Project Mailer - User contributions [en]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Norman Mailer Bibliography: 2018

2021-03-03T03:18:12Z

BMeister: Added the remainder of page six

{{DISPLAYTITLE:
{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR13}}
{{Byline|last=Zinck|first=Shannon L.|note=Much of the following has been incorporated into ''[[NM:WD|Norman Mailer: Works and Days]]''.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13zin}}


==2018==
===Primary===
{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter=''An American Dream'' |title=Norman Mailer: Four Books of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2Z34YAX |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=1–238 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter=APPENDIX: Preface to the Bantam Paperback edition (May 1964) |title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=446–448 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= APPENDIX: Preface to the Berkley Paperback Edition (October 1976) |title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=449–452 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= APPENDIX: Preface to The Presidential Papers|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=435–436 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= APPENDIX: A Prefatory Paper – Heroes and Leaders (1963)|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=437–445 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= The Argument Reinvigorated|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=309-318 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter=''The Armies of the Night'' |title=Norman Mailer: Four Books of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2Z34YAX |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=359-650 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= ‘The Big Bite’: April, May, August, 1963|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=158-170 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= ‘The Big Bite’: November and December, 1962; January and March, 1963|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=69-78 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= The Case Against McCarthy: A Review of ‘’The Group’’|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=216-225 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= The Debate with William Buckley: The Real Meaning of the Right Wing in America|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=79-91 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= An Evening with Jackie Kennedy, or, The Wild West of the East|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=52-68 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= Forward to ‘’The End of Obscenity’’|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=430-434 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= A Happy Solution to Vietnam: From a ‘’Partisan Review’’ Symposium|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=293-302 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= Homage to El Loco|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=355-373 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= In The Red Light: A History of the Republican Convention in 1964|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=232-280 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= An Instrument for the City|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=416-429 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= Introducing Our Argument|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=303-308 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= The Leading Man: A Review of ‘’J.F.K.:The Man and the Myth’’|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=208-215 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= Looking for the Meat and Potatoes - Thoughts on Black Power|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=401-415 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter=''Miami and the Siege of Chicago'' |title=Norman Mailer: Four Books of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2Z34YAX |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=651-868 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= ‘’My Hope for America:’’ A Review of a Book by Lyndon B. Johnson |title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=281-287 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= ‘’Norman Mailer: The Collected Essays of the 1960s’’|title= Norman Mailer: The Sixties, vol.2 |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url= https://www.amazon.com/dp/1598535579/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_8DZXXPXQ45X12VKVHMHD |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=|isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= ‘’Norman Mailer: Four Books of the 1960s’’|title= Norman Mailer: The Sixties, vol.1 |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url= https://www.amazon.com/dp/1598535579/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_8DZXXPXQ45X12VKVHMHD |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=|isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= |title=Norman Mailer: The Sixties, vol.2 |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url= https://www.amazon.com/dp/1598535579/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_8DZXXPXQ45X12VKVHMHD |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=|isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last= |first= |date=2018 |chapter= The Notebook (Images) |title= The Mailer Review, vol. 12, no. 1 |editor-last= |editor-first= |url= https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_12,_2018 |location= |publisher= |pages=9-12 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last= |first= |date=2018 |chapter= The Notebook |title= The Mailer Review, vol. 12, no. 1 |editor-last= |editor-first= |url= https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_12,_2018 |location= |publisher= |pages=13-15 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= An Open Letter to John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Fidel Castro|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=38-51 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= An Open Letter to Richard Nixon|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=397-400 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= Our Argument at Last Presented|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=319-324 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= A Piece for ‘’The New York Times’’|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=288-292 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= The Playwright as Critic|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=325-247 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= Appendix: Preface to ‘’Why are We in Vietnam?’’ |title=Norman Mailer: Four Books of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2Z34YAX |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=869-874 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= Punching Papa: A Review of ‘’That Summer in Paris’’|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=148-151 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= Responses and Reactions II|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=152-157 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= The Saint and the Psychopath|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=353-354 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=348-352 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= “Some Children of the Goddess”|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=171-203 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= A Statement for ‘’Architectural Forum’’|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=226-228 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= Superman Comes to the Supermarket|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=3-37 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= A Television Show with Nelson Algren|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=204-207 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= Ten Thousand Words a Minute|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=92-147 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= Up the Family Tree|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=374-396 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= A Vote for Bobby K|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=229-231 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= ‘’Why are We in Vietnam?’’ |title=Norman Mailer: Four Books of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2Z34YAX |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=239-358 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

===Secondary===

Essays, Articles, Book Chapters, Dissertations, and Creative Works

{{cite book |last=Alexander |first=Gordon |date=2018 |chapter= Jewish American Literature |title=Encyclopedia of American Studies |editor-last= |editor-first= |url=https://eas-ref.press.jhu.edu/ |location= |publisher=John Hopkins UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Arnold |first=Amanda |date=2018 |chapter= Did Norman Mailer’s Official Biographer Forget the Writer Stabbed His Wife? |title=The Cut, 23 |editor-last= |editor-first= |url=https://www.thecut.com/2018/03/norman-mailer-biographer-forgot-the-writer-stabbed-his-wife.html |location= |publisher= |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Bauerlein |first=Mark |date=2018 |chapter= I’m Watching Myself |title=Academic Questions, vol. 31, no.1 |editor-last= |editor-first= |url= https://link.springer.com/journal/12129/volumes-and-issues/31-1 |location= |publisher= |pages=10-17 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Begiebing |first=Robert J. |date=2018 |chapter= Lipton's Journal: Mailer's Quest for Wholeness and Renewal |title=The Mailer Review, vol. 12, no.1 |editor-last= |editor-first= |url= https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_12,_2018/Lipton%E2%80%99s_Journal:_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Quest_for_Wholeness&action=edit&redlink=1 |location= |publisher= |pages=51-71 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Berry |first=Stephen Eric |date=2018 |chapter= Aphrodite in Transition |title=The Mailer Review, vol. 12, no.1 |editor-last= |editor-first= |url= |location= |publisher= |pages=346 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Biebel |first=Mary Therese |date=2018 |chapter= Remembering Norman Mailer |title=Times Leader|editor-last= |editor-first= |url= https://timesleader.com/features/724893/remembering-norman-mailer |location= |publisher= |pages=51-71 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Brady |first=Phillip |date= 2018|chapter=Nothing Attested, Everything Sung |title=The Mailer Review, vol. 12, no. 1 |editor-last= |editor-first= |url= |location= |publisher= |pages=329-335 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Busa |first=Christopher |date=2018 |chapter=Norman Mailer: Of Vitality and Morality |title=The Mailer Review, vol. 12, no. 1 |editor-last= |editor-first= |url= |location= |publisher= |pages=171-177 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Bykofsky |first=Stu |date=March 23, 2018 |chapter=She Just Wants Affair Shake in Court;Norman Mailer's Mistress Says She Was Defamed in Biography |title=Philadelphia Daily News |editor-last= |editor-first= |url= |location= |publisher= |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite news |author=The Philadelphia Inquirer |title=She Wants Her Say on the Naked and the Dead |url= |work= |location= |date=March 23, 2018 |access-date=}}

{{cite book |last= Canfield|first=Kevin |date=September 8, 2018 |chapter=The FBI's Spying on Writers Was Literary Criticism at Its Worst |title=The Daily Beast |editor-last= |editor-first= |url=https://thedailybeast.com/thefbis-spying-on-writers-was-literary-criticism-at-its-worst |location= |publisher= |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Carpenter |first=Lea |date=2018 |chapter=How to Write a 21st-Century Spy Novel |title=Esquire |editor-last= |editor-first= |url= |location= |publisher= |pages=34-36 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Carter |first=Ash |date=2018 |chapter=Fighting Words: Leave Your Safe Space and Read the Library of America's New Norman Mailer Collection |title=Esquire |editor-last= |editor-first= |url= |location= |publisher= |pages=57 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Cetrano |first=Sal |date=2018 |chapter=For Plato |title=The Mailer Review, vol. 12, no. 1 |editor-last= |editor-first= |url= |location= |publisher= |pages=353 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last= |first= |date=2018 |chapter=Mission Statement |title=The Mailer Review, vol. 12, no. 1 |editor-last= |editor-first= |url= |location= |publisher= |pages=354 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last= |first= |date=2018 |chapter=Naming |title=The Mailer Review, vol. 12, no. 1 |editor-last= |editor-first= |url= |location= |publisher= |pages=349 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last= |first= |date=2018 |chapter=Sleeping Weather |title=The Mailer Review, vol. 12, no. 1 |editor-last= |editor-first= |url= |location= |publisher= |pages=350 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Norman Mailer Bibliography: 2018}}
[[Category:Bibliographies (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Norman Mailer Bibliography: 2018

2021-03-03T02:49:49Z

BMeister: Added more bibliography text

{{DISPLAYTITLE:
{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR13}}
{{Byline|last=Zinck|first=Shannon L.|note=Much of the following has been incorporated into ''[[NM:WD|Norman Mailer: Works and Days]]''.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13zin}}


==2018==
===Primary===
{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter=''An American Dream'' |title=Norman Mailer: Four Books of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2Z34YAX |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=1–238 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter=APPENDIX: Preface to the Bantam Paperback edition (May 1964) |title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=446–448 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= APPENDIX: Preface to the Berkley Paperback Edition (October 1976) |title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=449–452 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= APPENDIX: Preface to The Presidential Papers|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=435–436 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= APPENDIX: A Prefatory Paper – Heroes and Leaders (1963)|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=437–445 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= The Argument Reinvigorated|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=309-318 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter=''The Armies of the Night'' |title=Norman Mailer: Four Books of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2Z34YAX |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=359-650 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= ‘The Big Bite’: April, May, August, 1963|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=158-170 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= ‘The Big Bite’: November and December, 1962; January and March, 1963|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=69-78 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= The Case Against McCarthy: A Review of ‘’The Group’’|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=216-225 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= The Debate with William Buckley: The Real Meaning of the Right Wing in America|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=79-91 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= An Evening with Jackie Kennedy, or, The Wild West of the East|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=52-68 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= Forward to ‘’The End of Obscenity’’|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=430-434 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= A Happy Solution to Vietnam: From a ‘’Partisan Review’’ Symposium|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=293-302 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= Homage to El Loco|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=355-373 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= In The Red Light: A History of the Republican Convention in 1964|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=232-280 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= An Instrument for the City|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=416-429 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= Introducing Our Argument|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=303-308 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= The Leading Man: A Review of ‘’J.F.K.:The Man and the Myth’’|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=208-215 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= Looking for the Meat and Potatoes - Thoughts on Black Power|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=401-415 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter=''Miami and the Siege of Chicago'' |title=Norman Mailer: Four Books of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2Z34YAX |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=651-868 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= ‘’My Hope for America:’’ A Review of a Book by Lyndon B. Johnson |title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=281-287 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= ‘’Norman Mailer: The Collected Essays of the 1960s’’|title= Norman Mailer: The Sixties, vol.2 |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url= https://www.amazon.com/dp/1598535579/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_8DZXXPXQ45X12VKVHMHD |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=|isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= ‘’Norman Mailer: Four Books of the 1960s’’|title= Norman Mailer: The Sixties, vol.1 |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url= https://www.amazon.com/dp/1598535579/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_8DZXXPXQ45X12VKVHMHD |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=|isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= |title=Norman Mailer: The Sixties, vol.2 |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url= https://www.amazon.com/dp/1598535579/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_8DZXXPXQ45X12VKVHMHD |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=|isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last= |first= |date=2018 |chapter= The Notebook (Images) |title= The Mailer Review, vol. 12, no. 1 |editor-last= |editor-first= |url= https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_12,_2018 |location= |publisher= |pages=9-12 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last= |first= |date=2018 |chapter= The Notebook |title= The Mailer Review, vol. 12, no. 1 |editor-last= |editor-first= |url= https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_12,_2018 |location= |publisher= |pages=13-15 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= An Open Letter to John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Fidel Castro|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=38-51 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= An Open Letter to Richard Nixon|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=397-400 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= Our Argument at Last Presented|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=319-324 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= A Piece for ‘’The New York Times’’|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=288-292 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= The Playwright as Critic|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=325-247 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= Appendix: Preface to ‘’Why are We in Vietnam?’’ |title=Norman Mailer: Four Books of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2Z34YAX |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=869-874 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= Punching Papa: A Review of ‘’That Summer in Paris’’|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=148-151 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= Responses and Reactions II|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=152-157 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= The Saint and the Psychopath|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=353-354 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=348-352 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= “Some Children of the Goddess”|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=171-203 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= A Statement for ‘’Architectural Forum’’|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=226-228 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= Superman Comes to the Supermarket|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=3-37 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= A Television Show with Nelson Algren|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=204-207 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= Ten Thousand Words a Minute|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=92-147 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= Up the Family Tree|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=374-396 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= A Vote for Bobby K|title=Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2NdKWRE |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=229-231 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2018 |chapter= ‘’Why are We in Vietnam?’’ |title=Norman Mailer: Four Books of the 1960s |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |url=https://amzn.to/2Z34YAX |location= |publisher=Library of America |pages=239-358 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

===Secondary===

Essays, Articles, Book Chapters, Dissertations, and Creative Works

{{cite book |last=Alexander |first=Gordon |date=2018 |chapter= Jewish American Literature |title=Encyclopedia of American Studies |editor-last= |editor-first= |url=https://eas-ref.press.jhu.edu/ |location= |publisher=John Hopkins UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Arnold |first=Amanda |date=2018 |chapter= Did Norman Mailer’s Official Biographer Forget the Writer Stabbed His Wife? |title=The Cut, 23 |editor-last= |editor-first= |url=https://www.thecut.com/2018/03/norman-mailer-biographer-forgot-the-writer-stabbed-his-wife.html |location= |publisher= |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Bauerlein |first=Mark |date=2018 |chapter= I’m Watching Myself |title=Academic Questions, vol. 31, no.1 |editor-last= |editor-first= |url= https://link.springer.com/journal/12129/volumes-and-issues/31-1 |location= |publisher= |pages=10-17 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Begiebing |first=Robert J. |date=2018 |chapter= Lipton's Journal: Mailer's Quest for Wholeness and Renewal |title=The Mailer Review, vol. 12, no.1 |editor-last= |editor-first= |url= https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_12,_2018/Lipton%E2%80%99s_Journal:_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Quest_for_Wholeness&action=edit&redlink=1 |location= |publisher= |pages=51-71 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Berry |first=Stephen Eric |date=2018 |chapter= Aphrodite in Transition |title=The Mailer Review, vol. 12, no.1 |editor-last= |editor-first= |url= |location= |publisher= |pages=346 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Biebel |first=Mary Therese |date=2018 |chapter= Remembering Norman Mailer |title=Times Leader|editor-last= |editor-first= |url= https://timesleader.com/features/724893/remembering-norman-mailer |location= |publisher= |pages=51-71 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Brady |first=Phillip |date= 2018|chapter=Nothing Attested, Everything Sung |title=The Mailer Review, vol. 12, no. 1 |editor-last= |editor-first= |url= |location= |publisher= |pages=329-335 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Busa |first=Christopher |date=2018 |chapter=Norman Mailer: Of Vitality and Morality |title=The Mailer Review, vol. 12, no. 1 |editor-last= |editor-first= |url= |location= |publisher= |pages=171-177 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last=Bykofsky |first=Stu |date=March 23, 2018 |chapter=She Just Wants Affair Shake in Court;Norman Mailer's Mistress Says She Was Defamed in Biography |title=Philadelphia Daily News |editor-last= |editor-first= |url= |location= |publisher= |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{cite news |author=The Philadelphia Inquirer |title=She Wants Her Say on the Naked and the Dead |url= |work= |location= |date=March 23, 2018 |access-date=}}

{{cite book |last= Canfield|first=Kevin |date=September 8, 2018 |chapter=The FBI's Spying on Writers Was Literary Criticism at Its Worst |title=The Daily Beast |editor-last= |editor-first= |url=https://thedailybeast.com/thefbis-spying-on-writers-was-literary-criticism-at-its-worst |location= |publisher= |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Norman Mailer Bibliography: 2018}}
[[Category:Bibliographies (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/When We Were Kings: Review and Commentary

2021-03-03T02:01:36Z

BMeister: fixed an in-text citation

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''When We Were Kings'': Review and Commentary}}
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{{MR13}}
{{Quote box|title=''When We Were Kings'' (Blu-Ray Special Edition)|Directed and Produced by Leon Gast Featuring Muhammad Ali, George Foreman With Norman Mailer, George PlimptonThe Criterion Collection, 2019, $35.00|align=right|width=25%}}
{{byline|last=Lowenburg|first=Bill|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13low}}

{{Cquote|In the ring, genius is transcendent moxie—the audacity to know that what usually does not work, or is too dangerous to attempt, can, in a special case, prove the winning move. Maybe that is why attempts are made from time to time to compare boxing with chess—the best move can lie very close to the worst move. At Ali’s level, you had to be ready to die, then, for your best ideas.|author=Norman Mailer|“The Best Move Lies Close to the Worst”}}

{{Start|In the fall of 1974, eight days before George Foreman}} was expected to annihilate Muhammad Ali in “The Rumble in the Jungle” in Zaire, Foreman suffered a cut over the eye while sparring. His trainer, Dick Sadler, closed the cut, which would require eleven stitches, with a butterfly bandage.{{sfn|Dundee|Sugar|2008|p=177}}

The so-called Butterfly Effect might have just as well taken its name from boxing, rather than chaos theory, and, in popular culture, Ray Bradbury’s 1952 science fiction story, “A Sound of Thunder.” The basic concept is that small causes may have momentous effects. In Bradbury’s tale, a time traveler goes back to the age of dinosaurs, accidentally steps on a butterfly, and returns to find his world irreparably changed—and not for the better.{{sfn|Bradbury|2005|p=236}} In the boxing example, one of the results was the documentary ''When We Were Kings'', which would not have been produced but for Foreman’s cut and the rescheduling of the heavyweight Championship of the World for five weeks later.

Criterion has released a Blu-Ray DVD of ''When We Were Kings''. Norman Mailer and George Plimpton, along with Spike Lee, Ali Biographer Thomas Hauser, and actor Malik Bowens provide sometimes-valuable commentary in-studio interviews recorded twenty years after the fight. The big bonus in the Blu-Ray version is the inclusion of Soul Power, a documentary of the Zaire 74 music festival associated with the fight. ''When We Were Kings'' is the perfect companion to Mailer’s short-but-compelling classic, ''The Fight''. The movie received an Academy Award in 1997 for Best Documentary, along with numerous other accolades. Coincidentally, six years after presenting the Oscar to director Leon Gast, actor Will Smith was cast to play Muhammad Ali in the biopic.

Mailer’s presence in the documentary is indispensable. Even though some of his contentions are based on hearsay, his tone is authoritative, and, as always when on camera, he’s simply entertaining. His account of the fight itself, like his written account, is precise and accurate. Plimpton, who was also in Zaire, has drawn criticism for some of his conjectures, and will from this reviewer a little further on. Spike Lee, who was a teenager at the time of the fight, deadpans a few Ali truisms, which add little to the film, and Malik Bowens’ presence feels entirely gratuitous. Bowens, who is fluent in English, and whose connection to the fight is unknown, for some reason delivers his remarks in French, which comes across as a directorial decision to introduce an unnecessary, exotic layer to the film.

''Soul Power'' was the original project ''When We Were Kings'' director Leon Gast hoped to complete it when he went to Africa. Segments of the music performances by James Brown, B.B. King, The Spinners, and Miriam Makeba did make it into ''When We Were Kings'' and also serve as the soundtrack for interesting B-roll footage. Many of the performances appear to be from rehearsals, with the performers enjoying themselves among one another rather than playing to an audience. No trace of an audience, in fact, is ever shown. Neither are any of the many African performers, with the unfortunate exception of Miriam Makeba.

