrenaline and Flapdoodle

By Stefan Kanfer

PIECES AND PONTIFICATIONS by Norman Mailer

Little, Brown; 422 pages; $20

"He is a person of very great gifts and he needs them to carry him through all those platitudes."

--Saul Bellow on Norman Mailer

When that sentence was pronounced on the Dick Cavett show last winter, fireworks were expected. Mailer had never been known to ignore a taunt; he had devoted whole chapters to demolitions of competing writers. Instead, there was an uncharacteristic silence. Six months later, Mailer has provided an answer. But it, too, is atypical. For if, as the editor of his new book claims, Mailer was "the literary world's finest counterpuncher" since Hemingway, he no longer deserves the title or the hype. Pieces and Pontifications demonstrates that, despite a pugilistic stance, the author has deserted the ring for color and commentary in the broadcaster's booth.

Pieces gathers fugitive articles written over the course of some ten years: fragments on subjects as diverse as Viet Nam, sex, television, Henry Miller and subway graffiti. Occasionally the old pro jabs with acute social observations and feints with malicious wit. He divides his examination of television into channels instead of chapters; he provides a graceful reappraisal of Novelist-Translator Jean Malaquais, who disliked The Naked and the Dead, but of whom Mailer acknowledges: "I had learned as much about writing from [him] as from anyone alive."

But far more often, Mailer easily squanders those "very great gifts." A televised meeting with an old adversary is not exactly The Clash of the Titans:

Mailer: Well, is [murder] ever nonsexual? .. .

Vidal: Not having murdered anybody lately, no, I don't know.

Mailer: You bragged about what you did to Jack Kerouac, after all.

Vidal: He didn't die.

Mailer: Well, he did.

In "The Faith of Graffiti," the author defends the space invaders from Krylon: "They had written masterpieces in letters six feet high . . . We are back to the cave man and his cave painting." To Mailer, the spray-can artists are brilliantly writing "I am." It never seems to have occurred to him that what is also being inscribed is "You aren't." Urban scrawl does not merely decorate, it also defaces: maps, buildings, trees, monuments. In this vandalized epoch, graffiti can be avoided only by the wealthy, and celebrated only by those who bombinate about the "rapt intent seething of its foliage ... the herald of some oncoming apocalypse less and less far away."

Even further removed from aesthetic or social sense is Mailer's assay of Henry Miller. More than 40 years ago, when it was bold to praise Tropic of Cancer, George Orwell wrote that Miller's value lay in his very ordinariness: " 'The average sensual man' has been given the power of speech, like Balaam's ass." That is not an inconsiderable gift, but Mailer will not be content with it. To him, "one has to take the English language back to Marlowe and Shakespeare before encountering a wealth of imagery equal in intensity."

Pontifications contains 20 interviews with the author, all of them featuring Mailer's celebrated amalgam of adrenaline, mysticism and flapdoodle.

On TV: "Every time one sees a bad television show, one is watching the nation get ready for the day when a Hitler will come."

On violence: "If a boy beats up an old woman, he may be protecting himself by discharging a rage which would destroy his body if it were left to work on the cells ... [He] may be anything from a brute to Raskolnikov. It requires an exquisite sense of context and a subtle gift as a moralist to decide these matters at times."

Having reduced assault to therapy, Judge Mailer passes on to less exquisite matters. Contradictions bloom in these fertilized paragraphs. He soberly discusses the achievements of physics and science, then announces that Russians have taken pictures of the human aura. He extols privacy, but has no trouble speaking about his daughter's loss of virginity. He sets great store on precision of expression and constructs febrile phrases like "On to the Congo with sex, technology, and the inflamed lividities of human will," or "The pores of society breathe a new metaphor--the enigma of Intelligence itself."

Excesses, personal and verbal, have put Mailer on the canvas before, but he was never counted out. His 21st book may be indispensable roadwork for the long-projected novel of ancient Egypt, here described as "amazing ... chapter by chapter there's extraordinary stuff in it." But it may also be that one of America's most important literary champions has finally succumbed to an ailment that has afflicted epicmakers since Vergil. Poet A.E. Housman's judgment of that ambitious pagan could be superimposed on the Mailer of Pieces and Pontifications without changing a diphthong: his "besetting sin is the use of words too forcible for his thoughts." -- By Stefan Kanfer

Excerpt

"Mailer . . . would sit by himself from midnight until two in the morning when . . . The Star- Spangled Banner would be played. It sounded like the first martial strains of that cancer he was convinced was coming on him, and who knows? If he had not stabbed his wife, he might have been dead in a few years himself -- the horror of violence is its unspoken logic."

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