THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS Friday, July 5, 1985 BOOKS Mailer's Jewish Attitude Is Rebellion Against Mom LEAPIN LIZARDS BY JOSEPH COHEN We almost forgot to subscribe to the Jewish News, Mom! Special to The Jewish News In a 1983 interview with Clive Sinclair, the London Jewish Chronicle's literary editor, Nor- man Mailer said, "I have always felt as if I am absolutely Jewish. It's never been a theme in my life that maybe I can put this under the carpet and people can forget about it or anything of that sort. I think the experience of the con- centration camps finally wiped out that possibility." On its face this remark could almost be regarded as a positive affirmation of a Jewish connec- tion. But it's hardly that. All his professional life Mailer has knocked himself out trying to put his Jewishness "under the car- pet." A long time ago he said in his frequently employed third-person Norman Mailer: • Anti-mama? persona that he rejected out of hand "the one personality he found absolutely unsupportable — the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn. Something in his adenoids gave it away — he had the softness of a man early accus- tomed to mother-love." The softness and the mother- love come through strongly in Peter Manso's remarkably engrossing Mailer: His Life and Times (Simon and Schuster). In- deed, this mammoth (over 700 pages), perhaps monstrous, biog- raphical collection of interspers- ing oral histories, mingling over 200 voices, some filled with love, some with hate, many ambiva- lent, narcissistic, extroverted, a few of them rational and objec- tive, others almost always emo- tional, with too many of them in- cessantly scatological, is, in my opinion, dominated by the singu- lar utterances of Fanny Schneider Mailer, the author's formidable mother, She speaks neither at length nor often, but her every comment is a priceless, informative gem in the loving suffocation of a male child. Hers is the devastating image of a ws11•ntantioned but tunnel- blinded Orendel's dam, a demon-dragon who emerges from the murky bog,as circumstances require to champion this offspr. ins who, in her eyes, on do no wrong, for which set ha could be excused from anything to ad- vacating violence to'actually *tabbing a wife. While Philip Rath was busy in- venting *phis Portnoy, Fanny Mailer was already living Sophie's life to the hilt and be- yond. But Sophie Portnoy doesn't ex- plain all of Fanny Mailer's life. There is a larger pattern discer- nible. It is one wherein a strong woman marries a weaker man and subsequently gives birth to a son upon whose shoulders falls the responsibility of achieving the triumph in the world of which the father has proved himself in- capable. I have no doubt that this pattern explains a number of Mailer's obsessions, with power and its abuses, with homosexual- ity and sodomy, and with rebel- lion, for no one can keep from reacting against constantly- applied heat from a madonna turned dynamo. And dynamo Fanny Mailer was. She ran the family business, a fuel delivery service, shunting aside her husband Barney when he could neither manage it nor overcome his gambling habit. Mailer paid his father's gambling debts for years. Running the business with one hand, she re- ared a son and a daughter with the other one, impressing upon Norman from his earliest years that he was. not only special but exceptional, a genius. She was a true-blue, red-hot Jewish mama, and in the end, the lullabies she belted out to him were, in a sense, an executioner's song. Obviously, that wasn't what she intended, but that's what resulted. More sinister than Mailer's re- jection of Jewishness is his out- right repudiation of Jewish ethi- cal values. To counter Jewish softness, or victimization, Mailer turned himself into an over- compensating public brawler. The number of fist-fights de- scribed in the oral histories is legion. His symbolic char- acterization of the existentialist, violence-prone hipster in the notorious essay The White Negro (1957), in which he appears to condone the murder of a candy- store owner by two 18-year-old thugs, arguing an implicit cour- age in their actions, is an open assault upon and an affront to the sense of human decency and the sacrednegs of life that together constitute the motivating force behind Jewish morality. Nonetheless, his talents have always been vitiated by his loath- ing for his origins and his deter- mination to escape them, For him "Jewish" corrupts, and absolute "Jewish" corrupts absolutely. This inversion of values, far from freeing him from his past, has turned him as a person into a boor and a bore. Consequently, the oral his- tories confirm the wasting of his gifts and the absence on his part of any mensalichlteit, Of course, we don't need a 100-page book to tell us that. However, Mailer has been central to the American ex- perience since the end of 'World War II, and the insights the biog- raphy provides into the cultural history of the recent past are as valuable as Mailer's l ife-story is deposit* Copyright 1956, daPepb Colon. MOW The JEWISH NEWS covers the events from the Mideast to the Midwest. Now, with our new T-shht, we even cover our readers! foribeaplerimivolponompoogy n top, Plow clip coupon and mail to: JEWISH NEWS TMIRT ztiosiiksameniatisnIAlson014 *NO poka. 20300 CIVIC CENTER AR., SUITE 240 p riltibeal4 411f i 60, joar Cm, SOUTHFIELD, klicjuGAN 480744138 rot jutemilwt may oriiiiiii44111401 enlY n AMg }OIL Aim Ow mak, Maw ADLOirbb mom '1121 A1400 , 14 , ciTY 'TAIT-- --ZIP piro •129 Out of Stote •$23 ForOsi '160 fkookul APP4T44) , 04901•T611• 41114HAIIOF 41040410, f,41141)01. tAINIJIMAR AP AMPFAIWAMMIMPFArCIFJPAPAPIO WAWA , APP WAIFS W' NIP MAK. Mr 1. AW AW Sr "I 69