''Rolling Stone'' reported that only 8,000 attended the first two nights of the festival, which may explain the dearth of crowd shots accompanying the performances. The 80,000 seat stadium filled on the final night only because President Mobutu “convinced” concert promoters to give away the remaining tickets.{{sfn|Gehr|2016}} Included on the Blu-ray version are brief interviews with Gast and co-producer David Sonenberg. For those devotees of Norman Mailer not interested in accumulating another piece of plastic in their home, both films are available via streaming on Amazon Prime, minus the extra content.

The fact that ''When We Were Kings'' was ever completed and released in 1996—more than twenty years after the fight—is a tribute to the perseverance of director Leon Gast. An entire book could be written about the legal and logistical rigmarole required to recover the exposed film, edit it, arrange for music rights, add additional interviews, and finance what eventually became the movie.

According to the Yale Film Archive, Gast was originally hired by promoter Don King to make a concert film of the Zaire 74 music festival, which was scheduled to be held along with the boxing match. His crew shot the festival, but then came Foreman’s cut and the crew was not allowed to leave the country. Perhaps sensing a great opportunity, Gast had them document the weeks leading up to the fight and we are all the richer for it today.{{sfn|Yale|n.d.}}

The perceptive, business-minded, and ever-mischievous Muhammad Ali may have precipitated all of this. Soon after learning of Foreman’s sparring injury, he called a press conference and said, “I appeal to the President to not let anybody connected with the fight out of the country. Be careful. George might sneak out at night. Watch the airports. Watch the train stations. Watch the elephant trails. Send boats to patrol the rivers. Check all the luggage big enough for a big man to crawl into. Do whatever you have to do, Mr. President, but don’t let George leave the country. He’ll never come back if you let him out . . . Because he knows I can’t lose!” To this he added, “These are my people, and I ain’t leaving!”{{sfn|Dundee|Sugar|2008|p=177}}

Foreman, in fact, would have liked nothing better than to return home. “I was miserable in Zaire,” he recalled. “My first quarters were at an old army base infested with rats, lizards, and insects. Surrounded by cyclone fencing and barbed wire, it was patrolled and inhabited by rowdy soldiers.”{{sfn|Goldstein|2000|p=108}} Foreman had hoped to go to Paris for medical attention and then have the fight rescheduled to take place in the United States. However, soon after Ali’s remarks, President Sele Seke Mobutu, who had ostensibly put up ten million dollars to have Zaire host the fight, took Ali’s advice and unofficially sealed the borders.

Foreman, although not well-educated, is a very intelligent man and he understood the situation in which he was placed. “This was clearly Muhammad Ali country . . . If I knocked him out, the most I’d get would be grudging respect for vanquishing a legend. And if I lost, there’d be a big crowd at the station, jeering me back to Palookaville.”{{sfn|Goldstein|2000|p=108}}

Indeed, as far the fans in Zaire were concerned, the fix was in against Foreman from the outset—partially due to Muhammad Ali and partially due to Foreman’s and his managers’ lack of worldliness. Ali had arrived in Zaire first, where there was little infrastructure and few people had access to television or print media. It seems incredible today, but up until fight time, because of rumors Ali started, quite a number of Zairians believed that George Foreman was ''white''. For his own part, Foreman deplaned in Zaire with his pet German shepherd, Diego. The dog was introduced at a press conference and filmed with his front paws on the table next to Foreman. George and his unsophisticated handlers had no idea that just a generation earlier, when Zaire was the Belgian Congo, German shepherds had been used by Belgian police to intimidate and attack Zairians.{{sfn|Gast|2019}}

After sustaining the injury, for the next five weeks Foreman retreated to his compound and had minimal contact with the press. He lost an additional ten days of training due to being advised that strenuous activity and sweating might delay the healing of his cut. Still, he was confident of his ability to dominate and knock out Muhammad Ali. He had good reason to believe this, having TKO’d both Ken Norton and Joe Frazier in short order within the past eighteen months. Norton had broken Ali’s jaw in the course of earning a split decision victory and Frazier had sent Ali to the canvas with one of the most perfectly delivered left hooks in boxing history. Foreman, like the rest of the boxing world, had observed that Ali was not the fighter he once was.

“This was gonna be the easiest fight of my life,” a mature Foreman quipped in a tone of good-natured irony in the 2009 documentary ''Facing Ali''. “I was just gonna walk in and knock him out in one, two, or three rounds. It was the most confident I’d ever been in a boxing match.”{{sfn|McKormack|2010}}

While Ali no longer danced as gracefully at age 32, his well of boxing resources was far from dry. For one thing, he could take a punch. Following his fight with Joe Frazier in Madison Square Garden on March 8, 1971, referee Arthur Mercante commented on the fourteenth-round knockdown: “Frazier hit him as hard as a man can be hit . . . Ali was exhausted. He went down, and anyone else would have stayed on the canvas, but he was up in three seconds . . . I motioned Frazier to a neutral corner and when I turned around to face Ali, he was on his feet.”{{sfn|Hauser|1991|p=229}} Besides his physical resilience, Ali could think under pressure and was a master of improvisation, both in and out of the ring.

In re-watching Foreman dismantle Norton and Frazier, I see exactly why Foreman felt the way he did. I’ve watched hundreds, perhaps over a thousand fights over the years and have never seen anyone punch harder than Foreman. In winning the championship against Joe Frazier in Kingston, Jamaica, on January 22, 1973 (after Frazier had defeated Ali) one of George’s uppercuts in the second round lifted Smokin’ Joe entirely off the canvas. Incredibly, Frazier got up, only to be knocked down again, for the sixth and final time, before the fight was stopped.{{sfn|Cosell|2021}} Coincidentally, the match was refereed by Arthur Mercante, who afterward may have revised his opinion about the hardest a man can be hit.

During the run-up to the fight in Zaire, while Foreman healed, brooded, and trained without gusto, Ali threw his one-man public relations machine into high gear. During a reception given in his honor at the presidential palace, Ali said, “Mr. President, I’ve been a citizen of the United States for 33 years and was never invited to the White House. It sure gives me pleasure to be invited to the Black House.”{{sfn|Goldstein|2000|p=110}} Meanwhile, he privately confessed to Howard Bingham, his personal photographer, “I’d give anything to be training in the United States. They got ice cream there, and pretty girls and miniskirts.”{{sfn|Hauser|1991|p=270}}

''When We Were Kings'' refers to the subject of women distracting boxers from their training regimens by way of George Plimpton’s comments. Ali, he reports, visited president Mobutu’s fortune teller, who predicted that a mystical woman with shaky hands would somehow get to Foreman. Plimpton refers to the woman as a succubus—a female demon believed to have sexual intercourse with sleeping men. “And that impressed me enormously,” Plimpton says with gravitas.{{sfn|Gast|2019}}

This arguably led to the decision by Leon Gast and his editors to open the movie with a brief clip from the music festival, showing an extreme close-up of South African performer Miriam Makeba spotlighted onstage against a dark background. She’s posed as if about to unleash a spell and emits a sound from her throat not unlike a death rattle. Later in the film, when Foreman gets KO’d, more of Makeba’s performance is cut in, symbolizing the supposedly invincible boxer’s vital powers having been drained by a succubus.

Ironically, one of the open secrets of Ali’s legacy was ''his'' penchant for women. Larry Holmes, who accompanied Ali to Africa as a sparring partner, had boxed hundreds of rounds with him at his Deer Lake, Pennsylvania training camp. He talked openly about his experiences in the book, ''Facing Ali'', and in a documentary of the same title. In those interviews, the plainspoken Holmes let it all hang out. “The women that came to that camp! He had his pick, you know what I’m saying? I know how he lived. I knew what he did. I seen the people come into camp and leaving camp. I know he walked around with a stiff dick every day. He would fuck a snake if you hold its head. You don’t even have to hold the motherfucker’s head. Just give him the snake.”{{sfn|Brunt|2002|p=286}}

Holmes even attempted to caution Ali, telling him, “You better be careful. You want to be prepared . . . and that’s when he told me, ‘Shut the hell up. I know boxing. You don’t tell me what to do.’ So I shut up and went about my business. Like he said, he knew what he was doing. He won the fight.”{{sfn|Brunt|2002|p=287}}

Following his apprenticeship with Ali, Holmes would go on to become one of the longest-reigning heavyweight champions and in 1980 defeated his mentor in a sad, one-sided affair that, toward the end, had Holmes waving the referee in to protect a proud-but-defenseless Ali.

Two other individuals featured in the film—promoter Don King and President Sese Seke Mobutu—are essential to understanding the context of the fight. Like Ali and Foreman and Mailer and Plimpton, they each possessed a huge ego and led complex and controversial lives.

Mailer comments in the film, “This fight came into existence because of Don King’s desire to be famous . . . if it failed, he was destined to go back into obscurity.”{{sfn|Gast|2019}} Consider the fact that just three and a half years earlier, King had listened to reports of the Ali-Frazier fight in his prison cell in Marion, Ohio, where he was serving time for a manslaughter conviction.{{sfn|Hauser|1991|p=261}} He had been convicted in 1967 for stomping Sam Garrett, an ex-employee in his numbers racket, to death on the street in Cleveland. It was the second time he had killed a man. In 1954, he shot Hillary Brown in the back and the killing was ruled justifiable homicide. Paroled in 1971, King was eventually granted a full pardon by Ohio Governor James Rhodes in 1983. Rhodes justified the pardon by saying he relied heavily on letters of support submitted by Reverend Jesse Jackson, Coretta Scott King, Steve Davis, executive director of the National Publishers Association, Cleveland Mayor George Voinovich, Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell, and Cleveland Indians president Gabe Paul, among others.{{sfn|Cengage|2019}}

Thomas Hauser, Ali’s biographer, said, “Don King is one of the brightest, most charismatic, hardest working people in the world . . . he’s also totally amoral and I can’t think of a man who has done more to demoralize fighters, take from fighters, and exploit fighters and ruin their careers. But you have to give him his due for what he did to make Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire.”{{sfn|Gast|2019}} Since 1975, [[w:Don King|King]] has been sued by Muhammad Ali, Larry Holmes, Tim Witherspoon, Mike Tyson, Terry Norris, Lennox Lewis, and ESPN, to name but a few.

According to the popular legend of how the fight was put together, King more or less willed it into existence through a combination of guile and gumption. As the story goes, King first went to George Foreman, told him he could get him five million dollars for fighting Ali, and got him to sign a contract. Then he went to Ali and did the same. However, at that point, Don King had not a penny to actually promote the fight.{{sfn|Gast|2019}}

Madison Square Garden matchmaker Teddy Brenner, who knew a thing or two about such matters, said, “Actually, King didn’t promote the fight, although he did his best to make it seem that way. Video Techniques put it together, with up front money from a British corporation and the rest from the government of Zaire. King was helpful in lining up the fighters, but the deal could have been made without him. For ten million dollars, which is what Foreman and Ali split, anyone could have done the job.”{{sfn|Hauser|1991|p=263}} The five million dollars each fighter was paid in 1974 is worth a total of roughly $52,200,000 now in 2020.{{sfn|CPI|2019}}

Brenner’s explanation makes sense. The big money was going to come in through worldwide television coverage and the fight ended up being broadcast live to an estimated one billion viewers, a record at that time. We’ll never know for sure, but chances are President Mobutu may have put up far less than the ten million he has been credited with. Like Don King, though, he did his best to make it seem that way.

Not that Mobutu was entirely without resources—both imagined and real. According to Neil Leifer, who photographed the fight for ''Sports Illustrated'', Mobutu owned one of only two privately-owned Boeing 747s at that time. In a phone interview, Leifer related the story of a photo shoot he did at the presidential palace prior to the fight. Ali and Foreman were to be personally escorted down a long, exquisitely beautiful flower-lined path by the president, strolling slowly toward the amassed press corps. Leifer, a consummate pro, arrived early and secured a good vantage point.

“An official press aide came out,” he related, “and gave us very specific instructions that we were not to cross the flower paths. No barricades had been set up.” As Mobutu and Ali approached, the photographers couldn’t contain themselves and the jostling began.

“Those Europeans were aggressive,” Leifer laughed. “I think it was a couple of French guys who started it . . . long story short, by the time the session was over, there wasn’t a single flower left . . . What could they do? They weren’t going to shoot the foreign press corps. I pitied the poor press aide, though. I hope they didn’t shoot him!”{{sfn|Leifer|2019}}

Born Joseph Desire Mobutu, upon seizing power with CIA help in 1965, Mobutu became Mobutu Sese Seke Kuku Ngbendu waza Banga, which translates to, “the all-conquering warrior, who because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake.”{{sfn|French|1997}} Like Don King, Mobutu was familiar with homicide. Six months after taking office, he had four former cabinet ministers hanged before 50,000 spectators.{{sfn|French|1997}} In the film and in his book, ''The Fight'', Mailer relates the unconfirmed tale of Mobutu’s detention cells beneath the Kinshasa stadium and the summary execution of 100 unfortunates in order to deter crime during the festival.

With borders on nine countries, Mobutu promoted Zaire to Washington, D.C. and Paris. He received economic and political support in exchange for allowing Zaire to be used as a staging area for Cold War era interventions and covert activities throughout Central Africa, most notably against the Marxist regime in Angola. Moreover, Zaire had extensive mineral deposits, especially copper, which provided revenue for his grandiose economic schemes. Despite these projects, such as the world’s largest hydroelectric dam near Kinshasa, the country had few viable roads or other infrastructure. In a special report to the ''New York Times International Edition'' subtitled, “Master of Ruin,” Howard French wrote in1997, when Mobutu was still president, “Life in a vast country deprived of roads, health care, electricity, telephones, and often education has reverted to a brutishness not known since the 1940s.”{{sfn|French|1997}}

Using other autocrats as role models, Mobutu’s personality cult had few rivals during his era. For weeks at a time, the press in Zaire was forbidden to mention any Zairian other than the president. “Mobutism” was cultivated, being described as, “The sum total of his actions . . . just as the sum total of Mao’s actions constitute Maoism.” A Zairian citizen related years later that the first 15 minutes of the day in elementary school required students to dance and shout the name of the president.{{sfn|French|1997}}

Unlike the open secret of Muhammad Ali’s dalliances, Mobutu’s sexual conquests were celebrated. Described as “looking like a sadist,” by Mailer, Mobutu fathered twenty-one children by official count. However, it should come as no surprise that he adopted ''driot de cuissage'', the right to deflower, as local chiefs offered him virgins on his trips across Zaire. The practice was considered–-or required to be considered—an honor by the virgin’s family.{{sfn|Van Raybrouck|2012|p=384}}

Mobutu’s usefulness to Washington and Paris faded as the Cold War wound down. In 1994, he briefly returned to importance as over a million Rwandan Hutus, many of whom had perpetrated mass genocide, fled into Zaire. Surviving Tutsis, of whom up to a million had been slaughtered, had, in a bizarre twist, assumed power. Mobutu reinstituted relations with France, who had been a major backer of the genocidal Hutus.{{sfn|French|1997}} Like boxing, the backstories of international politics are almost always ugly.

Nothing would be easier than to apply 20/20 hindsight in the year 2020 to attack Muhammad Ali’s culpability in accepting five million dollars to fight in a country ruled by a brutal dictator whose crimes were well-known, especially given Ali’s even-then growing reputation as a crusader for human rights and humanitarian causes. At the time, however, Ali expressed nothing but appreciation, even awe, at Zaire’s very existence. “It don’t seem possible,” he said, “but 28 million people run this country and not one white man is involved.”{{sfn|Goldstein|2000|p=111}} As for the money coming from Mobutu and the dictator’s goal to promote himself and Zaire, Ali was only too happy to take it. “Countries go to war to get their names put on the map. And wars cost a lot more than ten million dollars.”{{sfn|Gast|2019}} As Ali told British challenger Joe Bugner in private before they fought the following year, “Whatever happens, boxing is like business.”{{sfn|Brunt|2002|p=153}}

The same 2020 self-righteous political correctness epidemic in our culture today could be applied to Ali’s embrace of the chant “Ali, ''boma ye''”—Ali, ''kill him'', by Zairian fans. In the context of the times, from his pre-fight antics to waving his glove to lead the crowd in the chant between rounds, it was all theater for Ali. Conversely, in what may be the film’s most poignant moment, one day, while receiving a post-workout rubdown, Foreman reflected, quietly, “When I walk down the street, the kids follow me, some screaming, George Foreman, ''boma ye''. I don’t like that. If they say anything about me, they should say George Foreman likes being here, George Foreman loves Africa, not George Foreman, ''kill him''. I don’t like that.”{{sfn|Gast|2019}}

With scenes like this, ''When We Were Kings'' does an admirable job of chronicling the weeks up to the fight, adding montage sequences set to musical performances from the Zaire 74 festival. The film has been criticized by some as depicting life in Zaire with more of a positive spin than it deserves, and while I can see the point, it doesn’t spoil the movie for me.

What does spoil the film for me in places is the heavy-handed return to the succubus reference, both visually and with the leitmotif. I remember being angered by it when the film was originally released. Now, after repeated viewings, the effect has diminished, but I find myself deliberately ignoring it and still wishing they’d stuck to boxing. It is, after all, primarily a boxing film. According to the Yale Film Archive, Gast recovered 250 hours of exposed 16mm film and audio tape from Liberian investors, from which he edited the Zaire parts of the movie. I wish he’d included more of that material instead of relying on Plimpton’s comment to establish what turned out to be, for me at least, an unsuccessful sub plot.

In Gast’s defense, though, who knows what personal and financial dynamics came into play when producer Taylor Hackford joined the project in 1995 and arranged for the studio interviews? Plimpton floated that comment and the editing team must have thought it too good to end up on the cutting room floor. The effect is one of the tail wagging the dog. And I wonder what Miriam Makeba thought of it.

The early betting line on the fight was seven-to-one, Foreman. By fight time, the odds had dropped to four-to-one, little consolation considering many in the sports world believed Ali would, at best, be knocked out, and, at worst, killed. Plimpton said, “The sense was, we were watching a man about to go to the gallows.” Howard Cosell, the toupee’d, verbose ABC commentator who had supported Ali throughout his career, delivers a morbid, premature eulogy that is included in the film, representing the mood of the moment.{{sfn|Gast|2019}}

In Ali’s pre-fight dressing room, according to Mailer, there was tense silence, until Ali led his entourage in a half-hearted call-and-response promising to dance. What Norman may not have heard was when, according to Bernie Yuman, who was also there, Ali first said to his shaky followers, “What’s the matter? This ain’t nothing but another day in the dramatic life of Muhammad Ali.”{{sfn|Hauser|1991|p=273}} To this day, I’m not convinced by Mailer’s contention that Ali was terrified of Foreman. Norman may have been projecting his own awe for Foreman on to Ali, as conveyed in his description of George hitting the heavy bag. But as Ali told the press earlier, “Us Black folks ain’t afraid of one another the way White folks is afraid of us.”{{sfn|Hauser|1991|p=270}}

The fight starts and Mailer does a brilliant job of describing the action, summarizing his even-better blow-by-blow account fleshed out in ''The Fight''. Norman is at his best here, nearly equaling his famous description of the 1962 ring death of Benny Paret at the hands of Emile Griffith and his piece for ''Life'' magazine on the first Ali-Frazier fight.

In round two, Ali begins the rope-a-dope, so it’s time to shine some light on the myth of Ali’s trainer, Angelo Dundee, loosening the ropes prior to the fight. Mailer has, to some degree, helped to perpetuate this myth. According to Dundee’s autobiography, ''My View From The Corner'' (a great read for all boxing fans), upon inspecting the ring the afternoon before the fight, Angelo and assistant Bobby Goodman discovered it had been set up by people who had never seen a boxing ring.{{sfn|Dundee|Sugar|2008|p=181}} Having set up a ring myself several times before matches I promoted, I can attest to the fact that it requires experience to do so properly.

