********************* Doug posted:
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=6230>
Volume 30, Number 7 ? April 28, 1983 Review
Norman in Egypt
By Harold Bloom Ancient Evenings by Norman Mailer Little, Brown, 704 pp., $19.95
'Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state.' With this artful sentence, Norman Mailer begins his Book of the Dead. Our most conspicuous literary energy has generated its weirdest text, a book that defies usual aesthetic standards, even as it is beyond any conventional idea of good and evil. Like James Merrill, with whom he has in common absolutely nothing else, Mailer finds one of his occult points of origin in the visionary Yeats, but unlike Merrill, Mailer truly shares Yeats's obsession with the world of the dead. Merrill's spirits, in The Changing Light at Sandover, are representations of our lives, here and now. But Mailer has gone back to the ancient evenings of the Egyptians in order to find the religious meaning of death, sex, and reincarnation, using an outrageous literalism, not metaphor. What the subscribers to the Literary Guild will find in it is more than enough bumbuggery and humbuggery to give them their money's worth.
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I liked Mailer's work. I got an insight into the mentality of war when I encountered THE NAKED AND THE DEAD and of the beat temper of the 50s after consuming ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF, where he revealed, among other matters, that he considered himself to be a "libertarian socialist". Mailer was not the man in the "grey flannel suit". I read WHY ARE WE IN VIETNAM as a student at Michigan State in the Sixties. It was only later on, when I spent some time in Texas that I *really* began to sense where he was coming from in this one. His EXECUTIONER'S SONG remains an extremely valuable peek onto the battered mind of those who revel in the infamies of the death penalty. And ANCIENT EVENINGS...I borrowed it from the Stanford library the day after his address...Mailer crawling into the minds of the ancient Egyptian court via Menenhetet, a character who is reincarnated again and again. The time he's born to a soldier's fate and the giant pile of severed hands marking his Pharaoh's victory over the tribal kings across the Red Sea...
Mike B)
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