The Man Who Studied Yoga by Norman Mailer

First published: 1959

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: The 1950's

Locale: New York City

Principal Characters:

• Sam Slovoda, a continuity writer for comic magazines
• Eleanor, his wife
• Alan Sperber, their guest

The Story

Sam Slovoda writes for comic magazines and feels overworked and underappreciated. He dreams of writing a great novel but cannot seem to organize his thoughts. Every time he begins to write fiction, he is overcome with the feeling that what he wants to say is too complex and his way of saying it is not focused enough.

A frustrated, middle-aged man, Sam also fancies himself a great lover and feels hampered in his marriage. He yearns for affairs with other women but does not act on his desires, feeling stymied by his wife, Eleanor, who does not appreciate how much he has to offer other women. He values intensity of feeling, yet his life is flaccid. He considers leaving Eleanor, going off to an unheated loft, and living alone as a man in quest of his genius and manhood. In other words, he is confronting a midlife crisis. He questions his mode of life and laments what he has failed to accomplish. He criticizes himself for lacking the will and courage to accomplish his ambitions.

Sam generalizes from his plight to a conception of the modern hero. He contemplates writing an essay about a hero who would be both a man of action and a thinker, but he doubts that any contemporary man could be such a hero. This is, in part, why Sam has so much trouble writing his novel: He cannot imagine a character who could fulfill his heroic potential.

One evening, Sam invites a group of friends over to watch a pornographic movie. Instead of doing something daring, Sam contents himself with this rather passive and voyeuristic activity. On a second showing of the film, alone with Eleanor, he makes love to her reasonably well, but without any sense that he has furthered his plans to write or to lead a bolder life.

Before the first showing of the pornographic movie, one of the guests, Alan Sperber, tells the story of the man who studied yoga—the legendary Cassius O'Shaugnessy. He is presented as the type of hero Sam has sought. During World War I, Cassius served in France as an ambulance driver with the writers Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. He was one of the founders of the Dadaist school of art. He is said to have influenced the poet T. S. Eliot and been involved in anarchist and then pacifist politics in World War II. He is, in short, one of the heroic questers of his age.

Sperber builds up O'Shaugnessy's biography, noting that he went to India to seek a mystical revelation about the meaning of life: There he contemplated his navel, believing that by giving it a counterclockwise twist he would receive the ultimate knowledge of things. All that happened after he unscrewed his navel was that his rear end fell off. It is a silly and anticlimactic joke that irritates Sam and his friends, who are ready to watch the pornographic movie.

Sperber's trivial ending to the big buildup of his story is paralleled by Sam's banal evening. After showing the film, after his friends leave, after he makes love to his wife, he retires to bed, a man who lives not by finding pleasure, but by merely trying to avoid pain.

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