The ring in the 20th of May Stadium had a pronounced list, one corner support having sunk into the turf. The ropes were sagging due to improper installation along with the tropical heat and humidity. Angelo and Goodman worked for several hours to jack up the sunken corner and install blocks under it. As for the ropes, they had to scrounge up a razor blade and use it to cut over a foot of slack from each rope before reinstalling and tightening them. According to Dundee, if they hadn’t attended to the ring, by fight time the ropes would have been sagging onto the canvas.{{sfn|Dundee|Sugar|2008|p=182}} His account is verified by Goodman in a separate interview.{{sfn|Hauser|1991|p=272}}

Dundee also found the canvas and padding on the ring floor to be improperly installed, but there was no time to rectify it. The foam padding underneath the canvas had turned mushy from the humidity, making it a very slow surface on which to box, much less dance. This he reported to Ali. Still, as far as Angelo or anyone else knew, the plan was for Ali to dance.

“I saw him dancing for five or six rounds,” Dundee recalled, “Then I imagined him picking up the pace when George got tired and knocking him out in the late rounds, but everything was planned around not getting hit . . . when he went to the ropes I felt sick . . . that shows what I know.”{{sfn|Goldstein|2000|p=109}}

Joyce Carol Oates points out in her small classic, On Boxing, that “boxers, like chess players, must think on their feet—must be able to improvise in mid-fight, so-to-speak.”{{sfn|Oates|1987|p=77}} Ali personified this and explains what happened in his own words:

I didn’t really plan what happened that night. But when a fighter gets in the ring, he has to adjust according to the conditions he faces. Against George, the ring was slow. Dancing all night, my legs would have gotten tired. And George was following me too close, cutting off the ring. In the first round, I used more energy staying away from him than he used chasing me. I was tireder than I should have been with fourteen rounds to go. I knew I couldn’t keep dancing, because by the middle of the fight I’d be really tired and George would get me. So between rounds I decided to do what I did in training when I got tired . . . It was something Archie Moore used to do. He’d let younger men take their shots and blocked everything in scientific fashion . . . when they got tired, Archie would attack . . . So starting in the second round, I gave George what he thought he wanted.{{sfn|Hauser|1991|p=277}}

Ironically, Archie Moore had helped to train Foreman and was in his corner that night. In the film, Mailer goes on to do an admirable job of describing the ebb and flow of the contest.

Fast forward to Round 8. Foreman has punched himself out and here comes the succubus again. Her leitmotif builds up slowly behind the action and Makeba’s ominous, hissing mouth is superimposed over the boxing. Ali connects, Foreman topples over. Plimpton recalls, “I turned to Norman and said, “The succubus has got him!”

Bullshit, George. Joyce Carol Oates, a far more practical observer of the sweet science, quotes a smart fighter in her book, who explains: “Boxing is a game of control, and, as in chess, this control can radiate in circles ''from'' the center, or in circles ''toward'' the center . . . the entire action of a fight goes in a circle; it can be little circles in the middle of the ring or big circles along the ropes, but always in a circle. The man who wins is the man who controls the action of the circle.”{{sfn|Oates|1987|p=78}}

Ali had done exactly that, from the outset. His lateral movement, circling first to the right and reversing to the left, had opened Foreman up to the right hand leads he threw so effectively in the first round. It had likewise opened Foreman up to the one-two combination that floored him in round eight, when Ali spun in a tight arc off the ropes. Boxing, not hoodoo, had won the fight.

Foreman, initially, made all kinds of excuses for losing. Years later, in retrospect, he was incredibly insightful and gracious. “Muhammad amazed me”, he recalled. “He out-thought me; he out-fought me. That night, he was just the better fighter . . . I went out and hit Muhammad Ali with the hardest body shot I ever delivered . . . anybody else in the world would have crumbled...I could see it hurt . . . he had that look in his eyes, like he was saying I’m not gonna let you hurt me. And to be honest, that’s the main thing I remember about the fight. Everything else happened too fast. I got burned out . . . I was the aggressor . . . but I knew in some way I was losing.”{{sfn|Hauser|1991|p=277}}

Following the fight, on a whim, writer Pete Bonventre commandeered a car and driver and rode through the monsoon to Ali’s compound, the twenty-mile trip taking two hours. The compound was deserted, with the press all having filed their stories and the entourage gone to party. “Three hours after the greatest victory of his life, Muhammad Ali was sitting on the stoop, showing a magic trick to a group of black children. . . . And it was hard to tell who was having a better time, Ali or the children.” Ten years after upsetting Sonny Liston and seven years after he’d been stripped of the title, Muhammad Ali was once again the heavyweight champion.{{sfn|Hauser|1991|p=279}}

While the Rumble in the Jungle may have been Ali’s greatest boxing victory, I think of it as the high point of the second act of his four-part dramatic career. In Act One, he defeats Sonny Liston and is stripped of his title for refusing induction into the military. In Act Two, after a three-year legal battle, his boxing license is reinstated, he loses to Frazier, and regains the title in Zaire. Act Three begins with winning the epic Thrilla in Manilla rubber match with Frazier, losing the title to Leon Spinks, who had only eight professional fights, defeating Spinks in the rematch to win the title for the third time, and ending his ring career with several tragically bad performances. In Act Four, Ali goes into serious physical decline and begins to slip into obscurity. Then he reemerges—more popular than ever—when he unsteadily lights the 1996 Olympic torch in Atlanta. To me, his greatest victory took place not in the ring, but in foregoing his physical peak as an athlete and defeating the United States government in the courtroom.

Muhammad Ali died in 2016. George Foreman remains alive, and, by all indications, is well at this writing. His career after Zaire is equally remarkable to Ali’s. Two years after losing to Ali, following a savage fight with slugger Ron Lyle, Foreman lost a decision to slick boxer Jimmy Young in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Afterward, George collapsed from heat stroke in his dressing room and had a near-death experience. He claimed God pulled him from the brink of an abyss and gave him a mission in life. He returned to Houston, stopped boxing, gained a hundred pounds, and began preaching on street corners. He established a church and built a congregation.

Foreman stayed away from boxing for ten years. He watched no television and didn’t follow the sport, concentrating on his preaching. Then, at age 38, weighing over 300 pounds, he began a comeback. His goal was to raise money to build a youth center for his church and—to everyone’s amusement—regain the heavyweight championship of the world.{{sfn|Dundee|Sugar|2008|p=281}}

The New George looked nothing like the original. He’d always been big, but now he was huge. And he’d learned to relax in the ring, no longer tensely stalking opponents and wasting energy as he had in those few short rounds in Zaire. The New George waited patiently, sometimes absorbing terrible blows, for his chance to land a short, sneaky right, and when he did, the effect was devastating. Somehow, he’d retained—even refined—his jab into something akin to a pile driver. His style was anything but pretty, but he had enough weapons to remain dangerous.{{sfn|Dundee|Sugar|2008|p=281}}

Another thing happened. He became a nice guy. A very funny guy. His self-deprecating humor charmed the press and the public alike, especially anyone old enough to remember his earlier incarnation. We’d always wanted to like George, but he wouldn’t let us. Now, when asked by a reporter with tongue-in-cheek, “When do you think you’ll fight for the title?” George replied, laughing, “Today, the biggest decisions I’ll make aren’t related to the heavyweight title, they’re whether I visit McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, or Jack in the Box.”{{sfn|Dundee|Sugar|2008|p=282}}

He took fights in places like Anchorage and other locations not on the boxing map. “I had seen others, like Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, fail in their comeback attempts because they were looking for overnight success. I knew it would take a long period of time to do it right, so I started from the bottom and worked my way up and it took three years.”{{sfn|Dundee|Sugar|2008|p=282}} He fought twenty-one fights against increasingly challenging opponents, including Gerry Cooney, Tommy Morrison, and Evander Holyfield.

On November 5, 1994, age 45 years, 299 days, the New George got his chance. Following the ninth round in a fight against champion Michael Moorer, George had lost every previous round on all scorecards. His corner man told him, “You gotta put this guy down. You’re behind, baby.” Foreman’s corner man was none other than Angelo Dundee, Ali’s former handler (“Foreman,” You Tube). George bristled at Angelo’s comment, but boy did he ever go out and follow directions. Like Ali in Zaire, he controlled the action of the circle. Moving to his left, he saw the opening and landed that sneaky right directly on Moorer’s chin. Traveling no more than twelve inches, the punch was reminiscent of the one Joe Louis floored Max Schmeling with in the first round of their rematch in 1938. Moorer was starched, as they say in boxing, landing on the seat of his pants, knocked out cold. Twenty years after losing the title to Ali, Foreman took it back from a man 19 years his junior. He had come full circle—along with his red boxing trunks, the same ones he wore in Zaire–with alterations for waist size. Muhammad Ali, whose disabilities had by this time become very evident, wrote to George. He said, “Congratulations, Champ, you had the courage and the guts to go out and do it.”{{sfn|Dundee|Sugar|2008|p=298}}

Following a close loss in his final fight at age 48 to respected heavyweight Shannon Briggs, Foreman returned to his dressing room dejected. There he was met by his lawyer with a check for a million dollars from the Salton company, whose electric grill George had reluctantly agreed to endorse. It was just the beginning.{{sfn|Rovell|2010}}

By 1998, Salton had sold $200 million worth of the George Foreman Lean, Mean, Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine, and the company made the business decision to offer Foreman a buyout instead of awarding him a percentage of sales. George was paid $137.5 million in cash and stock for use of his name in perpetuity. Added to what he’d earned previously, along with $11 million more for television appearances, Foreman’s profit from the grill approaches $200 million—more, by far, than he earned or ever dreamt of in his boxing career. He continues to sidelight as a boxing commentator for HBO and payper-view broadcasts.{{sfn|Rovell|2010}}

Asked in recent years to reflect on the Rumble in the Jungle, the New George delivers his own version of the Butterfly Effect. “I’m just happy that I didn’t win it . . . because everything would be different . . . it made me fall into the hands of God . . . it was that fragile . . . one little thing could have messed the whole thing up. The world would have been different for us”{{sfn|Brunt|2002|p=189}} . . . ”I’m just proud to be part of the Ali legend. If people mention my name with his from time to time, that’s enough for me. That, and I hope Muhammad Ali likes me, because I like him. I like him a lot.”{{sfn|Hauser|1991|p=278}}

===References===
{{Reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Bradbury |first=Ray |date=2005 |title=A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories |url= |location= |publisher=William Morrow |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Brunt |first=Stephen |date=2002 |title=Facing Ali |edition=1 |publisher=The Lyons Press |ref=harv }}
* {{cite AV media |people=Cosell, Howard (narrator) |date=2011 |title=George Foreman Knocks Out Joe Frazier |trans-title= |medium=video |language= |url=http://youtu.be/vz3tPjLhw2U |access-date= |archive-url= |archive-date= |format= |time= |location= |publisher=ABC Sports |ref={{SfnRef|Cosell|2011}} }}
* {{cite web |url=https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl |author= |title=CPI Inflation Calculator |publisher=US Government |date=November 1, 2019 |ref={{Sfnref|CPI|2019}} }}
* {{cite web |url=https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/sports-and-games/sports-biographies/don-king |title=Don King |author= |date=2019 |website=Encyclopedia.com |publisher=Cengage |access-date=2021-02-28 |quote= |ref={{SfnRef|King|2019}} }}
* {{cite book |last1=Dundee |first1=Angelo |last2=Sugar |first2=Bert R. |date=2008 |title=My View From The Corner: A Life In Boxing |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw Hill |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=French |first=Howard W. |date=May 17, 1997 |title=Anatomy of an Autocracy: Mobutu’s 32 Year Reign |url=https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/world/africa/051797zaire-mobutu.html?scp=21&sq=32&st=cse |work=The New York Times |edition=International |page= |access-date=2021-02-28 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite AV media |people=Gast, Leon (director); Grant, Leon (producer) |date=2019 |title=When We Were Kings |trans-title= |medium=Blu-Ray |publisher=Criterion |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Gehr |first=Richard |date=June 6, 2016 |title=Zaire ’74: How a Pan-Continental Funk Fest Soundtracked Muhammad Ali |url=https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/zaire-74-how-a-pan-continental-funk-fest-soundtracked-muhammad-ali-59935/ |magazine=Rolling Stone |pages= |access-date=2021-02-28 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite AV media |people= |date=May 11, 1994 |title=George Foreman vs Michael Moorer |trans-title= |medium=video |language= |url=http://youtu.be/2VQmYUg2Pp8 |access-date=2021-02-28 |archive-url= |archive-date= |format= |time= |location= |publisher=Classic Boxing Matches |ref={{Sfnref|Foreman|1994}} }}
* {{cite book |last=Goldstein |first=Alan |title=Muhammad Ali |publisher=MetroBooks |date=2000 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hauser |first=Thomas |title=Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times |publisher=Simon & Schuster |date=1991 |ref=harv }}
* {{citation |last=Leifer |first=Neil |title=Telephone Interview |date=November 13, 2019 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite AV media |people=McKormack, Pete (director); Murray, Derik (producer) |date=2010 |title=Facing Ali |trans-title= |medium=video |publisher=Network Entertainment |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Oates |first=Joyce Carol |title=On Boxing |edition=1 |location=Garden City |publisher=Dolphin/Doubleday |date=1987|ref=harv }}
* {{cite web |url=http://www.cnbc.com/id/38657945 |title=Foreman’s Grill Deal: Best in Sports Marketing History? |last=Rovell |first=Darren |date=August 11, 2010 |website=CNBC |publisher= |access-date=2021-02-28 |quote= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |author-link=Phillip Sipiora |ref=harv }}
* {{cite web |url=https://web.library.yale.edu/film |title=When We Were Kings |author= |date=n.d. |website=Yale Film Archive |publisher= |access-date=2021-02-26 |quote= |ref={{SfnRef|Yale|n.d.}} }}
* {{cite book |last=Van Raybrouck |first=David |title=Congo: The Epic History of a People |publisher=Harper Collins |date=2012 |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT: When We Were Kings: Review and Commentary}}
[[Category: Book Reviews (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/When We Were Kings: Review and Commentary

2021-03-03T01:41:59Z

BMeister: made a minor spell fix in citations

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''When We Were Kings'': Review and Commentary}}
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{{Quote box|title=''When We Were Kings'' (Blu-Ray Special Edition)|Directed and Produced by Leon Gast Featuring Muhammad Ali, George Foreman With Norman Mailer, George PlimptonThe Criterion Collection, 2019, $35.00|align=right|width=25%}}
{{byline|last=Lowenburg|first=Bill|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13low}}

{{Cquote|In the ring, genius is transcendent moxie—the audacity to know that what usually does not work, or is too dangerous to attempt, can, in a special case, prove the winning move. Maybe that is why attempts are made from time to time to compare boxing with chess—the best move can lie very close to the worst move. At Ali’s level, you had to be ready to die, then, for your best ideas.|author=Norman Mailer|“The Best Move Lies Close to the Worst”}}

{{Start|In the fall of 1974, eight days before George Foreman}} was expected to annihilate Muhammad Ali in “The Rumble in the Jungle” in Zaire, Foreman suffered a cut over the eye while sparring. His trainer, Dick Sadler, closed the cut, which would require eleven stitches, with a butterfly bandage.{{sfn|Dundee|Sugar|2008|p=177}}

The so-called Butterfly Effect might have just as well taken its name from boxing, rather than chaos theory, and, in popular culture, Ray Bradbury’s 1952 science fiction story, “A Sound of Thunder.” The basic concept is that small causes may have momentous effects. In Bradbury’s tale, a time traveler goes back to the age of dinosaurs, accidentally steps on a butterfly, and returns to find his world irreparably changed—and not for the better.{{sfn|Bradbury|2005|p=236}} In the boxing example, one of the results was the documentary ''When We Were Kings'', which would not have been produced but for Foreman’s cut and the rescheduling of the heavyweight Championship of the World for five weeks later.

Criterion has released a Blu-Ray DVD of ''When We Were Kings''. Norman Mailer and George Plimpton, along with Spike Lee, Ali Biographer Thomas Hauser, and actor Malik Bowens provide sometimes-valuable commentary in-studio interviews recorded twenty years after the fight. The big bonus in the Blu-Ray version is the inclusion of Soul Power, a documentary of the Zaire 74 music festival associated with the fight. ''When We Were Kings'' is the perfect companion to Mailer’s short-but-compelling classic, ''The Fight''. The movie received an Academy Award in 1997 for Best Documentary, along with numerous other accolades. Coincidentally, six years after presenting the Oscar to director Leon Gast, actor Will Smith was cast to play Muhammad Ali in the biopic.

Mailer’s presence in the documentary is indispensable. Even though some of his contentions are based on hearsay, his tone is authoritative, and, as always when on camera, he’s simply entertaining. His account of the fight itself, like his written account, is precise and accurate. Plimpton, who was also in Zaire, has drawn criticism for some of his conjectures, and will from this reviewer a little further on. Spike Lee, who was a teenager at the time of the fight, deadpans a few Ali truisms, which add little to the film, and Malik Bowens’ presence feels entirely gratuitous. Bowens, who is fluent in English, and whose connection to the fight is unknown, for some reason delivers his remarks in French, which comes across as a directorial decision to introduce an unnecessary, exotic layer to the film.

''Soul Power'' was the original project ''When We Were Kings'' director Leon Gast hoped to complete it when he went to Africa. Segments of the music performances by James Brown, B.B. King, The Spinners, and Miriam Makeba did make it into ''When We Were Kings'' and also serve as the soundtrack for interesting B-roll footage. Many of the performances appear to be from rehearsals, with the performers enjoying themselves among one another rather than playing to an audience. No trace of an audience, in fact, is ever shown. Neither are any of the many African performers, with the unfortunate exception of Miriam Makeba.

''Rolling Stone'' reported that only 8,000 attended the first two nights of the festival, which may explain the dearth of crowd shots accompanying the performances. The 80,000 seat stadium filled on the final night only because President Mobutu “convinced” concert promoters to give away the remaining tickets.{{sfn|Gehr|2016}} Included on the Blu-ray version are brief interviews with Gast and co-producer David Sonenberg. For those devotees of Norman Mailer not interested in accumulating another piece of plastic in their home, both films are available via streaming on Amazon Prime, minus the extra content.

The fact that ''When We Were Kings'' was ever completed and released in 1996—more than twenty years after the fight—is a tribute to the perseverance of director Leon Gast. An entire book could be written about the legal and logistical rigmarole required to recover the exposed film, edit it, arrange for music rights, add additional interviews, and finance what eventually became the movie.

According to the Yale Film Archive, Gast was originally hired by promoter Don King to make a concert film of the Zaire 74 music festival, which was scheduled to be held along with the boxing match. His crew shot the festival, but then came Foreman’s cut and the crew was not allowed to leave the country. Perhaps sensing a great opportunity, Gast had them document the weeks leading up to the fight and we are all the richer for it today.{{sfn|Yale|n.d.}}

The perceptive, business-minded, and ever-mischievous Muhammad Ali may have precipitated all of this. Soon after learning of Foreman’s sparring injury, he called a press conference and said, “I appeal to the President to not let anybody connected with the fight out of the country. Be careful. George might sneak out at night. Watch the airports. Watch the train stations. Watch the elephant trails. Send boats to patrol the rivers. Check all the luggage big enough for a big man to crawl into. Do whatever you have to do, Mr. President, but don’t let George leave the country. He’ll never come back if you let him out . . . Because he knows I can’t lose!” To this he added, “These are my people, and I ain’t leaving!”{{sfn|Dundee|Sugar|2008|p=177}}

Foreman, in fact, would have liked nothing better than to return home. “I was miserable in Zaire,” he recalled. “My first quarters were at an old army base infested with rats, lizards, and insects. Surrounded by cyclone fencing and barbed wire, it was patrolled and inhabited by rowdy soldiers.”{{sfn|Goldstein|2000|p=108}} Foreman had hoped to go to Paris for medical attention and then have the fight rescheduled to take place in the United States. However, soon after Ali’s remarks, President Sele Seke Mobutu, who had ostensibly put up ten million dollars to have Zaire host the fight, took Ali’s advice and unofficially sealed the borders.

