NORMAN MAILER AND THE POST-WAR NOVEL

A thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of .^ , r the requirements for the Degree EM Git

Master of English

In

Literature

by

Tristan Robert Spencer

San Francisco, California

August 2015 Copyright by Tristan Robert Spencer 2015 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read Norman Mailer and the Post-war Novel by Tristan

Robert Spencer, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of English in Literature at San Francisco State University.

%lie Paulson, Ph.D. Associate Professor NORMAN MAILER AND THE POST-WAR NOVEL

Tristan Robert Spencer San Francisco, California 2015

This study contends that Norman Mailer's first two novels comprise a chronicle of competing ideologies, encompassing the traditions of the New York Intellectuals. In chapter 1, characters are interpreted as representing the ideologies discussed in Dwight MacDonald’s “The Root is Man.” In chapter 2, Mailer continues to examine Marxism by presenting two forms of Trotskyism, corresponding to the factions of the Socialist Workers Party. Mailer’s chronicle thus demonstrates his late narrative radicalization, transgressing the New York Intellectuals’ political transformation towards neo-conservatism

in of the-c^ntent of this

17Ji It Date ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I want to thank Dr. Lawrence Hanley for his reading recommendations during my research. I would not have been introduced to most of my sources without Hanley’s guidance. I would also like to thank Dr. Julie

Paulson for her patience and encouragement; I could not have done this without her, and I am forever indebted.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction...... 1

Chapter 1: Competing Ideologies in The Naked and the Dead...... 17

I. Hearn's Reflection: Dwight MacDonald's Radical...... 18

II. Inexperience and Incoherence...... 25

III. Cummings' Scientific Pretensions...... 32

IV. The Rise of Bureaucracy: The Third Alternative...... 43

Chapter 2: Competing Forms of Trotskyism in Barbary Shore...... 51

I. Orthodoxy Versus Heresy...... 53

II. Jean Malaquais and the Socialist Workers Party...... 56

III. Trotskyism on Trial...... 60

IV. Lannie: Orthodoxy in Crisis...... 62

V. Hollingsworth: The Bureaucratic Machine...... 69

VI. The Other Alternative: McLeod's Trotskyism...... 75

VII. The Polemics of Barbary Shore...... 80

Conclusion...... 83

Works Consulted...... 87 1

Introduction:

In the debate at Mount Holyoke College in 1952 between best-selling author

Norman Mailer and renowned Marxist political theorist Dwight MacDonald, the moderator posed the question of choice between the West and the East. Their answers to this question, crystallizing two distinct positions Marxist intellectuals occupied in the 1950s, would prove to be a defining moment for American dissident socialists. To decide on the West signified that one accepted Western democracy as an alternative to Soviet Russia and its satellite states. This decision also implied an admittance that the revolution had failed. To decide on the East suggested a continued belief in socialist theory. By presenting such a polarizing question, the moderator no doubt meant for a stance to be taken, and the question revealed something problematic not just for their own political identities but about the transforming identity of socialists in the post-war period. Would MacDonald, a well-known political theorist and dissident individual, select Stalinism over the evils of Western capitalism? On the other hand, Norman Mailer, an author celebrated for his recent novels

The Naked and the Dead and Barbary Shore, had just as much at stake with the choice before him as MacDonald. If Mailer chose the East, he would be disinheriting himself from the traditions of the New York Intellectuals and his own political radicalism. If Mailer chose the West, he would be condoning the very flaws and hypocrisies of democracy that he had depicted in his first two novels. In other words, both MacDonald and Mailer were in vulnerable positions by their respective answers. Were the horrific realities of Stalinism 2

so immense that socialism could never recover? Were the gears of capitalism, ceaselessly grinding away, a real alternative to the East? These were the questions that haunted the participants of the debate, and that would haunt a generation of Marxist intellectuals. By the conclusion of the debate, MacDonald would choose the West, and Mailer would state that he could choose neither.

Mailer's reluctance to choose the West in the Mount Holyoke debate is reflected in his first two novels. In this thesis I argue that Mailer's first two novels represent the various competing ideologies in relation to the radical traditions of the New York Intellectuals. I contend that Mailer investigates the status of socialism in both The Naked and the Dead and Barbary Shore. One may accuse Mailer of pursuing the will o' the wisp of socialism, pursuing it when other intellectuals had abandoned their search, but Mailer's fiction should be understood as a chronicle of competing ideologies that continued the radical traditions of the New York Intellectuals. Moreover, by examining their ideas in the post-war period he defines himself beyond the demarcated boundaries of their group.

The Mount Holyoke debate was as dramatic as it was important for intellectuals of the early 1950s because both Norman Mailer and Dwight MacDonald had a close affiliation with the group known as the New York Intellectuals. The New York Intellectuals consisted chiefly of one-time communists who had a continued dedication to socialist theory. The

1950s marked a time of deradicalization in American politics, and the New York 3

Intellectuals were not immune to this cultural shift. Nearly all of the New York Intellectuals by the end of the 1950s would disavow Marxism. While MacDonald was known for his active involvement within the New York Intellectuals, Mailer was a grandchild to this movement; his literature depicted the tail end of what New York Intellectuals had produced over the previous two decades. What was the difference between Mailer and MacDonald?

While Mailer was eager to readdress socialism within his literature, MacDonald had already moved on.

When confronted with the decision, MacDonald shocked the audience by stating that he had indeed chosen the West instead of the Soviet Union (Sumner 223). It was primarily the events of the 1940s that had caused the dramatic political change in

MacDonald's stance. WWII had the opposite effect on Stalin's Russia than was predicted by most of the New York Intellectuals. Instead of the war dissolving Stalin's regime, the war resulted in a regeneration of the socio-economic force of the Soviet Union. By the late

1940s, Stalin's bureaucratic caste was no longer perceived as a temporary phenomenon but as a permanent structure that continued to confound the anti-Stalinist Left. While many other factors played into the concession for Western policy, it was the notion of the permanence of Stalinism that made MacDonald's disavowal of Marxism resolute.

MacDonald later recalled his hesitant choice for the West as the lesser of two evils: 4

I choose the West - the U.S. And its allies - and reject the

East - the Soviet Union .... By “choosing” 1 mean that I

support the political, economic, and military struggle of the

West against the East. I support it critically - I'm against the

Smith and McCarran Acts, French policy in Indo-China,

etc. - but in general I do choose, I support Western policies

.... I prefer an imperfectly living, open society to a perfectly

dead, closed society. (116-118)

With the credibility of two decades as a New York Intellectual, MacDonald was pragmatic and honest about supporting the West over the East. From the historical perspective of

1952, the level of foresight MacDonald had in his political judgment is astounding, for after the debate, nearly all of the New York Intellectuals would concede similarly.

MacDonald must have been conscious of the irony of his decision at Mount Holyoke, for not ten years earlier he scolded his peers for backing Churchill over Hitler (Wreszin 92).

In a subsequent revision of “The Root is Man,” MacDonald addressed why he had shifted from pacifism to radicalism in the 1940s:

During the [first] war, I did not choose, at first because I was

a revolutionary socialist of Trotskyist coloration .... [In the 5

second war the] power vacuum was filled at once by either

Soviet or American imperialism. The Third Camp of the

masses just doesn’t exist anymore. (147)

Historian Neil Jumonville, discussing the significance of MacDonald’s change of positions, observes that “Macdonald's slow turnabout in support of the West is testimony to how even the staunchest dissenters were reoriented by the international conflict” (69). MacDonald's political transformation, as Jumonville notes, embodied the shift the New York

Intellectuals would make in the coming decade. To MacDonald’s credit, his decision for the West signified that he was acting not as the pacifist he had been in the late 1930s. His previous refusal to take sides in WWII went as far as viewing Churchill and Hitler as equally imperialist. But MacDonald's decision for Western policy reflected the Radical defined in his essay “The Root is Man.” The Radical, according to MacDonald, assesses decisions by the value judgment terms “good” and “bad,” and this is an “ambiguous

[process] because it involves a qualitative discrimination about something which is by its very nature not reducible to uniform and hence measurable units” (65). The philosophical

argument MacDonald integrated into “The Root is Man” is that ambiguity exists in value judgment because it is based on the individual's “qualitative discrimination” rather than on

the quantitative, objective discrimination of the scientific method. On the limitations of the

scientific method, MacDonald states: It can tell us everything about a work of art or a way of life

— its psychological and economic motivation, its historical significance, its effects on the beholder or the participant — everything except the one essential thing: is it Good?

Scientific method can tell us how to reach a given End: the chances of success by one method against another, the past experience of other people, the favorable and unfavorable factors. It can tell us what the consequences of reaching a given End will be. It can even tell us a good deal about why we in fact choose one set of values (i.e., on End) rather than another; that is, it can tell us all about the historical, economic, glandular, psychological and other objective actors involved in value choices. All this information is important and useful. But science is mute on what is, after all, the central question: what values should we choose, what End ought we to want? Science comes into play only after the values have been chosen, the End selected. For it, the End must always be “given,” that is, assumed as a fact, a datum which scientific method cannot and should not “justify” any more 7

than it can tell why coal “ought to be” coal. (68)

MacDonald's radical stance does not completely reject science, but merely finds that it is incompetent for discerning value judgments (74). Instead of focusing on the scientific approach of Marxism, MacDonald's radical “denies the existence of any such rigid pattern to history as Marxism assumes, one that will start off from one’s own personal interests and feelings, working from the individual to society rather that the other way around” (23).

In sum, MacDonald's radical does not approach a political decision with the presuppositions science assumes for ethics; rather, the Radical reflects on what “should we choose, what End ought we to want” (68) to be the rational for ethical decisions. For

MacDonald's radical, Marxism was dead in the scientific sense. MacDonald's position in the late 1940s marked a near complete reversal from his political beliefs of the early 1930s, when he had been a fellow-traveler of the American Communist Party. It was undoubtedly the culmination of his experiences as a New York Intellectuals and his Radical ideas that had caused his drastic political transformation.

MacDonald's participation in the New York Intellectuals had started with an open letter published in The New Republic in 1936. In it, MacDonald challenged Malcolm

Cowley's defense of the trials in Moscow (Wald 141). After its publication, MacDonald was approached by Fred Dupee. A recent dissident, Dupee had been a political organizer for the Communist Party in New York and was eager to recruit MacDonald for his intellectual group. With the assistance of Dupee, MacDonald was notified that Phillip Rahv 8

and William Phillips of New Masses desired a dialogue with him. In a private meeting,

MacDonald was convinced of the “actual role of the Party with detailed accounts of its corrupting effect on all literary and cultural activity” (Wreszin 60). By the end of the meeting, MacDonald agreed to leave the Communist Party and join them. MacDonald was placed on the editorial board of Partisan Review amongst Trotskyist sympathizers (Wald

143-147). Yet MacDonald would remain skeptical about the accuracy of Trotsky’s theories.

While a member of the Socialist Workers' Party, a Trotskyist political organization,

MacDonald attempted to publish articles in the Internal Bulletin, but was “monotonously rejected” because of his skepticism towards Trotskyism {Memoirs o f a Revolutionist 18).

When MacDonald finally succeeded in publishing an article, Trotsky was enraged by its content. The article's main point indicated: “Only if we meet the stormy and terrible years ahead with both skepticism and devotion - skepticism toward all theories, governments and social systems; devotion to the revolutionary fight of the masses - only then can we justify ourselves as intellectuals” (“National Defense, the Case for Socialism” 253-266).

Why the article posed a threat to Trotsky was that it implied one needed to be skeptical of theories because of the fallibility of its authors. This threat was a personal one to Trotsky, for a view such as MacDonald's discredited his authority as a Marxist interpreter. The larger implication of MacDonald's article, which Trotsky rightfully understood as a peril to all

Marxism, is that a skeptical view of theory would result in it becoming a method rather than a science. To view Marxism as an open method would bankrupt any Marxist authority 9

of claiming an interpretation as valid or not, resulting in the disintegration of the study and practice of Marxism.

MacDonald's article was not the only voice that posed a threat to Trotsky's interpretations. James Burnham and others from within the Socialist Workers' Party, an

American Trotskyist based organization, also expressed skepticism towards Trotsky's analyses in the late 1930s, which ultimately crescendoed in the spring of 1940 with the fractional split of the Socialist Workers' Party. The fractional split of the S WP was a crucial event to the New York Intellectuals, one of the causes for their political shift during the

1940s. It signified that Trotskyism, as a social movement, was not immune from its own theoretical contradictions, such as Trotsky's interpretation of Stalin's Russia as a degenerated workers' state. By 1950, the number of New York Intellectuals that still adhered to aspects of Trotskyism had dwindled to only a select few.

