Mind of an Outlaw Read Free Page A

at different times because they are deeply conflicted—a tension that reveals itself as existential angst. Mailer was keenly aware of the rich texture of contradictions that make up human beliefs but believed that these contradictions offer considerable flexibility in one’s choices throughout life. In posing these possibilities, Mailer promotes a sensibility that recognizes the importance of divergent thought and behavior.
    Mailer’s intellectual opponents, who included James Baldwin; Norman Podhoretz; William F. Buckley, Jr.; Gore Vidal; and Irving Howe; did not always acknowledge the suppleness of the Mailer mind, but his debates with others (and with himself) for more than six decades reveal a man fully capable of being persuaded. Mailer’s detractors routinely disagreed, oftentimes with exceptional fervor, with his interpretation of events and the inferences he drew from those interpretations. Above all else,Mailer had a mind guided by reason. His well-known political self-designation (often taken as oxymoronic) was “left conservative,” and Mailer’s unwillingness to entrench himself in hard-and-fast alliances is demonstrated by this early identification in “A Credo for the Living”: “I feel myself to the left of the Progressive Party and to the right of the Communist Party.” This sentiment from the 1940s echoes a later Mailer quotation that provides a glimpse into his sense of the complexities of the fierce, unceasing political struggle of his time: “It may yet take an alchemy of Left and Right to confound the corporate center.” Mailer’s stances are necessarily fluid and constantly under pressure from within for critical reconsideration, reformulation, and rearticulation, which is where the inevitable inconsistency comes in.
    This inconsistency—a valuable, fascinating by-product of the forces at work within Mailer’s intellectual matrix—is reflected in his shifting attitude toward homosexuality. In “The Homosexual Villain,” Mailer describes his early representations of homosexuality: “I have been as guilty as any contemporary novelist in attributing unpleasant, ridiculous, or sinister connotations to the homosexual (or more accurately, bisexual) characters in my novels.” Mailer had earlier felt that “there was an intrinsic relation between homosexuality and ‘evil,’ ” and does not spare himself from tough criticism as he accuses himself of bigotry: “I had been acting as a bigot in this matter, and ‘bigot’ was one word I did not enjoy applying to myself. With that came the realization I had been closing myself off from understanding a very large part of life.” Mailer was willing to change his mind publicly when warranted, no matter the consequences to perceptions of his personal consistency.
    This ability to adjust his beliefs continually reminds the reader of the ethical texture of Mailer’s thinking. His ethos is strategically important because it requires the reader to be aware of his or her own ethical stance on issues. If a reader is in conflict with Mailer’s positions, he or she shares an obligation with Mailer to base any resistance on ethics. Mailer’s writing, throughout his career, is founded upon considerations of what is “right” under the present circumstances. Further, Mailer subscribed to Fitzgerald’sbelief that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” For Mailer, contrariety was a necessary condition of any intellectual activity, whether thinking, speaking, or writing; it is a catalyst for debate as well as lubrication for honest thinking and writing. Mailer well understood the importance of paying attention to the machinery of discourse. When he assumed contrary positions, as he did throughout his life, he knew that one of its effects would be to enrich the debate. This sensibility is most evident in Mailer’s engagement with