The Crack-Up

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF (532 pp.) --Norman Mailer--Putnam ($5),

Like other writers struck by early success, Novelist Norman Mailer, 36, is fond of discussing his talent, often in terms that make it sound like a prize begonia. "America is a cruel soil for talent," he writes. "It stunts it, blights it, uproots it, or overheats it with cheap fertilizer." In this book, Author Mailer (The Naked and the Dead) sets aside the arduous business of novel writing and takes up horticulture. His first book in four years is a rock garden of schoolboy short stories, failed poems, fragments of plays, snippings from old novels and lumps from a new one--a mammoth work which Mailer says will probably take ten years to write and may be unprintable. Judging from the excerpts offered, its title should be The Nude and the Stewed.

Elsewhere in this collection, Mailer speculates coyly about what future Ph.D. candidates will say of him, shoots back, wadded into spitballs, most of the unfavorable reviews he has received, and reacts with the fury of an upstaged diva to a photograph he considers ill-chosen. In effect, what Mailer has produced is a record of an artistic crackup. By the early 1950s the spare, controlled prose of The Naked and the Dead had turned sour and turgid, and its author was drifting in a haze of liquor, seconal and marijuana. Mailer has stopped using "the minor drugs," he says (although he believes that after a few more years of suppression marijuana will be as widely used as was bootleg gin in the '203), but his book gives no sure sign that the wreck is under effective repair.

The author's Greenwich Village days, for instance, have left him with what seems to be a permanent fascination with Hip--that freemasonry of the beard and the weird, whose lodge brothers Mailer tags "white Negroes" (although black Negroes also are members). Hipsters, writes Mailer admiringly, are "philosophical psychopaths," stronger, less intellectual and more vigorous sexually than Beatniks. The opposite of Hip, of course, is Square. Mailer it-provides a small glossary of opposites: crooks and sin are Hip, while cops and salvation are Square; likewise T-formation football and the New York Herald Tribune are Hip, but the single-wing formation and the New York Times are Square. Asking why, apparently, is also Square.

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