MacDonald would remain distant to the two fractions of Trotskyism after the 1940 split, and declared himself a pacifist in reaction to WWII. MacDonald was adamant that pacifism was the necessary reaction to WWII. Lesser evilism, the political support for the

lesser of two evils, was a stance MacDonald was highly critical of because it gave tacit assent to the policies of the West. Biographer Michael Wreszin explains:

Dwight insisted that “lesser evilism” had a history of defeat

in Italy, France, and most graphically in Spain, which was 10

another example of the “fatal results of compromising the

revolutionary struggle of the masses by giving political

support to a democratic capitalist government as a lesser

evil to fascism.” (91-92)

MacDonald was, as Wreszin remarks, reluctant to support a democratic capitalist government over fascism because both represented the same end result: a deterioration of the individual. MacDonald had already disavowed himself from Marxism, but it wasn't until the question was asked of him at the Mount Holyoke debate that he openly disclosed that he had chosen a democratic capitalist government over the East.

MacDonald's views had taken a dramatic turn, a near complete reversal. This had

been a culminating turnaround, based primarily on his work “The Root is Man” published

in April of 1946. Wreszin suggests “The Root is Man” signified MacDonald's refutation of

Marxism's scientific approach:

“The Root” was simply his open, final disavowal of any

Marxist residue. Having pronounced Marxism obsolete,

Dwight returned to his earlier skepticism .... [He] argued that

the firmest ground to struggle for human liberation was “the

ground not of History but of those non-historical Absolute 11

Values (Truth, Love, Justice) which the Marxists [had] made

unfashionable among socialists.” (177)

His choice for the West, instead of the East, solidified him as one of the most articulate and dramatic political shifts to the Right within the New York Intellectuals. Ironically, his opponent's response in the debate would echo the political sentiments he had held a decade earlier.

In the Mount Holyoke debate, Mailer's answer, “I cannot choose,” represented a position not wholly different than MacDonald's pacifism in the early 1940s. Mailer's was hesitant to choose because he regarded both blocs as equally destructive. Moreover, his views were similar to that of an older generation of New York Intellectuals. At the time of the debate, Mailer's revolutionary views were deeply influenced by the author and translator Jean Malaquais, who was personally instructing Mailer on the history of Marxism and Trotskyism (Wald 275). According to essayist Andras Gregory, through Malaquais' influence, Mailer became “exposed to the intellectual trends of post-war Europe of which

Malaquais had first-hand experience” (Gyorgy).

Malaquais' influence on Mailer extended beyond his political career and into his authorship. Indeed, the teacher-student discipleship was so influential that Mailer would later admit that the final draft of Barbary Shore reflected a “political position which was a far-flung mutation of Trotskyism” (Lennon 85). Nigel Leigh's “Marxism on Trial: Barbary 12

Shore ” describes Malaquais' influence on Mailer as one that cultivated a critical dialectic from which, according to Leigh, Mailer's authorship benefited: “Immune from the forces which demoralized and disillusioned the conventional American left, he was free to occupy an advanced position, albeit on his own idiosyncratic terms” (86). The position Leigh interprets Mailer to inhabit is one that not only pursued the traditions of the New York

Intellectuals, but also politically radicalized when most intellectuals were abandoning their beliefs. This critical attitude of political systems, even Trotskyism, was very similar to the position earlier taken by MacDonald. Mailer, however naive, was reluctant to dismiss the possibility of revolutionary socialism when his contemporaries had become dis-enthralled by the events of the 1930s and 1940s.

Mailer was attracted to Trotskyism as a socialist expression for many of the same

reasons the two generations of Marxist intellectuals before him had been. Mailer's reason

for investigating Trotskyism was the same as his predecessors. As Alex Callinicos' work

Concepts in Social Thought: Trotskyism analyzes, Trotskyism gained momentum during

the 1930s and 1940s because it gave Marxist intellectuals the ability to reject capitalism

and Stalinism while simultaneously asserting socialism's ideals. Callinicos comments on

the appeal of Trotskyism for intellectuals when he states: 13

Trotskyism as a political current defined itself by the rejection

of two dominant definitions of socialism - those provided by

Stalinism in the East and by social democracy in the West -

and by the reassertion of what it took to be the traditions of

October 1917 .... In the 1930s and 1940s an astonishingly

large number of what later became known as the New York

Intellectuals became directly or peripherally involved in the

American Trotskyism movement ... before drifting

rightwards towards Cold War liberalism or neo-conservatism.

(2)

Callinicos describes the crisis of the duality between the West and the East. On the one hand, there is socialism defined by Stalinism in the East. On the other, there is socialism defined by social democracy in the West. Trotskyism, as Callinicos observes, was an

alternative interpretation of socialism that transgressed both definitions of socialism. As a

Marxist interpreter, the credentials of Leon Trotsky added to the redeeming qualities of the

theory since he had been a primary orchestrator of the 1917 revolution. With this

experience, and with his initial criticisms against Stalin, Trotsky was for intellectuals in

America the most significant combatant against capitalism and Stalinism. Thus, Mailer

sympathized with Trotsky's ideas for the same reasons his predecessors did, and The Naked

and the Dead and Barbary Shore showcase a radicalization towards Trotskyism. 14

Generally, Mailer's first two novels are read independently of each other, and not found to constitute a larger chronicle, as I argue here. The only literary critic that has suggested that The Naked and the Dead and Barhary Shore create a political multi-novel account is Nigel Leigh in his essay “Marxism on Trial: Barhary Shore. ” He argues that socialist politics in The Naked and the Dead are placed on trial in Barbary Shore.

However, whereas this thesis focuses on both novels, Leigh's essay is concentrated primarily on Barbary Shore, and Leigh does not comment on the implications of this narrative. Another critic, Max F. Schulz, similarly finds Barbary Shore to be part of a multi-novel narrative in his essay “Mailer's Divine Comedy.” However, Schulz does not interpret The Naked and the Dead as part of this narrative. Instead, Schulz associates

Barbary Shore with Mailer's next two novels, Deer Park and An American Dream.

Schulz argues that these three novels encompass an allegorical journey towards redemption, comparing it to Dante's The Divine Comedy. My reading, by contrast, contends that The Naked and the Dead and Barbary Shore comprise a chronicle of competing ideologies.

The benefit in reading The Naked and the Dead and Barbary Shore together as a political multi-novel is that such an approach helps to illustrate how Mailer transgressed the demarcated boundaries of the New York Intellectuals by radicalizing in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Specifically, such a reading of Mailer's first two novels indicates that he regressed to the Trotskyist politics that had defined the New York Intellectuals in the 15

early 1940s. In this sense, Mailer's chronicle is an inversion of Dwight MacDonald's political shift from the Trotskyist based politics he held in 1940 to his decision to choose the West as the lesser of two evils. This study affirms that Mailer politically distinguished himself from other New York Intellectuals by continuing to engage in

Marxist thought during a period of deradicalization.

In the first chapter, I argue that Mailer's chronicle begins with The Naked and the

Dead and its examination of three post-war ideologies. I suggest that the novel's characters represent the politics of Radicalism, Progressivism, and Bureaucratic Collectivism as described in Dwight MacDonald's “The Root is Man.” First, I interpret Hearn's politics to mirror MacDonald's Radical because he concentrates on the ethical aims of Marxism, and his death is shown as a result of the logical incoherence of Radicalism' subjective claims.

Second, I interpret Cummings' politics to characterize the Progressive mentality because he philosophically espouses scientism, that is, the belief that science is the only way to know truth. Consequently, his defeat at the end of the narrative is due to his scientific pretensions. Third, I interpret Major Dalleson's behavior and polices as an incipient form of bureaucratic collectivism, a theory that MacDonald and other New York Intellectuals used to describe Russia's bureaucratic caste. Dalleson's incipient form of bureaucracy at the end of the The Naked and the Dead anticipates the fully more developed bureaucracy of Mailer's second novel, Barbary Shore. 16

In the second chapter, I argue that Barbary Shore continues Mailer's political chronicle by examining Trotskyism as an alternative to bureaucracy. Whereas previous criticism has interpreted the characters Lannie and McLeod to embody the same Trotskyist politics, I argue that they defend different traditions, orthodox and heretical, corresponding to the majority and minority factions which resulted from the Socialist Workers Party conflict in 1940. This distinction in turn allows us to see how Mailer is demonstrating the deficiency of orthodox Trotskyism because Lannie suffers from linguistic barbarism, that is, she fails to communicate intelligibly in speech and writing. Similarly, Mailer shows the malignant impact of bureaucracy with Hollingsworth's linguistic barbarism because it indicates that his nature is mechanical, not human. Finally, I interpret McLeod's final speech as evidence of his heretical stance since he revises Trotsky's analysis. Through these characters, Mailer is espousing the Trotskyist based politics of the New York Intellectuals, showing commitment specifically towards the Shachtmanites' heretical Trotskyism.

The Naked and the Dead and Barbary Shore thus show Mailer's radical regression from the politics of the New York Intellectuals in the late 1940s, whose idiosyncratic concepts are echoed by MacDonald's “The Root is Man,” to their Trotskyist based politics in the early 1940s. 17

Chapter 1: Competing Ideologies in The Naked and the Dead

Mailer wrote The Naked and the Dead in 1948, four years before his debate with

MacDonald at Mount Holyoke College. The primary narrative depicts individuals involved in the battle of Anopopei, a fictional island in the South Pacific, during WWII. But there is a second and equally important political narrative. While critics commonly associate the characters Hearn, Cummings, and Dalleson with a particular political perspective, they do so in a way that fails to appreciate the nuances of those views. For instance, Hearn is often interpreted as a proto-Marxist, leftist liberal, or humanist, and all of these one word definitions reveal absolutely nothing about his radical claims. Critics have failed to understand the novel's politics because they have not adequately appreciated how deeply

The Naked and the Dead engages contemporary debates within the New York Intellectuals.

In this chapter, I suggest that The Naked and the Dead must be read against MacDonald’s

“The Root is Man,” an essay Mailer would have been familiar with. I first show how Hearn,

Cummings, and Dalleson embody the Radical, Progressive, and bureaucratic mentalities outlined in MacDonald's essay. I contend that the similarities between the two texts show

Mailer to be participating in The Naked and the Dead in the same discussion as

MacDonald's “The Root is Man”; those similarities also reveal The Naked and the Dead to be a component of a larger political chronicle which, together with Barbary Shore, show

Norman Mailer to be engaging in the radical traditions of the New York Intellectuals. 18

I. Hearn's Reflection: Dwight MacDonald's Radical

Critics usually identify Hearn as some sort of prototypical Marxist, but fail to define the particularities of his Marxist perspective. One of the reasons critics fail to correctly characterize Hearn's ideology is that he does not explicitly identify with any one Marxist tradition. Another difficulty in defining Hearn's politics is that his politics are made more opaque due to his character's existential crisis between his past bourgeois existence and his present socialist aspirations. If, however, one concentrates on Hearn's arguments against

General Cummings, it becomes clear that he espouses Radicalism, a Marxist perspective defined by Dwight MacDonald's “The Root is Man.”

Dwight MacDonald was a prominent member of the group later known collectively as the New York Intellectuals. The New York Intellectuals, composed mostly of theorists, publishers and literary critics, were defined by their anti-Stalinist revolutionary socialism.

Like most members of the group, Dwight MacDonald had defined his anti-Stalinist revolutionary socialism largely, both directly and indirectly, on the theories of Leon

Trotsky. MacDonald had even been a member of the American based Trotskyist organization, the Socialist Workers Party. But after the factional conflict of the Socialist

Workers Party in 1940, MacDonald's relationship with Trotsky became tumultuous after publishing an article arguing for theoretical skepticism. Trotsky responded with an open letter, criticizing MacDonald's skepticism: 19

Here is one of the leaders of the so-called “Workers” Party,

who considers himself not a proletarian but an “intellectual.”

He speaks of skepticism toward all theories.

