Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 102

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leftist. There is an almost visceral dimension to his alienation. He is
revolted by the "air of Ivy League intimacy" surrounding liberals such
as William Sloane Coffin, the chaplain of Yale (Armies 83-84).
Richard Poirier links his chronic "will to differentiate" (90) to his
obsession with dialectic tension (102). The problem with Mailer the
would-be revolutionary is that "in his world the only real defeat is in
any illusion of victory . .." (Poirier 103). Real victory would resolve
or at least ameliorate tension. Mailer's real quest, as Poirier sees it,
is for new and novel ways to differentiate himself:
He is searching for the ways in which Mailer the
Novelist does NOT fit into any easy alliance. How
could he be expected to fit, having designated
himself as the Novelist responsible for values no
other kind of writer, except possibly a poet,
necessarily has to care about--the Imagination,
dread, awe, wonder, mystery? (90)
It is something of an understatement, therefore, when Walter
Rideout characterizes Mailer's radicalism as being of "an
indeterminate sort" (318). Consider his class affiliations, or rather
disaffiliations. While he credits the working class for their loyalty
to friends, he cannot condone their indifference to ideas. Conversely,
he credits the middle class for their idealism, yet remonstrates them
for their aloofness towards more rooted values (Armies 287), the
values of the town rather than the city. He remarks on the odd
inversion of Marxist revolutionary theory that the Pentagon March
represented.
It would take the rebirth of Marx for Marxism to
explain definitively this middle class condemnation
of an imperialist war in the last Capitalist nation
(and this working class affirmation). But it is the
urban middle class in America who always feel most
uprooted, most alienated from America itself, and so
instinctively most critical of America . . . . (Armies
287)