Foreman, although not well-educated, is a very intelligent man and he understood the situation in which he was placed. “This was clearly Muhammad Ali country . . . If I knocked him out, the most I’d get would be grudging respect for vanquishing a legend. And if I lost, there’d be a big crowd at the station, jeering me back to Palookaville.”{{sfn|Goldstein|2000|p=108}}

Indeed, as far the fans in Zaire were concerned, the fix was in against Foreman from the outset—partially due to Muhammad Ali and partially due to Foreman’s and his managers’ lack of worldliness. Ali had arrived in Zaire first, where there was little infrastructure and few people had access to television or print media. It seems incredible today, but up until fight time, because of rumors Ali started, quite a number of Zairians believed that George Foreman was ''white''. For his own part, Foreman deplaned in Zaire with his pet German shepherd, Diego. The dog was introduced at a press conference and filmed with his front paws on the table next to Foreman. George and his unsophisticated handlers had no idea that just a generation earlier, when Zaire was the Belgian Congo, German shepherds had been used by Belgian police to intimidate and attack Zairians.{{sfn|Gast|2019}}

After sustaining the injury, for the next five weeks Foreman retreated to his compound and had minimal contact with the press. He lost an additional ten days of training due to being advised that strenuous activity and sweating might delay the healing of his cut. Still, he was confident of his ability to dominate and knock out Muhammad Ali. He had good reason to believe this, having TKO’d both Ken Norton and Joe Frazier in short order within the past eighteen months. Norton had broken Ali’s jaw in the course of earning a split decision victory and Frazier had sent Ali to the canvas with one of the most perfectly delivered left hooks in boxing history. Foreman, like the rest of the boxing world, had observed that Ali was not the fighter he once was.

“This was gonna be the easiest fight of my life,” a mature Foreman quipped in a tone of good-natured irony in the 2009 documentary ''Facing Ali''. “I was just gonna walk in and knock him out in one, two, or three rounds. It was the most confident I’d ever been in a boxing match.”{{sfn|McKormack|2010}}

While Ali no longer danced as gracefully at age 32, his well of boxing resources was far from dry. For one thing, he could take a punch. Following his fight with Joe Frazier in Madison Square Garden on March 8, 1971, referee Arthur Mercante commented on the fourteenth-round knockdown: “Frazier hit him as hard as a man can be hit . . . Ali was exhausted. He went down, and anyone else would have stayed on the canvas, but he was up in three seconds . . . I motioned Frazier to a neutral corner and when I turned around to face Ali, he was on his feet.”{{sfn|Hauser|1991|p=229}} Besides his physical resilience, Ali could think under pressure and was a master of improvisation, both in and out of the ring.

In re-watching Foreman dismantle Norton and Frazier, I see exactly why Foreman felt the way he did. I’ve watched hundreds, perhaps over a thousand fights over the years and have never seen anyone punch harder than Foreman. In winning the championship against Joe Frazier in Kingston, Jamaica, on January 22, 1973 (after Frazier had defeated Ali) one of George’s uppercuts in the second round lifted Smokin’ Joe entirely off the canvas. Incredibly, Frazier got up, only to be knocked down again, for the sixth and final time, before the fight was stopped.{{sfn|Cosell|2021}} Coincidentally, the match was refereed by Arthur Mercante, who afterward may have revised his opinion about the hardest a man can be hit.

During the run-up to the fight in Zaire, while Foreman healed, brooded, and trained without gusto, Ali threw his one-man public relations machine into high gear. During a reception given in his honor at the presidential palace, Ali said, “Mr. President, I’ve been a citizen of the United States for 33 years and was never invited to the White House. It sure gives me pleasure to be invited to the Black House.”{{sfn|Goldstein|2000|p=110}} Meanwhile, he privately confessed to Howard Bingham, his personal photographer, “I’d give anything to be training in the United States. They got ice cream there, and pretty girls and miniskirts.”{{sfn|Hauser|1991|p=270}}

''When We Were Kings'' refers to the subject of women distracting boxers from their training regimens by way of George Plimpton’s comments. Ali, he reports, visited president Mobutu’s fortune teller, who predicted that a mystical woman with shaky hands would somehow get to Foreman. Plimpton refers to the woman as a succubus—a female demon believed to have sexual intercourse with sleeping men. “And that impressed me enormously,” Plimpton says with gravitas.{{sfn|Gast|2019}}

This arguably led to the decision by Leon Gast and his editors to open the movie with a brief clip from the music festival, showing an extreme close-up of South African performer Miriam Makeba spotlighted onstage against a dark background. She’s posed as if about to unleash a spell and emits a sound from her throat not unlike a death rattle. Later in the film, when Foreman gets KO’d, more of Makeba’s performance is cut in, symbolizing the supposedly invincible boxer’s vital powers having been drained by a succubus.

Ironically, one of the open secrets of Ali’s legacy was ''his'' penchant for women. Larry Holmes, who accompanied Ali to Africa as a sparring partner, had boxed hundreds of rounds with him at his Deer Lake, Pennsylvania training camp. He talked openly about his experiences in the book, ''Facing Ali'', and in a documentary of the same title. In those interviews, the plainspoken Holmes let it all hang out. “The women that came to that camp! He had his pick, you know what I’m saying? I know how he lived. I knew what he did. I seen the people come into camp and leaving camp. I know he walked around with a stiff dick every day. He would fuck a snake if you hold its head. You don’t even have to hold the motherfucker’s head. Just give him the snake.”{{sfn|Brunt|2002|p=286}}

Holmes even attempted to caution Ali, telling him, “You better be careful. You want to be prepared . . . and that’s when he told me, ‘Shut the hell up. I know boxing. You don’t tell me what to do.’ So I shut up and went about my business. Like he said, he knew what he was doing. He won the fight.”{{sfn|Brunt|2002|p=287}}

Following his apprenticeship with Ali, Holmes would go on to become one of the longest-reigning heavyweight champions and in 1980 defeated his mentor in a sad, one-sided affair that, toward the end, had Holmes waving the referee in to protect a proud-but-defenseless Ali.

Two other individuals featured in the film—promoter Don King and President Sese Seke Mobutu—are essential to understanding the context of the fight. Like Ali and Foreman and Mailer and Plimpton, they each possessed a huge ego and led complex and controversial lives.

Mailer comments in the film, “This fight came into existence because of Don King’s desire to be famous . . . if it failed, he was destined to go back into obscurity.”{{sfn|Gast|2019}} Consider the fact that just three and a half years earlier, King had listened to reports of the Ali-Frazier fight in his prison cell in Marion, Ohio, where he was serving time for a manslaughter conviction.{{sfn|Hauser|1991|p=261}} He had been convicted in 1967 for stomping Sam Garrett, an ex-employee in his numbers racket, to death on the street in Cleveland. It was the second time he had killed a man. In 1954, he shot Hillary Brown in the back and the killing was ruled justifiable homicide. Paroled in 1971, King was eventually granted a full pardon by Ohio Governor James Rhodes in 1983. Rhodes justified the pardon by saying he relied heavily on letters of support submitted by Reverend Jesse Jackson, Coretta Scott King, Steve Davis, executive director of the National Publishers Association, Cleveland Mayor George Voinovich, Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell, and Cleveland Indians president Gabe Paul, among others.{{sfn|Cengage|2019}}

Thomas Hauser, Ali’s biographer, said, “Don King is one of the brightest, most charismatic, hardest working people in the world . . . he’s also totally amoral and I can’t think of a man who has done more to demoralize fighters, take from fighters, and exploit fighters and ruin their careers. But you have to give him his due for what he did to make Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire.”{{sfn|Gast|2019}} Since 1975, [[w:Don King|King]] has been sued by Muhammad Ali, Larry Holmes, Tim Witherspoon, Mike Tyson, Terry Norris, Lennox Lewis, and ESPN, to name but a few.

According to the popular legend of how the fight was put together, King more or less willed it into existence through a combination of guile and gumption. As the story goes, King first went to George Foreman, told him he could get him five million dollars for fighting Ali, and got him to sign a contract. Then he went to Ali and did the same. However, at that point, Don King had not a penny to actually promote the fight.{{sfn|Gast|2019}}

Madison Square Garden matchmaker Teddy Brenner, who knew a thing or two about such matters, said, “Actually, King didn’t promote the fight, although he did his best to make it seem that way. Video Techniques put it together, with up front money from a British corporation and the rest from the government of Zaire. King was helpful in lining up the fighters, but the deal could have been made without him. For ten million dollars, which is what Foreman and Ali split, anyone could have done the job.”{{sfn|Hauser|1991|p=263}} The five million dollars each fighter was paid in 1974 is worth a total of roughly $52,200,000 now in 2020.{{sfn|CPI|2019}}

Brenner’s explanation makes sense. The big money was going to come in through worldwide television coverage and the fight ended up being broadcast live to an estimated one billion viewers, a record at that time. We’ll never know for sure, but chances are President Mobutu may have put up far less than the ten million he has been credited with. Like Don King, though, he did his best to make it seem that way.

Not that Mobutu was entirely without resources—both imagined and real. According to Neil Leifer, who photographed the fight for ''Sports Illustrated'', Mobutu owned one of only two privately-owned Boeing 747s at that time. In a phone interview, Leifer related the story of a photo shoot he did at the presidential palace prior to the fight. Ali and Foreman were to be personally escorted down a long, exquisitely beautiful flower-lined path by the president, strolling slowly toward the amassed press corps. Leifer, a consummate pro, arrived early and secured a good vantage point.

“An official press aide came out,” he related, “and gave us very specific instructions that we were not to cross the flower paths. No barricades had been set up.” As Mobutu and Ali approached, the photographers couldn’t contain themselves and the jostling began.

“Those Europeans were aggressive,” Leifer laughed. “I think it was a couple of French guys who started it . . . long story short, by the time the session was over, there wasn’t a single flower left . . . What could they do? They weren’t going to shoot the foreign press corps. I pitied the poor press aide, though. I hope they didn’t shoot him!”{{sfn|Leifer|2019}}

Born Joseph Desire Mobutu, upon seizing power with CIA help in 1965, Mobutu became Mobutu Sese Seke Kuku Ngbendu waza Banga, which translates to, “the all-conquering warrior, who because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake.”{{sfn|French|1997}} Like Don King, Mobutu was familiar with homicide. Six months after taking office, he had four former cabinet ministers hanged before 50,000 spectators.{{sfn|French|1997}} In the film and in his book, ''The Fight'', Mailer relates the unconfirmed tale of Mobutu’s detention cells beneath the Kinshasa stadium and the summary execution of 100 unfortunates in order to deter crime during the festival.

With borders on nine countries, Mobutu promoted Zaire to Washington, D.C. and Paris. He received economic and political support in exchange for allowing Zaire to be used as a staging area for Cold War era interventions and covert activities throughout Central Africa, most notably against the Marxist regime in Angola. Moreover, Zaire had extensive mineral deposits, especially copper, which provided revenue for his grandiose economic schemes. Despite these projects, such as the world’s largest hydroelectric dam near Kinshasa, the country had few viable roads or other infrastructure. In a special report to the ''New York Times International Edition'' subtitled, “Master of Ruin,” Howard French wrote in1997, when Mobutu was still president, “Life in a vast country deprived of roads, health care, electricity, telephones, and often education has reverted to a brutishness not known since the 1940s.”{{sfn|French|1997}}

Using other autocrats as role models, Mobutu’s personality cult had few rivals during his era. For weeks at a time, the press in Zaire was forbidden to mention any Zairian other than the president. “Mobutism” was cultivated, being described as, “The sum total of his actions . . . just as the sum total of Mao’s actions constitute Maoism.” A Zairian citizen related years later that the first 15 minutes of the day in elementary school required students to dance and shout the name of the president.{{sfn|French|1997}}

Unlike the open secret of Muhammad Ali’s dalliances, Mobutu’s sexual conquests were celebrated. Described as “looking like a sadist,” by Mailer, Mobutu fathered twenty-one children by official count. However, it should come as no surprise that he adopted ''driot de cuissage'', the right to deflower, as local chiefs offered him virgins on his trips across Zaire. The practice was considered–-or required to be considered—an honor by the virgin’s family.{{sfn|Van Raybrouck|2012|p=384}}

Mobutu’s usefulness to Washington and Paris faded as the Cold War wound down. In 1994, he briefly returned to importance as over a million Rwandan Hutus, many of whom had perpetrated mass genocide, fled into Zaire. Surviving Tutsis, of whom up to a million had been slaughtered, had, in a bizarre twist, assumed power. Mobutu reinstituted relations with France, who had been a major backer of the genocidal Hutus.{{sfn|French|1997}} Like boxing, the backstories of international politics are almost always ugly.

Nothing would be easier than to apply 20/20 hindsight in the year 2020 to attack Muhammad Ali’s culpability in accepting five million dollars to fight in a country ruled by a brutal dictator whose crimes were well-known, especially given Ali’s even-then growing reputation as a crusader for human rights and humanitarian causes. At the time, however, Ali expressed nothing but appreciation, even awe, at Zaire’s very existence. “It don’t seem possible,” he said, “but 28 million people run this country and not one white man is involved.”{{sfn|Goldstein|2000|p=111}} As for the money coming from Mobutu and the dictator’s goal to promote himself and Zaire, Ali was only too happy to take it. “Countries go to war to get their names put on the map. And wars cost a lot more than ten million dollars.”{{sfn|Gast|2019}} As Ali told British challenger Joe Bugner in private before they fought the following year, “Whatever happens, boxing is like business.”{{sfn|Brunt|2002|p=153}}

The same 2020 self-righteous political correctness epidemic in our culture today could be applied to Ali’s embrace of the chant “Ali, ''boma ye''”—Ali, ''kill him'', by Zairian fans. In the context of the times, from his pre-fight antics to waving his glove to lead the crowd in the chant between rounds, it was all theater for Ali. Conversely, in what may be the film’s most poignant moment, one day, while receiving a post-workout rubdown, Foreman reflected, quietly, “When I walk down the street, the kids follow me, some screaming, George Foreman, ''boma ye''. I don’t like that. If they say anything about me, they should say George Foreman likes being here, George Foreman loves Africa, not George Foreman, ''kill him''. I don’t like that.”{{sfn|Gast|2019}}

With scenes like this, ''When We Were Kings'' does an admirable job of chronicling the weeks up to the fight, adding montage sequences set to musical performances from the Zaire 74 festival. The film has been criticized by some as depicting life in Zaire with more of a positive spin than it deserves, and while I can see the point, it doesn’t spoil the movie for me.

What does spoil the film for me in places is the heavy-handed return to the succubus reference, both visually and with the leitmotif. I remember being angered by it when the film was originally released. Now, after repeated viewings, the effect has diminished, but I find myself deliberately ignoring it and still wishing they’d stuck to boxing. It is, after all, primarily a boxing film. According to the Yale Film Archive, Gast recovered 250 hours of exposed 16mm film and audio tape from Liberian investors, from which he edited the Zaire parts of the movie. I wish he’d included more of that material instead of relying on Plimpton’s comment to establish what turned out to be, for me at least, an unsuccessful sub plot.

In Gast’s defense, though, who knows what personal and financial dynamics came into play when producer Taylor Hackford joined the project in 1995 and arranged for the studio interviews? Plimpton floated that comment and the editing team must have thought it too good to end up on the cutting room floor. The effect is one of the tail wagging the dog. And I wonder what Miriam Makeba thought of it.

The early betting line on the fight was seven-to-one, Foreman. By fight time, the odds had dropped to four-to-one, little consolation considering many in the sports world believed Ali would, at best, be knocked out, and, at worst, killed. Plimpton said, “The sense was, we were watching a man about to go to the gallows.” Howard Cosell, the toupee’d, verbose ABC commentator who had supported Ali throughout his career, delivers a morbid, premature eulogy that is included in the film, representing the mood of the moment.{{sfn|Gast|2019}}

In Ali’s pre-fight dressing room, according to Mailer, there was tense silence, until Ali led his entourage in a half-hearted call-and-response promising to dance. What Norman may not have heard was when, according to Bernie Yuman, who was also there, Ali first said to his shaky followers, “What’s the matter? This ain’t nothing but another day in the dramatic life of Muhammad Ali.”{{sfn|Hauser|1991|p=273}} To this day, I’m not convinced by Mailer’s contention that Ali was terrified of Foreman. Norman may have been projecting his own awe for Foreman on to Ali, as conveyed in his description of George hitting the heavy bag. But as Ali told the press earlier, “Us Black folks ain’t afraid of one another the way White folks is afraid of us.”{{sfn|Hauser|1991|p=270}}

The fight starts and Mailer does a brilliant job of describing the action, summarizing his even-better blow-by-blow account fleshed out in ''The Fight''. Norman is at his best here, nearly equaling his famous description of the 1962 ring death of Benny Paret at the hands of Emile Griffith and his piece for ''Life'' magazine on the first Ali-Frazier fight.

In round two, Ali begins the rope-a-dope, so it’s time to shine some light on the myth of Ali’s trainer, Angelo Dundee, loosening the ropes prior to the fight. Mailer has, to some degree, helped to perpetuate this myth. According to Dundee’s autobiography, ''My View From The Corner'' (a great read for all boxing fans), upon inspecting the ring the afternoon before the fight, Angelo and assistant Bobby Goodman discovered it had been set up by people who had never seen a boxing ring.{{sfn|Dundee|Sugar|2008|p=181}} Having set up a ring myself several times before matches I promoted, I can attest to the fact that it requires experience to do so properly.

The ring in the 20th of May Stadium had a pronounced list, one corner support having sunk into the turf. The ropes were sagging due to improper installation along with the tropical heat and humidity. Angelo and Goodman worked for several hours to jack up the sunken corner and install blocks under it. As for the ropes, they had to scrounge up a razor blade and use it to cut over a foot of slack from each rope before reinstalling and tightening them. According to Dundee, if they hadn’t attended to the ring, by fight time the ropes would have been sagging onto the canvas.{{sfn|Dundee|Sugar|2008|p=182}} His account is verified by Goodman in a separate interview.{{sfn|Hauser|1991|p=272}}

Dundee also found the canvas and padding on the ring floor to be improperly installed, but there was no time to rectify it. The foam padding underneath the canvas had turned mushy from the humidity, making it a very slow surface on which to box, much less dance. This he reported to Ali. Still, as far as Angelo or anyone else knew, the plan was for Ali to dance.

“I saw him dancing for five or six rounds,” Dundee recalled, “Then I imagined him picking up the pace when George got tired and knocking him out in the late rounds, but everything was planned around not getting hit . . . when he went to the ropes I felt sick . . . that shows what I know.”{{sfn|Goldstein|2000|p=109}}

Joyce Carol Oates points out in her small classic, On Boxing, that “boxers, like chess players, must think on their feet—must be able to improvise in mid-fight, so-to-speak.”{{sfn|Oates|1987|p=77}} Ali personified this and explains what happened in his own words:

I didn’t really plan what happened that night. But when a fighter gets in the ring, he has to adjust according to the conditions he faces. Against George, the ring was slow. Dancing all night, my legs would have gotten tired. And George was following me too close, cutting off the ring. In the first round, I used more energy staying away from him than he used chasing me. I was tireder than I should have been with fourteen rounds to go. I knew I couldn’t keep dancing, because by the middle of the fight I’d be really tired and George would get me. So between rounds I decided to do what I did in training when I got tired . . . It was something Archie Moore used to do. He’d let younger men take their shots and blocked everything in scientific fashion . . . when they got tired, Archie would attack . . . So starting in the second round, I gave George what he thought he wanted.{{sfn|Hauser|1991|p=277}}

Ironically, Archie Moore had helped to train Foreman and was in his corner that night. In the film, Mailer goes on to do an admirable job of describing the ebb and flow of the contest.

Fast forward to Round 8. Foreman has punched himself out and here comes the succubus again. Her leitmotif builds up slowly behind the action and Makeba’s ominous, hissing mouth is superimposed over the boxing. Ali connects, Foreman topples over. Plimpton recalls, “I turned to Norman and said, “The succubus has got him!”