We have prepared ourselves for this crisis by

studying, by building a scientific method, and our method is

Marxism. Then the crisis comes and Mr. Macdonald says “be

skeptical of all theories,” and then talks about devotion to the

revolution without replacing it with any new theory. Unless it

is this skeptical theory of his own. How can we work without

a theory? What is the fight of the masses and what is a

revolutionary? The whole article is scandalous and a party

which can tolerate such a man as one of its leaders is not

serious. (Trotsky 181)

Trotsky's critical response to MacDonald's article reveals several issues on both sides of the debate, but Trotsky's response is clearly meant to be pragmatic. How could MacDonald, who had no theory of his own, replace the Marxist program? Even if MacDonald had some sort of skeptical theory, how would one assess it? While Marxism might not be a perfect method, it can at least be examined by the rigor of the scientific method (a method that makes characterizations, hypotheses, predictions and experiments). Moreover, Trotsky's 20

open letter argues that MacDonald's article is literally self-defeating, for if one's theory is to be skeptical towards all theory, then one would also have to be skeptical towards one's

own theory as well. Although Trotsky's letter successfully exposes an apparent

contradiction in MacDonald's logic, it fails to refute the even more important

epistemological questions: Is Marxism an open or closed science? Who is the ultimate

authority on Marxism? What credentials are necessary for an interpreter/author of

Marxism, and on what basis are they assessed? Thus, while MacDonald's article proves to

have an apparent contradiction, its skeptical outlook successfully calls into question the

very foundations of Marxism as a science. Ultimately, MacDonald would develop his

skepticism into a theory, but it would not be until six years later, in the spring of 1946, that

“The Root is Man” was published.

MacDonald's “The Root is Man” identifies two dominant political stances in the

1940s, the Radical and the Progressive. MacDonald defines what it means to be Radical

when he writes:

“Radical” would apply to the as yet few individuals — mostly

anarchists, conscientious objectors, and renegade Marxists

like myself — who reject the concept of Progress, who judge

things by their present meaning and effect, who think the

ability of science to guide us in human affairs has been 21

overrated and who therefore redress the balance by

emphasizing the ethical aspect of politics. They, or rather we,

think it is an open question whether the increase of man’s

mastery over nature is good or bad in its actual effects on

human life to date, and favor adjusting technology to man,

even if it means — as may be the case — a technological

regression, rather than adjusting man to technology. We do

not, of course, “reject” scientific method, as is often charged,

but rather think the scope within which it can yield fruitful

results in narrower than is generally assumed today. And we

feel that the firmest ground from which to struggle for that

human liberation which was the goal of the old Left is the

ground not of History but of those non-historical values

(truth, justice, love, etc.) which Marx has made unfashionable

among socialists. (21)

To be Radical, in other words, is to concentrate on the ethical aims of Marxism. Though this seems to be stating the obvious for socialists, MacDonald's Radical notions were set against the historical context of the 1930s and 1940s when countless atrocities had been accomplished because of the science of Marxism; for instance, Stalin's systematic 22

liquidation of his own people. MacDonald's Radical approach contrasts other Marxist ideologies by focusing on the non-historical values that are inaccessible to science.

This non-historical approach to Marxism is the same as Hearn's in The Naked and the Dead. In dialogue, Hearn proves that he is Radical when discussing the historical significance of the war to Cummings, who argues that WWII is simply “power concentration” (177). Hearn counters Cummings' argument by stating, “I don't see where you can dismiss the continued occurrence and re-forming of certain great ethical ideas”

(177). This comment demonstrates how Hearn is trying to refute Cummings' arguments by emphasizing something that cannot be reduced by the scientific method. Hearn's Radical accentuation on ethics mirrors the thesis of “The Root is Man”:

But why not, after all, base one's socialism on what Trotsky

contemptuously calls “Utopian” aspirations? Why not begin

with what we living human beings want, what we think and

feel is good*? And then see how we can come closest to it -

instead of looking to historical process for a justification of

our socialism? It is the purpose of this article to show that a

direct approach may be made and must be made, one that

denies the existence of any such rigid pattern to history as

Marxism assumes, one that starts off from one's own personal 23

interest and feelings, working from the individual to society

rather than the other way around. Above all, its ethical

dynamic come from the absolute and non-historical values,

such as Truth and Justice, rather than the course of history.

(29)

MacDonald's Radical ideology rejects the scientific aims of Marxism because, he asserts, science cannot explain non-historical values. Hearn's utterance that there is a “continual occurrence and re-forming of certain great ethical ideas” (177) thus correspondingly demonstrates a Radical stance because of its concentration on the non-historical values of ethics.

Hearn's Radical approach is also demonstrable by his focus on the individual's consciousness and sensibility. This approach is most apparent in the chess game between

Hearn and Cummings. During the game, Cummings states, “Chess ... is inexhaustible.

What a concentration of life it is really” (180). Cummings' interpretation of chess is that it is like warfare, and every piece in chess has a quantitative unit value comparable to persons

in the army. But Hearn rejects this interpretation, and he reinterprets the game from his

Radical perspective: 24

I don't know, but warfare certainly isn’t chess. You might

make a case for the Navy, where it's all maneuvering on open

flat surfaces with different units of pure power, where it's all

Force, Space and Time, but war is like a bloody football

game. You start off with a play and it never quite works out

as you figured it would. (180)

Hearn's Radical argument properly characterizes Cummings' interpretation of chess as a scientific reduction of war, for there are more variables than Cummings' two-dimensional analogy. Hearn's analogy is three dimensional, focusing most on the individual because any value judgment, either good or bad, is subjectively decided by persons. Hearn presses the idea further, stating, “By God, there're more pages to the book than you've read. You take a squad of men ... what the hell do you know what goes on in their heads?” (181). By concentrating on consciousness and sensibility, Hearn is trying to illustrate to Cummings that his scientific view does not take into account the importance of the individual. As

MacDonald explains, science has no access to value judgments, but the individual

subjectively does:

Such a judgment is always ambiguous because it involves a

qualitative discrimination about something by its very nature 25

not reducible to uniform and hence measurable units .... In a

word, there seems to be something intrinsically unknowable

about values in a scientific sense. (82)

The philosophical point that MacDonald's “The Root is Man” highlights here is that the value judgments good and bad are inaccessible to science. For example, Claude Monet's

“The Cliff at Etretat after the Storm” cannot be scientifically described as a good piece of art. Science can describe the materials that form the composition of the painting, but it cannot make an aesthetic judgment. Similarly, value judgments made about ethics cannot be accessed scientifically. Science can describe the physiological effects of death, but it cannot explain why murder is morally wrong. Some truth cannot be accessed scientifically, but only by the subjective discrimination of the individual.

II. Inexperience and Incoherence

Through most of the narrative, Hearn's Radical arguments exist only as theories and are not converted into any form of policy. In contrast, Cummings' fascism is not just theory but has been examined, and he constantly emphasizes this experience, as when he states,

“I'm not peddling theories. This is observation” (175). Cummings' reveals that he considers 26

politics scientifically. For Cummings, fascism is not just a hypothesis but a scientifically tested program. In order to counter the General's claims about fascism, Hearn attempts to test his Radical theory by commanding a platoon. However, once in the reconnaissance mission, Hearn's Radical ideology completely fails; ultimately, Hearn is killed in action, and this presents an awkward problem for critics. Despite Hearn being able to characterize the limits in Cummings' arguments, Hearn's death signifies a failure for his Radicalism. On the one hand, his death demonstrates his inexperience that prevents him from implementing his Radicalism. On the other, his death reflects negatively on Radicalism's subjective claims.

The reconnaissance mission clearly illustrates that experience takes precedence over theory. This, for example, is demonstrated by Hearn's thoughts when the Platoon treks through the foliage of the jungle:

There was a special kind of fear when the ground was

unexplored; each step further into the jungle was difficult....

Croft hadn't shown too much discomfort. That Croft

was a boy all right. If he wasn't careful Croft would keep

effective command of the platoon. The trouble was that Croft

knew more, and it was silly to disagree with him; until now

the march had demanded a woodsman. (459) 27

Hearn's thoughts show that he is aware that his inexperience is a serious problem for his

Radical policy. Hearn realizes that Croft's experience in the platoon seriously threatens his own command, as Hearn's colloquial expression that “Croft was a boy all right” (459)

suggests. Whereas Croft's experience affords him the respect of the men, Hearn's

inexperience leads to insubordination. Hearn's attempt to reward Red Valsen, for instance,

leads only to disrespect. Valsen's stream of consciousness exhibits his contempt for Hearn:

“He hated this lieutenant, this big guy with the phony grin who was always trying to buddy”

(600). Hearn’s Radical policy is to be fair, resulting to further insubordination. Meanwhile,

Croft, whose policies mirror Cummings' authoritarian beliefs, is able to maintain the

respect of the men precisely because they fear him.

The greatest display of Hearn's Radical policy in the reconnaissance is just before

his death when he considers whether to continue the mission or to return:

“If we run into anything, any ambushes, any Japs in the pass,

we're turning right around and going back to the beach. Is that

fair enough?” .... In a few minutes they started o u t.... Quite

naturally [Hearn] assumed the point and led the platoon

toward the pass. (602, italics mine) 28

In this passage, Hearn implements his Radical policy in two ways. First, he does so by defying Cummings' comment that the “Army functions best when you're frightened of the man above you, and contemptuous of your subordinates” (176). By inquiring of the opinions of the men before making a decision, he transgresses Cummings' army structure by removing his personal authority. Second, he implements Radical policy by taking the point position, for a platoon officer never takes this position because of the danger, indicating that Hearn is actively attempting to remove the Army's class structure. But it is after this last Radical expression that, without any elaboration, the narrative voice explains:

“A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine-gun bullet which passed through his chest” (602). The lack of description leading to Hearn's death is astonishing, especially considering that the narrative encourages readers to think of his death as inevitable. Instead of a grandiose death scene, Mailer supplies his readers with the opposite, and the brevity of the sentence results in an anticlimactic death, a sort of ellipsis after his

Radical action.

Why does Hearn's Radicalism fail? Firstly, because of his inexperience with

Radical policy. The second, which seems equally important, is that his death denotes the incoherence of Radicalism' subjective claims. The purpose of Radicalism, according to

MacDonald, is to elicit a society of persons with maximum well-being by basing one's socialism on Utopian aspirations. Above all, MacDonald states, the Radical's “ethical dynamic come from the absolute and non-historical values, such as Truth and Justice, rather 29

than the course of history” (29). According to MacDonald, the Radical views value judgments as a subjective process because it “involves a qualitative discrimination” of the individual (49). The individual, in other words, subjectively decides what is good or bad.

But herein lies the first philosophical issue with Radicalism, for if moral subjectivism is true, then no decision could be said to be good or bad, including the decision to be subjective. However, our intuitions reveal that there are actually good and bad decisions, and even if our intuitions are wrong, such as in the decision for the lesser of two evils, some objectivity is still presupposed. Thus by the same token that MacDonald shows the limits of science, his subjective approach also undermines his own theory. MacDonald seemed to understand the consequences of his subjectivism when he admits:

Once we have divorced value judgments from scientific

method, we are embarked on a slope which can easily lead if

not to Hell at least to Heaven. For if we assume that men

decide what is Good, True, Just and Beautiful by a partially

free choice, then the blank question confronts us: if our value-

choices are not wholly determined by the scientifically

understandable “real” world (I put “real” in quotes because

what the scientificians call the “unreal” world seems to me

equally real), then where in the world or out of it, DO they

come from? The easiest answer is the religious one: that there 30

is some kind of divine pattern, of otherworldly origin, to

which our choices conform. (54)

But MacDonald rejects the religious solution. Instead of finding moral codes and duties objectively grounded in God, MacDonald's position is that there is no moral objectivity:

The attempt to give values either a religious or a scientific

basis seems to me an attempt to objectify what is a subjective,

personal, even arbitrary process. I think each man’s values

come from intuitions which are peculiar to himself and yet —

if he is talented as a moralist — also strike common chords

that vibrate respondingly in other people’s consciences. (55)

The Radical thus subjectively discriminates value judgments towards a society that maximizes well-being, responding to his central question: “What End ought we to want?”

(52). However, MacDonald's argument for moral subjectivism fails at least in two ways.

The first, which Mailer does not show in the narrative, is the self-defeating claim that one objectively ought (the moral “ought” here is about epistemic duties) to be subjective. Thus, 31

far from removing the idea of objective morality, MacDonald's essay awkwardly points towards the notion that there are objective values.

Unlike this first philosophical obstacle, Mailer's does actually entertain the second way in which MacDonald's argument for moral subjectivism fails. MacDonald's whole theory balances on the idea that individuals can create a society of well-being persons by their subjective discrimination of value judgments. But this implies that the property of being good is identical as the property of well-being because any ethically good decision must be to maximize well-being. This logic for moral subjectivism is incoherent, however, because the society MacDonald imagines could just as easily be occupied by bad persons, provided that their subjective choices maximize their well-being or the well-being of others. In The Naked and the Dead, Hearn's death provides an interesting thought experiment about MacDonald's subjective claims. Mailer begins by creating a possible world (the reconnaissance mission) where the property of goodness and the property of well-being are not identical. Mailer places Croft in this possible world. Croft is a psychopath: he does not feel any remorse about doing wrong to others. Most notably, during the reconnaissance Croft withholds the location of the Japanese forces so that Hearn is killed by them. Croft does something that most persons would say is morally wrong.

