But the years after The Naked and the Dead left him flailing, and he spent more time making promises of great novels to come than he did actually writing them.
Had Mailer remained true to his early methods, he might well have become America’s last great naturalist (an achievement probably best claimed by Mailer’s longtime friend and competitor James Jones). Out of them will come a few as themselves and a half dozen more as synthetics of several.” Then he would work out “their relation & attitude toward each of the other men”-an exercise that promised to “lay bare the many as yet unposed problems” and “generate story business.” The war (and life in general) was, for Mailer, what the pit is for a miner or a field is for a farmer-a place to gather what was valuable and put it to proper use. He wrote his first wife, Beatrice, in November 1945, that he planned “to list the names of every man I can remember clearly in the Army-there should be several hundred. Well before he experienced war firsthand, Mailer was preparing to write about it and almost every letter he wrote during his service was designed to record, and organize, his raw experience into an eventual novel. Published when Mailer was 25 years old, The Naked and the Dead remains his greatest fictional achievement-and in honor of Mailer’s centennial this year, Library of America has reissued a new hardback edition along with a new selection of his letters from 1945 to 1946. His realization is Mailer at his most cynical (and throughout his life, Mailer could be very cynical): The only soldiers who suffer disappointment in The Naked and the Dead are those who believe that the world is presided over by noble forces-America, God, or whatever general happens to be commanding them.
Valsen is a young man who looks at war as a way to get away from a country that never made a home for him, only to find military life as brutal as the Montana mining town where he was raised. “There damn sure ain’t anything special about a man if he can smell as bad as he does when he’s dead,” Red Valsen reflects in Norman Mailer’s 1948 novel The Naked and the Dead.
0 kommentar(er)