Bullshit, George. Joyce Carol Oates, a far more practical observer of the sweet science, quotes a smart fighter in her book, who explains: “Boxing is a game of control, and, as in chess, this control can radiate in circles ''from'' the center, or in circles ''toward'' the center . . . the entire action of a fight goes in a circle; it can be little circles in the middle of the ring or big circles along the ropes, but always in a circle. The man who wins is the man who controls the action of the circle.”{{sfn|Oates|1987|p=78}}

Ali had done exactly that, from the outset. His lateral movement, circling first to the right and reversing to the left, had opened Foreman up to the right hand leads he threw so effectively in the first round. It had likewise opened Foreman up to the one-two combination that floored him in round eight, when Ali spun in a tight arc off the ropes. Boxing, not hoodoo, had won the fight.

Foreman, initially, made all kinds of excuses for losing. Years later, in retrospect, he was incredibly insightful and gracious. “Muhammad amazed me”, he recalled. “He out-thought me; he out-fought me. That night, he was just the better fighter . . . I went out and hit Muhammad Ali with the hardest body shot I ever delivered . . . anybody else in the world would have crumbled...I could see it hurt . . . he had that look in his eyes, like he was saying I’m not gonna let you hurt me. And to be honest, that’s the main thing I remember about the fight. Everything else happened too fast. I got burned out . . . I was the aggressor . . . but I knew in some way I was losing.”{{sfn|Hauser|1991|p=277}}

Following the fight, on a whim, writer Pete Bonventre commandeered a car and driver and rode through the monsoon to Ali’s compound, the twenty-mile trip taking two hours. The compound was deserted, with the press all having filed their stories and the entourage gone to party. “Three hours after the greatest victory of his life, Muhammad Ali was sitting on the stoop, showing a magic trick to a group of black children. . . . And it was hard to tell who was having a better time, Ali or the children.” Ten years after upsetting Sonny Liston and seven years after he’d been stripped of the title, Muhammad Ali was once again the heavyweight champion.{{sfn|Hauser|1991|p=279}}

While the Rumble in the Jungle may have been Ali’s greatest boxing victory, I think of it as the high point of the second act of his four-part dramatic career. In Act One, he defeats Sonny Liston and is stripped of his title for refusing induction into the military. In Act Two, after a three-year legal battle, his boxing license is reinstated, he loses to Frazier, and regains the title in Zaire. Act Three begins with winning the epic Thrilla in Manilla rubber match with Frazier, losing the title to Leon Spinks, who had only eight professional fights, defeating Spinks in the rematch to win the title for the third time, and ending his ring career with several tragically bad performances. In Act Four, Ali goes into serious physical decline and begins to slip into obscurity. Then he reemerges—more popular than ever—when he unsteadily lights the 1996 Olympic torch in Atlanta. To me, his greatest victory took place not in the ring, but in foregoing his physical peak as an athlete and defeating the United States government in the courtroom.

Muhammad Ali died in 2016. George Foreman remains alive, and, by all indications, is well at this writing. His career after Zaire is equally remarkable to Ali’s. Two years after losing to Ali, following a savage fight with slugger Ron Lyle, Foreman lost a decision to slick boxer Jimmy Young in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Afterward, George collapsed from heat stroke in his dressing room and had a near-death experience. He claimed God pulled him from the brink of an abyss and gave him a mission in life. He returned to Houston, stopped boxing, gained a hundred pounds, and began preaching on street corners. He established a church and built a congregation.

Foreman stayed away from boxing for ten years. He watched no television and didn’t follow the sport, concentrating on his preaching. Then, at age 38, weighing over 300 pounds, he began a comeback. His goal was to raise money to build a youth center for his church and—to everyone’s amusement—regain the heavyweight championship of the world.{{sfn|Dundee|Sugar|2008|p=281}}

The New George looked nothing like the original. He’d always been big, but now he was huge. And he’d learned to relax in the ring, no longer tensely stalking opponents and wasting energy as he had in those few short rounds in Zaire. The New George waited patiently, sometimes absorbing terrible blows, for his chance to land a short, sneaky right, and when he did, the effect was devastating. Somehow, he’d retained—even refined—his jab into something akin to a pile driver. His style was anything but pretty, but he had enough weapons to remain dangerous.{{sfn|Dundee|p=281}}

Another thing happened. He became a nice guy. A very funny guy. His self-deprecating humor charmed the press and the public alike, especially anyone old enough to remember his earlier incarnation. We’d always wanted to like George, but he wouldn’t let us. Now, when asked by a reporter with tongue-in-cheek, “When do you think you’ll fight for the title?” George replied, laughing, “Today, the biggest decisions I’ll make aren’t related to the heavyweight title, they’re whether I visit McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, or Jack in the Box.”{{sfn|Dundee|Sugar|2008|p=282}}

He took fights in places like Anchorage and other locations not on the boxing map. “I had seen others, like Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, fail in their comeback attempts because they were looking for overnight success. I knew it would take a long period of time to do it right, so I started from the bottom and worked my way up and it took three years.”{{sfn|Dundee|Sugar|2008|p=282}} He fought twenty-one fights against increasingly challenging opponents, including Gerry Cooney, Tommy Morrison, and Evander Holyfield.

On November 5, 1994, age 45 years, 299 days, the New George got his chance. Following the ninth round in a fight against champion Michael Moorer, George had lost every previous round on all scorecards. His corner man told him, “You gotta put this guy down. You’re behind, baby.” Foreman’s corner man was none other than Angelo Dundee, Ali’s former handler (“Foreman,” You Tube). George bristled at Angelo’s comment, but boy did he ever go out and follow directions. Like Ali in Zaire, he controlled the action of the circle. Moving to his left, he saw the opening and landed that sneaky right directly on Moorer’s chin. Traveling no more than twelve inches, the punch was reminiscent of the one Joe Louis floored Max Schmeling with in the first round of their rematch in 1938. Moorer was starched, as they say in boxing, landing on the seat of his pants, knocked out cold. Twenty years after losing the title to Ali, Foreman took it back from a man 19 years his junior. He had come full circle—along with his red boxing trunks, the same ones he wore in Zaire–with alterations for waist size. Muhammad Ali, whose disabilities had by this time become very evident, wrote to George. He said, “Congratulations, Champ, you had the courage and the guts to go out and do it.”{{sfn|Dundee|Sugar|2008|p=298}}

Following a close loss in his final fight at age 48 to respected heavyweight Shannon Briggs, Foreman returned to his dressing room dejected. There he was met by his lawyer with a check for a million dollars from the Salton company, whose electric grill George had reluctantly agreed to endorse. It was just the beginning.{{sfn|Rovell|2010}}

By 1998, Salton had sold $200 million worth of the George Foreman Lean, Mean, Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine, and the company made the business decision to offer Foreman a buyout instead of awarding him a percentage of sales. George was paid $137.5 million in cash and stock for use of his name in perpetuity. Added to what he’d earned previously, along with $11 million more for television appearances, Foreman’s profit from the grill approaches $200 million—more, by far, than he earned or ever dreamt of in his boxing career. He continues to sidelight as a boxing commentator for HBO and payper-view broadcasts.{{sfn|Rovell|2010}}

Asked in recent years to reflect on the Rumble in the Jungle, the New George delivers his own version of the Butterfly Effect. “I’m just happy that I didn’t win it . . . because everything would be different . . . it made me fall into the hands of God . . . it was that fragile . . . one little thing could have messed the whole thing up. The world would have been different for us”{{sfn|Brunt|2002|p=189}} . . . ”I’m just proud to be part of the Ali legend. If people mention my name with his from time to time, that’s enough for me. That, and I hope Muhammad Ali likes me, because I like him. I like him a lot.”{{sfn|Hauser|1991|p=278}}

===References===
{{Reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
* {{cite book |last=Bradbury |first=Ray |date=2005 |title=A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories |url= |location= |publisher=William Morrow |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Brunt |first=Stephen |date=2002 |title=Facing Ali |edition=1 |publisher=The Lyons Press |ref=harv }}
* {{cite AV media |people=Cosell, Howard (narrator) |date=2011 |title=George Foreman Knocks Out Joe Frazier |trans-title= |medium=video |language= |url=http://youtu.be/vz3tPjLhw2U |access-date= |archive-url= |archive-date= |format= |time= |location= |publisher=ABC Sports |ref={{SfnRef|Cosell|2011}} }}
* {{cite web |url=https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl |author= |title=CPI Inflation Calculator |publisher=US Government |date=November 1, 2019 |ref={{Sfnref|CPI|2019}} }}
* {{cite web |url=https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/sports-and-games/sports-biographies/don-king |title=Don King |author= |date=2019 |website=Encyclopedia.com |publisher=Cengage |access-date=2021-02-28 |quote= |ref={{SfnRef|King|2019}} }}
* {{cite book |last1=Dundee |first1=Angelo |last2=Sugar |first2=Bert R. |date=2008 |title=My View From The Corner: A Life In Boxing |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw Hill |ref=harv }}
* {{cite news |last=French |first=Howard W. |date=May 17, 1997 |title=Anatomy of an Autocracy: Mobutu’s 32 Year Reign |url=https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/world/africa/051797zaire-mobutu.html?scp=21&sq=32&st=cse |work=The New York Times |edition=International |page= |access-date=2021-02-28 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite AV media |people=Gast, Leon (director); Grant, Leon (producer) |date=2019 |title=When We Were Kings |trans-title= |medium=Blu-Ray |publisher=Criterion |ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Gehr |first=Richard |date=June 6, 2016 |title=Zaire ’74: How a Pan-Continental Funk Fest Soundtracked Muhammad Ali |url=https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/zaire-74-how-a-pan-continental-funk-fest-soundtracked-muhammad-ali-59935/ |magazine=Rolling Stone |pages= |access-date=2021-02-28 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite AV media |people= |date=May 11, 1994 |title=George Foreman vs Michael Moorer |trans-title= |medium=video |language= |url=http://youtu.be/2VQmYUg2Pp8 |access-date=2021-02-28 |archive-url= |archive-date= |format= |time= |location= |publisher=Classic Boxing Matches |ref={{Sfnref|Foreman|1994}} }}
* {{cite book |last=Goldstein |first=Alan |title=Muhammad Ali |publisher=MetroBooks |date=2000 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Hauser |first=Thomas |title=Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times |publisher=Simon & Schuster |date=1991 |ref=harv }}
* {{citation |last=Leifer |first=Neil |title=Telephone Interview |date=November 13, 2019 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite AV media |people=McKormack, Pete (director); Murray, Derik (producer) |date=2010 |title=Facing Ali |trans-title= |medium=video |publisher=Network Entertainment |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Oates |first=Joyce Carol |title=On Boxing |edition=1 |location=Garden City |publisher=Dolphin/Doubleday |date=1987|ref=harv }}
* {{cite web |url=http://www.cnbc.com/id/38657945 |title=Foreman’s Grill Deal: Best in Sports Marketing History? |last=Rovell |first=Darren |date=August 11, 2010 |website=CNBC |publisher= |access-date=2021-02-28 |quote= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |author-link=Phillip Sipiora |ref=harv }}
* {{cite web |url=https://web.library.yale.edu/film |title=When We Were Kings |author= |date=n.d. |website=Yale Film Archive |publisher= |access-date=2021-02-26 |quote= |ref={{SfnRef|Yale|n.d.}} }}
* {{cite book |last=Van Raybrouck |first=David |title=Congo: The Epic History of a People |publisher=Harper Collins |date=2012 |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT: When We Were Kings: Review and Commentary}}
[[Category: Book Reviews (MR)]]

User:BMeister

2021-03-02T22:37:08Z

BMeister: Created my userpage

Hi! Welcome to my user page! My name is BMeister, I'm a college student in Georgia,hoping to graduate soon. I'm looking forward to adding to the project!

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Prism Break

2021-02-23T20:00:13Z

BMeister: Added guides from body to photos

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR13}}
{{Byline|last=Mailer|first=Maggie|note=This Keynote Address was delivered to the annual meeting of the Norman Mailer Society on Saturday, October 19, 2019 at Wilkes University.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13mai}}

{{dc|dc=H|ello, Mailer Scholars!}}

In good Mailer fashion, I will admit that I have in the past harbored a certain, mild antipathy towards most of you. I thought I would fess up right away about my discomfort and my animosity, and hope that my Mailerean honesty might help to forge a kind of friendship between us.

Thank you for inviting me to be here and part of me feels amazed that
you trust me enough to be the Keynote Speaker. I wasn’t clear on the exact
meaning of Keynote, so I looked it up on Google, a habit Norman would
definitely abhor. Having read Merriam Webster’s list of synonyms, I do not
feel that I qualify as any of the following: bottom line, bull’s-eye, centerpiece,
core, crux, essence, gist, heart, kernel, meat, meat and potatoes, net, nub,
nubbin, pith, pivot, point, root, sum. I was surprised by “meat and potatoes,”
although of all those items, it resonates first, perhaps because Dad loved potroast
and once tried to teach me how to make it. But I’m not going to tell that
story. I’m keeping most of the “Norman As Family Man” stories to myself,
for reasons which will unfold. And the talk may—or may not—feel like meat
and potatoes, may or may not feel like the gist, heart, or essence. But I will
do my best, and can probably manage a nub, nubbin, or pith.

This talk is dedicated to my Siblings. Here is a brief outline, two warnings,
and a confession.

I will deliver the talk in two parts. The first part was difficult to write,
personally revealing, and possibly solipsistic. The second part is all about
me, so I can promise you a modicum of fun. I considered asking you to vote
on which one to present. But working on this project has extracted the egomaniac in me, so I made the decision to give you both talks. Hopefully your attention won’t be commandeered by the promise of fun in part 2, which, by
the way, is also all about me.

===Part 1. “Third Person Father”===

It has been said that in families of two or more children, each child experiences
a different version of the same parent. If that is true, in our case, there
were at least nine Normans, in addition to all the experimental versions, and
accents that he tested in public.

I am going to talk today about the different ways in which I have met my
father, and the different stations in my own life, where these meetings took
place: child, teenager, adult. I have met my father in dreams, and of course,
in his writing. I have met Norman Mailer, the character, trying out for the
role of Dad. I met Dad in the days before death, in the hospital, when he lost
the ability to speak or properly hold a pen, but could still flirt heavily with
the nursing staff, and communicate to us through a look. And I met him
just after death, when his presence seemed to permeate everything. I had the
sense that he had finally gained access to the whole cosmos. It couldn’t be an
accident that on the morning after he died I saw his last book in the window
of a nearby bookstore, just released to the public: ''Norman Mailer, On God''.
His fame had always seemed to confer a kind of immortality, but this was the
real thing. The simultaneity of his presence, in those three days after his
death, was palpable. It felt like The Universe’s Bookshelf now contained only
Norman Mailer books—only all the pages had traded places. He was everywhere
in an instant, there was no story, no continuity, only essence.

I also met my father long after his death: some two years ago, in the Jungle
in Peru, while drinking the supernatural concoction Ayahuasca, and
crossing the border between this world and the afterlife. I had heard that
imbibing this purgative tea, known as the “Vine of the Dead,” was a route to
the other side, and I might meet my father there. I was looking for my father,
but I met Norman Mailer. He showed up reluctantly, after several days, six
cups of the tea, and a brief interlude with Norris, who showed up ahead of
him, so that we could hash out a few things. When Dad appeared, he did
not appear: I heard his voice, saying, “Listen Darlin, I know you’ve come a
long way to talk, and you’ll hear my voice, but you won’t be able to see me.
I’m working on a film, and it’s difficult to get away. But we can talk.” I said,
“I came all the way to Peru to track you down in the afterlife, and you better
fucking show up.” Some smoke descended, and there he was: But not my
Dad. It was Mailer in 1969, with his turbulent curls, the man a couple of
years before my birth in ’71. I was looking for Dad, and I got Norman Mailer,
running for Mayor: looking, oddly enough, exactly like the image of him
printed on the front of this year’s Mailer conference program.

He said to me: “you had a choice: you could have been one of my women,
or come in as my daughter.” I said, “why would I want to be one of your
women? It was your Genius I was interested in. I was hoping to inherit some
of that.” He then gave me a talk about Work, with a capital W, the Work that
you meet when taking on a creative life. He said: “Listen, Darlin. You’ve been
approaching Work as if I’m the gate you need to pass through first, on the way
to Work. That’s your problem. Work is its own gate, you need to find your
own way through. You can’t get to Work through me. I am not the Way.”

I do not know if that was a real conversation with his soul, or an animated
character scripted by my subconscious. But I am not sure there’s a difference.
The Novel as History, and History as a Novel, is something I have lived.
I was quite resistant to giving this talk today and my main hesitation is
that it occupies the spooky—yes, spooky—territory of rewriting history.
There is a phenomenon that I have repeatedly encountered when reading
most biographies, essays, or articles about my father, in which I begin to believe
I am wrong about the man I knew. My version of him is tenuous, easily
displaced. History may have known him better. It has been hard for me
to hold both versions at the same time.

While putting this talk together I was repeatedly interrupted, and sometimes
held hostage, by a six-year-old girl who kept showing up and demanding
certain things. She said that she would not allow me to write the
talk until I acknowledged her. She specifically wanted me to tell the story of
my Dad’s leaving, at Christmas time, in 1975. I thought that she was a pain
in the ass, and kept telling her to leave me alone. I did not think that the
Mailer Conference would have much interest in this particular six-year-old.
What did she know about Norman Mailer? She was tedious, not intellectual
in the least, and spoiled. At a certain point, her presence became so insistent
that she began to invade my personality. I started throwing tantrums, refusing
to take care of business, and so on—and this was just last week. Nothing
could stand up to this girl. So I finally caved, and—Here I am—
acknowledging her.

I could say that at age six, I met up with my father’s absence. I have a cinematic
memory of the moment and it is a bit melodramatic.

I remember one night, looking out the window facing the driveway of our
enormous house at the top of Yale Hill in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. I was
talking to the darkness on the other side of the glass, the black darkness that
you get in the Berkshires, in winter, and I was saying, “I miss him.” My mother
Carol and I were still living in the house, which she describes to this day, in
mantra-like fashion, as “the house with 28 rooms.” Dad had left earlier that
week. The house with 28 rooms had never seemed too large to me, and there
had always been a stream of guests that included friends, writers, musicians,
actors, siblings. When he left and took everyone with him, the house felt cavernous.
That night, when I spoke out loud the words, “I miss him,” I did not
understand what I was saying. The words were someone else’s words, and I
had probably heard my mother saying them as well. The sensation of newness
in that sentence offered a confusing, and sharply held experience. Somehow
I viscerally decided that to know my father was to miss him. And, more
to the point, that to Miss him was to Know him. I was staking my claim upon
him, even if all I could get my hands on was his absence. Missing him was an
action that I could take, it was a verb: “I miss him,” but a verb that also revealed
a vacuum and vulnerability that did not go with my six-year-old’s idea
of action. I did not know what a stative verb was. How confusing. To know
you is to miss you, and to miss you is to know you. I had not been exposed
to country music much—my mother Carol was a Jazz vocalist—but I seemed
to know that I could milk this feeling like a line from a country song. And,
small irony, Dad was leaving my mother for Norris, who was from Arkansas
and loved country music. Maybe he had been playing country music for us
all prior to his departure. I do know that he had been passing around photos
of Norris to show the kids their new Stepmother, and according to my mother
he was excited, like a little kid. But back to this other little kid. She was beginning
to understand that any bond with her father would now be bracketed—
would have to compete—with a distant network that included other
people, strangers, the whole world it seemed, but did not necessarily include
his children. He once said to me, “I am a writer first, and your father second,
and I don’t have a choice about this.”

