The eye of every dream Hemingway ever had must have looked down the long vista of his future suicide—so he had a legitimate fear of chaos. He never wrote about the river—he contented himself, better, he created a quintessentially American aesthetic by writing about the camp he set up each night by the side of the river—that was the night we made camp at the foot of the cliffs just after the place where the rapids were bad.
Miller is the other half of literature. He is without fear of his end, a literary athlete at ease in earth, air, or water. I am the river, he is always ready to say, I am the rapids and the placids, I’m the froth and the scum and twigs—what a roar as I go over the falls. Who gives a fart. Let others camp where they may. I am the river and there is nothing I can’t join.
Hemingway’s world was doomed to collapse so soon as the forces of the century pushed life into a technological tunnel; mood to Hemingway, being a royal grace, could not survive grinding gears, surrealist manners—here’s shit in your hat!—and electric machines which offered static, but Miller took off at the place where Hemingway ended. In Tropic of Cancer he was saying—and it is the force of the book—I am obliged to live in that place where mood is in the meat grinder, so I know more about it. I know all of the spectrum which runs from good mood to bad mood, and can tell you that a stinking mood is better than no mood. Life has also been designed to run in the stink.
Miller bounces in the stink. We read Tropic of Cancer, that book of horrors, and feel happy. It is because there is honor in the horror, and metaphor in the hideous. How, we cannot even begin to say. Maybe it is that mood is vastly more various, self-regenerative, hearty, and sly than Hemingway ever guessed. Maybe mood is not a lavender lady, but a barmaid with full visions of heaven in the full corruption of her beer breath, and an old drunk’s vomit is a clarion call to some mutants of the cosmos just now squeezing around the bend. It is as if without courage, or militancy, or the serious cultivation of strength, without stoicism or good taste, or even a nose for the nicety of good guts under terrible pressure, Miller is still living closer to death than Hemingway, certainly he is closer if the sewer is nearer to our end than the wound.
History proved to be on Miller’s side. Twentieth-century life was leaving the world of individual effort, liquor, and tragic wounds for the big-city garbage can of bruises, migraines, static, mood chemicals, amnesia, absurd relations, and cancer. Down in the sewers of existence where the cancer was being cooked, Miller was cavorting. Look, he was forever saying, you do not have to die of this crud. You can breathe it, eat it, suck it, fuck it, and still bounce up for the next day. There is something inestimable in us if we can stand the smell.
Considering where the world was going—right into the World-Wide Sewer of the Concentration Camps—Miller had a message which gave more life than Hemingway. “One reason why I have stressed so much the immoral, the wicked, the ugly, the cruel in my work is because I wanted others to know how valuable these are, how equally if not more important than the good things.… I was getting the poison out of my system. Curiously enough, this poison had a tonic effect for others. It was as if I had given them some kind of immunity.”†
The legend, however, was never to develop. With his fingers and his nose and his toenails, he had gotten into the excrements of cancerland—he had to do no more than stay there, a dry sardonic demon, tough as nails, bright as radium. But he had had a life after all before this, tragic, twisted, near to atrophied in some of its vital parts, he was closer to the crud himself than he ever allowed. So he had to write himself out of his own dungeons and did in all the work which would follow Tropic of Cancer and some of the secrets of his unique, mysterious, and absolutely special personality are in his later work and we will yet live with him there, and try to comprehend him—a vital search. We would all know more if we could find him.
But for now let us take on the pleasure of Tropic of Cancer. Much of the first half is reprinted here.
* * *
* The Diary of Anaïs Nin, vol. 1 (New York: Swallow Press and Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), p. 62.
† Jonathan Cott, “Reflections of a Cosmic Tourist,” Rolling Stone (February 27, 1975), pp. 38–46, 57.
