Readings: When Lessing is More

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At the time of the death of Norman Mailer, a writer under whose influence, both in terms of literature and in terms of culture, I came of age, I posted this angry piece on Rodak Riffs. I thought at the time that the Nobel Prize committee had made a terrible unforced error in choosing Doris Lessing over Mailer for the literature prize. I am no longer so sure of that.

The reason for my tentative change of heart is that I have begun reading Lessing’s Canopus in Argos:Archives, a sequence in which the first novel is Re: Colonised Planet 5 Shikasta. I have begun reading Shikasta as a result of a conversation on Facebook involving my reading of Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis. This led me to Lessing’s novel sequence. I am about one-third of the way through the first book, having borrowed the first three from the library, and I am very impressed. The following brief excerpt from the Wikipedia article on Lessing will give you enough background on the nature of the sequence to save me the trouble:

When asked about which of her books she considers most important, Lessing chose the Canopus in Argos sequence. These novels present an advanced interstellar society's efforts to accelerate the evolution of other worlds, including Earth. […] Using Sufi concepts, to which Lessing had been introduced in the mid-1960s by her "good friend and teacher" Idries Shah,  the series of novels also owes much to the approach employed by the early 20th century mystic G. I. Gurdjieff in his work All and Everything.

So what we basically have in the Canopus sequence is a “chariot of the gods” scenario, with Shikasta—the fallen planet—representing Earth; Canopus standing in for “heaven” and the evil planet Shammat and its agents representing “hell” and the demonic forces.

It has been insights like the one below concerning the evolution of religion that have made Shikasta so rewarding for me, thus far:

            During the entire period under review, religions of any kind flourished. Those that concern us most here took their shape from the lives or verbal formulations of our envoys. This happened more often than not, and can be taken as a rule: every one of our public cautioners left behind a religion, or cult, and many of the unknown ones did, too.

            These religions had two main aspects. The positive one, at their best: a stabilization of the culture, preventing the worst excesses of brutality, exploitation, and greed. The negative: a priesthood manipulating rules, regulations, with punitive inflexibility; sometimes allowing, or exacerbating, excesses of brutality, exploitation, and greed. These priesthoods distorted what was left of our envoys’ instruction, if it was understood by them at all, and created a self-perpetuating body of individuals totally identified with their invented ethics, rules, beliefs, and who were always the worst enemies of any envoys we sent.

            These religions were a main difficulty in the way of maintaining Shikasta in our system.

            They have often been willing agents of Shammat.

This passage expresses succinctly and precisely what I had already come to believe concerning the nature of professional priesthoods and organized religion.

So I have reevaluated Lessing’s contribution to literary culture and her body of work. If my enthusiasm for this series continues to grow, I intend to go back and read more of her work. I read The Golden Notebook way back in my Ann Arbor days and liked it. And I have read a few of her novels—The Fifth Child comes mind—since; but not many. That may now change.

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Reflections: Like Mailer, Like Weil

I have lately been neglecting my devotions to Simone Weil, whom I consider to be the patron saint of this blog. Perhaps, then, it was subconscious guilt over such neglect that caused me, when I read the sentence from Christopher Hitchens’ introduction to his interview with Norman Mailer which I quote below, to have the thought that it might be applied with equal insight to Simone Weil:

His deliberately paradoxical stance of ‘left conservatism’ is offered semi-belligerently as a challenge to those who remain fixed in orthodoxy or correctness.

In musing upon what I might have at hand that would provide authoritative support of this hypothesis, it occurred to me that no lesser conservative saint than T. S. Eliot had written a preface to Weil’s brilliant but disturbing book, The Need for Roots, and that this would be excellent ground to mine for corroboration of my notion. The second sentence of Eliot’s preface seemed to fit the bill:

The reader of her work finds himself confronted by a difficult, violent, and complex personality...

Certainly, this is a statement which could be applied with equal accuracy to Norman Mailer.

A bit further on, Eliot informs us that Fr. Perrin, the Catholic priest who served as Simone Weil’s intimate and sounding-board in her on-going interior disputation with orthodox Catholicism, had opined: Je crois que son âme est incomparablement plus haute que son génie. [I believe that her soul is incomparably superior to her genius.]

This is saying much, as Simone Weil’s genius is vast. But if I might, by way of comparison, interject my own opinion of Mailer here, I would say that transferring this concept from the sphere of religious philosophy to that of creative and expository writing, it can be said of Mailer that his genius was incomparably superior to his talent. In reading Mailer, one has the feeling that through his fiction, and even through his most excellent non-fiction, such as The Armies of the Night, he never quite got it all out. This inexpressible thing that he harbored inside comes through, perhaps, more directly in conversations such as this one with Christopher Hitchens, than it does in his worked and reworked published writings.