However, according to MacDonald's Radicalism which identifies goodness and well-being as the same, when Croft kills Hearn he is actually doing something good because Croft's experience is likely to maximizes the well-being of the platoon. But Croft's value judgments in the reconnaissance showcases that the property of goodness and the property 32

of well-being are not identical. Hearn's death therefore paints a picture of a very different world where, if choices were to be made to maximize well-being, the terms good and bad would become obsolete.

Hearn's Radicalism thus exhibits the philosophically sound and unsound components of MacDonald's “The Root is Man.” Hearn's arguments illustrate many of

MacDonald's contentions against the science of Marxism and its ability to access truths about aesthetics, ethics, and metaphysics. On the other hand, Hearn's demise signifies the incoherence of Radicalism' subjective approach because it forces one to identify the moral goodness of a person to depend on whether or not they maximize well-being.

III. Cummings' Scientific Pretensions

The arguments asserted by General Cummings also indicate that the political representations in The Naked and the Dead are closely related to Dwight MacDonald's

“The Root is Man.” Cummings provides numerous scientific counter arguments to Hearn's

Radicalism, reflecting what MacDonald describes as the Progressive mentality.

Furthermore, Cummings' view is not just political but philosophical. The philosophy

Cummings' espouses is “scientism,” a philosophy defined in the OED as: 33

The belief that only knowledge obtained from scientific

research is valid, and that notions or beliefs deriving from

other sources, such as religion, should be discounted; extreme

or excessive faith in science or scientists. Also: the view that

the methodology used in the natural and physical sciences can

be applied to other disciplines, such as philosophy and the

social sciences.

Scientism, the belief that truth is only accessible by science, is a philosophical position that is consistent with what MacDonald describes as the Progressive mentality which, unlike the Radical mentality, embraces the scientific aims of Marxism. MacDonald characterizes

Progressive thought as follows:

By “Progressive” would be understood those who see the

Present as an episode on the road to a better Future; those who

think more in terms of historical process than of moral values;

those who believe that the main trouble with the world is partly

lack of scientific knowledge and partly the 34

failure to apply to human affairs such knowledge as we do

have; those who, above all, regard the increase of man’s

mastery over nature as good. ...(21)

Cummings reflects all of these characteristics of Progressive ideology, as is evident in his focus on historical process (the science of Marxism), his presumption that science can access all forms of knowledge, and his desire to structure what he encounters within his environment.

Cummings' Progressive mentality explains why he adopts fascism: after analyzing it, he finds it most suitable for his philosophy. But his reason for becoming a fascist is also illuminated deterministically. In his childhood vignette, after Cummings attends a church sermon where he is instructed to be an “instrument” of God, his father undermines the message by saying, “Life's a hard thing and nobody gives you nothing ... in religion you act one way, and in business ... you go about things in another way” (406). The primary authoritarian principle that Cummings' father teaches him is this: to be “respected if he is not loved” (408). This principle is Machiavellian in nature because it ascribes fear to be the best way to maintain authority. During the present time narrative on the island of

Anopopei, one finds the Machiavellian lesson of his father reflected in Cummings' dialogue with Lieutenant Hearn when he says, “The trick is to make yourself an instrument of your own policy. Whether you like it or not, that's the highest effectiveness man has achieved” 35

(82); this demonstrates that Cummings' fascism is to some extent deterministically developed from his childhood because this statement echoes the words of his father to be an instrument of policy.

Fascism to Cummings is more credible than other theories because it has been scientifically proven to be able to control the historical process more than other ideologies.

In a confrontation with Hearn, Cummings communicates that he has made a study of what makes a nation fight well (174), and invites Hearn to guess the answer. Responding, Hearn guesses, “I imagine it would be a kind of identity between the people and the country whether it's for good reasons or bad” (175). Hearn's approach is to immediately focus on the value judgments made by individuals, but Cummings responds with a scientific explanation:

[There are just] two main elements. A nation fights well in

proportion to the amount of men and materials it has. And the

other equation is that the individual soldier in the army is a

more effective soldier the poorer his standard of living has

been in the past. (176)

Both equations are based on measurable economic factors and void of any ethical concerns.

Cummings is only concerned with an individual's economic background, a quantitative 36

judgment to predict a measured performance in the army as a whole. Far from discovering that individuals have intrinsic worth, Cummings perceives the individual as a means to an end. After being questioned by Hearn whether patriotism improves a country's fight,

Cummings declares that patriotism is “undependable” (175) due to his belief that only the quantitative data about persons and the scientific method is required for his predictions.

MacDonald explains the scientific method as:

[The] process of gathering measurable data, setting up

hypotheses to explain the past behavior of whatever is being

investigated, and testing these hypothesis by finding out if

they enable one to predict correctly future behavior. The

essence in the ability to accept or reject the scientific

conclusion by means of objective - and ultimately

quantitative - tests whose outcome is unambiguous. (81-82)

As a tool, the scientific method allows a person to formulate accurate predictions about patterns of behavior. MacDonald does not reject the scientific method, but rather the belief that one is able to arrive at a value judgment that something is good or bad scientifically.

However, this is exactly how Cummings operates. Cummings' scientific pretension is that he can predict and structure future events by focusing on quantitative data, despite factors 37

such as patriotism that are clearly beyond his control. Cummings cannot accept the impact qualitative feelings may have on his predictions because it would be admitting to the limitations of science.

In “The Root is Man,” MacDonald explains how fascism is actually a consequence of science, an extreme expression of Progressive thought that mirrored the “bureaucratic- collective dictatorship” in Stalin's Russia (MacDonald 44). MacDonald warns that it is through this scientific lens that barbarism occurs:

It is sometimes said in defense of Marxism on this point that

he did not predict the inevitable factory of socialism but

rather said that the choice before mankind was either

socialism or barbarism, and that today we are getting the

latter. But what did “barbarism” mean to Marx? From the

context of his whole thought, I venture to say it meant

disorganization, chaos, a regression in the scientific-

technological sphere .... But what we see today is just the

opposite: it is the very triumph of scientific organization of

matter (and of men) that is the root of our trouble .... (52) 38

According to MacDonald, it is not the negation of science that causes barbarism but the very success of it. Cummings adopts fascism because he believes that it has the ability to organize and “co-ordinate” historical energy more than any other competing ideology

(321). Fascism functions perfectly for Cummings' political needs because it concentrates on the scientific aims of Marxism.

Cummings’ assessment of fascism as a superior program is based on his claim that the war is a “power concentration” (177). The General claims: “The machine techniques of this century demand consolidation, and with that you’ve got to have fear, because the majority of men must be subservient to the machine, and it’s not a business they instinctively enjoy” (177). His metaphor of the machine grinding out of control suggests that, if left alone, the historical process will continue autonomously. Cummings' function is to mediate the historical process, shaping and consolidating it into predictable forms.

Moreover, Cummings' machine metaphor describes reification, a process that MacDonald describes here:

Marxism regards war as a means to an end, a method of

advancing certain definite class interests .... [Tjhere is

implied in this whole view a certain rationality ....

There was some truth in these ideas in Marx’s time,

but they are now obsolete. War has become an end in itself 39

.... War tends more and more to make the situation of

“victors” indistinguishable from that of the “defeated” ....

The machine is out of control and is grinding away according

to its own logic. Here is another example of “reification”

(“thing-ification”): human creations developing their own

dynamic and imposing their own laws on their creators. (57)

The General mistakenly believes that he has the power to shape the historical process, and the irony of his machine metaphor is that the historical process is too powerful to be controlled by his own policy. However, Cummings believes that he can control the historical process with fascism, and he describes history and ideology like a science experiment, interpreting the war like a test tube:

“I like to call it a process of historical energy. There are

countries which have latent powers, latent resources, they

are full of potential energy, so to speak. And there are great

concepts which can unlock that, express it. As kinetic energy

a country is organization, co-ordinated effort, your epithet,

fascism.” He moved his chair slightly. “Historically the

purpose of war is to translate America’s potential into kinetic 40

energy. The concept of fascism, far sounder than

communism if you consider it, for it’s grounded firmly in

men’s actual natures, merely started in the wrong country, in

a country which did not have enough intrinsic potential

power to develop completely. In Germany with that basic

frustration of limited physical means there were bound to be

excesses. But the dream, the concept was sound.” Cummings

wiped his mouth. “As you put it, Robert, not too badly,

there's a process of osmosis. America is going to absorb that

dream, it's in the business of doing it now. When you've

created power, materials, armies, they don’t wither of their

own accord. Our vacuum as a nation is filled with released

power, and I can tell you that we're out of the backwaters of

history now.” (321)

According to his view, the kinetic energy of America will be used regardless of policy, but that fascism is best equipped to guide historical energy into predictable outcomes.

Therefore, Cummings pragmatically adopts fascism because it acts as a catalyst with the historical process, allowing the economic reactions to occur faster and with less energy.

But Cummings' test tube analogy would only work if matter was the object of his study. 41

To accurately predict and shape the historical process, Cummings would have to consider the feelings of man, but his scientific view prevents him from accessing qualitative facts.

Despite the fact that Cummings claims to have scientifically tested fascism, his character is defeated at the end of the novel. While Cummings' political defeat is not as direct as Hearn's death, the fact that he does not predict the victory of Anopopei refutes his belief in the superiority of fascism. Ultimately the failure of Cummings' fascist command is a philosophical one, stemming from his scientific lens. Throughout the narrative, his misconception is that his fascist policy allows him to predict and manipulate events into structured patterns.

Cummings' desire for structured patterns is manifest in his map making skills. In the beginning of the narrative, Cummings is shown to have the ability to orchestrate battle

“without referring once to a map” (77), providing specific co-ordinates “[based on] a mental image of his battle map” (112). The reason Cummings has such an aptitude for making, reading, and recalling maps is because they represent the quintessential structure he seeks in the world. His desire to create structure is most evident when he dictates in his journal about the asymmetrical parabola (569). Since it lacks symmetry, an asymmetrical parabola violates the predictable patterns Cummings pursues to establish. The General attempts to find structure by philosophically suggesting that its shape encompass all human experience, “from another approach that form is the flank curve of a man or woman’s breast 42

.... It is the curve of all human powers” (570). Cummings is trying to ascertain symmetry: by philosophically comparing the asymmetrical parabola with all human experience, he creates symmetry in his own mind. His desire to find structure in the asymmetrical parable is inspired by his experience shooting a howitzer earlier that day: “What is this curve? It is the fundamental path of any projectile ... it demonstrates the form of existence, and life and death are merely different points of observation on the same trajectory” (570). But both these shapes transgress the straight and symmetrical forms that he strives for, and so his by attempting to find patterns he also demonstrates his absurd belief that he can structure everything. Nigel Leigh has a similar interpretation of the General:

[Cummings'] epic scheme is to discover the 'curve' that is the

form line of all cultures, the ultimate map which is the key

to everything. But his attempts to map the curve are too

simple: “There was order but he could not reduce it to the

form of a single curve. Things eluded him” [p. 571]. (428)

The General adds that there are two forces in the howitzer trajectory, gravity and wind, which he calls “parasite forces” (570) because they introduce disorder in what otherwise would be a predictable pattern. Cummings, however, does not focus enough attention on these forces, simplifying them in his journal as mere nuisances. But as with Cummings' 43

two dimensional interpretation of chess, his analysis excludes factors that are beyond the reach of science.

Whether it is the Cummings' inability to consider the qualitative thoughts of man or the asymmetrical parabola, Cummings' scientism proves itself to be anti-scientific. He does not follow the evidence where it leads, which would be the conclusion that he cannot predict and shape everything that he encounters. It is only by the end of the novel, when

Major Dalleson wins the battle of Anopopei, that Cummings finally comprehends the limitations of his scientific approach.

IV. The Rise of Bureaucracy: The Third Alternative

So far it has been demonstrated that Hearn and Cummings' ideologies correspond to MacDonald's Radical and Progressive ideologies respectively in “The Root is Man.”

The depiction of Major Dalleson's bureaucracy at the end of the novel exhibits yet another

similarity between Mailer and MacDonald: both viewed bureaucracy as a permanent political structure in the post-war period. Dalleson's bureaucratic success at the end of the

narrative indicates that his character reflects the bureaucratic reality in Stalin's Russia.

