Word: mailers
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...applaud your Essay, "The Poetic License to Kill" [Feb. 1], but it should have more strongly condemned Norman Mailer's oracular pronouncement that "culture is worth a little risk." There are people who are blind to moral values-just as there are those who are oblivious to aesthetic ones, but both originate from the idea that a human life is important because it cannot be traded for anything...
...Feingolds have little aptitude for it. Irving Howe, Susan Sontag, Alfred Kazin, Leslie Fiedler, Norman Podhoretz, Elizabeth Hardwick, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Gates, Norman Mailer, William Styron, Donald Barthelme, Jerzy Kosinski and Truman Capote do not come to their party. They miss quite a scene. Among the uncelebrated guests is a Holocaust survivor who literally levitates the living room with horror stories. Lucy also rises to the occasion with a Christian-pagan vision rooted in agriculture, bacchanalia and fertility symbols. The reader is left suspended with images of unreachable men locked in "the glory of their martyrdom...
...claimed mercy. But Jack Abbott's vividly ranting book, brutal and brutalized, should have made the jury wonder which was more characteristic of the man: literature or murder. In a long and essentially tragic perspective (in which all consequences are endured, all debts paid), literature performs its redemptions. Mailer's formula is a shallow little mechanism. "Culture is worth a little risk," he says. The world of that sentence is upside down: you defend culture, do you not, by locking up the people who try to kill...
...Mailer's principle-art should redeem or rather, more important, exculpate the artist-reached its full blossom as a tenet of Romanticism. The artist, for centuries regarded as merely a liveried servant of church and aristocracy, sprang up out of the bourgeoisie in the early 19th century as a dashing hierophant whose work connected him to the divine. It excused everything, from rudeness to homicide. "The fact of a man's being a poisoner," proclaimed Oscar Wilde, "is nothing against his prose...
...indifferent in a week/ To a beautiful physique/ Worships language and forgives/ Everyone by whom it lives." Yes: time grants pardon. But the law is not in the trade of metaphysics; the law's only hope of survival lies precisely in its struggle to be impartial. The Mailer doctrine suggests that somehow the law should set up separate standards for artists. There are grotesque possibilities here. Who judges the literary merit? What if a literary convict is really a terrible writer? String him up? Will we need a panel of literary judges to meet the first Monday of every...