Hitchens having commented on the paradox embodied in the thought of Norman Mailer, compare this observation of Eliot's on Weil:

In the work of such a writer we must expect to encounter paradox. …And in her political thinking she appears as a stern critic of both Right and Left; at the same time more truly a lover of order and hierarchy than most of those who call themselves Conservative, and more truly a lover of the people than most of those who call themselves Socialist.

That seems like a pretty fair characterization of a ‘left conservative’ to me. A bit further on, Eliot says:

As a political thinker, as in everything else, Simone Weil is not to be classified. The paradoxicality of her sympathies is a contributing cause of the equilibrium. On the one hand she was a passionate champion of the common people and especially of the oppressed – those oppressed by the wickedness and selfishness of men and those oppressed by the anonymous forces of modern society. ...One the other hand, she was by nature a solitary and an individualist, with a profound horror of what she called the collectivity – the monster created by modern totalitarianism.

Consider the similarity between Eliot’s comprehension of the paradoxical nature of Simone Weil’s philosophy, and this exchange between Christopher Hitchens and Normal Mailer:

Hitchens: I remember you once saying to me that you’d refined your dissidence, you could give it a name, you were now a fully paid up left conservative. Elaborate on that.

Mailer: Well, as you can guess, it’s almost impossible to elaborate on it, because one of the laws of rhetoric is that you cannot elaborate on an oxymoron. And being a left conservative hits most people absolutely that way, they just stop thinking and they look at you aghast.

This is, I think, much the way most people, confronted with the thought of Simone Weil – her person, as well as her philosophy – will react. She is almost too much for us process – intellectually , or emotionally. But if one can only suspend this cognitive disability and immerse oneself in her biography, as well as in her writings, she will repay that act of intellectual charity again and again and again.

[On a personal note, these musings on the supreme exemplars, Weil and Mailer, serve to strengthen my disdain for that orthodox school of culturally conservative thought which understands culture to have reached a peak in some Golden Age prior to the hatching of the poisonous egg containing that monster raptor, Liberalism, which, once hatched, rampages through our world, devouring any and all values in its path. Could they but obtain the means, these intellectual totalitarians would go back, Amish-like, to that pre-Liberal age; they would arrest and bind culture at that point, avoiding all future risk by pinching off the all intellectual evolution in the bud. Stasis is death, not life.]

Reflections: More Mailer

One problem that I have with the mind-set that would burn books as a means to the end of establishing a “public orthodoxy” is that it is emblematic of a kind of cowardice. It is an effeminate act, a sort of intellectual nesting impulse, which wants to abide behind basalt-hard walls of cultural stasis, perched upon feathered layers of the pluperfect, hunkered down upon the finished, the thoroughly known, safely classified and encased; the self a part of the time-frozen diorama that defines it. It is, among other things, a priggish fear of the mixed metaphor.

In the introduction to his interview with Norman Mailer, Christopher Hitchens displays his admiration for Mailer’s expression of the polar opposite understanding of the cultural role of the intellectual:

Hitchens: The phrase ‘culture is worth a little risk’ was uttered by Mailer in the early 1980s, after his literary protégé Jack Henry Abbott, author of In the Belly of the Beast, had been released from prison only to slay again. I always thought that the statement itself was more important than the calamitous context in which it was uttered.

While Mailer’s personal history, as well as his literary career, shows him to be unafraid of risk-taking, aware that one can often learn as much, or more, from one’s failures as from one’s successes, this does not mean that Mailer is unappreciative of that which is rife with traditional culture:

Mailer: Culture’s worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we’re all totalitarian beasts. I’d go as far as to say that it’s the only thing that keeps us from going totalitarian, given the new world of technology, which inspires us to be totalitarian. After all, what technology promises is that we can all be control freaks. That the world is ours to dominate. The fact that we no longer have any senses left after we’ve been working at a fluorescent-lit computer for six hours, that’s by-the-by. …And culture is more than just being able to get it on CD-ROM. Culture is going into a library, and finding an old book on an old shelf, and opening it, and it has the patina of the past and maybe hasn’t been taken out in five years, and that’s part of its virtue at this point. There’s a small communion that takes place between the book and yourself, and that’s what’s disappearing.

Mailer, in fact, refers to himself as a “left conservative,” about which more in a future post.

