OF A FIRE ON THE MOON by Norman Mailer. 472 pages. Little, Brown. $7.95.
Scorpio had been brooding about his much abused deviated septum when a copy of Norman Mailer's Of a Fire on the Moon arrived. It was a confrontation that would measure the dimensions of his dread. To begin with, Mailer, born Jan. 31, 1923, called himself Aquarius throughout the book. But there were other things to cause one to worry. Although Scorpio shared Aquarius' tendencies toward water displacement, there were incompatibilities. Aquarians were eccentric and extremely difficult to judge. Uranus had bestowed on them the gift of radical vision and strong impulses to alter the status quo. On the other hand, Scorpios—ruled by Pluto and Mars—were drawn to private, clandestine lives. Like the stinging arachnid of their sign, some could be dangerous in a hellish way. Scorpio had a habit of seeking warmth in the boots of bigger men. The safariing Hemingway, a Cancer, would rarely forget to shake his out in the morning.
Yet Scorpio would yield to no man in his respect for Aquarius. Insight-for-insight, metaphor-for-metaphor, few writers could touch him. His ability to perceive, absorb and organize details and abstractions into platoons of charging prose were proof of his exceptional intelligence. As a social critic, he had an extraordinarily keen nose for the hydrants of power.
Besides, Scorpio had been an Aquarius rooter from the start. Although he had the same affectionately ambiguous feelings toward him that he once held for the Brooklyn Dodgers, he followed Aquarius' erratic career with a kid brother's awe and expectation. To go directly from The Bobbsey Twins to The Naked and the Dead was not an experience one overcame easily.
Scorpio had often found himself troubled about Aquarius' novels, however. What visions of damnation, for instance, smoked in Aquarius' head when in The Deer Park he had Marion the pimp say, "No one ever loved anyone except for the rare bird, and the rare bird loved an idea or an idiot child." Could it be that Aquarius, the nice Jewish boy from Long Branch, N.J., and Brooklyn, N.Y., the kid who loved model airplanes and went to Harvard to study aeronautical engineering—could it be that the youth committed to the ideals of democratic socialism and the young man who fought the Imperial Japanese in World War II had despaired of the sweet grapes of rational humanism? Had the frustration and pressure of not writing another novel as successful as The Naked and the Dead soured him on himself, curling his talent and imagination against itself? Had Aquarius begun to turn into the sort of God seeker who searched for the back door to salvation? The questions were too big for Scorpio. With the courage of his quotations, he had to agree with Leon Daudet. On such matters, "criticism must yield to theology."