In his early years of fame, my father told me that he regarded the character
Norman Mailer as the outer shell of a Sarcophagus, which he occupied during
the day and at night he would venture out and scribble notes and revisions on
the outside. And even though I read this description in one of his books years
after its telling, hearing it directly from him gave me a great deal of emotional
ballast. He was telling me because he could relate to my shyness, which was the
sarcophagus that I lived inside, and the telling felt full of love and attention.
Later on, when I found that he had already written the idea and released it to
the world, I could have felt duped, but I did not. The intensity of his attention
was worth as much as what he said. But the place where I often did feel duped
was in reading about him. Most anything written about my father had the effect
of reducing him to the man described on the Sarcophagus, and left me
with the sense that the other guy did not exist. In the same way that he constantly
rewrote and adjusted his public image, texts about him seemed to
rewrite my memory, and my sense of him would change with each reading.

For a long time, I did not want to come to the Mailer conferences. The
ballast I was always seeking in our relationship could be further displaced by
any version of Norman I might establish hearing—or especially speaking—
about him. In the effort to connect with an audience who knew externally
more about him than I did, I could lose track of my dad completely.

But now I am in it: I have agreed to take on the role of the one telling, adjusting,
and revising the image. And perhaps I can say nothing. While
preparing this talk, I had the fantasy of standing here on stage without uttering
a single word, as if you, the audience, would be able to read me. After
all, I am his flesh and blood. A living text. I could stand here as the Speechless
Aftermath, to quote a friend, and accept your readerly attention so that,
given the collective knowledge about Norman Mailer in this room, we might
construct together a new idea of him without my ever speaking. This is the
part of me that feels like the truth, and throughout this talk there is present
a version of this self.

If I am not honest, this podium becomes an impossible insertion point,
like an Escher drawing, where I transform in real time into a character in
Dad’s continuing novel, a character who will surprise the writer in the act of
writing, who has things to say the writer cannot know until it is written. If
my writing is off, I will not believe in the character, or in this moment of
self invention. This impossible insertion point is half-first person, half-third
person. Anything else would be a lie. Perhaps that is how Norman understood
himself as a father—that his children were partly his creations, but
that he had limited say in the matter. I once got angry at him for remarking
that when you have kids, you have no idea who you’re going to get—as if we
were volumes from the Book-of-the-Month-Club. I wanted him to write
that text himself. And I wanted it to be the Great American Novel. I still believed
he could transmit his brilliance to me, with his attention, as he was
able to do on the page.

Like most of my siblings, I did not see a lot of my dad growing up, so I
tended to feel that the way I knew him was always warring with the third person
version he wrote about. If Mailer’s third person self was to become an habitual
feature in his writing—Mailer’s Mailer—it was also an habitual feature
in his parenting. My father, when at home, was often still playing the character
Norman Mailer with us. It seemed that he maintained an eye on himself
as NM while attempting to inhabit the other character, called Dad. Perhaps the
sarcophagus was a permanent fixture. It allowed him to speak to us, his children,
with a forthrightness that was good for Norman the writer, but perhaps
not so good for the kids. I thought that he regarded us with a cooler eye than
most parents, and was comfortable dispensing comments about our appearance
and aptitudes that could easily be taken for insults, but given as they were
with a writerly eye, could also be tossed off as attempts at sentences that did
not quite work. He might announce to me and my sisters, something like:
“Maggie always had a purchase on Beauty, but now she really owns it.” Such
insults/compliments were a matter of course for him. He did not believe in
compliments. He wanted us to be on our toes and he was always looking for
a sparring partner. I was probably the world’s worst sparring partner. I would
meet his glancing barbs, his attempts to wake me out of a dreamy inwardness,
with greater shyness. I was almost mute around him. I loved my father fiercely,
perhaps in the way that only a daughter can love her father, but around him I
was so terrified of getting hurt that I could not think.

He once told me that most of what he said to me should not be taken seriously.
I heard this around college-age and I felt shocked at the revelation that
every word he uttered TO ME, was not meant for consumption, unlike his
writing. I was confused, as was he, between the writer and the Father. It is a
confusion that I have continually grappled with in a kind of reflexive inner
merry-go-round, wherein I seek the private father and hope to find him in
the public one. I want the first-person, and I want to chase the third-person.

I see myself planted upon a carousel creature, spinning round a central axis
with vertical mirrored sections that catch your reflection as you pass by. The
outer rings of the carousel are also adorned with small mirrors, as well as the
ceiling, each placed at a different angle and offering multiple views of one’s
position astride an absurdly painted animal. The central axis may or may not be
my father, and the outer spokes my siblings, but the mirrored fragments feel
like a third person version of me, the only one possible in a family of nine children
and six stepmothers. At times it was difficult if not impossible to hold
onto a sense of self amidst the family, but I became an expert at surveying the
arena and observing my role in it, even if the only reflective surfaces appeared
willy nilly, at oddly punctuating moments, in my field of vision.

From our teenage years until adulthood, Dad used to take each of his kids
out individually for dinner, with the idea that because he knew we were not
getting enough of him during the year, he would at least try to deliver an intense
injection of one-on-one time with him. During these dinners, he
would often lay down incisive commentary on my being, and I would listen
like a sponge to everything that he had to say, and then spend the next several
months trying to digest it. “Oh, I’m like this. Maggie calls a spade a
spade. Maggie’s silence projects her intelligence. Maggie has the ambition of
a Napoleon, but the worldliness of a house-wife.” These dinners, which happened
one or two times a year, were like those oddly placed carousel mirrors,
flashing back a quick reflection. In his absence I would outgrow the image
that he had offered, but try to hold on to it anyway, because it was delineated
with such power—and it was all that I had of him. Or, let me switch
metaphors: our dinners felt like short stories, in which the character Maggie
came into being for a brief time. For me there was a quasi-religious quality
to them, as if I were being invented anew. In Dad’s absence his ideas about
me became relics and, to keep them alive, I traded my developing idea of
myself for his, thereby casting myself into the third person. I thought on
some level I could meet him, if not in daily life, then on the page, his page,
in some nether region where we were both enigmas. I wanted this maneuver
to be liberating for me, as I knew that it was for Mailer the writer. Handing
over my first-personhood was, of course, a form of captivity. It was not
a creative act. If I really wanted to meet him, I would have to join in the creative
process, or else live in a kind of perpetual denial, a prison without walls.
“You can’t cheat life,” he would say.

So I am meeting him right now, at the Norman Mailer Conference.
Maybe now he is equally present—and absent—for all of us. Maybe we all
Miss him, and try to Know him, or bring him to life, with our missing. He
would find this notion sentimental. But we need him. We need to know what
he would say about Trump. He might write an imaginary conversation, in
which the character Mailer says to the character DT, “Pal, we have this in
common: I could spit in the mythological eye of the Media, and they would
still love me.” DT would respond, “That’s terrific, you understand me. I could
stand in the middle of 5th avenue and shoot someone and I wouldn’t lose
any voters.” Perhaps right now Mailer’s words and energy would restore
some balance in the great match between God and The Devil. Perhaps he
could rev up the artist in the collective us.

I think that something about being an artist is to admit that liberation is
found within the prison. For me, liberation has come in part from trying to
answer the question: What did he mean when he said he was a writer first,
and a parent second? For much of my life I have entertained obvious, boring
answers: He knew he was not able to give us the right kind of attention.
Children were not his priority. He did once say he was not really interested
in his kids until he could have a decent conversation with them. But his form
of apology was to tell the truth. And one of the most helpful and corrective
comments he ever passed on was the notion that ''Feeling Sorry for Oneself is
a Great Sin''. So entertaining those answers has never been interesting enough,
on top of being Sinful!

I have come to understand, or perhaps decide, on another meaning:
Namely, a writer first, and a parent second, means that the writer begat the
father. If he were a writer first, that idea of himself permeated every part of
his existence. In some ways, I did not have a Father. I had a Writer. I was
raised by the same mind that investigates the nature of existence, raised by
a magician. No pun intended—just a different set of rules. The sense of possibility,
the magical possibilities this engenders, partly sustain the loss of
missing the other man. There is a transmission of freedom in the understanding.
As the daughter of a writer first, my sense of self, when I meet it—
becomes fluid, a creative action. If growing up, I had clung to that carousel
horse and waited for the flash of deliverance offered by his attention, as an
artist I learn everyday how to enliven that plastic horse, take it where I want
to go. If I felt that I lived as a character who shared ranks with his other protagonists,
I am now part author. The question of authorship now becomes
a philosophical stance, a living, existential question: who is doing the writing?
Who is creating the life? While this may be the underlying question for
all of us, not everyone is encouraged to attempt an answer. In telling me that
he was a writer first, and a father second- in admitting a truth exquisitely
painful for a child to hear, he was also handing me the mantle of the artist’s
life. Did this mean I would become an artist first and a mother second? No.
But the idea of being an artist was built in. And as an artist, I would need to
use all those reflections and versions of myself-first, second, third person,
reflected in the crazy prism of our family.

===Part 2: The Prism, or, the Dream Life of My Siblings===

I would like to show you some diagrams featuring the nine children, six
wives, and Norman in various formations and relationships that seem to
resonate with some hefty cosmic references. They also help me locate myself
within the family.

Here is Dad and the children as the Sun and nine planets. John Buffalo,
the youngest, saw the most of Dad, and Sue, the oldest, probably saw him
the least, so it made sense to go in this order. My nine-year-old son,
Nicholas, pointed out that I made myself the Earth, and questioned my
integrity in making such a self-serving map, but I assured him it was a
lucky accident, and also, that if this were so I would be taking on a lot of
responsibility! (See '''Figure 1''')

placeholder for Figure 1 - Planetary Siblings

I make up for it in the next one: Here we have Dad and the nine children
as the ten layers of the earth, from core to exosphere. (See '''Figure 2''')

placeholder for Figure 2 - Earth Layers

The children as nine cosmic phases of CREATION, PRESERVATION,
AND DISSOLUTION in Yantra, or sacred mandala construction. (See '''Figure 3''')

placeholder for Figure 3 - Creation Stage Yantra

Here is the family arrayed like a Benzene Ring; which has the chemical
formula C6H6). If Dad had only had six children, we would have a perfect
match. Thankfully, it is not a perfect match. Benzene is notable for its sweet
smell. It is also terribly toxic. Benzene is used to make plastics, that most totalitarian
of materials! How would Dad feel to know that he almost constructed
such a metaphorical compound around himself? A Benzene ring is
formed of six carbons, which are usually bonded four ways. The one unbonded
electron from each carbon forms something called a conjugated
ring, meaning the electrons have free movement among all six carbons. A bit
like Mailer and his women. This also bears quite a resemblance to the Merry
Go Round described earlier. (See '''Figure 4''' and '''Figure 5''')

placeholder for Figure 4 - Benzene Ring

placeholder for Figure 5 - Dad & Siblings Benzene Ring

Next we have Norman as Pianist: the wives are the black keys and the
children, the white, and fit within an Octave until his marriage to Norris,
which starts a new Octave. (See '''Figure 6''' and '''Figure 7''')

placeholder for Figure 6 - Piano Keys

Here we have the Family as a cell membrane and here (See '''Figure 8'''), Mother (my
Mother), as catalytic converter (See '''Figure 9'''). She was extremely protective, and one could
say she reduced any toxic emissions coming my way with the force of her
love, both for me, and for Norman, even after they split. So we have the
father-centric model, the child-centric model, and the wife-centric model.

placeholder for Figure 7 - Notebook Diagrams of Sibling Models

placeholder for Figure 8 - Cell Structure Siblings

placeholder for Figure 9 - Mother as Cataclytic Converter

As a painter, I have spent some time investigating this family structure,
and mining it for clues about my creative habits. But, for a long time, I unwittingly
carried these structures, and projected them onto my paintings.

The numbers eight and nine come up a lot in my work. Without knowing
why, I once spent a year researching eight random topics to fuel a body of
work, in the hopes that my subconscious might forge some interesting paintings
from the overload. My references were far ranging: comic books, rebuses,
yantras, the genres of floating world and cliffhangers, and the palettes of Gauguin,
Goya, and Hiroshige. The title of the show was Floating World and, at
the time, the structure of the project made perfect sense to me, without once
consciously attaching it to my family. I just assumed that the conceptual overload
would induce the sensation of floating in the viewer. I was trying to locate
myself as a painter, and I thought that the number eight resonated with
the eight cardinal directions. It never occurred to me that I was making portraits
of my eight siblings. I see now that I was trying to accommodate eight
or nine possible viewpoints, and anything less felt wrong.

Here is a subsequent series of nine landscapes that I later understood as
portraits of the nine of us in our varied terrain and palettes. I like connecting
things that are not sure that they want to be connected: Arranged marriages
of colors, materials, and ideas. The conversations are wide ranging
and at times chaotic: palettes argue with one another; ideas overlap and interlope.
The revolving personalities in my family template have become standard
bearers for all my decisions about color, composition, and number. In
this way, landscapes become psychological terrain, siblings and stepmothers
become open fields and barren hillsides, and our family tree emerges as a
guiding spirit in my creative processes. (See '''Figure 10''' and '''Figure 11''')

placeholder for Figure 10 - Scissors Language 2

placeholder for Figure 11 - The Dream Life of My Siblings

I will close with the piece I read at Carnegie Hall at Dad’s memorial.
(show of hands: who heard it there?) I think it offers what the rest of the
speech may have missed: My Father. We could say, this was one time I met
him. It is called, ''Fellow Geniuses:''

I am going to share with you a seminal work of non-fiction by my father:
until now a hidden literary gem, and one that helped me get started as an
artist. I was fifteen and was spending the summer in Provincetown with Dad,
Norris, and my eight siblings. Privacy was scarce but, somehow, a two-week
stretch emerged in which I had my own room.

As an only child living with my mother the rest of the year, I was well
equipped psychologically to spread out. I decided that I would tackle a sculpture
that I had been thinking about for some time. As any serious contemplative
will do, I began by collecting large pieces of driftwood. Buckets of
sand and seaweed piled up on the floor, which also happened to be covered
in wall to wall carpeting that my stepmother had chosen. I think, at one
point in a moment of annoyance with her, and imagining the deepening
bond with my father over our shared aversion to carpeted floors, I may have
dumped some of the sand onto the wall to wall and formed a Carl Andrelike
floor piece.

From the Army Navy store in town I collected buckets full of brass buttons,
and rusted machine gun bullets, which I thought were strangely beautiful,
and they looked to me like beads for a necklace. I think, subconsciously,
I was recreating scenes from ''The Naked and the Dead'', even though I had not
read it.

Meanwhile, deep in artistic fervor, clothes and wet bathing suits and towels
were landing in various locations around the room. I will say, and my
husband can attest, that our house today does perhaps bear a resemblance
at times to events described here.
[[File:Mr13-mai-12.jpg|thumb|'''Figure 12''': Young Maggie’s Note from Dad]]
At fifteen, I was still too shy to speak easily with my father. Days might
pass without conversing, but we would always exchange meaningful looks.
We were both absorbed in our work and I felt that we shared the unspoken
understanding of artists. I was sure, too, that he recognized in me a fellow genius.
So I was not surprised on the day when, returning to my room, I found
a note from Dad, placed at the entrance, so as not to disturb me. “He must
be really impressed to put it in writing” I thought, and eagerly read his assessment
of my work. (See '''Figure 12''')

When I read this note at the Carnegie Hall tribute, I wasn’t sure about
saying “Asshole” out loud, and perhaps I did not want to make him look bad
during his Memorial, so I substituted the word, “Twit.” But here it is in its
original wording.

My father was always superstitious about giving anyone compliments.
And I knew this—but after reading his note I was devastated. Only partially
devastated, though. After all, Norman did teach the art of parsing emotional
states into percentages. Perhaps I was 80% devastated. The other 20% was
hopeful. The other 20% realized, with something like happiness, that my
habits mattered to my father. And on some level, he had stopped being Norman
Mailer and become, simply, my father. I cleaned up my room.

Dad had a great generosity whereby, if he felt that you were serious or excited
about something, he would forget his anger, and give you his full attention. He found me a little later and said, “Listen, I didn’t realize you were up to something in there. I took another look, and I’m pleased. I think you
may be an artist. Finish the sculpture, I’d like to live with it a while. Maybe
we’ll put it in the Living Room.”

To which I now say: Thanks, Dad.

I miss you.

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Prism Break }}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Prism Break

2021-02-17T14:56:41Z

BMeister: added the body of the article, as well as the work cited

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR13}}
{{Byline|last=Mailer|first=Maggie|note=This Keynote Address was delivered to the annual meeting of the Norman Mailer Society on Saturday, October 19, 2019 at Wilkes University.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13mai}}

{{dc|dc=H|ello, Mailer Scholars!}}

In good Mailer fashion, I will admit that I have in the past harbored a certain, mild antipathy towards most of you. I thought I would fess up right away about my discomfort and my animosity, and hope that my Mailerean honesty might help to forge a kind of friendship between us.

Thank you for inviting me to be here and part of me feels amazed that
you trust me enough to be the Keynote Speaker. I wasn’t clear on the exact
meaning of Keynote, so I looked it up on Google, a habit Norman would
definitely abhor. Having read Merriam Webster’s list of synonyms, I do not
feel that I qualify as any of the following: bottom line, bull’s-eye, centerpiece,
core, crux, essence, gist, heart, kernel, meat, meat and potatoes, net, nub,
nubbin, pith, pivot, point, root, sum. I was surprised by “meat and potatoes,”
although of all those items, it resonates first, perhaps because Dad loved potroast
and once tried to teach me how to make it. But I’m not going to tell that
story. I’m keeping most of the “Norman As Family Man” stories to myself,
for reasons which will unfold. And the talk may—or may not—feel like meat
and potatoes, may or may not feel like the gist, heart, or essence. But I will
do my best, and can probably manage a nub, nubbin, or pith.

This talk is dedicated to my Siblings. Here is a brief outline, two warnings,
and a confession.

I will deliver the talk in two parts. The first part was difficult to write,
personally revealing, and possibly solipsistic. The second part is all about
me, so I can promise you a modicum of fun. I considered asking you to vote
on which one to present. But working on this project has extracted the egomaniac in me, so I made the decision to give you both talks. Hopefully your attention won’t be commandeered by the promise of fun in part 2, which, by
the way, is also all about me.

'''PART 1. “THIRD PERSON FATHER”'''

It has been said that in families of two or more children, each child experiences
a different version of the same parent. If that is true, in our case, there
were at least nine Normans, in addition to all the experimental versions, and
accents that he tested in public.

I am going to talk today about the different ways in which I have met my
father, and the different stations in my own life, where these meetings took
place: child, teenager, adult. I have met my father in dreams, and of course,
in his writing. I have met Norman Mailer, the character, trying out for the
role of Dad. I met Dad in the days before death, in the hospital, when he lost
the ability to speak or properly hold a pen, but could still flirt heavily with
the nursing staff, and communicate to us through a look. And I met him
just after death, when his presence seemed to permeate everything. I had the
sense that he had finally gained access to the whole cosmos. It couldn’t be an
accident that on the morning after he died I saw his last book in the window
of a nearby bookstore, just released to the public: ''Norman Mailer, On God''.
His fame had always seemed to confer a kind of immortality, but this was the
real thing. The simultaneity of his presence, in those three days after his
death, was palpable. It felt like The Universe’s Bookshelf now contained only
Norman Mailer books—only all the pages had traded places. He was everywhere
in an instant, there was no story, no continuity, only essence.

I also met my father long after his death: some two years ago, in the Jungle
in Peru, while drinking the supernatural concoction Ayahuasca, and
crossing the border between this world and the afterlife. I had heard that
imbibing this purgative tea, known as the “Vine of the Dead,” was a route to
the other side, and I might meet my father there. I was looking for my father,
but I met Norman Mailer. He showed up reluctantly, after several days, six
cups of the tea, and a brief interlude with Norris, who showed up ahead of
him, so that we could hash out a few things. When Dad appeared, he did
not appear: I heard his voice, saying, “Listen Darlin, I know you’ve come a
long way to talk, and you’ll hear my voice, but you won’t be able to see me.
I’m working on a film, and it’s difficult to get away. But we can talk.” I said,
“I came all the way to Peru to track you down in the afterlife, and you better
fucking show up.” Some smoke descended, and there he was: But not my
Dad. It was Mailer in 1969, with his turbulent curls, the man a couple of
years before my birth in ’71. I was looking for Dad, and I got Norman Mailer,
running for Mayor: looking, oddly enough, exactly like the image of him
printed on the front of this year’s Mailer conference program.

