Battle of Clay Shirky’s self-aggrandizing jerks: Seymour Krim vs. Norman Mailer

The Internet is big and until this minute I missed the hullabaloo over Clay Shirky’s A Rant About Women that calls on females to behave like “arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks” — aka, men — to get ahead.

God, I love having read Seymour Krim. He was a damned American Geiger counter who 40 years ago detected the deep underground tremors that are shaking Shirky.

I don’t even want to address the issue of whether women should adopt this male tactic because first things first: what is the effect of this behavior with only half the population engaging in it?  Why, the topic is huge. I can feel Saul Bellow lines tumbling out of my mind like the crowd in the cabin scene in A Night at the Opera. Shirky is telling us all to go out and become Herzogian Reality Instructors. Is there no room left in America, even in the liberal arts universities, for anything but the most mercenary if-you’re-so-smart-how-come-you’re not rich approach to life?

“Who was that non-fool?” Herzog asked himself, considering alternatives to the type he realizes himself to be in the eyes of the Shirkys of the world. “Was it the power-lover, who bent the public to his will?” Yeah, that’s about right, Shirky seems to say. Well, Herzog can see the attraction. “Now wouldn’t it be nice to be one” he wonders to himself.

Yes, wouldn’t it? But there’s the rub, and it won’t go away no matter how many clear-eyed, hard-headed Shirkys rant that we must turn ourselves into self-promoting Sammy Glicks. This one-size-fits-all doesn’t fit us all. This personality regimentation is a straitjacket for too many. And in the middle of a massive recession, what some are calling a controlled depression, instead of a call for reflection on this mad American life we all lead Shirky is echoing celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse and shouting BAM! Kick it Up a Notch!

Somewhere I read that for Alfred Kazin the Depression was a blessing in disguise because he could spend his days in the library without fear of rebuke or censure. There was freedom in America for the likes of him, when there frequently is little, to feel that his approach was not idiocy.

But there’s no time to think like that today. There’s no countervailing force against this overwhelming “making it” philosophy. Bohemianism is dead, man.

Did I say Krim was onto this 40 years ago? Make it more than 50.

I was going to start with his 1969 “Norman Mailer, Get Out of My Head,” Krim’s terrific but shamefully buried essay on just this topic of the allure and rewards of self-aggrandizing jerkdom and how it taunts those who just can’t be that kind of jerk. (I’m not claiming sainthood here for myself or my dead Jews club of Bellow and Krim. They were jerks. It’s been documented. And so am I. Take my word for it. But we’re focusing on just one expression of that rich characteristic for the moment.)

Yes, I was going to start with the “Norman Mailer” essay, which from what I understand was left out of the 1991 posthumous Best of Seymour Krim collection to mollify Mailer — the prototype of the self-aggrandizing jerk that anyone hoping to be a self-aggrandizing jerk should study closely before he or she goes for it to make sure they’ve got the stomach for it — and so the piece has not appeared in print in 40 years.

But let’s kick things off instead with Krim’s aptly titled 1959 essay “Making It!” Shirky, you’re gonna love this. Or at least one-half of it. Because Krim picked up on the new go-getter vibes shaking New York like sandpapered fingertips do tumblers. And he dug it. Because he got it. And he anticipated your call for women to get going. But he didn’t call for it, beseech it. It was already happening:

“Middle-class ideals of success once curled the lip of the intellectual; today he grins not, neither does he snide. Columbia professor, poet, painter, ex-Trotskyite, Partisan Review editor, G.E. engineer, Schenley salesman—they all live in the same world for a change and that world says, go! The Marxist, neo-Christian, romantic, humanitarian values of 20 years ago are great for the mind’s library and its nighttime prayer mat; but will they fill the cancerous hunger in the soul for getting what you want today? Softies become tough, toughies get harder, men dig that they’d rather be women, women say to hell with lilacs and become men, the road gets rougher (as Frankie lays his smart-money message on us) and you’ve got to move, hustle, go for the ultimate broke or you’ll be left with a handful of nothing, Jack and Jill!”

Did Krim leave anything out? No, that covers it, doesn’t it. At least, it covers Shirky’s side of the argument. But there is something more to be said. There’s got to be something more than that or let’s just end the pretense and fire all the poetry and literature and philosophy professors and kick all the namby-pamby Emily Dickinson-lovers onto the street where they can beg for their supper, which is all they deserve, right? Or as Krim’s brilliantly devised Reality Instructor (Bellow published Krim’s work in 1961 and it seems the master picked up a trick for his 1964 Herzog from this very talented flake) puts it:

“Values? Purpose? Selectivity? Principles? For the birds, Charley! I want to make it and nothing’s going to stand in my way because everything is crap, except making it! I want my ego to ride high, my heart to bank the loot of life, my apartment to swing, my MG to snarl down the highway, my pennant to wave above the scattered turds of broken dreams for a better world! Why don’t you level and say you want the same, you hypocrite? Be honest for Chrissakes!”

