177 - Three American Moralists: Mailer, Bellow, Trilling

Three American Moralists: Mailer, Bellow, Trilling
By Nathan A. Scott, Jr.
Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973. 230 pp. $6.95.

As the news media constantly remind us, whether speaking of emergent nation-states, international hijackings, or the Symbionese Liberation Army, ours is an age of rampant apocalypticism. The decline of culture Christianity, say Rosemary Ruether and others, has loosened the church's hold on the eschatological vocabulary itself, and now the apocalyptic imagination is at work once more where it was always most at home, among the poor, the hungry, and the disenfranchised. Therefore, we can expect more, not fewer, reverberations of end-time threat and promise from the Third World, the ghetto, and other pockets of militancy with the global culture.

Scott deplores such frenzied scannings of the horizon, which attempt to rush us toward some New Jerusalem, as historical cop-outs and phony solutions. What they betoken, he says, is a collapse of nerve in the face of the stringent options which have always belonged to man. He holds the three authors who are the objects of examination in this book in high esteem precisely because they regard the human condition with a steady eye and refuse to join the stampede to cheap salvation. They have systematically managed to write with courage about courage, depicting the anomie and nihilism of the times without succumbing to them. It is for this that Scott dubs them "public moralists"-for expressing large confidence in humanity during the cliff-hangingest episode of its long and vicissitudinous history.

The essay on Norman Mailer is especially brilliant for the way it appreciates his "stunning multifariousness of stratagem" and "unexampled versatility of performance" and beholds running through the diverse terrain of his novels and parajournalism (from The Naked and the Dead and Barbary Shore to The Armies of the Night and Why Are We in Vietnam?) a singular commitment to fronting and exposing the mad death of the national moral substance. The key, says Scott, lies in the now famous essay on "The White Negro" published in Dissent in 1957, in which Mailer declared hipsterism, living without roots and

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fear in the face of both nuclear and social holocaust, to be the only game tactic for survival in our time-not fleeing from the abyss but leaping into it. By carefully annotating the progress of this theme throughout the Mailer corpus, Scott manages even to rehabilitate the significance of some of Mailer's most severely criticized writings, including An American Dream, whose protagonist Stephen Rojack fits the Mailerian pattern of "psychic outlaw" in resistance against the totalitarianism of his sick culture. Thus Mailer runs true to Scott's comparison in calling him "Our Whitman"; his neo-barbaric yawp paces the entire gamut of American society and politics, protesting assumptions gone awry and bargaining for a future more honest and responsive to human need than the present.

Scott detects and elaborates upon a similar thread uniting most of Saul Bellow's fiction, especially Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler's Planet. It is not, he says, the fragmentedness and alienation of the characters, which so readily identify Bellow with the Underground Man genre from Dostoevsky to Kafka and Ellison, but the quiet appearance, when his personae cease to struggle against the fatefullness of their situations, of a kind of grace revealing the "infinitely poignant fullness and beauty of the very miracle of life itself." Again, as in the essay on Mailer, Scott performs a redemptive mission, pursuing this theme of sola gratia to the eventual rescue of such neglected or puzzling works as The Victim and Henderson the Rain King.

If the essay on Lionel Trilling, which concludes the book, proves the least compelling of the three, it is probably because critics are inevitably less exciting objects of criticism than the novelists and poets they write about. But there is justification for its being included in the third position, for Trilling not only produced a novel (The Middle of the Journey) but has clung, as Mailer and Bellow have, to a belief in man despite a continuously rigid confrontation with the meanness and difficulty of the human situation. I do not share Scott's estimate of the dramatic vitality of The Middle of the Journey, but I readily join him in applauding the resoluteness with which Trilling in The Liberal Imagination, The Opposing Self, and Beyond Culture has refused to practice the oversimplification of either liberals or conservatives by collapsing the contradictions and complexities of life and ignoring their ubiquitous interaction.

The Trilling essay is especially interesting in view of the obvious influence which Trilling has exercised on Scott himself, particularly in the business of seeing literary situations as cultural situations requiring far more of the critic than an investigation of the work itself-requiring, in fact, an almost exhaustive acquaintance with all the human sciences, both technical and speculative. And it is just at this point that Scott begs more of Trilling than he has yet provided, by demanding of him an admission of the spiritual dimension of existence

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where Trilling has insistently held to a more biological dimension as explanation for the toughness and resilience of the human psyche. In doing this, Scott confronts Trilling with his own other dominant mentor, Reinhold Niebuhr, who also refused oversimplification, including the reduction of life to mere anthropology.

Scott is an inestimably important critic, and this is one of his finer books. One may quarrel with occasional judgments or rhetorical usages (I am sometimes bothered by the intrusion of non-idiomatic foreign phrases which add little to the precision or the rhythm of the text), but Scott's achievement is, finally, prodigious. His writing, on the whole, is quite exceptional, exhibiting, in his own description of Mailer, an "astonishing prodigality" of gifts. And his witness to the radical spirituality at the heart of our most thoroughly secular literature continues to be one of the most vital and refreshing phenomena in contemporary theology. He is, as he says of Bellow, not merely a writer of speculative prose, but a voice; and not just any voice, but the vox humana et angelica.

John Killinger
Vanderbilt Divinity School
Nashville, Tennessee