“Bureaucratic collectivism,” originally coined by Bruno Rizzi, is a term adopted by the

minority faction of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the early 1940s to describe the

bureaucratic caste which had formed in Stalin's Russia (Callinicos 55). When the minority 44

faction of the SWP started to identify Stalin's Russia as a bureaucratic collective, immediate controversy broke out. The identification of Russia as a bureaucratic collective conflicted with Trotsky's analysis of it as a “degenerated workers' state.” In Trotsky's analysis, the workers' state had degenerated but was in a period of transition towards a socialist state, viewing Stalin's “bureaucratic ruling cast as a temporary, unstable phenomenon and was certain it would not survive World War II” (180). The Hitler-Stalin pact, however, proved to be a defining event that signified that the Soviet Union was no longer a workers' state because it showed that it could not be considered as transitional.

Between the Hitler-Stalin pact in the fall of 1939 and early 1940 that the theory of bureaucratic collectivism became the most important issue for members in the SWP, and the debate crescendoed in the 1940 split of the SWP (Callinicos 24). While the majority faction of the SWP continued to adhere to Trotsky's analysis of Russia, minority members like MacDonald considered Russia's bureaucracy as a sheer reality that needed to be reckoned with:

A form of society has come into being which is not Socialist

but rather an even more oppressive form of class society than

Capitalism, and yet which has resolved those economic

contradictions on which Marx based his expectation of

progress to socialism. It is a “third alternative” to both

capitalism and socialism. (37) 45

For those individuals that found bureaucratic collectivism to be an accurate description of

Russia, the difficult task of describing its economic laws of motion still remained. Members of the minority faction would continue to develop the theory for years to come, such as

James Burnham and his much celebrated work The Managerial Revolution. Nevertheless,

MacDonald's description of the bureaucratic collectivist' economy represents the consensus view of the minority faction of the SWP. MacDonald describes that the market continues to exist under bureaucratic collectivism, but that now production is controlled by the ruling caste:

Economically, this is production for use, the use being, of

course, a highly undesirable one from the social point of view.

Nor is this production controlled by a market mechanism

working “independent of man’s will” but by a bureaucratic

apparatus which plans production (as against the well-known

“anarchy” of capitalist production) and which consciously

and willfully works out the best solution to the particular

problem. No individual producer thinks “for himself’; on the

contrary, if not one man, at least a small group of top

bureaucrats, “think for all.” (39) 46

The ruling caste owns and controls the means of production, and by doing so resolves the economic contradictions by replacing a market mechanism with the bureaucratic apparatus which extrapolates surplus: “The old capitalist forms existed, but they expressed a new content” (39).

Stalin's bureaucratic collective is translated in The Naked and the Dead as a single character, Major Dalleson. Moreover, the bureaucracy that is depicted in the narrative is not yet fully developed but rather in an incipient form that is just coming into power. The first bureaucratic gesture that Major Dalleson is noted in his determination to please

Cummings' by his administrative productivity: “the Major floundered through his work, or more exactly, he sweated through it, for what he could not supply in brilliance he was determined to produce in hard work” (385). Dalleson's nature is bureaucratic because he views his self-worth to be sutured to his productivity. Additionally, this scene showcases his desire to please higher authority by being productive. Unlike Hearn who found authority in himself, Dalleson receives it from the hierarchy of command, and he is perfectly content with his position as a Major, with “no more hope of becoming a general than a rich merchant in the Middle Ages might have dreamed of becoming king” (385).

Furthermore, Dalleson yearns to submit his work to his superiors because it allows him to be impartial about his work; sacrificing his personal judgment permits his efforts to be 47

systematically reviewed. This impartiality towards his work displays that his value in the administration ultimately stems from the procedural correctness of his reports.

Mailer also uses Dalleson's management of information as another means of diagnosing the failings of a bureaucratic mentality. Unlike Cummings’ desire to find patterns in data, Dalleson focuses on the efficiency and productivity of his administration.

When his subordinates are slacking in the administration, he reacts with a bureaucratic solution: “To correct [their behavior], he was after his clerks all the time to make them retype papers in which there was one error or even one erasure” (387). Notice that Dalleson is not concerned about the factual content of the reports; rather, his neuroticism directs his attention to procedural accuracy. Dalleson's obsession with procedure directly contrasts with Cummings' concern with the factual content of reports. When Cummings realizes

Dalleson's bureaucratic behavior, he watches him with contempt. He tells himself:

“Dalleson’s got a mind like a switchboard .... If your plug will fit one of his mental holes, he can furnish the necessary answer, but otherwise he’s lost” (388). Cummings characterizes Dalleson's behavior as a switchboard, an operating device that connects two persons by a cable or switch in the manual telephone exchange. Cummings' mechanical imagery of Dalleson's mind highlights Dalleson's systematic management of information, but Cummings also suggests that Dalleson has been dehumanized by his bureaucracy.

Nigel Leigh similarly characterizes Dalleson as inhuman and mechanical: “The congeries of images the Major attacks—timetables, crosswords, switchboards—evokes his closed mechanical mind... his world is uninhabited by the arcane forces which animate and obsess 48

Cummings” (87). The mechanical imagery Mailer uses to describe Dalleson's mind shows that his bureaucratic policies have resulted from the loss of his humanity. Dalleson is merely a mechanism for a larger machine, exhibiting no creative individuality.

However scientific Cummings' tendencies are, his desire to change history is an artistic attempt to render symmetry and structure in an otherwise disorderly world. Far from diminishing his humanity, the lengths to which Cummings is willing to go, even adopting absurd philosophical notions, at least demonstrates his creative expression and individuality. Dalleson presents no such creative expression with his policies. Dalleson changes history with administrative scrutiny and a removed sense of self. Whereas

Cummings' fascism demonstrates a tour de force of individual potential, Dalleson's bureaucracy shows a limitation of potentiality. For example, Dalleson receives a report about the Japanese forces:

The Jap corpses lately looked skinnier. All the islands were

supposed to be blockaded, not getting any supplies .... The

Major was weary. Why did he have to make these decisions?

He lost track of the minutes listening to the rapt absorptive

buzzing of the flies under the latrine boards. One or two

whipped against his naked flanks and he grunted with

displeasure. They damn sure needed a new latrine. (649) 49

This depiction of Dalleson’s thought processes here demonstrates that his potentiality has become limited because he equates the importance of the report with the necessity to build new, more efficient latrines. Again, this is a mechanized behavior like the switchboard: he does not appropriately concentrate his attention to the victory of the campaign. Ironically,

Dalleson wins the battle of Anopopei in Cummings' absence, despite not giving the proper attention to the reports on the Japanese forces.

By the end of the novel, Dalleson's bureaucracy is crystallizing into an actual political program. Dalleson has been politically elevated in the ranks of the army because of the victory of Anopopei, and the last scene in the novel unveils the success of his bureaucratic policies: “[Dalleson could] write a letter [for a] pin-up girl .... And in the meantime he might send a letter to the War Department Training Aids Section .... The

Major could see every unit in the Army using his idea at last. He clenched his fists with excitement” (721). This picture is eerie for two reasons. First, Dalleson's idea to co-ordinate grid over a pin-up girl is a perversion of Cummings' map-making tendencies; the difference is that Dalleson strives to compartmentalize information. This desire to compartmentalize again indicates bureaucracy as a limiting force against human potential. For whereas

Cummings' was shown to access many forms of knowledge and have complex thoughts about them, such as when he muses philosophically about the asymmetrical parabola,

Dalleson is incapable of accessing more than one type of information and forming complex thoughts about them, philosophical or otherwise. What this indicates is that Dalleson lacks 50

intentionality. Dalleson's inability to be intentional further exhibits a mechanical mental process rather than human thought. Dalleson’s compartmentalizing, in other words, stems from the mechanical state of his mind, and like the switchboard his mind transfers information through outlets without adding any of his own. Second, this illustrates that he is propagating his bureaucratic ideas to be adopted by other administrative units in the army. This is an eerie moment in the narrative because, until then, his bureaucratic policies were not yet shared with other persons. Although Dalleson has no authority through most of the narrative, his victory on Anopopei politically elevates his character so that he can

successfully make his ideas into army protocol. The Naked and the Dead thus ends

anticipating the bureaucracy of Mailer's second novel, Barbary Shore, because it shows

Dalleson's bureaucracy as crystallizing into a formidable policy that will continue to exist

in the post-war period. 51

Chapter 2: Competing Forms of Trotskyism in Barbary Shore

Mailer's chronicle of competing ideologies continues in his second novel, Barbary

Shore. Whereas in Naked and the Dead describes the experiences of a collection of soldiers during WWII, Barbary Shore focuses on a small group of individuals in an apartment complex. It opens with its protagonist, Lovett, moving into the apartment building and encountering three of the buildings inhabitants: Lannie, a closet Trotskyist and informant for the FBI; Hollingsworth, a bureaucratic agent for the FBI; and McLeod, who has become a Trotskyist by developing a revised theory of Trotsky's analysis. Although mystery clouds the identity of each character through the first half of the narrative, it becomes apparent that McLeod was previously a hangman for Stalin's Left Opposition. The second half of the narrative consists of an unofficial trial that Hollingsworth conducts against McLeod, resulting in McLeod's death and Lovett's adoption of Trotskyism.

The Naked and the Dead interacts with socialism obliquely through the guise of post-war Radicalism. In contrast, Barbary Shore, explores Trotskyism directly through the concrete, lived experiences of its Trotskyist characters Lannie and McLeod. Thus, whereas

The Naked and the Dead entertains three of the ideologies in MacDonald's “The Root is

Man,” Barbary Shore gives attention to the Trotskyist traditions of the 1940s.

Criticism of Barbary Shore typically identifies only one form of Trotskyism in the narrative. Critics traditionally interpret Lannie and McLeod's Trotskyism to be identical; 52

however, such readings are untenable when one considers the characters' disparate political motivations. In contrast to previous critics, I argue that Lannie and McLeod represent two distinct forms of Trotskyism, “orthodox” and “heretical.” These two forms of Trotskysim correspond to the two factions of the Socialist Workers Party that formed after the 1940 conflict. My reading suggests that Mailer was not just casually flirting with Trotskyism but seriously engaged with it. Mailer represents Trotskyism in the novel as a social reality for the characters of the novel, not as some abstract concept. In a time of post-war deradicalization, Barbary Shore proves to be a radical text that engages in socialist theory that had been largely abandoned since the Socialist Workers Party conflict in 1940.

Barbary Shore's examination of Trotskyism is thus an indication of Mailer's continued interest in the radical traditions of the New York Intellectuals.

I further argue that Mailer uses what I call “linguistic barbarism” to make key distinctions between the political characters of the novel. When a character is interpreted as linguistically barbaric, their writing or speech is so poor that it does not communicate intelligibly. In keeping with the OED's definition, “barbarism” is the “use of words or expressions not in accordance with the classical standard of a language, especially such as are of foreign origin; orig. the mixing of foreign words or phrases in Latin or Greek; hence, rudeness or unpolished condition of language.” As a conceit, linguistic barbarism is manifest primarily in the speech and writing of Lannie and Hollingsworth. While Lannie's 53

barbarism stems from the deficiencies in her orthodox explanation of bureaucracy,

Hollingsworth's barbarism results directly from his bureaucratic mode.

Because linguistic barbarism is caused by bureaucracy, although indirectly in

Lannie's case, Barbary Shore indicates that Mailer found bureaucracy to be a malignant political force. Whereas in The Naked and the Dead, bureaucracy is presented in an

incipient form that causally comes into power only by chance, in Barbary Shore,

bureaucracy is fully developed, dominating the Western and Eastern blocs. The actual

impact that bureaucracy has on an individual, something merely suggested in The Naked

and the Dead, is made evident in Barbary Shore by the characters who suffer from

linguistic barbarism.

I. Orthodoxy Versus Heresy

While the plot of Barbary Shore is easily summarized, interpreting the Trotskyist

politics of the novel is difficult because Lannie and McLeod defend different traditions. To

aid in describing how Mailer represents the polemics of Trotskyism in Barbary Shore, this

chapter will adopt the terms “orthodox” and “heretical” as used by Alex Callinicos in

Trotskyism: Concepts in Social Thought.1 The terms orthodox and heretical have become

1 However the terms did not originate with Callinicos. James P. Cannon was the first to coin the term “orthodox Trotskyism” in the 1953 open letter titled “A Letter to 54

synonymous with the Cannonite and Shachtmanite factions, respectively. Since the term

“orthodoxy” is generally used to describe theological adherence to tradition, Cannon was making the position of the majority faction clear: they would continue to adhere to

Trotsky's writing. But by describing his faction as orthodox, Cannon was also implying that the Shachtmanites were heretics to tradition. While the implication was obviously meant to be negative, the term does properly describe the Shachtmanites' belief that

Trotsky's writing was inadequate. Without any religious connotations, these terms accurately delineate between traditions that adhere or deviate from Trotsky's analysis.