Christ, Satan, and the Presidential Candidate: A Visit to Jimmy Carter in Plains
(1976)
PLAINS WAS DIFFERENT from what one expected. Maybe it was the name, but anticipation had been of a dry and dusty town with barren vistas, ramshackle warehouses, and timeless, fly-buzzing, sun-baked afternoons. Instead, Plains was green. As one approached, the fields were green and the trees were tall. The heat of southern Georgia was as hot in summertime as it promised to be, but there was shade under the elms, the pecan trees, and the oaks, and if the streets were wide, the foliage was rich enough to come together overhead. A surprising number of houses were big and white and wooden and looked to be fifty years old or more. Some were a hundred years old. They had porches and trees in the front yard, and lawns ran a good distance from the front door to the sidewalk while the grass to the rear of the house meandered leisurely into the backyard of the house on the street behind. Some homes might be newly painted, and some were shabby, but the town was pleasant and spread out for a population of 683 inhabitants. By comparison with meaner-looking places with a gas station, barbecue shack, general store, junkyard, empty lots, and spilled gasoline, a redneck redolence of dried ketchup and hamburger napkins splayed around thin-shanked, dusty trees, Plains felt peaceful and prosperous. It had the sweet deep green of an old-fashioned town that America has all but lost to the interstates and the ranch houses, the mobile homes and the condominiums, the neon strips of hotted-up truck stops and the static pall of shopping centers. Plains had an antiques store on the main street that must have been a hundred feet deep, and it was owned by Alton Carter, Jimmy Carter’s uncle; Plains had a railroad running through the middle of the main street and a depot that was not more than twice as long as a tinker’s wagon: Plains had an arcade one block long (the length of the main street), and all the stores were in the shade under the arcade, including a brand-new restaurant called the Back Porch with white tin ceilings fifteen feet high, four-blade propeller fan turning overhead, and chicken salad sandwiches with a touch of pineapple and a touch of pepper—tasty. Plains was that part of America which hitherto had been separate from the media, the part that offered a fundamental clue to the nature of establishment itself. One could pass through a hundred small towns in a state, and twenty or thirty might be part of a taproot for the establishment of its capital to draw upon. A place like Plains could be modest by the measure of its income and yet offer an unmistakable well-ordered patina, a promise that the mysterious gentility of American life was present, that there were still people interested in running things without showing the traces, that the small-town establishment remained a factor to be taken account of among all the other factors like exhaust roar and sewage slick and those plastic toylands stretching to the American horizon.
Maybe it was the architecture of the leading church in each town that gave the clue. Plains Baptist Church, now famous for the Sunday Bible classes for men conducted once a month (in his turn) by Jimmy Carter, had a fine architecture within. Painted white, with a ceiling of gracious wooden eaves and two splendid old chairs with red velvet seats on either side of the pulpit, it was an elegant church for a very small town, and its architect, whoever he had been—one could hope it was the town carpenter—must have lived a life that dwelt with ease in the proportions and needs of ecclesiastical space. The choir sang the hymns and the congregation sang with them, the words full of Christian exaltation, their sword of love quivering in the air, that secret in the strength of Christianity where the steel is smelted from the tears. “I will sing the wondrous story of the Christ who died for me,” went the words, “how He left His home in glory for the cross of Calvary.” When they came to sing “Bringing in the sheaves,” or may it have been “When the roll is called up yonder, I’ll be there,” a member of the choir took out hi
s harmonica and played it with feeling pure enough to take one back to the last campfires of a Confederate Army 111 years gone, the harmonica stirring old river reeds out of the tendrils of the past. It was a fine church service, and it gave the visitor from the North a little too much to think about, especially since he had spent a bemused hour in the basement of Plains Baptist Church somewhat earlier the same Sunday morning taking in Men’s Bible Class 10 to 11 A.M. The basement, a schoolroom with institutional pale green walls, gray floor, gray metal seats, a blackboard, and a metal table up front for the deacons where Jimmy Carter sat, even an open window on the other side of which a ladder was leaning, had been relatively filled this Sunday with curious visitors, some press and two women from the media who had been allowed, as a political point (in the ongoing epic of women’s liberation), to be admitted. They must have wondered what they were seeing. There was a devotion in the dry little voice, drier than gunpowder, of the deacon who interpreted the Scripture, a farmer or a shopkeeper, thin as jerky dried in the sun, a dry, late-middle-aged man with eyeglasses, hollow cheeks, and an ingrown devotion that resided in the dungeon clamor of his lungs. He spoke in a wispy Georgia snuffle, very hard to hear, and his piety being as close to him as the body of one young beloved clasping the body of another through the night, it was not the place to pull out a pad and start taking notes.
