Last of the Leftists?

Last of the Leftists? BARBARY SHORE (312 pp.)--Norman Mailer--Rinehart ($3).

Norman Mailer has a bad case of moral claustrophobia. Viewed through his polarizing spectacles, all the dice are loaded, all the cards are marked, all the wheels are rigged. All the world's a cage, and all its men & women merely slayers. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, had enough of the juice of life to disguise this sophomoric fatalism. The only juice in Barbary Shore is embalming fluid.

Author Mailer's new novel is hauled from the literary graveyard of the '30s, when "social consciousness" was in vogue. Like other books of the school, it tries to pin the blame for human evil on the favorite villain of every park-bench anarchist, "the system."

The Glue of Lust. This time Mailer's jungle is asphalt instead of tropical. Penned in the stuffy cubicles of a Brooklyn rooming house are some of the wrecks and the wreckers of contemporary society. Mock hero of the piece is Michael Lovett, an ex-G.I. with a remade plastic face and a blacked-out memory, the author's symbol for the crippled common man. A writer, "Mikey" Lovett tries to grasp the haunted, hunted relationships around him. Soon he finds that he and the other occupants are stuck together with the glue of lust and politics.

He makes a play for the landlady, a blowzy, bosomy redhead named Guinevere, who rambles on about past loves and lovers like a debased edition of Joyce's Molly Bloom. She teases, then repulses Mikey, ostensibly because of her husband McLeod, a gaunt, backslid Stalinist. Actually, she is having an affair with another tenant, Hollingsworth, a sadistic Government agent. A late entry in the sexual sweepstakes is Lannie, a Lesbian ex-Trotskyite with a touch of insanity who makes "strange" love to all but McLeod.

The Stilts of Fallacy. Halfway through the book it becomes clear that Lannie and Hollingsworth are working together to force McLeod to surrender a precious "little object" stolen from the U.S. Government. From then on, in a nonstop talkalogue, Author Mailer shunts his narrative cargo off the fictional track and into an editorial tract. Using the stereotypes of the tortured confessional, the state spy, the bureaucratic machine, universal fear and insecurity, he achieves at best a small-beer Nineteen Eighty-Four. At worst, he talks like a highbrow caught with his I.Q. down.

In idea content, Barbary Shore is perched on the stilts of four fallacies: 1) that there is nothing to choose between the Russian "system" and the U.S. "system," 2) that the Russian Revolution was "betrayed," i.e., Lenin was O.K., but Stalin spoiled everything, 3) that the complex problem of evil is a simple matter of economic inequity, i.e., "empty bellies," and 4) that "men enter into social and economic relations independent of their wills."

Since there is no exit from the coming clash of the two "colossi," mankind is doomed to a long night of barbarism--i.e., a Barbary shore.

Riffling the dead leaves of a bankrupt dream, neo-Marxist Mailer sees one faint hope, "socialist culture." This idea, which ex-Stalinist McLeod passes on to Lovett as a heritage--just before Government Agent Hollingsworth does him in--seems to be the precious "little object" the poor fellow has been nursing all along.

Mailer nails his flag to the mast as a sort of last-of-the-intellectual-leftists. But his novel, paceless, tasteless and graceless, is beached on a point of no fictional, or intellectual, return.

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