The two Trotskyist characters of the novel are Lannie and McLeod. Lannie is an orthodox Trotskyite, adhering to the letter of Trotsky's writing. Her orthodoxy is manifest in her persecution of McLeod, whose politics differ in significant ways from Trotsky's writing, implying a heretical stance. Lannie justifies her persecution of McLeod by claiming that McLeod “sinned” and that her judgment is “righteous” (157). The religious language used by Lannie is interesting, given that her Trotskyism later becomes known as orthodox by Cannon in 1953. Mailer seems to use Lannie's religious language to distinguish between her orthodoxy and heresy. The pious discourse Lannie uses clearly suggests that she believes her form of Trotskyism to be the correct Marxist theory. The religious term “sin” that Lannie uses does not indicate a moral transgression in the traditional sense on McLeod's part, rather it indicates that McLeod has transgressed against orthodox Trotskyism by authoring a heretical form of the theory. Though Lannie proves to

Trotskyists Throughout the World." 55

be conflicted about her role in the trial, the ultimate reason behind her persecution of

McLeod is to limit the political agency of his theory and reassert the fundamentals of

Trotsky's analysis. Second, Lannie shows the orthodoxy of her belief that Trotsky was the best author of Marxism. Lannie's Trotskyism, in contrast to McLeod's, is not independent from the authorship of Trotsky, and how Lannie constantly recalls Trotsky's death reveals the importance of his authorship to her tradition. For instance, when describing the implications of McLeod's sin, Lannie states to Lovett, “[McLeod] destroyed the world, do you understand? He's a murderer of the best and thus gives the impression of being the best” (211). McLeod did not physically murder Trotsky, and both Lannie and Lovett know this, but her comment implies that only Trotsky's authorship could have orchestrated another revolution. This confirms that Lannie views Trotsky as an infallible author. So

Lannie should not only be understood as an orthodox Trotskyist but as a zealot. Lannie understands Trotsky's death to prohibit any development of his ideas. In other words,

Trotsky's death results in a political impasse between his followers who believe they should adhere strictly to his ideas. While there are other ways in which Lannie's orthodoxy is represented by Mailer, her adherence to Trotsky's analysis and persecution of McLeod are two ways in which she displays her orthodoxy throughout the novel.

Lannie's uncritical zealotry directly contrasts McLeod's relation to Trotskyism.

McLeod, a critical theorist, reveals himself to be a heretic to tradition through his revision of Trotsky's analysis. The heretical nature of McLeod's Trotskyism is exemplified by his final speech. In it, McLeod abandons Trotsky's belief about the overthrow of capitalism by 56

state ownership will occur. According to McLeod's theory, the Western and Eastern blocs are monopoly and state capitalist societies. The Eastern bloc, rather than a true socialist state, is no more than a bureaucratic collective with the ownership of the means of production (277). This theory contrasts Trotsky's interpretation of Stalin's Russia as a degenerated workers' state, for it interprets Russia's bureaucratic caste as a permanent structure.

II. Jean Malaquais and the Socialist Workers Party

Mailer might have based McLeod's heretical Trotskyism on that of his quasi-

Trotskyist translator of The Naked and the Dead, Jean Malaquais. Certainly there is support

for such a supposition. Mailer himself attributes Barbary Shore's focus on Trotskyism to

Malaquais's influence (Wald 275). On the political influence of Jean Malaquais, Mailer

stated:

1 started Barbary Shore as some sort of fellow-traveler, and

finished with a political position which was a far-flung

mutation of Trotskyism.. ..[Jean Malaquais] had an enormous

influence on me... .1 doubt if I would even have gone back to 57

rewrite Barbary Shore if I didn't know Malaquais. (Lennon

85)

Mailer reflects his own relationship with Malaquais in the narrative with the teacher- student relationship between McLeod and Lovett. Moreover, McLeod's Balkan accent and false identity as an Irishman mirrors Malaquais's biography. Born in Poland as Wladimir

Malacki, Malaquais adopted a French identity when he settled in France in 1936 (Menand

37). However, the political differences between McLeod and Malaquais are extreme.

McLeod's Trotskyism does not necessarily reflect the quasi-Trotskyist views of Malaquais.

Whether or not Malaquais's Trotskyism was orthodox or heretical at the end of the 1940s is unknown. What is known is that in 1939 Trotsky wrote an article about Jean Malaquais titled “A Great New Writer.” In it, Trotsky praised Malaquais's art as doing a service to

Marxism. The article was published in the Fourth International in 1941. The dates when

Malaquais wrote the article and when it was published therefore serve as strong evidence that Malaquais had little to no participation in the SWP conflict, for Trotsky would not have published a heretical view in his journal. This means that Malaquais's political views in his writing expressed the basic tenets of Trotskyism and were not considered controversial. So rather than interpreting McLeod's heretical Trotskyism in relation to 58

Malaquais’s influence, McLeod’s theory should be interpreted as corresponding to the views of the Shachtmanite faction of the SWP in the early 1940s.2

The SWP, an American Trotskyist based organization, had a factional conflict that resulted in the party's split in 1940. The conflict was not a peripheral event for the New

York Intellectuals, but central to their identity through the 1940. As Alan Wald explains,

“The American Trotskyist movement had an impact on virtually an entire generation of

New York-based intellectuals, a surprising number of whom held membership in its organizations and youth groups” (164). The conflict started in the fall of 1939 when

Shachtman, supported by the SWP leaders Martin Abem and James Burnham, argued that the Hitler-Stalin pact signified that the Soviet Union was no longer a workers' state

(Callinicos 24). Trotsky had previously described the USSR as a degenerated workers' state, but his analysis proved to be problematic because, while asserting the overthrow of capitalism, it viewed Stalin's regime as a transitional state. To Shachtman and other members of the SWP, the Hitler-Stalin pact signified that Stalin's bureaucracy was a permanent state (and not the temporary phenomenon that Trotsky had identified it to be).

To Shachtman and his followers, the Hitler-Stalin pact was thus strong evidence against the validity of Trotsky's ideas.

The internal crisis of the SWP resulted in the majority and minority factions known as Cannonites and Shachtmanites, respectively. While the Stalin-Hitler pact was one of the

2 Even if Malaquais' Trotskyist views were heretical by the 1950s, any heretical notions probably stemmedfrom the minority faction o f the Socialist Workers Party. 59

important events highlighting the contradictions of Trotsky's analysis, it was the aftermath of WWII that polarized the Cannonites and Shactmanites to even more distinct positions.

Alex Callinicos notes:

The post-war transformation of Eastern Europe by the USSR

in its own likeness presented Trotsky's heirs with the

following dilemma: to abandon his identification of the

overthrow of capitalism with state ownership of the means

of production or to revise the classical Marxist conception of

socialist revolution as 'the self-conscious, independent

movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the

immense majority'.... 'Orthodox Trotskyism', as Cannon was

the first to call it, consisted in taking the second horn of this

dilemma. (29)

The post-war transformation of Europe pointed out a contradiction in Trotsky's analysis.

For orthodox Trotskyists, the solution to this contradiction was to revise classical Marxism so that the immense majority could be represented by proxy. This revision was necessary since the transformation of Eastern Europe had been done by Stalin's ruling bureaucratic caste. Instead of abandoning Trotsky's claim that capitalism would be overthrown by state 60

ownership, the Cannonites extended Trotsky's analysis of Russia to include its satellite states (Callinicos 39). For the Shachtmanites, however, Russia's satellite states signified contradictions in the theory. To answer these contradictions, the Shachtmanites revised

Trotsky's analysis to make sense of the bureaucratic caste that controlled the means of production.

III. Trotskyism on Trial

Barbary Shore is much more focused on Marxism than The Naked and the Dead.

Whereas the Radical position in The Naked and the Dead is but one of three competing ideologies, Marxism in Barbary Shore is the central object of investigation. As Nigel Leigh points out, a key difference between Mailer's first two novels is that Barbary Shore focuses specifically on Marxist ideology:

The Marxist influence in The Naked and the Dead is

translated in Barbary Shore into Marxist perspective. The

only actual Marxists in the first novel-if Hearn is excluded

as a left liberal or proto-Marxist-are an anonymous hobo in 61

a time-machine section and the members of Harvard's John

Reed Club who expel Hearn from their group. In Barbary

Shore Marxism is centralized. (Norman Mailer 83)

To put it another way, the Radical position in The Naked and the Dead is but one of the three competing ideologies, whereas in Barbary Shore, McLeod's trial centralizes the political inquiry on Marxist thought. However, Leigh interprets the trial to be of Marxism itself, an interpretation that does not account for Lannie's political persecution of McLeod.

Leigh's argument is, in fact, another example of a traditional interpretation that does not recognize Lannie and McLeod's Trotskyism to be different. When interpreting McLeod,

Leigh remarks,

McLeod is not politically active and no longer a 'joiner'

(p.35). Socialist experience has amounted to personal

tragedy; being a state functionary has left him 'destroyed as

a person' (p. 185). As an independent leftist, a 'Marxist-at-

liberty' (p.36), he searches for a non-bureaucratic alternative

in writing and study. This recontemplation of the basic aims

of socialism is a way of continuing to affirm Marxist 62

politics. Precisely what sort of politics is left vague, but the

gesture is hopeful.... (93)

While Leigh's interpretation is insightful, it nevertheless fails to explain the novel's politics. For Leigh, McLeod's politics remain simply “vague.” Leigh's interpretation of

McLeod is demonstrably false for at least two reasons. First, if McLeod is merely an independent leftist, then Lannie would have no good reason to persecute him because he would pose no threat to her orthodoxy. Second, McLeod's final speech provides evidence of his heretical views. If one contends that McLeod is a prototypical Marxist as Leigh does, then one would have to entirely disregard Lannie's motivations and McLeod's final speech.

IV. Lannie: Orthodoxy in Crisis

The orthodox Trotskyist in the novel is Lannie Madison. While her past is as mysterious as McLeod's, what is certain is that she had been a dedicated Trotskyist, even to the point of being tortured with electroconvulsive therapy by government agents

(possibly the FBI or CIA). Though she is currently an FBI informant and working with

Hollingsworth, her constant references to Trotsky's assassination, defense of Trotsky's analysis, and her contempt for McLeod indicate an orthodox tradition. 63

Critics are usually puzzled about Lannie's political motives. However, when one identifies Lannie as an orthodox Trotskyist, her persecution of McLeod makes perfect sense. There are two reasons Lannie persecutes McLeod. First, he participated in the assassination of Trotsky. Second, he authored a competing theory of Trotskyism. Lannie presents her case to Lovett by stating, “There is a man of extreme turpitude ... and we are here to punish him for his sins.... And you will try to interfere for you know nothing, and you will not succeed for we are righteous people” (157). Lannie describes McLeod's guilt as a “sin,” a religious term that she introduces to explain the indictment against him. Lannie further elaborates that McLeod “[murdered] the best and thus he gives an impression of being one of the best” (211). Lannie's accusation here is false. The narrative makes it clear that McLeod had, as he testifies, an “infinitesimal part of the operation” (244). How, then, do we understand Lannie's belief that McLeod “destroyed the world” (211)? By interpreting Lannie's meaning to be figurative. Lannie believes that McLeod destroyed the world by authoring written revisions on Trotsky's work. Likely because of her psychosis, the only way that Lannie can describe the conflict between her orthodoxy and McLeod's heresy is by falsely accusing McLeod of directly participating in Trotsky assassination.

The persecution of McLeod by Lannie is thus a fictional representation of the conflict between the two factions of the SWP after the 1940 split. Essentially, Lannie's persecution of McLeod is her attempt to restore his Trotskyism to orthodoxy . For instance, she says to Lovett, “Oh, Mikey, you could never understand him because he’s different

[....] He doesn’t know what he possesses, and I could show it to him” (151). What Lannie 64

is referring to is the “little object,” an ambiguous object that never physically manifests in the novel. While the contents of the little object remains unknown, it serves as a token for

Marxism. Lannie's comment that McLeod “doesn't know what he possesses” (151) demonstrates that Lannie does not believe McLeod is a credible interpreter of Trotskyism.

