On Being Hip or Not

I’ve been fairly racing through the last third or so of Mailer’s Advertisements For Myself. It’s highly entertaining, thought-provoking stuff, if a little silly on occasion, but the silliness derives from ambition and a determination to stake out new territory. It’s fascinating to see Mailer moving beyond the highly successful realistic style of The Naked and the Dead in the early material included in Advertisements and struggling towards a new style, in fact, a whole new way of seeing the world. The difference can be seen comparing the article The Homosexual Villain with The White Negro. The former is a nicely crafted apologia for his treatment of homosexuality in his early work, with its distinct overtones of what we would now term homophobia, in a thoroughly balanced, sensible and civilised form. Mailer makes it clear that he detests his essay for those very reasons. He’s after something wild and unbalanced enough to upset and provoke his readers and make them think the unthinkable and see its possible truth.

He clearly feels he has achieved this in The White Negro which, amongst other things, celebrates psychopathy and murder and develops a philosophy of the Hip which underpins the rest of the collection. And this is a breakthrough. The essential ideas carry Mailer through his work in the sixties, though I think leavened there by a great deal more humour and self-awareness, an awareness which manifests itself in a number of the advertisement sections of Advertisements but somehow not as attractively as in the later works – I’m thinking particularly of my great favourite The Armies of the Night here. Certainly the final third of Advertisements seems easier to read than the occasionally stodgy opening bits in the earlier material. There’s a kind of excitement and daring that drags the reader along with it.

But I must say the basic contrast between what Mailer terms the Hip and the Square just doesn’t seem to work for me. The trouble with Mailer’s generalisations is that, after their initial excitement, when you cool-headedly analyse them, you realise they don’t work – except for Mailer himself, which I suppose is enough.

Oddly enough this was brought home to me when listening to what is rapidly becoming one of my favourite CDs. I’m referring to Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s playing of works for piano by Olivier Messiaen entitled Hommage A Messiaen. And what a homage it is! I listened to this on the flights to and from NZ (and got the pianist’s name wrong in my earlier post when I first mentioned the CD.) It’s a brilliant, gorgeous collection of really accessible pieces – there are nine early preludes, written when Messiaen was just twenty, and his beloved mother had just died, which are squarely in the great tradition of highly attractive French piano music, which won’t frighten the neighbours in any way - and it comes with an excellent essay on Messiaen by Aimard himself.

So what has this got to do with Mailer’s conception of the Hip? Well, it occurs to me that in most respects it would be difficult to think of anyone less hip than Messiaen. I don’t think such a good, simple Catholic would have felt at home with Mailer’s hipster buddies and their search for the ultimate orgasm somehow. Yet in the 1950’s, the period covered by Advertisements, Messiaen decided to develop an entirely new conception of his music, represented on the CD by two pieces from Catalogue d’oiseaux, based around (of all things) birdsong. You don’t get much more radical than that. So how should Messiaen be classified? As Square? I recall seeing a film clip of the great composer with his second wife, Yvonne Loriod, both looking like perfectly ordinary, rather nondescript, petit bourgeoisie, walking through a copse, or small forest, tape-recorder in hand, capturing the songs of the birds therein. They looked charmingly ordinary whilst doing something so extraordinary it made it necessary to rethink the very nature of musical experience, and much more satisfyingly so than the other members of the avant garde of the period. (I’m thinking particularly of Pierre Boulez, a pupil of Messiaen and something of a thorn in his side, as I understand it, who achieved nothing as lasting, at least that I’m aware of.) No, I can’t see Messiaen as one of Mailer’s Squares, or as a Hipster. I can only think of him as a Round, and that’s a classification I think we might all safely aspire to.