Word: rojack
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Rojack (like Mailer?) knows so many worlds that he is never an insider. Rojack is in limbo, always a familiar face, always tuned in on the less guarded secrets, but always a floater on the periphery, always a nose pressed against the glass. This is Rojack (and Mailer his shadow), much too hip to swing with the squares, but too close to power to call himself an outcast; doomed to a netherworld of liberal intellectuals, never in the back rooms with Mr. Big nor safe on a midnight street in Harlem...
...again. How can we call him (either of them--we forget now who is the celebrity, who the shadow) a liberal intellectual, with all the puny impotence that implies? Rojack is a dilettante across the board of his life, all right, suspended lonely between anarchy and the Establishment, but he's roaring down the canyons of danger as well, whipping his own naked back with fevered thongs...
...Rojack (like Mailer?) con- ducts his life as if it were some black experiment, he needs the battle even when life itself has almost been kicked out of him, needs the action, the booze, the orgasm--that inescapable moment--even with the fetid breath of murder and suicide and madness congealing in his nostrils. Even dizzy on the parapet, exhausted in the desert, he pushes on, tracking the devil, hunting out a more ultimate disaster; ready, even on the precipice of collapse, to go the very depths of possible experience...
...Mailer's "American Dream?" It must be a whole horizon of dreams gone sour, not into nightmares but into that phantasmagoric horror of hallucinogens, where one feels the vomit recede back down the throat through massive pressure from neck muscles. The Valentino Dream of sexual power gone wild as Rojack somersaults with the maid while his wife's corpse empties its intestines on the upstairs rug; the Dream of the Heiress polluted by Deborah's guileful malevolence; The Alger Dream of self-made empires gone rotten in her father's diabolic machinations; The Westerner Dream of the loner...
...leverage, however, I was one of the more active figures of the city--no one could be certain finally that nothing large would ever come from me." Rojack writes of Mailer, of course. An American Dream is large; we know Mailer had in mind something a great deal larger. The critics are I think too certain that it will not come