OK, you’ve got the drift. Krim channels the voice of Shirky’s jerky hero but he doesn’t come off very well. Still, it’s not a set-up, not a fix. The writing is so damn exciting that the “gunner and gunnerette in the turret of the aircraft that is Self” who watches out “for number one with a hundred new-born eyes” almost wins us over in spite of Krim’s intentions. It’s a Milton’s Satan situation.

But what’s the likely outcome of this approach? Krim foresaw a bad trip.

“. . . while down below the lusting average man and woman sweats in jealousy at the sight of these Dexedrine angels, the very inspiration of what he and she can become if only they too can put that last shred of shame behind them and swing.”

And now I can get to the “Norman Mailer” piece. In it Krim weaves in and out of the madness lanes because the Making It! mating call of American life is here driving him crazy. Yes, in this article Krim is the lusting average man or woman sweating in jealousy at the sight of Norman. Norman, Earl of Aggrandizement, ruler of the Duchy of Jerky.

And a fucking monster talent. Oh, yes. Mailer was born to be a jerk. He had the real stuff. He didn’t need a call to arms from a Shirky. Like Bellow’s Humboldt he was “Orpheus, the Son of Greenhorn, turned up in Greenwich Village.” But unlike Humboldt, who complained in his downfall that his friend had turned up on his doorstep to say he was going to going to be a consciousness-shifting writer and he wasn’t, Mailer was. Mailer could be the demanding jerk that Shirky is encouraging women to become — forget other human qualities such as charm, wit, flirtatiousness, empathy, humor, generosity that both men and women have used for centuries to advance themselves and their careers. It’s life during wartime. Ain’t got time for that now! — because Mailer had the talent required to back it up.

But the vast majority of those who will heed Shirky and wear this new effrontery with pride will not be able to pull it off. They will oversell themselves and people will inspect the goods and see that they are fools. And if Shirky’s jerks don’t understand the difference between their mostly average selves and the Mailers of this world, in whatever field, then they will suffer the agony that Krim confesses in his essay on Mailer but without the understanding that at the last minute preserves a bit of Krim’s sanity.

Early in the essay Krim realizes that “as a writer ages he has to come to terms with the actuality of the landscape he exists on or he will be driven mad with envy and frustration.” But as the essay progresses Krim begins to lose it. The envy and frustration are too much. Mailer’s “imperialistic personality” has made it impossible for Krim to be happy with himself.

“Did Mailer ever stop to think that his gigantic personal needs for being indiscriminately admired would help smear up a standardless period, seed an unbidden resentment and defensiveness and equal yen for the most whorish showbiz lights in others who once thought they were content to work in the stacks all their lives and wear the good odor of library must like Spinoza and (N.M.’s beloved) Marx and Joyce before them?”

“In other words, did Mailer ever see the implications of being Norman, which reach far beyond himself?”

No, he didn’t, Krim concludes, and he didn’t have to, because Mailer’s celebrity fallout would poison others, not himself. But Krim realizes he’s been poisoned, that he caught the self-aggrandizing bug that Shirky is now spreading like Typhoid Mary. And Krim realizes that it is bad for him and for those around him.

“But even as I know that I now mean to have my share of the most striking notoriety, money, pussy, fun English shoes, TV interviews, the entire swinging menu . . . I know that what Mailer has done to me I WILL DO TO OTHERS whom I have never seen or heard of. If I succeed in becoming the public force that I must now become to protect myself from the Mailers of my time, what insane itch for the new name-fame powerplay will I implant in others, what jealousies and outraged thinskinned needs for capping me will I arouse in their all too human beings?

“To tell the truth, as I see it, the best thing that could happen to me would be if I FAIL to make that booming public impact.”

Now there’s more than a teaspoon of sanctimony there. Yes, I hear it. What Krim should have written and is clearly there between the lines is that he was not cut out for the “the entire swinging menu.” That no matter how loudly he banged on the table he was not going to get all those goodies but was going to fail because he was not Norman Mailer.

And neither are the overwhelming majority of Shirky’s readers. It is beyond them to be truly great. But they can become jerks.