He said to me: “you had a choice: you could have been one of my women,
or come in as my daughter.” I said, “why would I want to be one of your
women? It was your Genius I was interested in. I was hoping to inherit some
of that.” He then gave me a talk about Work, with a capital W, the Work that
you meet when taking on a creative life. He said: “Listen, Darlin. You’ve been
approaching Work as if I’m the gate you need to pass through first, on the way
to Work. That’s your problem. Work is its own gate, you need to find your
own way through. You can’t get to Work through me. I am not the Way.”

I do not know if that was a real conversation with his soul, or an animated
character scripted by my subconscious. But I am not sure there’s a difference.
The Novel as History, and History as a Novel, is something I have lived.
I was quite resistant to giving this talk today and my main hesitation is
that it occupies the spooky—yes, spooky—territory of rewriting history.
There is a phenomenon that I have repeatedly encountered when reading
most biographies, essays, or articles about my father, in which I begin to believe
I am wrong about the man I knew. My version of him is tenuous, easily
displaced. History may have known him better. It has been hard for me
to hold both versions at the same time.

While putting this talk together I was repeatedly interrupted, and sometimes
held hostage, by a six-year-old girl who kept showing up and demanding
certain things. She said that she would not allow me to write the
talk until I acknowledged her. She specifically wanted me to tell the story of
my Dad’s leaving, at Christmas time, in 1975. I thought that she was a pain
in the ass, and kept telling her to leave me alone. I did not think that the
Mailer Conference would have much interest in this particular six-year-old.
What did she know about Norman Mailer? She was tedious, not intellectual
in the least, and spoiled. At a certain point, her presence became so insistent
that she began to invade my personality. I started throwing tantrums, refusing
to take care of business, and so on— and this was just last week. Nothing
could stand up to this girl. So I finally caved, and—Here I am—
acknowledging her.

I could say that at age six, I met up with my father’s absence. I have a cinematic
memory of the moment and it is a bit melodramatic.

I remember one night, looking out the window facing the driveway of our
enormous house at the top of Yale Hill in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. I was
talking to the darkness on the other side of the glass, the black darkness that
you get in the Berkshires, in winter, and I was saying, “I miss him.” My mother
Carol and I were still living in the house, which she describes to this day, in
mantra-like fashion, as “the house with 28 rooms.” Dad had left earlier that
week. The house with 28 rooms had never seemed too large to me, and there
had always been a stream of guests that included friends, writers, musicians,
actors, siblings. When he left and took everyone with him, the house felt cavernous.
That night, when I spoke out loud the words, “I miss him,” I did not
understand what I was saying. The words were someone else’s words, and I
had probably heard my mother saying them as well. The sensation of newness
in that sentence offered a confusing, and sharply held experience. Somehow
I viscerally decided that to know my father was to miss him. And, more
to the point, that to Miss him was to Know him. I was staking my claim upon
him, even if all I could get my hands on was his absence. Missing him was an
action that I could take, it was a verb: “I miss him,” but a verb that also revealed
a vacuum and vulnerability that did not go with my six-year-old’s idea
of action. I did not know what a stative verb was. How confusing. To know
you is to miss you, and to miss you is to know you. I had not been exposed
to country music much—my mother Carol was a Jazz vocalist—but I seemed
to know that I could milk this feeling like a line from a country song. And,
small irony, Dad was leaving my mother for Norris, who was from Arkansas
and loved country music. Maybe he had been playing country music for us
all prior to his departure. I do know that he had been passing around photos
of Norris to show the kids their new Stepmother, and according to my mother
he was excited, like a little kid. But back to this other little kid. She was beginning
to understand that any bond with her father would now be bracketed—
would have to compete—with a distant network that included other
people, strangers, the whole world it seemed, but did not necessarily include
his children. He once said to me, “I am a writer first, and your father second,
and I don’t have a choice about this.”

In his early years of fame, my father told me that he regarded the character
Norman Mailer as the outer shell of a Sarcophagus, which he occupied during
the day and at night he would venture out and scribble notes and revisions on
the outside. And even though I read this description in one of his books years
after its telling, hearing it directly from him gave me a great deal of emotional
ballast. He was telling me because he could relate to my shyness, which was the
sarcophagus that I lived inside, and the telling felt full of love and attention.
Later on, when I found that he had already written the idea and released it to
the world, I could have felt duped, but I did not. The intensity of his attention
was worth as much as what he said. But the place where I often did feel duped
was in reading about him. Most anything written about my father had the effect
of reducing him to the man described on the Sarcophagus, and left me
with the sense that the other guy did not exist. In the same way that he constantly
rewrote and adjusted his public image, texts about him seemed to
rewrite my memory, and my sense of him would change with each reading.

For a long time, I did not want to come to the Mailer conferences. The
ballast I was always seeking in our relationship could be further displaced by
any version of Norman I might establish hearing— or especially speaking—
about him. In the effort to connect with an audience who knew externally
more about him than I did, I could lose track of my dad completely.

But now I am in it: I have agreed to take on the role of the one telling, adjusting,
and revising the image. And perhaps I can say nothing. While
preparing this talk, I had the fantasy of standing here on stage without uttering
a single word, as if you, the audience, would be able to read me. After
all, I am his flesh and blood. A living text. I could stand here as the Speechless
Aftermath, to quote a friend, and accept your readerly attention so that,
given the collective knowledge about Norman Mailer in this room, we might
construct together a new idea of him without my ever speaking. This is the
part of me that feels like the truth, and throughout this talk there is present
a version of this self.

If I am not honest, this podium becomes an impossible insertion point,
like an Escher drawing, where I transform in real time into a character in
Dad’s continuing novel, a character who will surprise the writer in the act of
writing, who has things to say the writer cannot know until it is written. If
my writing is off, I will not believe in the character, or in this moment of
self invention. This impossible insertion point is half-first person, half-third
person. Anything else would be a lie. Perhaps that is how Norman understood
himself as a father—that his children were partly his creations, but
that he had limited say in the matter. I once got angry at him for remarking
that when you have kids, you have no idea who you’re going to get—as if we
were volumes from the Book-of-the-Month-Club. I wanted him to write
that text himself. And I wanted it to be the Great American Novel. I still believed
he could transmit his brilliance to me, with his attention, as he was
able to do on the page.

Like most of my siblings, I did not see a lot of my dad growing up, so I
tended to feel that the way I knew him was always warring with the third person
version he wrote about. If Mailer’s third person self was to become an habitual
feature in his writing—Mailer’s Mailer—it was also an habitual feature
in his parenting. My father, when at home, was often still playing the character
Norman Mailer with us. It seemed that he maintained an eye on himself
as NM while attempting to inhabit the other character, called Dad. Perhaps the
sarcophagus was a permanent fixture. It allowed him to speak to us, his children,
with a forthrightness that was good for Norman the writer, but perhaps
not so good for the kids. I thought that he regarded us with a cooler eye than
most parents, and was comfortable dispensing comments about our appearance
and aptitudes that could easily be taken for insults, but given as they were
with a writerly eye, could also be tossed off as attempts at sentences that did
not quite work. He might announce to me and my sisters, something like:
“Maggie always had a purchase on Beauty, but now she really owns it.” Such
insults/compliments were a matter of course for him. He did not believe in
compliments. He wanted us to be on our toes and he was always looking for
a sparring partner. I was probably the world’s worst sparring partner. I would
meet his glancing barbs, his attempts to wake me out of a dreamy inwardness,
with greater shyness. I was almost mute around him. I loved my father fiercely,
perhaps in the way that only a daughter can love her father, but around him I
was so terrified of getting hurt that I could not think.

He once told me that most of what he said to me should not be taken seriously.
I heard this around college-age and I felt shocked at the revelation that
every word he uttered TO ME, was not meant for consumption, unlike his
writing. I was confused, as was he, between the writer and the Father. It is a
confusion that I have continually grappled with in a kind of reflexive inner
merry-go-round, wherein I seek the private father and hope to find him in
the public one. I want the first-person, and I want to chase the third-person.

I see myself planted upon a carousel creature, spinning round a central axis
with vertical mirrored sections that catch your reflection as you pass by. The
outer rings of the carousel are also adorned with small mirrors, as well as the
ceiling, each placed at a different angle and offering multiple views of one’s
position astride an absurdly painted animal. The central axis may or may not be
my father, and the outer spokes my siblings, but the mirrored fragments feel
like a third person version of me, the only one possible in a family of nine children
and six stepmothers. At times it was difficult if not impossible to hold
onto a sense of self amidst the family, but I became an expert at surveying the
arena and observing my role in it, even if the only reflective surfaces appeared
willy nilly, at oddly punctuating moments, in my field of vision.

From our teenage years until adulthood, Dad used to take each of his kids
out individually for dinner, with the idea that because he knew we were not
getting enough of him during the year, he would at least try to deliver an intense
injection of one-on-one time with him. During these dinners, he
would often lay down incisive commentary on my being, and I would listen
like a sponge to everything that he had to say, and then spend the next several
months trying to digest it. “Oh, I’m like this. Maggie calls a spade a
spade. Maggie’s silence projects her intelligence. Maggie has the ambition of
a Napoleon, but the worldliness of a house-wife.” These dinners, which happened
one or two times a year, were like those oddly placed carousel mirrors,
flashing back a quick reflection. In his absence I would outgrow the image
that he had offered, but try to hold on to it anyway, because it was delineated
with such power—and it was all that I had of him. Or, let me switch
metaphors: our dinners felt like short stories, in which the character Maggie
came into being for a brief time. For me there was a quasi-religious quality
to them, as if I were being invented anew. In Dad’s absence his ideas about
me became relics and, to keep them alive, I traded my developing idea of
myself for his, thereby casting myself into the third person. I thought on
some level I could meet him, if not in daily life, then on the page, his page,
in some nether region where we were both enigmas. I wanted this maneuver
to be liberating for me, as I knew that it was for Mailer the writer. Handing
over my first-personhood was, of course, a form of captivity. It was not
a creative act. If I really wanted to meet him, I would have to join in the creative
process, or else live in a kind of perpetual denial, a prison without walls.
“You can’t cheat life,” he would say.

So I am meeting him right now, at the Norman Mailer Conference.
Maybe now he is equally present—and absent—for all of us. Maybe we all
Miss him, and try to Know him, or bring him to life, with our missing. He
would find this notion sentimental. But we need him. We need to know what
he would say about Trump. He might write an imaginary conversation, in
which the character Mailer says to the character DT, “Pal, we have this in
common: I could spit in the mythological eye of the Media, and they would
still love me.” DT would respond, “That’s terrific, you understand me. I could
stand in the middle of 5th avenue and shoot someone and I wouldn’t lose
any voters.” Perhaps right now Mailer’s words and energy would restore
some balance in the great match between God and The Devil. Perhaps he
could rev up the artist in the collective us.

I think that something about being an artist is to admit that liberation is
found within the prison. For me, liberation has come in part from trying to
answer the question: What did he mean when he said he was a writer first,
and a parent second? For much of my life I have entertained obvious, boring
answers: He knew he was not able to give us the right kind of attention.
Children were not his priority. He did once say he was not really interested
in his kids until he could have a decent conversation with them. But his form
of apology was to tell the truth. And one of the most helpful and corrective
comments he ever passed on was the notion that ''Feeling Sorry for Oneself is
a Great Sin''. So entertaining those answers has never been interesting enough,
on top of being Sinful!

I have come to understand, or perhaps decide, on another meaning:
Namely, a writer first, and a parent second, means that the writer begat the
father. If he were a writer first, that idea of himself permeated every part of
his existence. In some ways, I did not have a Father. I had a Writer. I was
raised by the same mind that investigates the nature of existence, raised by
a magician. No pun intended—just a different set of rules. The sense of possibility,
the magical possibilities this engenders, partly sustain the loss of
missing the other man. There is a transmission of freedom in the understanding.
As the daughter of a writer first, my sense of self, when I meet it—
becomes fluid, a creative action. If growing up, I had clung to that carousel
horse and waited for the flash of deliverance offered by his attention, as an
artist I learn everyday how to enliven that plastic horse, take it where I want
to go. If I felt that I lived as a character who shared ranks with his other protagonists,
I am now part author. The question of authorship now becomes
a philosophical stance, a living, existential question: who is doing the writing?
Who is creating the life? While this may be the underlying question for
all of us, not everyone is encouraged to attempt an answer. In telling me that
he was a writer first, and a father second- in admitting a truth exquisitely
painful for a child to hear, he was also handing me the mantle of the artist’s
life. Did this mean I would become an artist first and a mother second? No.
But the idea of being an artist was built in. And as an artist, I would need to
use all those reflections and versions of myself-first, second, third person,
reflected in the crazy prism of our family.

'''PART 2: THE PRISM, OR, THE DREAM LIFE OF MY SIBLINGS'''

I would like to show you some diagrams featuring the nine children, six
wives, and Norman in various formations and relationships that seem to
resonate with some hefty cosmic references. They also help me locate myself
within the family.

Here is Dad and the children as the Sun and nine planets. John Buffalo,
the youngest, saw the most of Dad, and Sue, the oldest, probably saw him
the least, so it made sense to go in this order. My nine-year-old son,
Nicholas, pointed out that I made myself the Earth, and questioned my
integrity in making such a self-serving map, but I assured him it was a
lucky accident, and also, that if this were so I would be taking on a lot of
responsibility!

placeholder for Figure 1 - Planetary Siblings

I make up for it in the next one: Here we have Dad and the nine children
as the ten layers of the earth, from core to exosphere.

placeholder for Figure 2 - Earth Layers

The children as nine cosmic phases of CREATION, PRESERVATION,
AND DISSOLUTION in Yantra, or sacred mandala construction.

placeholder for Figure 3 - Creation Stage Yantra

Here is the family arrayed like a Benzene Ring; which has the chemical
formula C6H6. If Dad had only had six children, we would have a perfect
match. Thankfully, it is not a perfect match. Benzene is notable for its sweet
smell. It is also terribly toxic. Benzene is used to make plastics, that most totalitarian
of materials! How would Dad feel to know that he almost constructed
such a metaphorical compound around himself? A Benzene ring is
formed of six carbons, which are usually bonded four ways. The one unbonded
electron from each carbon forms something called a conjugated
ring, meaning the electrons have free movement among all six carbons. A bit
like Mailer and his women. This also bears quite a resemblance to the Merry
Go Round described earlier.

placeholder for Figure 4 - Benzene Ring

placeholder for Figure 5 - Dad & Siblings Benzene Ring

Next we have Norman as Pianist: the wives are the black keys and the
children, the white, and fit within an Octave until his marriage to Norris,
which starts a new Octave.

placeholder for Figure 6 - Piano Keys

Here we have the Family as a cell membrane and here, Mother (my
Mother), as catalytic converter. She was extremely protective, and one could
say she reduced any toxic emissions coming my way with the force of her
love, both for me, and for Norman, even after they split. So we have the
father-centric model, the child-centric model, and the wife-centric model.

placeholder for Figure 7 - Notebook Diagrams of Sibling Models

placeholder for Figure 8 - Cell Structure Siblings

placeholder for Figure 9 - Mother as Cataclytic Converter

As a painter, I have spent some time investigating this family structure,
and mining it for clues about my creative habits. But, for a long time, I unwittingly
carried these structures, and projected them onto my paintings.

The numbers eight and nine come up a lot in my work. Without knowing
why, I once spent a year researching eight random topics to fuel a body of
work, in the hopes that my subconscious might forge some interesting paintings
from the overload. My references were far ranging: comic books, rebuses,
yantras, the genres of floating world and cliffhangers, and the palettes of Gauguin,
Goya, and Hiroshige. The title of the show was Floating World and, at
the time, the structure of the project made perfect sense to me, without once
consciously attaching it to my family. I just assumed that the conceptual overload
would induce the sensation of floating in the viewer. I was trying to locate
myself as a painter, and I thought that the number eight resonated with
the eight cardinal directions. It never occurred to me that I was making portraits
of my eight siblings. I see now that I was trying to accommodate eight
or nine possible viewpoints, and anything less felt wrong.

Here is a subsequent series of nine landscapes that I later understood as
portraits of the nine of us in our varied terrain and palettes. I like connecting
things that are not sure that they want to be connected: Arranged marriages
of colors, materials, and ideas. The conversations are wide ranging
and at times chaotic: palettes argue with one another; ideas overlap and interlope.
The revolving personalities in my family template have become standard
bearers for all my decisions about color, composition, and number. In
this way, landscapes become psychological terrain, siblings and stepmothers
become open fields and barren hillsides, and our family tree emerges as a
guiding spirit in my creative processes.

placeholder for Figure 10 - Scissors Language 2

placeholder for Figure 11 - The Dream Life of My Siblings

I will close with the piece I read at Carnegie Hall at Dad’s memorial.
(show of hands: who heard it there?) I think it offers what the rest of the
speech may have missed: My Father. We could say, this was one time I met
him. It is called, ''Fellow Geniuses:''

I am going to share with you a seminal work of non-fiction by my father:
until now a hidden literary gem, and one that helped me get started as an
artist. I was fifteen and was spending the summer in Provincetown with Dad,
Norris, and my eight siblings. Privacy was scarce but, somehow, a two-week
stretch emerged in which I had my own room.

As an only child living with my mother the rest of the year, I was well
equipped psychologically to spread out. I decided that I would tackle a sculpture
that I had been thinking about for some time. As any serious contemplative
will do, I began by collecting large pieces of driftwood. Buckets of
sand and seaweed piled up on the floor, which also happened to be covered
in wall to wall carpeting that my stepmother had chosen. I think, at one
point in a moment of annoyance with her, and imagining the deepening
bond with my father over our shared aversion to carpeted floors, I may have
dumped some of the sand onto the wall to wall and formed a Carl Andrelike
floor piece.

From the Army Navy store in town I collected buckets full of brass buttons,
and rusted machine gun bullets, which I thought were strangely beautiful,
and they looked to me like beads for a necklace. I think, subconsciously,
I was recreating scenes from ''The Naked and the Dead'', even though I had not
read it.

Meanwhile, deep in artistic fervor, clothes and wet bathing suits and towels
were landing in various locations around the room. I will say, and my
husband can attest, that our house today does perhaps bear a resemblance
at times to events described here.

At fifteen, I was still too shy to speak easily with my father. Days might
pass without conversing, but we would always exchange meaningful looks.
We were both absorbed in our work and I felt that we shared the unspoken
understanding of artists. I was sure, too, that he recognized in me a fellow genius.
So I was not surprised on the day when, returning to my room, I found
a note from Dad, placed at the entrance, so as not to disturb me. “He must
be really impressed to put it in writing” I thought, and eagerly read his assessment
of my work. (See Figure 12)

When I read this note at the Carnegie Hall tribute, I wasn’t sure about
saying “Asshole” out loud, and perhaps I did not want to make him look bad
during his Memorial, so I substituted the word, “Twit.” But here it is in its
original wording.

My father was always superstitious about giving anyone compliments.
And I knew this—but after reading his note I was devastated. Only partially
devastated, though. After all, Norman did teach the art of parsing emotional
states into percentages. Perhaps I was 80% devastated. The other 20% was
hopeful. The other 20% realized, with something like happiness, that my
habits mattered to my father. And on some level, he had stopped being Norman
Mailer and become, simply, my father. I cleaned up my room.

Dad had a great generosity whereby, if he felt that you were serious or excited
about something, he would forget his anger, and give you his full at-

placeholder for Figure 12 - Young Maggie's Note from Dad

tention. He found me a little later and said, “Listen, I didn’t realize you were
up to something in there. I took another look, and I’m pleased. I think you
may be an artist. Finish the sculpture, I’d like to live with it a while. Maybe
we’ll put it in the Living Room.”

To which I now say: Thanks, Dad.

I miss you.