Lannie believes her orthodox stance affords her authority that McLeod does not have; her desire to obtain the object from McLeod is ultimately to revise his misconceptions.

Lannie's attempts to revise McLeod's heretical Trotskyism mirrors the historical struggle between the Shachtmanites and Cannonites after the 1940 split of the S WP. Alex Callinicos writes the following about orthodox and heretical Trotskyism:

The post-war transformation of Eastern Europe by the USSR

in its own likeness presented Trotsky's heirs with the

following dilemma: to abandon his identification of the

overthrow of capitalism with state ownership ..., or to revise

the classical Marxist conception of socialist revolution as 'the

self-conscious, independent movement of the immense

majority, in the interest of the immense majority' ....

'Orthodox Trotskyism', as Cannon was the first to call it,

consisted in taking the second horn of this dilemma. (29) 65

This dilemma is equivalent to the one eminent between Lannie and McLeod. McLeod's final speech demonstrates that his theories address this dilemma, he abandons the idea of the overthrow of capitalism with state ownership. McLeod specifically interprets Stalin's

Russia as an advanced bureaucratic collective, but Lannie wants him to adhere to Trotsky's analysis of Russia as a degenerated workers' state. However, Lannie's attempt to suppress

McLeod's Trotskyism is paradoxical, for by doing so she is limiting the political agency of socialist theory as a whole. The key difference between orthodox Trotskyism and heretical

Trotskyism in the 1940s and early 1950s is that the latter attempted to properly characterize

Stalin's Russia as a bureaucratic collective rather than a temporary structure in progress to a permanent socialist state. Therefore, when Lannie persecutes McLeod she is denying a theory that more accurately describes Russia's bureaucracy.

Lannie’s orthodoxy is also symbolically indicated through the arrangement of her apartment furniture. Lovett remarks that they “shifted the sofa several times—to the windows, against the fireplace, by a wall—but nothing pleased her” (105). It is not until the sofa is facing a wall with “its back to the center of the room” that Lannie is finally satisfied with its location (105). The sofa essentially epitomizes Lannie's orthodoxy, for she, like the sofa, is estranged from other political views. Since Lannie is unwilling to acknowledge any Marxist interpreter other than Trotsky, she is unable to interact with theories that could give an answer to the contradictions in Trotsky's analysis. Thus, the position of the sofa towards the wall and away from the living space is symbolic of how her orthodoxy has alienated her. 66

Like the arrangement of Lannie's furniture, the reoccurring dream that she describes to Lovett reflects the orthodoxy of her beliefs. She recalls,

When Night comes. I'll be able to see the courtyard better.

There's a pool at the bottom, and I float in the middle with lily

pads about my hair, and a bird calls for me. I can hear that

clearly. (151)

Her dream is an allusion to Hamlet's Ophelia, but more importantly it reflects her orthodoxy. The lily pads that surround Lannie symbolize the many competing ideologies in the post-war period, but it's the symbolic interaction between herself and the bird that suggests an orthodox relationship to Trotskyism. The bird is symbolic of Trotsky's authorship because its noise is the ultimate source of clarity for Lannie. Moreover, Lannie is hailed by the bird, rather than just hearing it, suggesting an orthodox relationship to

Trotskyism because Lannie receives authority from the bird rather than from herself. This is an important distinction because it reflects the orthodox belief in Trotsky as the ultimate authority on Marxism.

While Lannie's dream exhibits her orthodoxy, her dream also illustrates her linguistic barbarism. While she recounts the dream to Lovett, the way it is communicated indicates that Lannie is unaware of the true meaning of the dream. Rather than interpreting 67

her dream and then describing its meaning to Lovett, Lannie presents it in the same cryptic manner in which she experienced it; she is unable to express her figurative dream with non-figurative language.

It is not just Lannie's inability to interpret and communicate her dream in a colloquial way that qualifies her as linguistically barbaric, but her writing as well. When

Lovett is given a sample of her writing, he is shocked because it reads:

and once on a hot night with the cannon going rub dub a dub

to the silver of the moon he had a filipino woman commit

salacio upon him and afterward he drove her away with a

whoop and a cry and no money for her battered mouth

thinking of this the next day in the sun with his yellow hair

reflecting the maize of the fields where he was bom the

sermon going on the chaplain smiling at him with a what a

fine serious chap smile and he smiling back while the Sunday

hymn comes out of his mouth sweet jesus redeemer his

yellow hair and blue eyes so devout the little smile upon his

mouth as he mouths the hymn and hears the cannon of the 68

night before going rub dub dub a dub in his young buck

crotch and through the jesus redeemer he sees the woman at

his feet and smells the caribao flop she has left behind her

sensing the sun in his hair again smiling at the chaplain for

he contains the night before and the present moment and it

renders him exquisite so that he sings the love words of

crabbed spinsters lover jesus lord redeemer while to himself

he says and he is wholly in love with his image as he cracks

her back head with his knuckle you do that you do that

now.... (156)

Lannie's writing lacks all forms of grammatical structure, for Lovett notes that her handwriting “followed no pattern” and that her letters “would slope to the left or right as the whim seized her” (156). Lannie's narrative is completely incoherent, so much so that

Lovett has to read the story twice to discover, although an inaccurate account, that it is a transcription of a story Hollingsworth dictated. Lannie's inability to describe

Hollingsworth in writing echoes the crisis of orthodox Trotskyism to account for the bureaucratic caste in Stalin’s Russia. The crisis of orthodox Trotskyism, as Callinicos summarized, was “constituted ... by the decision to preserve Trotsky's analysis of the

USSR as a degenerated workers' state” at the cost of explanatory power (39). Thus, the 69

crisis of orthodox Trotskyism is reflected by Lannie's inability to characterize

Hollingsworth's bureaucracy.

Thus, Lannie's linguistic barbarism indicates that there are two deficiencies in orthodox Trotskyism. First, Lannie's orthodoxy is deficient because she cannot provide an adequate account of bureaucracy. Second, she falsely assumes that bureaucracy is temporary, and she acts on this assumption by assisting Hollingsworth in the trail against

McLeod.

V. Hollingsworth: The Bureaucratic Machine

While Lannie's speech is often obscured by complex allusions and symbolism,

Hollingsworth's speech is exhaustively literal. Hollingsworth, like Lannie, can also be identified as having linguistic barbarism. The difference between Lannie's linguistic barbarism and Hollingsworth's is that Hollingsworth struggles to articulate the most basic forms of communication. Linguistic barbarism is evident in Hollingsworth speech even the first time that he appears in the narrative, as Lovett's literary imagination describes,

“[Hollingsworth] produced his excessive laughter, going hir-hir-hir for some time and then ceasing abruptly. I had a passing image of the mechanical laughter in a canned radio program, the fans whirring, the gears revolving, the klaxons producing their artificial mirth and halting on signal” (40). This depiction conjures the mechanical imagery used in The 70

Naked and the Dead for Major Dalleson. Similar to the switchboard imagery used for

Major Dalleson, Hollingsworth's canned laughter is mechanical in nature. The noise is not spontaneous but systematic; it is a measured output of sound which mimics human laughter. Lovett finds that even the delivery of the laughter is contrived. Hollingsworth overly compensates by being “excessive” (40). His laughter also shows no sign of emotion, for any genuine laughter usually subsides over a span of time and not “abruptly.” If one compiled list of the characters of Barbary Shore who had the most difficulty with language,

Hollingsworth would be at the top because he cannot even communicate normally with a part of speech that requires no words. Laughter should be an involuntary reaction to joy, but Hollingsworth's laughter displays a calculated response.

Hollingsworth's linguistic barbarism is also noticeable during intercourse with

Guinevere. Like the laughter, Hollingsworth's speech is contrived. Lovett reports,

I was to hear another Hollingsworth. “Yes, I love you,” he

said, his delivery pitched in novel tones for me. As though

language were a catapult he proceeded to tell her how he

loved her, his speech contained more obscenity that I have

ever heard in so short a space, and in a rapid succession with

a gusto ... he named various parts of her body and described

what he would do to them. (203) 71

When Hollingsworth says that he loves Guinevere, Lovett indicates that he hears “novel tones,” meaning that it was a pitch he has never heard during sexual intercourse. This is the second reference, the first being the laughter, of Hollingsworth phonetically transgressing normative speech patterns. Additionally, Hollingsworth's vulgarity in this scene is a component of his barbarism, for he says so many obscenities in succession that it seems he is relying on them to avoid forming sentences. Hollingsworth's vulgarity in describing parts of her body reflects a similar behavior towards sex exhibited by Major Dalleson in

The Naked and the Dead when he thinks of placing a “full-size color photograph of Betty

Grable ... with a co-ordinate grid system laid over it” (721). What Hollingsworth has in common with Dalleson is that he has a perverted sense of sexuality, for he is concentrated in objectifying Guinevere's body into quantitative units. Later in the same scene, Lovett describes that he hears:

[A] sequence of you're his wife and yes I'm his wife and the

nourishment of just a feast furnishing its perpetual circle of

absorption... and his wife devoured became his wife

resplendent until he sleeping, the producer of wives, might

almost have been merged himself, but never quite. (206) 72

What Lovett witnesses is Hollingsworth's homosexual desires for McLeod. By constantly verbalizing Guinevere's marital contract, literally during the act of infidelity, Hollingsworth seems to want to become part of their sexual union. This homo-erotic behavior indicates that his sexual desires are sutured to his politics. Sex for Hollingsworth has become a political act because he is using it to advance his persecution of McLeod. Bureaucracy has dehumanized Hollingsworth to the point that his sexuality, an instinctual behavior, has become a political act.

Similarly to the short, profane utterances to Guinevere, the list of admittances compiled against McLeod further depicts Hollingsworth's linguistic barbarism. The record exhibits that Hollingsworth writing reduces McLeod's confession to short independent clauses that compose an accounting sheet rather than a transcript. Hollingsworth's list reads:

Admits to being Bolshevist.

Admits to being Communist.

Admits to being atheist.

Admits to blowing up churches.

Admits to being against free enterprise. 73

Admits to encouraging violence.

Advocates murder of President and Congress.

Advocates destruction of the South.

Advocates use of poison.

Advocates rise of the colored people.

Admits allegiance to a foreign power.

Is against Wall Street. (81)

Hollingsworth is so impacted by his linguistic barbarism that he cannot transcribe what

McLeod dictates. Moreover, the list demonstrates Hollingsworth’s inability to form complex sentences, for he truncates McLeod's entire conversation into a series of incriminating admittances. The result is an accounting sheet, not a transcription, formatted to compile quantitative data.

Hollingsworth speech and writing thus illustrate that he lacks the linguistic ability to assimilate his mechanical self to his literary environment. This is most evident when

Lovett observes the literary texts in Hollingsworth's apartment. Hollingsworth possesses a random collection of reading material: a pocket anthology of letters by famous people, pulp magazines, a radio amateur's handbook, Westerns, and a “series of mimeographed papers 74

which contained lessons on ballroom dancing” (41). The randomness of the material has no relevance to him, but he reads them because he believes they convey a human experience. The reading material also demonstrates that Hollingsworth has no common interest, something like a hobby that would indicate personality. Rather, the literature

Hollingsworth has systematically assembled is for observational purposes. Hollingsworth desires to observe his culture in order to assimilate into it.

The image maintained through this interpretation of Hollingsworth is a grim one.

Whether it is Hollingsworth's artificial pronunciation, objectifying speech, writing or reading material, his linguistic barbarism shows a mechanical nature that results from bureaucratic politics. Hollingsworth's barbarism is thus evidence of Mailer’s chronicle between The Naked and the Dead and Barbary Shore because it further represents the mechanical depictions of Mailer's first novel. Moreover, Hollingsworth's linguistic barbarism further contrasts the two forms of Trotskyism in the novel because it shows that

Lannie's orthodoxy is just as detrimental as bureaucracy. The political deficiencies in

Lannie and Hollingsworth's politics have physical consequences, manifesting in their linguistic barbarism. In contrast, McLeod does not suffer from any form of linguistic barbarism, and he is skilled in both spoken and written language. Implicit in this contrast is the notion that heretical Trotskyism is a more viable stance against bureaucracy as it is associated with positive forms of communication. 75

VI. The Other Alternative: McLeod's Trotskyism

McLeod's heretical Trotskyism is evident in his final speech. The speech shows his stance to be heretical because it contains three ideas that conform to the theories developed by the Shachtmanite faction of the SWP. First, he identifies Russia as a bureaucratic state capitalist society, whose economic production is determined by the ruling production.

Second, he abandons Trotsky's belief in the overthrow of capitalism by state ownership.

