On Jan. 3, journalist Michael Wolff reported that Random House was canceling the publication of an essay collection by the late Norman Mailer, which had been slated to mark the centennial of Mailer’s 1923 birth. A giant of American letters in his time, Mailer has disappeared from the cultural landscape since his death in 2007. This is no doubt in part because of a brash, abrasive personality he made every effort to convey in his writing, which would now make him a clear exemplar of “toxic masculinity.” In his own time, too, he was a target of feminist critiques — not least because he stabbed and nearly killed his second wife.
Random House’s nixing of the new Mailer anthology, per Wolff, resulted not from his sexist reputation but from “a junior staffer’s objection to the title” of the essay “The White Negro.” Perhaps the staffer objected to the use of an obsolete ethnonym or imagined Mailer to be offering a defense of Rachel Dolezal-style “transracialism.”
“The White Negro” was every bit as divisive in its own time as it is likely to be now. (It is still available in full, for now, on the website of Dissent, the venerable left-wing “little magazine” where it first appeared.) The contemporary reader will be struck, perhaps just as much as by the now-cancelable title, by the subtitle, “Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.” About a decade ago, the term “hipster” was a staple of cultural commentary, having seen a resurgence amid the rise of various style trends at about the turn of the millennium. The hipster of the ‘90s and ‘00s was a young, white follower of retro trends drawn from 20th-century material culture: trucker hats, porn mustaches, fixed-gear bicycles, mason jars, and so on. More recently, “hipsters” barely register.
As Mailer describes him, the midcentury hipster was, like his recent successor, a collector of signifiers of authenticity. However, he sought these not in the archive of the past but across town: in the enclaves of the black underclass. He was, in today’s terms, a “cultural appropriator” of music and style and perhaps most memorably of argot: his selective adoption of black vernacular introduced a new lingo into the mainstream. This includes “hip” itself, along with other words enumerated by Mailer, many now standard or else amusingly outdated: “man, go, put down, make, beat, cool, swing, with it, crazy, dig, flip, creep, hip, square.”
The hipster’s embrace of black diction, music, and style, for Mailer, was incidental: the more essential development was his pursuit of a new “existentialist” consciousness that, he claimed, had also emerged first among black people. In the postwar era, he asserts, the “psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb” forced people to recognize that a civilization ostensibly on an inexorable path toward technological abundance was in fact under constant threat of cataclysmic self-destruction. The standard response, according to Mailer, was the fear-driven conformism of the Eisenhower era.
The hipster offered a radical alternative. His conviction, Mailer explains, is that “if our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State … the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.” Here, as in musical tastes and verbal habits, however, Mailer’s hipster takes after his black compatriots. It took the faraway events of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Nazi camps to instill in a handful of white people a sensibility black people had developed closer to home. He writes: “It is no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro, for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries.” This is how Mailer glosses his controversial title: The hipster, he says, “absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro.”
Mailer’s polemic attracted two major lines of contemporary criticism. The first came from black writers and intellectuals such as Lorraine Hansberry, Ralph Ellison, and especially James Baldwin (an erstwhile Mailer friend and admirer). They objected most of all to Mailer’s celebration of the supposed sexual potency and liberatedness of black men, which they viewed, plausibly, as reiterating the racist stereotypes of the “square” white America Mailer claimed to reject. A second group of critics included the literary avatars of “hip” themselves. Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac’s and Allen Ginsberg’s responses resembled the “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme deployed in recent years to mock clumsy interlopers in online subcultures. Mailer, for them, was himself a “square” trying to cash in on a subculture he wasn’t part of and misunderstood.
Casual readers of “The White Negro” today will likely find these critiques compelling. Both Mailer’s vitalist raptures about “the Negro” and his interpolations of “hip” phraseology — as in, “If you as a cat are way out too, and we are in the same groove … why then you say simply, ‘I dig’” — will read to many as (to use more up-to-date slang) cringe. But today’s reader will also find lines that could have been published recently, with slight modifications, such as: “No Negro can saunter down a street with any real certainty that violence will not visit him on his walk.”
In the decades after “The White Negro” appeared, American capitalism embraced the same values Mailer regarded as antithetical to its functioning. And yet, despite the triumph of expressive individualism and sexual permissivism, our current impasses oddly resemble the ones Mailer evoked in 1957. When he writes that “a stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life, and we suffer from a collective failure of nerve,” critics of the coronavirus state of exception might hear an echo of their misgivings. Similarly, those who currently deplore the ideological monoculture pervading institutions and professions will recognize his denunciation of a society in which one is “doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.”
“The White Negro” was an early shot fired in what we now call the culture war. It set the agenda for debates that persist to this day, albeit in sometimes unrecognizable forms. All of this makes Mailer’s posthumous cancellation a revealing incident.
Geoff Shullenberger is a writer and academic. He blogs at outsidertheory.com. Follow him on Twitter: @daily_barbarian.
