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44 Chapter Two THE APOCALYPTIC HIPSTER “The White Negro” and Norman Mailer’s Achievement of Style Robert Penn Warren wrote out of a southern tradition, treasured the distinctiveness of the South, and sought, throughout his literary career, to reconcile the contradictions between southern deed and the American creed. Warren considered himself an academic as well as a writer, serving on the faculty of various colleges and universities throughout his career. Norman Mailer was, in many ways, the antithesis of Robert Penn Warren . Mailer rejected conventional schools of thought, sought to provoke as much as he did to enlighten, and avoided the staid responsibilities of the academy. Mailer’s fascination with race in the 1950s derived not from lived experience but from his study of the media accounts of the Montgomery bus boycott. From this consideration, Mailer concluded that white Americans could regain the moral standing they had lost during World War II by identifying with Black Americans. This identification would, Mailer felt, radicalize American innocence by aligning exceptionalism with a life that demanded meaningful action instead of conformity. Mailer arrived at this point by linking racial protest and American innocence with his negotiations with his own ethnic identity as he sought to transform himself into an American archetype, a process that intensified after the publication of his first novel. Early success is a curious thing for a writer to experience, especially in the United States during that fifty-year period in the twentieth century when producing a best-selling first novel granted celebrity as well as wealth. Fame can hinder an author, for writing is a solitary vocation, and even the most socially integrated writer feels some measure of isolation while crafting a novel or collection of poetry. Ironically, success often deepens that sense of isolation, for, as Norman Mailer observed, as “a node in a new electronic landscape of celebrity, personality and "The White Negro" and Mailer's Achievement of Style 45 status, [the newly successful writer] has been moved from the audience to the stage.”1 Some writers consider their newfound notoriety liberating and continue to create their art secure in the knowledge that they have earned a place in the literary market. Other writers seem intimidated by the sensation their breakthrough novel occasions, and find themselves either desperate to duplicate that achievement or determined to preserve their authenticity as a struggling artist by challenging their public with a narrative designed to be as difficult as possible. Some, like Harper Lee, simply abandon their literary careers altogether.2 Norman Mailer, whose debut novel, The Naked and the Dead, was arguably the most successful of the period immediately following World War II, distinguished himself by acting upon each of these impulses before the protests of the civil rights movement led him to the insight that would shape the bulk of his career. The iconoclastic Mailer is simultaneously one of the most idealistic and one of the most cynical writers in the post–World War II period. In Advertisements for Myself (1959), his autobiographical review of his literary career to date, Mailer reports that “before I was seventeen I had formed the desire to be a major writer.”3 Whether this claim serves as a self-fulfilling recollection or is an accurate representation of his adolescent desires, Mailer pursued this goal when he matriculated to Harvard by participating in various literary activities, though he was nominally an engineering major. While he flourished there, when Mailer arrived at Harvard from his Jewish enclave in Brooklyn he found himself on the margins for the first time. According to Adele Morales Mailer, Norman’s second wife, “[H]e . . . felt like a fish out of water [at Harvard]. It was probably a combination of his family not having a lot of money and being Jewish.”4 Mailer recognized during his senior year at Harvard that there would be great demand in the literary marketplace for fiction about the war, and he volunteered for the army after graduating so that he could acquire the material he needed for such a novel. Mailer’s experiences in the army reinforced his outsider status, this time not because of religious or class differences. Mailer discovered that, despite his intellect and Ivy League education, “when it came to taking care of myself, I had little to offer next to the practical sense of an illiterate sharecropper ” (91). This is an important moment for Mailer, because it taught him that outsider status is not...

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