‘The Best Writer in America’

Abstract

Mailer started writing whilst still at Harvard under the influence of various thirties’ writers — principally Farrell, Dos Passos and Steinbeck. The stories from this period, some of which are reprinted in Advertisements for Myself, show this influence very clearly. One of the best of these, written in 1943 (a year before Mailer went into the American army), is an attempt to write about war, and it forms an interesting contrast to The Naked and the Dead. In ‘A Calculus at Heaven’, the remnants of an American company are isolated in a house on the edge of a swamp shortly before a Japanese attack in which they are all killed. The characters represent a cross-section of American types: a priest from a poor Irish family, a captain who was a Boston painter in an unhappy marriage before being drafted, a courageous and brutalised Italian, a blond football-playing Jew, and an Indian sergeant. There is an omniscient viewpoint of the action with flashbacks to the civilian life of the soldiers, and the alienation of the individual men from the army and the war emerges as one of the main themes. Thus, although the narrative technique and situation is different from that of The Naked and the Dead, some of the same themes and literary devices are already present in this early short story.