Norman Mailer by Robert Merrill (review)

BOOK REVIEWS317 Robert Merrill, Norman Mailer. Boston: Twayne, 1978. 169 p. Brief but informative, this sympathetic treatment aims to assess Mailer as literary artist. Merrill claims this has not yet been done because critics have been too interested in Mailer's ideas and his public image. Merrill's focus is on "the aesthetic structure of Mailer's individual works." He is interested above all in unity and coherence, believing that Mailer's books "succeed or fail in terms of their aesthetic form." This formalistic yardstick is applied throughout. What measures up satisfactorily ? The Naked and the Dead, The Deer Park, The Armies of the Night, and some selected essays. Although Merrill is a competent formalistic critic, he fails to avoid some of the pitfalls of that approach. For example, he claims too often that the work he is treating has "much greater unity than anyone has yet acknowledged." This is the standard hype in articles of aspiring scholars who ingeniously uncover unifying patterns hitherto overlooked. This claim to finding something everybody else missed is generally absent from the writing of seasoned scholars, who are humbly aware that the most significant unifying devices do not go totally overlooked. Merrill's assertion that the artful narrative strategy in Armies of the Night has been ignored seems overstated, especially considering that the book won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. The formalist compulsion is strong in Merrill. Just after stating that Advertisements for Myself contains a miscellaneous assortment of material, much of it "unmistakably dull and inherently valueless" — stories written in college, stories he couldn't previously publish, undeveloped essays, interviews, political essays, poetry, plays, fragments — he says, "The first question about this book must be whether it has any artistic unity whatsoever." Why must this be the first question? In fact, why must it be asked at all? It is a question appropriate enough for Mailer's novels, but seems irrelevant applied to his miscellanies. Merrill's approach is simply too narrow for his subject. This is obvious in his treatment of Mailer's journalism. He refuses to acknowledge Mailer's success as a journalist because he always measures how the journalism succeeds or fails in aesthetic form and strategy. For example, in Miami and the Siege of Chicago, the author's "perfunctory development of his own activities deprives his work of an organizing principle significantly different from that of 'pure'journalism." In treating Of a Fire on the Moon, he restricts his remarks to "Mailer's failure to transcend the narrative structure of a report." It would be better to concede that in some cases Mailer was writing journalism and not unified and coherent works of art. Mailer himself acknowledges this. As interesting as it is to be instructed concerning the artistic structure of Mailer 's works (most of which by Merrill's own admission lack successful aesthetic unity), the more important questions have to do with his unusual personality, his ideas, the accuracy and value of his reporting on the American scene, and his prophetic stance as social and cultural commentator. STEPHEN L. TANNER Brigham Young University ...