[On a personal note, as a bibliophile who spends more than a little time searching the stacks for esoteric literary gems, I am very much attuned to Mailer’s observation concerning the “communion” between the book and the reader. When I borrow an old, long-neglected volume from the library, I always check the back to see how much time has elapsed since it was last checked out. The longer it’s been, the more special I feel my personal relationship to that book to be.]

Readings: ...But Not Forgotten

When I got home from work last Friday, I found that my friend Jim—a guy you’ll probably never meet, as he steadfastly refuses to blog—had sent me via snail mail two essays which he had, years ago, carefully ripped out of magazines, or journals. One was an essay by Czeslaw Milosz that was published in Harper’s. The other, and the one concerning which I intend to write at least a couple of posts, was an interview conducted by Christopher Hitchens, with Norman Mailer.

The hard copy of the Mailer piece gave no indication of either its date, or its origin. From context, one could assume that it was pre-Millennium, and, thus, pre-9/11. I searched the internet and found it here. This would date it from 1997.

Tonight, as a teaser, I share with you Mailer on Bill Clinton:

Clinton’s very bright. His heart is as often in the right place as the wrong place. But there’s something about him that’s hopeless. Which is he’s not ready to die for a political idea. And what I mean by that is not that he’d die literally with his own flesh and blood, but that he’d lose his political career over an idea. He’s not going to do that, and so he’s going to die for the absence of a political ideal. And that’s his terrible weakness. I’ve said this before, but if I could be a sixteen-year-old French peasant girl named Joan of Arc, I’d go to him and say, ‘Dauphin, you must save America.’ He wouldn’t. He’d go back and forth, back and forth. Everything about him that’s good is wiped out by that fact, that he simply doesn’t have one last idea that, whatever else they take away from me, they can’t get that idea.

Does Mailer nail that, or what? As it turns out, it may well have come to pass that it is Hillary’s political career, more than his own, that is brought down by the Achilles’ heel so presciently described by Mailer. She has got the family curse, and he is running around America highlighting that fact, even as I write.

This may well be the crucial difference between Hillary and Barack Obama. Obama’s refusal to back down on such things as his support of his pastor, regardless of the political consequences, would surely have drawn Mailer’s praise. His latest alleged “gaff” concerning the “clinging” of “bitter” small-town losers in the global economy crap-shoot to “God and guns” by way of compensation is spot-on. But you can’t say that on television. Again, America may not be ready for Obama in Prime Time.

Reflections: Remembering Mailer

Back in November, 2007 I noted the passing of the great American writer, Norman Mailer. This morning, in my travels around cyberspace, I came upon this remarkable interview with Mailer, from five years ago. It is full of wisdom and insight into contemporary America, the human condition, politics, the Middle East, the war in Iraq, the implications of hegemony, religion, the evils of flourescent lighting, and much more.

To perhaps pique your interest in reading this long interview, I give you the excerpt below, which is Mailer's take on an observational refrain my own, to which I have frequently referred as cognitive dissonance:

A lot of Americans [in the aftermath of WWII] were very happy to be prosperous, but they also felt secretly guilty. Why? Because we are a Christian nation. The Judeo in Judeo-Christian is essentially a grace note. We are a Christian nation. And the idea, if you really are a Christian and a great many people in America at that point were significantly devout, was that you were not supposed to be all that rich. God didn’t want it. Jesus certainly didn’t. You were not supposed to pile up a lot of money. You were supposed to spend your life in reasonably altruistic acts. That was one half of the collective psyche. The other half: Beat everybody you are in a contest with because you’ve got to win. To a certain extent, and this is a cruel, but possibly an accurate remark, to be an American is to be an oxymoron. On the one hand, you are a good Christian, and on the other, you are viscerally combative. You are supposed to be macho and win. Jesus and Evel Knievel don’t necessarily consort too well in one psyche.

I hope that I can encourage anybody who has never read Mailer to do so now. I believe that he will be known to history as one of two or three definitional voices of the generation immediately preceding my own, and a major, if subliminal, influence on the generations thereafter.

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Mailer Photo: Take 2

Mailer's New York Times obituary offered a slide show that included this photo. I would have used it yesterday, if I had seen it on time:



Who says that there's no hope for Jews and Muslims to get together, eh?

Rodney King, call your office.

NORMAN MAILER, R.I.P.

I have just read that Norman Mailer has died. In my estimation, he was a giant of American letters. As I am not fit to lace up Mailer's boxing gloves, I will leave it to others more capable than I to eulogize the man: the mensch. I will say, however, that if there was a rush this year to award the Nobel Prize for Literature one step ahead of the Grim Reaper, then the Nobel committee fucked up, big time. Doris Lessing, talented as she is, wouldn't make a patch on Norman Mailer's ass.

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