[To] write history in Mailer's style requires even more strenuous efforts with language than does the writing of a novel or a play. Having more claims to preexistent forms of reality than novels do, history will give up the shape it has assumed to some other shape only under enormous stylistic (or scholarly) pressure. In the absence of such pressure, we're left to contemplate only the failure of the efforts to exert it, to study the drama of confrontation between a doughty self and resistant historical forces. (p. 168)

His books are about Mailer, to be sure, about the man as he writes history as well as about the man who tried to participate in its making. But they are meant to reveal the true nature of the historical events and issues with which he has involved himself. Similarly, while his metaphors do reveal the workings of his mind, in its probing, contradictory, fluid movement, they also, he would insist, expose the reality of America. He'll settle for nothing less. It's a heroic ambition, but except in the special circumstances of Armies, where the nature of his participation in events is beautifully synchronized with his writing about them, the ambition is seldom achieved. Mailer is more often than not the overreacher of his times.

His metaphoric and melodramatic versions of society and history are of course full of revelations; they tell us more than would a Mailer gone sane and sedate…. There is nothing more seductively entrapping than a repetitive commitment to one's own inventions. It is not the weak, but rather the exceptionally strong writer, a Mailer or a Faulkner or a Hemingway, who finds himself eventually constrained by the persuasiveness of his own fictions, his own metaphors, his own stylistic manners. These come to dominate his mind, to tether the imagination far more than the "reality" they were meant to displace.

Of a Fire on the Moon suffers precisely because he has come to believe so staunchly in the orthodoxy of what he has already written, to believe so literally in his own metaphors, and in the efficacy of his peculiar management of them. They are almost invariably laid down in pairs, for example, in a dualism, like "mystery" and "technology." Each side is imagined tied to the other in a continual struggle. As a consequence, these tensed pairings express for him the schizophrenia he finds in the country and, as a responsible part of it, in himself. But they do much more than that: their interaction is a stay against the complete disruption of the American community and of communication among its parts. In this respect, as in others, Mailer's style is a conservative rather than a radical instrument. The induced give-and-take between the factions is a necessary alternative to a more dreadful possibility: a drawing apart of the factions, the end of any dialectical relationship between them. The consequences would be either the one-dimensionality which is the condition predicted for us in Of a Fire on the Moon, or revolution, the dread eventuality in Armies. Revolution for Mailer would mean that he could no longer live within his dualisms, no longer partake of the characteristics of both sides; he would have to opt for a fragment of the country and of himself, and in the choice would be final madness. This commitment to necessary oppositions, both as a form of writing and as a form of society, has so far been given its most eloquent expression in Armies where the language shuttles back and forth over the various conflicting elements, political and stylistic, with almost unflagging assurance—but in the moon book the shuttling becomes mechanical. (pp. 168-69)

Perhaps more important than odors to Mailer as a writer is the possible demise of the verbal equivalent of odors, blasphemies and dirty words. Since World War II, obscenity has lost those enlivening powers that Mailer wistfully remembers in Armies as part of the language of his buddies…. (p. 170)

Making it one of the most anxiously, sadly patriotic books in our literature, Mailer's perplexities in Armies are as culturally and stylistically rewarding to his writing as are any of the comparable perplexities of Yeats.

Yet roughly the same position operates to his disadvantage in Of a Fire on the Moon, which is, I think, a quite messy performance. Everything he wrote before made it likely that he would have to write about the moon shot; but what was not required of him was that he meet the challenge with techniques used in earlier and lesser confrontations. The landing on the moon raised for him an old question: what will finally be left to the literary imagination by the exploitations of science? In combination with every political, financial, and industrial institution in America, science has empowered technology to the point where it can invade the very symbol of romance and dream. Such big words, such a tried issue—it's really a factitious and phoney issue, I suspect. The real issue is how well it, like any myth or fiction, can be explored, especially by a writer who has already locked himself into those metaphors, those dualisms, those large turns of mind which dictated that this was the question he would want to ask.

It's to the point that the best parts of the book are the ones most freed of Mailer's larger ambitions. Some part of him seemingly wants less to reinstate magic and romance than, deeply, to get away from the lure of them, like Rojack at the end of An American Dream who "wanted to be free of magic, the tongue of the Devil, the dread of the Lord … to be some sort of rational man again, nailed tight to details." His most impressive performances are descriptive ones, which isn't to join the tiresome chorus of those who step away from the difficulties of his achievement by saying that he is a great journalist and a lesser novelist. The distinction, not much good to begin with, is trivializing in the case of a writer who reveals here a genius for even the quickest characterizations …, for Proustian social observation…. And he is sometimes close to Lawrence in his capacity for imaginative drifts and extensions, all the while being moved forward by what seem to be the accidental associations of language. Not in his intellectual superstructurings, but in these more open evidences of his powers as a writer is assurance enough that the Machine has not yet collapsed the language or stilled the imagination. His magnificent description, the product of intense research, of the cratered face of the moon excels anything made available in words or pictures by the machined men of the Apollo flights.

The book is messed up by ambitions in excess of what is done brilliantly. Too much of it is put on loan to one dualism or another: technology and intuition, the Sanitary-Lobe and the Wild-Lobe nesting together in every American, technological reality and the reality of death, Von Braun as a man of opposites, NASA as having in it the sound of Nazi even though technology and Nazism may be inimical to one another, the space program as insane or noble, "a search for the good, or the agent of diabolisms yet unglimpsed." On and on it goes…. Old ways of facing new problems produce old questions and answers, but he goes ahead anyway; divide and conquer. Divide the material, argue the differences, reach a kind of stalemate and call it a "mystery."

It is by such means that the book gets hooked on the subject of dreams. After all, the only life other than the irredeemably evident one that Mailer can propose for men of such rectitude has to be in the unconscious. (pp. 171-73)

Having decided to create a division in the astronauts by populating their unconscious, he must then up the ante still more: their unconscious can't be individuated; it must instead contain the historical, metaphysical, and social components Mailer needs for the on-going rhetoric of his book. Obviously he wouldn't allow their dreams to be the result of anything so merely personal as sublimation. While he can't supply it, he must therefore call for a theory of dreams beyond Freud, thus showing, if only for a moment, his alignment with a kind of intellectual who thinks that questions not answered by Freud or Marx have not yet even been asked. But there's more to come. Once he's escalated his terms to this point, Mailer is scarcely going to settle for the idea that the voyage itself represents merely a larger, corporate effort at the sublimation "of aggressive and intolerably inhuman desires." Even as he allows that possibility, he prefers to divide the matter more ostentatiously: the astronauts and their flight may be the instrument of "celestial and satanic endeavors."

I don't think I am being unfair in schematizing what might be called the incremental technique of Mailer's writing. But why, it still has to be asked, must he engage in these banal acts of cosmic division? Their function is best understood, and made altogether less debilitating, I suspect, if the reader takes them less as part of the substance of the book than its necessary fuel, its lubricant even. They get him moving, get him involved and boosted to a level of intensity where he will then be able to produce the masterful straight stuff in the book, like his description of the Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral. (p. 173)

[He] still can, in his own phrase, "climb to capture the language again." He and not the space program, not Technology, is responsible for making the climb harder than it need be by carrying intellectual luggage that is always heavy, usually excess, and now manifestly a hindrance. (p. 174)