In the second row of seats, the first row being all but empty, sat the real stalwarts of the Bible class, seven or eight big Georgia farmers, pleased by the crowd of visitors in the class, bemused in their own right that the church, the town, the county was a center suddenly of all the buzzing, insectlike instruments of the media and the peculiar pale faces of the media people. The second row owned the basement. They nudged each other in the ribs as they sat down next to one another. “Didn’t see you sneak in here,” they said to each other. They were the meat and mind of the South. They looked as if they had been coming here fifty Sundays a year for twenty years, here to think whatever thoughts they had on such occasions—one might be better situated to read the minds of Martians—and they were impressive in their mixture of hardworking bodies and hardworking hands, red necks with work-wrinkle lines three-sixteenths of an inch deep, and the classic ears of Southern farmers, big ears with large flappy chewed-out lobes as if they had been pulled on like old dugs over the ten thousand problems of their years. Men’s Bible class was teaching that Christian love was unselfish devotion to the highest good of others, and up front Jimmy Carter sat silently at the metal table with a couple of other deacons, his face calm, his mind attentive to one knew not necessarily what, dressed in a gray-blue suit and harmonious tie, and the hour passed and it was time to go upstairs to eleven o’clock service.
Somewhere the yeast must have been working in the religious call, for in the early afternoon, a couple of hours after church, when his private interview with Jimmy Carter took place, it proved to be the oddest professional hour Norman Mailer ever spent with a politician—it must have seemed twice as odd to Carter. In retrospect, it quickly proved mortifying (no lesser word will do), since to his embarrassment, Mailer did too much of the talking. Perhaps he had hoped to prime Carter to the point where they could have a conversation, but the subject he chose to bring up was religion, and that was ill-chosen. A man running for president could comment about Christ, he could comment a little, but he could hardly afford to be too enthusiastic. Religion had become as indecent a topic to many a contemporary American as sex must have been in the nineteenth century. If half the middle-class people in the Victorian period held almost no conscious thoughts about sex, the same could now be said of religion, except it might be even more costly to talk about than sex, because religious conversations invariably sound insane when recounted to men or women who never feel such sentiments. Since it was a safe assumption that half of America lived at present in the nineteenth century and half in the twentieth, a journalist who had any respect for the candidate he was talking to would not ask an opinion on sex or religion. Still, Mailer persisted. He was excited about Carter’s theological convictions. He wanted to hear more of them. He had read the transcript of Bill Moyers’s one-hour TV interview with Carter (“People and Politics,” May 6, 10:00 P.M., Public Broadcasting Service) and had been impressed with a few of Carter’s remarks, particularly his reply to Moyers’s question “What drives you?”
After a long silence Carter had said, “I don’t know … exactly how to express it … I feel I have one life to live. I feel that God wants me to do the best I can with it. And that’s quite often my major prayer. Let me live my life so that it will be meaningful.” A little later he would add, “When I have a sense of peace and self-assurance … that what I’m doing is the right thing, I assume, maybe in an unwarranted way, that that’s doing God’s will.”
