Taken from The New Statesman 29 September 1961
The American writer Norman Mailer, who died on 10 November, visited Britain in 1961 to launch his book, Advertisements for Myself. He was interviewed for the New Statesman by the philosopher Richard Wollheim.
In the resulting question-and-answer session, Mailer revealed himself to be an individualistic hellraiser with an alarming taste for violence, a hip philosophy of physical action and more ego than id.
Selected by Robert Taylor
Norman Mailer: What is a free act? It's an act for which there are no guides, when one has to make a moral judgement and there's no preparation for it because the life of the day has become more complex than the morality that covers it. Morality is a quartermaster corps bringing up supplies to starving soldiers. So the hipster acts and after he acts, he feels that it was either good or not good. He has a sensation that tells him which it was. Now if the hipster always obeys this sensation, then he follows his unconscious, he acts on the basis of his id. He becomes the creature of the id.
Richard Wollheim: But how do you get from the idea of the free act to that of a way of life flowing directly from the unconscious? Why shouldn't we identify the free act with the act that results from arbitrary choice?
Mailer: That's the Sartrean idea, isn't it? Well, I reject Sartre. I don't reject him entirely, because I've not read him entirely. But I think that a Sartrean logic can work psychologically for very few people. Violence must be violence for which full responsibility is accepted, and that's rare today. Today we have the violence of the man who won't look his victim in the face. Take Eichmann. If he had killed 500,000 people with his bare hands, he would have been a monster, but a heroic monster. He'd have gained our unconscious respect. He'd have worn the scar of his own moral wound.
I think there are two anxieties. The first comes because one contains more hatred than one can express, and one's afraid that it will come out; and there's another that comes precisely when you release it, because when you do, there are consequences.
I know it's not easy to release the id. Incidentally I don't like the word "id". In America we have a better word: "it". You know, "get with it". But I don't see the real choice as one between violence and non-violence. It's rather between the violence of the individual and collective violence.
I believe there is a way in which a man's personality can die before his time, and that is worse than being killed in a concentration camp because - and this is where I am optimistic - if a man is killed in some most unjust way, then this will be taken account of in eternity; but if one's death isn't dramatic, if one is extinguished day by day by the society in which one lives, then one loses one's chance of eternity.
I wouldn't like to say that I'm no longer a Marxist - I don't like the connotations of saying it. And since I happen to have got more from Marx than from anyone else I've ever read, I wouldn't want to jettison Grandfather. But I'm not orthodox. I don't believe that capitalist exploitation can be explained entirely in terms like surplus value. I think that Marxism revisited would have to take into account something else that goes much deeper. Deeper than the love of property is the fear of the past, the fear of the vitality of the lower classes, the fear that if all men were to walk the earth equal, the upper classes would not long survive.
What separates hip from aestheticism is that it's not a man living in a country house, surrounding himself with the most beautiful works of art, receiving only those people with manners sufficiently attuned to his, and savouring every moment of it. Hip is living a little like a hero in a Hollywood Western. It's aestheticism with danger added.
Wollheim: Is it really beyond us to conceive of, or even bring about, a society in which, though dissent will still be necessary, protest won't, at least in this total form?
Mailer: This depends on whether one thinks a society can solve its problems rationally. If one thinks it can, then hip will go nowhere. But if one thinks it can't, and that barbarism is closer, and that violence is in the seed, then at least hip introduces the notion of art into barbarity.
If anything is to come of socialism, the existential content will have to be changed altogether. I've never really been a socialist, but I've always thought, "Better socialism than anything else - and what else is there?" The trouble with socialists, I don't know about English socialists, but the trouble with American socialists - and some of my best friends are socialists - is that they're prigs. They have very often failed to lead interesting lives. No, socialism isn't terribly interesting if it means looking after the happiness of other people for them. And it doesn't solve the real problem. Socialism has never considered that part of the establishment that puts emphasis on courage, on manners, on physical graces, on wit. I'd be much more excited about socialism if it contained the notion of the artist-warrior - and I don't mean myself by that.
Wollheim: And psychoanalysis has nothing to say on the subject?
Mailer: I see it as an instrument of conformity. Psychoanalysts are sedentary middle-class people, and I see no reason to give the universe over to sedentary middle-class people. In America now there's a new establishment. It's impossible for anyone now to do anything individual without being crucified in those very mediocre and dreary salons that pop up like mushrooms all over New York. I've seen the city dying over the past ten years. There's a psychic poverty in the city today, perhaps in the whole country.
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