Third, he asserts that socialism is not inevitable and that, for socialism to be possible, certain conditions must exist.

The first way McLeod's speech reveals his heretical stance is by his identification of Russia as a bureaucratic collective, mirroring the bureaucratic collectivist identification by the Shachtmanites. McLeod claims that the bureaucrats own and maintain the means of production, making Russia a state capitalist society because its ruling bureaucracy plans production for a war economy (277). This heretical claim radically opposes Trotsky's analysis of Russia as a degenerated workers' state. Dwight MacDonald, whose views reverberate the consensus view of the Shachtmanite faction, makes an identical identification of Russia:

Economically, this is production for use, the use being, of

course, a highly undesirable one from the social point of view.

Nor is this production controlled by a market mechanism 76

working “independent of man’s will” but by a bureaucratic

apparatus which plans production (as against the well-known

“anarchy” of capitalist production) and which consciously

and willfully works out the best solution to the particular

problem. No individual producer thinks “for himself’; on the

contrary, if not one man, at least a small group of top

bureaucrats, “think for all.” (39)

McLeod and MacDonald's identical analyses show how closely McLeod's views conform to the Shachtmanite tradition. Furthermore, McLeod's theory holds to the Shachtmanites' view that bureaucratic collectivism is a permanent political structure, not a temporary, transitional state as Trotsky asserted. Unlike Lannie's orthodox stance, which would defend

Russia as a workers state no matter how degenerated it is, McLeod's heretical stance is to denounce Russia because it mirrors capitalism in the West.

Second, McLeod's final speech exhibits a heretical stance because it abandons

Trotsky's “identification of the overthrow of capitalism with state ownership of the means of production” (Callinicos 29). According to McLeod, the only way that the bureaucrats

“retain their power and privilege” during the conflict is to gear production for warfare

(278). This war based economy, as McLeod argues, results in state capitalism absorbing monopoly capitalism: 77

It is a war fought by two different exploitative systems, a

system vigorous in the fever of death, and another monstrous

in the swelling of anemia .... State capitalism occupies the

historical seat. The state, the sole exploiter capable of

supporting the ultra war economy and the regimentation of

the proletariat, absorbs monopoly.... (278-279)

McLeod's Trotskyism also proves to be heretical because he claims that monopoly capitalism will be absorbed by state capitalism. This claim directly contrasts Trotsky's claim that capitalism would be overthrown altogether. According to McLeod's theory, when the East absorbs the West, capitalism merely is given a new economic structure that is controlled by the bureaucratic apparatus. As Callinicos points out, one of the defining characteristics of heretical Trotskyism is the abandonment of Trotsky's belief in the overthrow of capitalism by state ownership (29). In the 1940s, the creation of Russia's satellite states proved to be problematic because they were established by Stalin's bureaucracy. The orthodox solution, as Callinicos notes, was to revise classical Marxism so that the majority could be represented by proxy. In contrast, McLeod's solution is heretical because it abandons Trotsky's belief by declaring that state capitalism will 78

assimilate monopoly capitalism. In McLeod's analysis, capitalism is not overthrown but undergoes an intrinsic change.

In identifying Russia as a bureaucratic collective and abandoning Trotsky's belief in the overthrow of capitalism, McLeod is also attempting to explain bureaucratic collectivism' economic laws of motion. Callinicos notes that one of the failures with

Shachtman's analysis of Russia was that it lacked in terms of describing its economic laws of motion:

The obvious difficulty with such a view was the huge

proportion of Soviet national income devoted to the

production of capital goods, a reflection of the priority given

heavy industry and the military. This pattern in turn indicated

the respect in which the rulers of the USSR were themselves

subject to pressures deriving from their involvement in the

international state system of competing military powers. But

such factors played no part in Shachtman's analyses. (57)

But where the Shachtmanites failed to elaborate in their theory, McLeod succeeds, for he provides an explanation of its economic laws of motion, especially its internal pressures to compete with Western monopoly capitalism. McLeod states that as Russia's economic 79

structure becomes permanently reassigned for war, the bureaucrats become subject to their own system because of the pressure to compete with monopoly capitalism. McLeod argues that the bureaucrats of state capitalism “are a class which comes to power at the very moment they are in the act of destroying themselves” because they self-cannibalize their class at the end of the conflict (282). McLeod terms this the “crowning of contradiction,” a point when the bureaucratic political structure is destroyed from within (282).

Third, McLeod's heretical stance is reflected by his rejection of the inevitability of socialism. McLeod states, “We assumed for far too long that socialism was inevitable ....

Socialism is inevitable only if there will be a civilization .... The hope is that the state deteriorates more rapidly than the people” (283-284). This assertion obviously opposes

Trotsky's belief that socialism is inevitable, but more importantly it provides an extraordinary model of capitalism. When McLeod says that socialism is only possible if there is “civilization,” that is, a state opposite to the present barbarism, he describes a kind of oscillation between monopoly capitalism and state capitalism. According to McLeod, at the present moment state capitalism is absorbing monopoly, but eventually state capitalism will collapse because of its own contradictions. McLeod's belief is that socialist must wait until state capitalism collapses and a new cycle begins. Additionally, McLeod states that socialists must cultivate a “revolutionary consciousness” before the next cycle (284). But exactly how one cultivates this consciousness, McLeod does not describe. Nevertheless, his

interpretation of capitalism as an oscillating model, where the conditions for socialism are only possible after state capitalism collapses, and his belief that socialist must cultivate a 80

revolutionary consciousness equally assert that certain conditions must exist for socialism to even be possible.

The three components to McLeod's speech, the claim that Russia is a bureaucratic collective, the assertion that monopoly capitalism will be absorbed by state capitalism, and the belief that socialism is not inevitable but only possible if certain conditions exist, comprise the basic tenets of the Shachtmanite tradition, qualifying McLeod's Trotskyism as heretical because he deviates from orthodox Trotskyism.

VII. The Polemics of Barbary Shore

Barbary Shore thus engages the concepts and stratagems embodied by the two factions of the SWP conflict. Although previous critics have assumed that Lannie and

McLeod's Trotskyism are identical, this study demonstrates that Mailer presents two forms of Trotskyism, orthodox and heretical, corresponding to the two factions of the SWP

conflict. Mailer's Barbary Shore is an important addition to his chronicle of competing

ideologies because it illustrates one of the greatest challenges for Marxists in the 1940s: to

hold an anti-Stalinist revolutionary socialist stance. Since Trotskyism provided a theory to

reject Stalinism and assert socialism, when it came into conflict in the early 1940s it acted

as a catalyst for political transformation from anti-Stalinist socialism to anti-communism. 81

The New York Intellectuals were arguably the most transformed by the SWP conflict, as

Wald stresses:

[The] schism that tore apart the SWP in 1939-40 had a

broader significance than might have seemed the case at the

time. The positions of Shachtman and Burnham, despite the

sincerity of their followers and the usefulness of some of the

political points they made about various aspects of the Soviet

Union and the application of Leninism to conditions in the

United States, tended to parallel the evolution of the

deradicalizng anti-Stalinist left as a whole. Of all the

intellectuals grouped in or around the Socialist Workers

Party in 1940, with the exception of a handful who remained

members such as Harold Isaacs, Felix Morrow, George

Novack, and Joseph Vanzler, only James T. Farrell and

Meyer Schapiro agreed with Cannon and Trotsky on the

issues in dispute. By 1946, only Novack and Vanzler still

agreed with Cannon. The others, if they retained any

socialist convictions, felt closer to the Shachtman-Burnham

position on the Soviet Union, and in various ways at 82

different rates were traveling the same general trajectory to

the right. (192)

Mailer examines the concepts and stratagems of the Cannonites and Shachtmanites because, like Wald’s hypothesis above, he considers the conflict to be sutured to the political transformation of his contemporaries. Mailer's Marxist pursuit in Barbary Shore is therefore to examine whether or not Trotskyism has any validity in the post-war context.

Thus, as the second part of Mailer's political chronicle, Barbary Shore exhibits a radicalization towards a position that most of the New York Intellectuals held a decade earlier: anti-Stalinist socialism defined by Trotskyism. Like Lovett's journey, the Trotskyist orientation in Barbary Shore struggles against the political tides of the post-war period. 83

Conclusion:

The Naked and the Dead and Barbary Shore constitute a political chronicle that radicalizes towards anti-Stalinist revolutionary socialism, from the Marxism exemplified by Radicalism to the Marxist perspective defined by Trotskyism, voicing the same continued hope for socialism that Mailer later maintained at the Mount Holyoke College debate against MacDonald. The findings of this study, however, have implications about

Mailer's authorship.

The first implication in reading Mailer's novels as a chronicle of competing ideologies is that Mailer transgressed the demarcated boundaries of the New York

Intellectuals. Mailer's relation to Marxism was eschewed from the experience most New

York Intellectuals had to it. A number of significant events dismayed the New York

Intellectuals by the late 1930s, and during the 1940s their Marxist persuasion was reorientated towards Western democracy. Most of the New York Intellectuals had a turbulent turnaround over their political careers; many had started their political journey in the Communist Party of America and, over the course of two decades, ended in neo­ conservative positions. Dwight MacDonald's political career, for instance, shows a drastic turnaround between 1930 and 1950, reflecting the general tendency of his contemporaries.

Alan Wald characterizes the political stances of New York Intellectuals in the postwar period as “essentially hegemonic,” and says, “the program and perspectives of most of the 84

New York intellectuals during the postwar era embodied support for capitalism albeit with a sprinkling of criticism to salve their consciences” (267). What had happened in the previous two decades that had changed their political stances to support capitalism?

Stalinophobia played the most significant role in the New York Intellectuals' transition from revolutionary anti-Stalinism to liberal anti-communism. The term “Stalinophobia” is used to characterize the Western fear of Stalinism. Stalinophobia became prevalent in the

West after Stalin's bureaucracy was viewed as a permanent structure. Consequently, the

New York Intellectuals' transition to anti-communism demonstrates the effects of

Stalinophobia. By adopting anti-communist views, the New York Intellectuals were making two remarkably concessionary statements. First, that Stalin's bureaucracy was permanent and that no Marxist theory could undue it. Second, that there was something causal between Marxism and Stalinism. Their eventual anti-communist stance in the 1950s demonstrated both of these great concessions. Mailer, however, resists the notions that

Marxism is politically ineffectual or causal to bureaucratic collectivism.

Mailer's chronicle displays a resistance to the historical shift the New York

Intellectuals made from anti-Stalinism to anti-communism. Alan Wald says that of the apostates of the the New York Intellectuals, “A few voices of left-wing resistance did come from a younger generation of anti-Stalinist radicals who participated in there 1952 Partisan

Review symposium on 'Our Country and Our Culture',” and Norman Mailer was one of these voices (275). While Stalinophobia transformed the New York Intellectuals, Mailer's chronicle demonstrates that he was immune to it. As Wald describes, during the early 1950s 85

Mailer continued to view “the United States and the Soviet Union as equivalently malignant forces” (275), reflecting the New York Intellectuals' stance a decade earlier.

Most of Mailer's contemporaries, however, saw that there was a significant difference between the West and the East; it was clear enough for MacDonald at Mount Holyoke who, when pressed by the moderator, conceded to Western democracy. While MacDonald would later recall his choice as the lesser of two evils, implicit in Mailer's indecision was his continued search for an alternative to capitalism.

Thus, the second implication of this study is that Mailer's search for an alternative to capitalism probably continues in his other novels. The Deer Park and An American

Dream, for example, likely continues the chronicle of competing ideologies. Such a study would provide answers to the following questions: If Marxism is presented, what is his attitude towards it? If a liberal ideology is adopted, then how is it colored by the radicalism of his first two novels? How does his political views compare to his contemporaries in the

New York Intellectuals? Is Western capitalism portrayed differently than it is in his first two novels? Does Mailer show appreciation for the West in subsequent novels? These and other questions are important and should be explored by future political readings of

Mailer's fiction.

The final implication of this reading is that Mailer transgressed the form of the novel with his political chronicle. The Naked and the Dead and Barbary Shore are employed as mere chapters, describing a picture of the political experience in the post-war period. If one was to continue this study, then a comparison with other novelists in the New 86

York Intellectuals might reveal some important points of comparison and contrast. Because the New York Intellectuals' political transformation occurred over a two decade period, the novelists that participated in their tradition probably composed their own chronicles, expressing the many peaks and valleys of their Marxist journey. I believe such a study would only further demonstrate how Mailer's late radicalization sets him apart from his contemporaries in the New York Intellectuals. 87

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