These were hardly historic remarks, and yet on reflection they were certainly remarkable. There was a maw of practicality that engulfed presidents and presidential candidates alike. They lived in all those supermarkets of the mind where facts are stacked like cans; whether good men or bad, they were hardly likely to be part of that quintessential elevation of mind that can allow a man to say, “Let me live my life so that it will be meaningful.” It was in the nature of politicians to look for programs to be meaningful, not the psychic substance of their lives. Reading the Moyers interview shortly before leaving for Plains must therefore have excited a last-minute excess of curiosity about Carter, and that was last-minute to be certain. Through all of the political spring when candidates came and went, Mailer had not gone near the primary campaigns. Working on a novel, he had made the whole decision not to get close to any of it. One didn’t try to write seriously about two things at once. Besides, it was hard to tell much about Carter. Mailer thought the media had an inbuilt deflection that kept them from perceiving what was truly interesting in any new phenomenon. Since he rarely watched television any longer, he did not even know what Carter’s voice was like, and photographs proved subtly anonymous. Still, he kept reading about Carter. In answer to the people who would ask, “What do you think of him?” Mailer would be quick to reply, “I suspect he’s a political genius.” It was all he knew about Carter, but he knew that much.
He also had to admit he enjoyed Carter’s reaction to meeting Nixon and Agnew, McGovern and Henry Jackson, Hubert Humphrey, George Wallace, Ronald Reagan, Nelson Rockefeller, Ed Muskie. Carter confessed he had not been impressed sufficiently to think these men were better qualified to run the country than himself. Mailer understood such arrogance. He had, after all, felt enough of the same on meeting famous politicians to also think himself equipped for office, and had been brash enough to run for mayor of New York in a Democratic primary. Mailer had always assumed he would be sensational as a political candidate; he learned, however, that campaign work ran eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, and after a while it was not yourself who was the candidate but 50 percent of yourself. Before it was over, his belly was drooping—one’s gut is the first to revolt against giving the same speech eight times a day. He came in fourth in a field of five, and was left with a respect for successful politicians. They were at least entitled to the same regard one would offer a professional athlete for his stamina. Later, brooding on the size of a conceit that had let him hope he could steal an election from veteran Democrats, Mailer would summarize his experience with the wise remark, “A freshman doesn’t get elected president of the fraternity.”
But Carter had. Carter must be a political genius. Nonetheless, Mailer felt a surprising lack of curiosity. Genius in politics did not interest him that much. He thought politics was a dance where you need not do more than move from right to left and left to right while evading the full focus of the media. The skill was in the timing. You tried to move to the left at that moment when you would lose the least on the right; to the right, when the damage would be smallest on the left. You had to know how to steer in and out of other news stories. It was a difficult skill, but hardly possessed of that upper aestheti
c which would insist skill be illumined by a higher principle—whether elegance, courage, compassion, taste, or the eminence of wit. Politics called for some of the same skills you needed in inventing a new plastic. Politics called to that promiscuous material in the personality which could flow into many a form. Sometimes Mailer suspected that the flesh of the true politician would yet prove nonbiodegradable and fail to molder in the grave!
Still, there was no question in his mind that he would vote for Carter. In 1976 he was ready to vote for many a Democrat. It was not that Mailer could not ever necessarily vote for a Republican, but after eight years of Nixon and Ford, he thought the country could use a Democratic administration again. It was not that Ford was unendurable. Like a moderately dull marriage, Ford was endlessly endurable—one could even get fond of him in a sour way. Jerry Ford, after all, provided the clue to how America had moved in fifty years from George Babbitt to Jerry Ford. He even offered the peculiar security of having been shaped by forces larger than himself. Maybe that was why Ford’s face suggested he would do the best he could with each problem as he perceived it: “Don’t worry about me,” said his face, “I’m not the least bit dialectical.”
Of course, the president was only a handmaiden to the corporate spirit. The real question was whether the White House could afford another four years of the corporate spirit, that immeasurably self-satisfied public spirit whose natural impulse was to cheat on the environment and enrich the rich.
It was certainly time for the Democrats. He would probably vote for any Democrat who got the nomination. Nonetheless, it was irritating to have so incomplete an idea of Carter, to be so empty of any thesis as to whether he might be deemed ruthless, a computer, or saintly.
Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays Page 34
