Turner: Deep in the American dream Continued from page one els, we must deplore the author's slips and miscues. If I am right in thinking them irrelevant, then those who bring up -- if only to praise - the novel's truth and precision have succeeded in cloud- ing the true issues. Styron's own characterization of his work, "a meditation on his- tory," seems no better a formu- lation. Here he meant only that his fourth novel was relevant to our own age - as Wilfrid Sheed in (The New York Times Book Re- view of Oct. 8, 1967) shrewdly guessed when he moved to amend Styron's phrase to "a meditation upon the daily papers." Do the same forces which moved Nat Turner also move Dr. King - or Stokely Carmichael, or Elijah Mu- hammad? Is the civil rights movement in the process of turn- ing into Nat's bloodbath? These are fascinating questions - it would be vain to deny it. Again, though, I doubt their relevance. Every novel that speaks to us at all, though it speak, like Don Quixote, across barriers of lan- guage and culture and time, tells us of ourselves: our minds, our hearts, our ways of structuring the world. Is every novel perti- nent to these times which deals, any old how, with Negroes or The Bomb or alienation? Shall we praise an author for his choice of subject-matter? The Confessions of Nat Turner is indeed pertinent to Now, but perhaps we should measure this quality by the skill with which Styron illuminates his chosen fraction of the human tragedy. And Nat Turner is in fact a tragic figure. Part of his tragedy arises from his having been born a slave; this is a tragedy of wasted potential, the sort of tragic sense which informs Macbeth. It is impossible to read The Confes- sions without getting a notion of Turner's stature and the fatal dis- parity between his grandeur and the pettiness of his environment; the great intellectual power put to work chopping wood and build- ing machines; the enormous libi- do dammed up; the spiritual ener- gy of a Luther finding release in the conversion of pariahs. But en- ergy, of whatever sort, will find an outlet: such are the laws of human physics. And so Turner must move inexorably to his end, his creative force turned to des- truction, his charisma to fanati- cism, his intelligence to the for- mation of plans for mass murder. The tragedy, in a way, is society's-for it is drive like Nat Turner's that builds civilization, so that it is always pitiable and t e r r i ble to see .such drive, hemmed about by the social or- der, returning to destroy. But there is another, more personal tragedy. To a religious man, to a saintly man, mere death-even ignominious death on the gallows -cannot be tragic. If a man is in the grace of God, the failure of his plans is a testing, his bodily des- truction a martyrdom. So Nat Turner's tragedy must involve not failure or death, but exclusion from grace. And for God to depart there must have been an earlier close- ness, a sense of intimacy: God had spoken to me many times and had surely guided my destiny ... He had spoken to me two words, and always these words alone ... It was through these words that I was strengthened and that I made my judgments, absorbing from them a secret wisdom which allowed me to set forth purposefully to do what I conceived as His will, in whatever mission, whether that of bloodshed or baptism or preaching or charity .. . He was never far off and ... when- ever I called He would answer - as He did for the first time on that cold day ... A cold winter wind breathed suddenly across the roof of the woods. This is the first time God speaks to Nat Turner, but it is not the last. Nor, as Turner implies, are his messages always those two words marking his presence and special favor. Upon one oc- casion-during a five-day fast in the woods-Turner receives a vi- sion of war between a black an- gel and a white, a scene which convinces him of his destiny as the sword of God the Avenger. So Nat walks with God all dur- ing the planning and the first stages of the insurrection. But on the morning of the third day, after the first indications have been seen that the revolt will fail, God slips away from Nat Turner: And I lingered there in the early morning and felt as alone and as forsaken as I had ever felt since I had learned God's name ... And I thought: maybe in this anguish of mine God is trying to tell me some- thing. Maybe in His seeming absence He is asking me to consider some- thing I had not thought or known of before .. . For surely God in his wis- dom and majesty would not ordain a mission like mine and then when I was vanquished allow my soul to be abandoned, to be cast away into some bottomless pit as if it were a miserable vapor or smoke. Surely by this silence and absence He is giving me greater sign than any I have ever known. But the significance of the sign escapes Nat, and he waits in Mailer: Mysterious prophet of the 'Age of Interruptions' Continued on page eleven Why Are We in Vietnam? by Norman Mailer. G. P. Putnam's Sons. $4.95. Cannibals and Christians, by Norman Mailer. Dell Publishing Co., $.95. by Andrei Laszlo Books today are stuffed with statements and arguments which purport to show that the human situation is hopeless. Overex- posure to such nihilistic sem- antics builds up a curious resist- ance to them; one simply be- comes bored. Many of us have arrived at ennui after a journey through rough terrain, from Cam- us' Sisyphus to Hesse's Joseph Knecht, from thermodynamics to nuclear holocaust. This journey in the realm of "meaningful meaninglessness," instead o f making us reason and attempt to ameliorate that which we still can, makes us withdraw into our own personal world and hardens our deception about ourselves and reality. It can lead to a state of what is fashionably called "total alienation," where the only way to achieve any meaning is to in- troduce alien chemicals into our bloodstreams, and where one's state of mind is such that any further attempt to illuminate real- ity is greeted with laughter. The core of our being is not easily reached, for the shield of self-deception has grown mighty thick, but on the rare occasions when our existence is touched, it really hurts. This is the effect Norman Mailer achieves in his latest two books, Cannibals and Christians and Why Are We in Vietnam? The former is in itself brilliant; the latter, at first, seems to make no sense at all. At first glance, one suspects that Mailer's pattern of a great journalistic book (The Presidential Papers) followed by a 1 o u s y novel (An American Dream) is repeating itself here. Yet once the implications of Can- n i b a l s and Christians are grasped, the reality of Why Are We in Vietnam? seems-to take on penetrating life of its own. The combini tion of the two is strong and shrewd enough to sneak by war in art to literatt Mail4 in the though the su subteri rifying decide as wit will s wrong. In 0] er asks better and wo We In On as even a scatolo do wit the att expedi Mount een-yea who h hanize his fati One why d book? in the of Car qualiti the fi writter The n road t metap Argun create intensi ity of illumii In C states: war in an ur war t in a n ery h( ers." I of the from c pictur tion's is at there book, categc the shield of self-deception, and thus pierce it. Cannibals and Christians is a collection of stories, essays, poe- try, book reviews, and the like divided into four parts (Lambs, Lions, Respites, and Arena), all brought to a conclusion by a rath- er theatrical story about the end of the world. Although the ar- rangement seems somewhat arbi- trary, there is a sense of continu- ity provided by the introductory s e c t i o n s called "arguments," which express certain obsessions, worries, and images that haunt Mailer's consciousness. The Ar- gument explores the question whether the curse is on the world, or on oneself. Does the world get better, no matter how - getting better and worse as part of the same process - or does the world get better in spite of the fact that it's getting worse, and are we approaching the time when an apocalypse will come in the night? This book is- a collection of at- tempts to deal with mysteries, and suggests that there is an an- swer to be found, or a clue. It is a search for the metaphor that can express the complete reality around us, the reality which is now in the Age of Interruption, and is suffering from a plague. The pieces explore various as- pects of this reality, through opin- ions coming out of passion, rath- er than deliberation, that range from modern architecture to the October, 1967 . CHICAGO LI 10 " CHICAGO LITERARY REVIEW " October, 1967 A& Ahk "- I A IL -.1. . r r A i