***When Norman Mailer Was A Lion-Cannibals and Christians- A Book Review

 

 

 

Book Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Cannibals and Christians, Norman Mailer, 1966

There was time in my youth back in the 1960s and early 1970s that I devoured everything I could get my hands on by the later American writer Norman Mailer. While that urgency is no longer true I nevertheless still find him an interesting political and philosophical opponent. What was the reason for that enthusiasm in my youth?  Simple, it was Mailer’s commitment to do novelistically and journalistically for the philosophy of existentialism what the French writers, especially, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, did for the philosophical argument itself. That philosophy, borne of terminal despair at the carnage, brutality and inhuman cruelties of World War II (and nicely written about in a first-hand way with his first novel, The Naked and the Dead), the seeming almost organic inability of the international working class to go beyond Stalinism and Social Democratic reformism in the quest for socialism and an acknowledgement that modern humankind had let technological developments outstrip its capacity to understand and control those forces, has nevertheless become threadbare with time. We live too existential lives to find much conform in such philosophy (to speak nothing of the aid of tech/text/eyes down-driven technology)

 

Let us face it; every political and social commentator is confronted with the need to find some basis to ground his or her analysis of the seemingly random events that demand our attentions and explanations. Over long experience I have found historical materialism a much more grounded philosophy for looking at the apparently random individual facts of existence. Although I have not read very recent Mailer all his works I have read lack this connection. So be it. We were after all in the end political opponents. Nevertheless, the man could turn some rather nice metaphors in his arguments. And he sure as hell could write. For this compilation of articles, reviews etc., written in the mid-1960’s and late I recommend his articles on the Republican National Convention, his stint as a man of the book review (especially that article about his then contemporaries like Styron, Jones, and Salinger), his polemic against the pretensions of the 1960’s New York liberal literary establishment (which in the end is where his real political fight was always aimed) centered on the famous Paris Review interview. There is a significant about of free verse poetry interspersed throughout the book although none of it would make any anthology of American poetry and is easily passed over. Read on.