===Work Cited===
{{Refbegin}}
*{{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Maggie |title=Prism Break |journal=The Mailer Review
|volume=13 |issue=No. 1|date=2019 |pages=65-84 |access-date=2021 |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Prism Break }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Prism Break

2021-02-04T04:54:35Z

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''This Keynote Address was delivered to the annual meeting of the Norman Mailer Society on Saturday, October 19, 2019 at Wilkes University''

HELLO, MAILER SCHOLARS!

In good Mailer fashion, I will admit that I have in the past harbored a
certain, mild antipathy towards most of you. I thought I would fess up right
away about my discomfort and my animosity, and hope that my Mailerean
honesty might help to forge a kind of friendship between us.

Thank you for inviting me to be here and part of me feels amazed that
you trust me enough to be the Keynote Speaker. I wasn’t clear on the exact
meaning of Keynote, so I looked it up on Google, a habit Norman would
definitely abhor. Having read Merriam Webster’s list of synonyms, I do not
feel that I qualify as any of the following: bottom line, bull’s-eye, centerpiece,
core, crux, essence, gist, heart, kernel, meat, meat and potatoes, net, nub,
nubbin, pith, pivot, point, root, sum. I was surprised by “meat and potatoes,”
although of all those items, it resonates first, perhaps because Dad loved potroast
and once tried to teach me how to make it. But I’m not going to tell that
story. I’m keeping most of the “Norman As Family Man” stories to myself,
for reasons which will unfold. And the talk may—or may not—feel like meat
and potatoes, may or may not feel like the gist, heart, or essence. But I will
do my best, and can probably manage a nub, nubbin, or pith.

This talk is dedicated to my Siblings. Here is a brief outline, two warnings,
and a confession.

I will deliver the talk in two parts. The first part was difficult to write,
personally revealing, and possibly solipsistic. The second part is all about
me, so I can promise you a modicum of fun. I considered asking you to vote
on which one to present. But working on this project has extracted the egomaniac in me, so I made the decision to give you both talks. Hopefully your attention won’t be commandeered by the promise of fun in part 2, which, by
the way, is also all about me.

'''PART 1. “THIRD PERSON FATHER”'''

It has been said that in families of two or more children, each child experiences
a different version of the same parent. If that is true, in our case, there
were at least nine Normans, in addition to all the experimental versions, and
accents that he tested in public.

I am going to talk today about the different ways in which I have met my
father, and the different stations in my own life, where these meetings took
place: child, teenager, adult. I have met my father in dreams, and of course,
in his writing. I have met Norman Mailer, the character, trying out for the
role of Dad. I met Dad in the days before death, in the hospital, when he lost
the ability to speak or properly hold a pen, but could still flirt heavily with
the nursing staff, and communicate to us through a look. And I met him
just after death, when his presence seemed to permeate everything. I had the
sense that he had finally gained access to the whole cosmos. It couldn’t be an
accident that on the morning after he died I saw his last book in the window
of a nearby bookstore, just released to the public: ''Norman Mailer, On God''.
His fame had always seemed to confer a kind of immortality, but this was the
real thing. The simultaneity of his presence, in those three days after his
death, was palpable. It felt like The Universe’s Bookshelf now contained only
Norman Mailer books—only all the pages had traded places. He was everywhere
in an instant, there was no story, no continuity, only essence.

I also met my father long after his death: some two years ago, in the Jungle
in Peru, while drinking the supernatural concoction Ayahuasca, and
crossing the border between this world and the afterlife. I had heard that
imbibing this purgative tea, known as the “Vine of the Dead,” was a route to
the other side, and I might meet my father there. I was looking for my father,
but I met Norman Mailer. He showed up reluctantly, after several days, six
cups of the tea, and a brief interlude with Norris, who showed up ahead of
him, so that we could hash out a few things. When Dad appeared, he did
not appear: I heard his voice, saying, “Listen Darlin, I know you’ve come a
long way to talk, and you’ll hear my voice, but you won’t be able to see me.
I’m working on a film, and it’s difficult to get away. But we can talk.” I said,
“I came all the way to Peru to track you down in the afterlife, and you better
fucking show up.” Some smoke descended, and there he was: But not my
Dad. It was Mailer in 1969, with his turbulent curls, the man a couple of
years before my birth in ’71. I was looking for Dad, and I got Norman Mailer,
running for Mayor: looking, oddly enough, exactly like the image of him
printed on the front of this year’s Mailer conference program.

He said to me: “you had a choice: you could have been one of my women,
or come in as my daughter.” I said, “why would I want to be one of your
women? It was your Genius I was interested in. I was hoping to inherit some
of that.” He then gave me a talk about Work, with a capital W, the Work that
you meet when taking on a creative life. He said: “Listen, Darlin. You’ve been
approaching Work as if I’m the gate you need to pass through first, on the way
to Work. That’s your problem. Work is its own gate, you need to find your
own way through. You can’t get to Work through me. I am not the Way.”

I do not know if that was a real conversation with his soul, or an animated
character scripted by my subconscious. But I am not sure there’s a difference.
The Novel as History, and History as a Novel, is something I have lived.
I was quite resistant to giving this talk today and my main hesitation is
that it occupies the spooky—yes, spooky—territory of rewriting history.
There is a phenomenon that I have repeatedly encountered when reading
most biographies, essays, or articles about my father, in which I begin to believe
I am wrong about the man I knew. My version of him is tenuous, easily
displaced. History may have known him better. It has been hard for me
to hold both versions at the same time.

While putting this talk together I was repeatedly interrupted, and sometimes
held hostage, by a six-year-old girl who kept showing up and demanding
certain things. She said that she would not allow me to write the
talk until I acknowledged her. She specifically wanted me to tell the story of
my Dad’s leaving, at Christmas time, in 1975. I thought that she was a pain
in the ass, and kept telling her to leave me alone. I did not think that the
Mailer Conference would have much interest in this particular six-year-old.
What did she know about Norman Mailer? She was tedious, not intellectual
in the least, and spoiled. At a certain point, her presence became so insistent
that she began to invade my personality. I started throwing tantrums, refusing
to take care of business, and so on— and this was just last week. Nothing
could stand up to this girl. So I finally caved, and—Here I am—
acknowledging her.

I could say that at age six, I met up with my father’s absence. I have a cinematic
memory of the moment and it is a bit melodramatic.

I remember one night, looking out the window facing the driveway of our
enormous house at the top of Yale Hill in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. I was
talking to the darkness on the other side of the glass, the black darkness that
you get in the Berkshires, in winter, and I was saying, “I miss him.” My mother
Carol and I were still living in the house, which she describes to this day, in
mantra-like fashion, as “the house with 28 rooms.” Dad had left earlier that
week. The house with 28 rooms had never seemed too large to me, and there
had always been a stream of guests that included friends, writers, musicians,
actors, siblings. When he left and took everyone with him, the house felt cavernous.
That night, when I spoke out loud the words, “I miss him,” I did not
understand what I was saying. The words were someone else’s words, and I
had probably heard my mother saying them as well. The sensation of newness
in that sentence offered a confusing, and sharply held experience. Somehow
I viscerally decided that to know my father was to miss him. And, more
to the point, that to Miss him was to Know him. I was staking my claim upon
him, even if all I could get my hands on was his absence. Missing him was an
action that I could take, it was a verb: “I miss him,” but a verb that also revealed
a vacuum and vulnerability that did not go with my six-year-old’s idea
of action. I did not know what a stative verb was. How confusing. To know
you is to miss you, and to miss you is to know you. I had not been exposed
to country music much—my mother Carol was a Jazz vocalist—but I seemed
to know that I could milk this feeling like a line from a country song. And,
small irony, Dad was leaving my mother for Norris, who was from Arkansas
and loved country music. Maybe he had been playing country music for us
all prior to his departure. I do know that he had been passing around photos
of Norris to show the kids their new Stepmother, and according to my mother
he was excited, like a little kid. But back to this other little kid. She was beginning
to understand that any bond with her father would now be bracketed—
would have to compete—with a distant network that included other
people, strangers, the whole world it seemed, but did not necessarily include
his children. He once said to me, “I am a writer first, and your father second,
and I don’t have a choice about this.”

In his early years of fame, my father told me that he regarded the character
Norman Mailer as the outer shell of a Sarcophagus, which he occupied during
the day and at night he would venture out and scribble notes and revisions on
the outside. And even though I read this description in one of his books years
after its telling, hearing it directly from him gave me a great deal of emotional
ballast. He was telling me because he could relate to my shyness, which was the
sarcophagus that I lived inside, and the telling felt full of love and attention.
Later on, when I found that he had already written the idea and released it to
the world, I could have felt duped, but I did not. The intensity of his attention
was worth as much as what he said. But the place where I often did feel duped
was in reading about him. Most anything written about my father had the effect
of reducing him to the man described on the Sarcophagus, and left me
with the sense that the other guy did not exist. In the same way that he constantly
rewrote and adjusted his public image, texts about him seemed to
rewrite my memory, and my sense of him would change with each reading.

For a long time, I did not want to come to the Mailer conferences. The
ballast I was always seeking in our relationship could be further displaced by
any version of Norman I might establish hearing— or especially speaking—
about him. In the effort to connect with an audience who knew externally
more about him than I did, I could lose track of my dad completely.

But now I am in it: I have agreed to take on the role of the one telling, adjusting,
and revising the image. And perhaps I can say nothing. While
preparing this talk, I had the fantasy of standing here on stage without uttering
a single word, as if you, the audience, would be able to read me. After
all, I am his flesh and blood. A living text. I could stand here as the Speechless
Aftermath, to quote a friend, and accept your readerly attention so that,
given the collective knowledge about Norman Mailer in this room, we might
construct together a new idea of him without my ever speaking. This is the
part of me that feels like the truth, and throughout this talk there is present
a version of this self.

If I am not honest, this podium becomes an impossible insertion point,
like an Escher drawing, where I transform in real time into a character in
Dad’s continuing novel, a character who will surprise the writer in the act of
writing, who has things to say the writer cannot know until it is written. If
my writing is off, I will not believe in the character, or in this moment of
self invention. This impossible insertion point is half-first person, half-third
person. Anything else would be a lie. Perhaps that is how Norman understood
himself as a father—that his children were partly his creations, but
that he had limited say in the matter. I once got angry at him for remarking
that when you have kids, you have no idea who you’re going to get—as if we
were volumes from the Book-of-the-Month-Club. I wanted him to write
that text himself. And I wanted it to be the Great American Novel. I still believed
he could transmit his brilliance to me, with his attention, as he was
able to do on the page.

Like most of my siblings, I did not see a lot of my dad growing up, so I
tended to feel that the way I knew him was always warring with the third person
version he wrote about. If Mailer’s third person self was to become an habitual
feature in his writing—Mailer’s Mailer—it was also an habitual feature
in his parenting. My father, when at home, was often still playing the character
Norman Mailer with us. It seemed that he maintained an eye on himself
as NM while attempting to inhabit the other character, called Dad. Perhaps the
sarcophagus was a permanent fixture. It allowed him to speak to us, his children,
with a forthrightness that was good for Norman the writer, but perhaps
not so good for the kids. I thought that he regarded us with a cooler eye than
most parents, and was comfortable dispensing comments about our appearance
and aptitudes that could easily be taken for insults, but given as they were
with a writerly eye, could also be tossed off as attempts at sentences that did
not quite work. He might announce to me and my sisters, something like:
“Maggie always had a purchase on Beauty, but now she really owns it.” Such
insults/compliments were a matter of course for him. He did not believe in
compliments. He wanted us to be on our toes and he was always looking for
a sparring partner. I was probably the world’s worst sparring partner. I would
meet his glancing barbs, his attempts to wake me out of a dreamy inwardness,
with greater shyness. I was almost mute around him. I loved my father fiercely,
perhaps in the way that only a daughter can love her father, but around him I
was so terrified of getting hurt that I could not think.

He once told me that most of what he said to me should not be taken seriously.
I heard this around college-age and I felt shocked at the revelation that
every word he uttered TO ME, was not meant for consumption, unlike his
writing. I was confused, as was he, between the writer and the Father. It is a
confusion that I have continually grappled with in a kind of reflexive inner
merry-go-round, wherein I seek the private father and hope to find him in
the public one. I want the first-person, and I want to chase the third-person.

I see myself planted upon a carousel creature, spinning round a central axis
with vertical mirrored sections that catch your reflection as you pass by. The
outer rings of the carousel are also adorned with small mirrors, as well as the
ceiling, each placed at a different angle and offering multiple views of one’s
position astride an absurdly painted animal. The central axis may or may not be
my father, and the outer spokes my siblings, but the mirrored fragments feel
like a third person version of me, the only one possible in a family of nine children
and six stepmothers. At times it was difficult if not impossible to hold
onto a sense of self amidst the family, but I became an expert at surveying the
arena and observing my role in it, even if the only reflective surfaces appeared
willy nilly, at oddly punctuating moments, in my field of vision.

From our teenage years until adulthood, Dad used to take each of his kids
out individually for dinner, with the idea that because he knew we were not
getting enough of him during the year, he would at least try to deliver an intense
injection of one-on-one time with him. During these dinners, he
would often lay down incisive commentary on my being, and I would listen
like a sponge to everything that he had to say, and then spend the next several
months trying to digest it. “Oh, I’m like this. Maggie calls a spade a
spade. Maggie’s silence projects her intelligence. Maggie has the ambition of
a Napoleon, but the worldliness of a house-wife.” These dinners, which happened
one or two times a year, were like those oddly placed carousel mirrors,
flashing back a quick reflection. In his absence I would outgrow the image
that he had offered, but try to hold on to it anyway, because it was delineated
with such power—and it was all that I had of him. Or, let me switch
metaphors: our dinners felt like short stories, in which the character Maggie
came into being for a brief time. For me there was a quasi-religious quality
to them, as if I were being invented anew. In Dad’s absence his ideas about
me became relics and, to keep them alive, I traded my developing idea of
myself for his, thereby casting myself into the third person. I thought on
some level I could meet him, if not in daily life, then on the page, his page,
in some nether region where we were both enigmas. I wanted this maneuver
to be liberating for me, as I knew that it was for Mailer the writer. Handing
over my first-personhood was, of course, a form of captivity. It was not
a creative act. If I really wanted to meet him, I would have to join in the creative
process, or else live in a kind of perpetual denial, a prison without walls.
“You can’t cheat life,” he would say.

So I am meeting him right now, at the Norman Mailer Conference.
Maybe now he is equally present—and absent—for all of us. Maybe we all
Miss him, and try to Know him, or bring him to life, with our missing. He
would find this notion sentimental. But we need him. We need to know what
he would say about Trump. He might write an imaginary conversation, in
which the character Mailer says to the character DT, “Pal, we have this in
common: I could spit in the mythological eye of the Media, and they would
still love me.” DT would respond, “That’s terrific, you understand me. I could
stand in the middle of 5th avenue and shoot someone and I wouldn’t lose
any voters.” Perhaps right now Mailer’s words and energy would restore
some balance in the great match between God and The Devil. Perhaps he
could rev up the artist in the collective us.

I think that something about being an artist is to admit that liberation is
found within the prison. For me, liberation has come in part from trying to
answer the question: What did he mean when he said he was a writer first,
and a parent second? For much of my life I have entertained obvious, boring
answers: He knew he was not able to give us the right kind of attention.
Children were not his priority. He did once say he was not really interested
in his kids until he could have a decent conversation with them. But his form
of apology was to tell the truth. And one of the most helpful and corrective
comments he ever passed on was the notion that ''Feeling Sorry for Oneself is
a Great Sin''. So entertaining those answers has never been interesting enough,
on top of being Sinful!

I have come to understand, or perhaps decide, on another meaning:
Namely, a writer first, and a parent second, means that the writer begat the
father. If he were a writer first, that idea of himself permeated every part of
his existence. In some ways, I did not have a Father. I had a Writer. I was
raised by the same mind that investigates the nature of existence, raised by
a magician. No pun intended—just a different set of rules. The sense of possibility,
the magical possibilities this engenders, partly sustain the loss of
missing the other man. There is a transmission of freedom in the understanding.
As the daughter of a writer first, my sense of self, when I meet it—
becomes fluid, a creative action. If growing up, I had clung to that carousel
horse and waited for the flash of deliverance offered by his attention, as an
artist I learn everyday how to enliven that plastic horse, take it where I want
to go. If I felt that I lived as a character who shared ranks with his other protagonists,
I am now part author. The question of authorship now becomes
a philosophical stance, a living, existential question: who is doing the writing?
Who is creating the life? While this may be the underlying question for
all of us, not everyone is encouraged to attempt an answer. In telling me that
he was a writer first, and a father second- in admitting a truth exquisitely
painful for a child to hear, he was also handing me the mantle of the artist’s
life. Did this mean I would become an artist first and a mother second? No.
But the idea of being an artist was built in. And as an artist, I would need to
use all those reflections and versions of myself-first, second, third person,
reflected in the crazy prism of our family.

'''PART 2: THE PRISM, OR, THE DREAM LIFE OF MY SIBLINGS'''

I would like to show you some diagrams featuring the nine children, six
wives, and Norman in various formations and relationships that seem to
resonate with some hefty cosmic references. They also help me locate myself
within the family.

Here is Dad and the children as the Sun and nine planets. John Buffalo,
the youngest, saw the most of Dad, and Sue, the oldest, probably saw him
the least, so it made sense to go in this order. My nine-year-old son,
Nicholas, pointed out that I made myself the Earth, and questioned my
integrity in making such a self-serving map, but I assured him it was a
lucky accident, and also, that if this were so I would be taking on a lot of
responsibility!

placeholder for Figure 1 - Planetary Siblings

I make up for it in the next one: Here we have Dad and the nine children
as the ten layers of the earth, from core to exosphere.

placeholder for Figure 2 - Earth Layers

The children as nine cosmic phases of CREATION, PRESERVATION,
AND DISSOLUTION in Yantra, or sacred mandala construction.

placeholder for Figure 3 - Creation Stage Yantra

Here is the family arrayed like a Benzene Ring; which has the chemical
formula C6H6. If Dad had only had six children, we would have a perfect
match. Thankfully, it is not a perfect match. Benzene is notable for its sweet
smell. It is also terribly toxic. Benzene is used to make plastics, that most totalitarian
of materials! How would Dad feel to know that he almost constructed
such a metaphorical compound around himself? A Benzene ring is
formed of six carbons, which are usually bonded four ways. The one unbonded
electron from each carbon forms something called a conjugated
ring, meaning the electrons have free movement among all six carbons. A bit
like Mailer and his women. This also bears quite a resemblance to the Merry
Go Round described earlier.

placeholder for Figure 4 - Benzene Ring

placeholder for Figure 5 - Dad & Siblings Benzene Ring

Next we have Norman as Pianist: the wives are the black keys and the
children, the white, and fit within an Octave until his marriage to Norris,
which starts a new Octave.

placeholder for Figure 6 - Piano Keys

Here we have the Family as a cell membrane and here, Mother (my
Mother), as catalytic converter. She was extremely protective, and one could
say she reduced any toxic emissions coming my way with the force of her
love, both for me, and for Norman, even after they split. So we have the
father-centric model, the child-centric model, and the wife-centric model.

placeholder for Figure 7 - Notebook Diagrams of Sibling Models

placeholder for Figure 8 - Cell Structure Siblings

placeholder for Figure 9 - Mother as Cataclytic Converter

As a painter, I have spent some time investigating this family structure,
and mining it for clues about my creative habits. But, for a long time, I unwittingly
carried these structures, and projected them onto my paintings.

The numbers eight and nine come up a lot in my work. Without knowing
why, I once spent a year researching eight random topics to fuel a body of
work, in the hopes that my subconscious might forge some interesting paintings
from the overload. My references were far ranging: comic books, rebuses,
yantras, the genres of floating world and cliffhangers, and the palettes of Gauguin,
Goya, and Hiroshige. The title of the show was Floating World and, at
the time, the structure of the project made perfect sense to me, without once
consciously attaching it to my family. I just assumed that the conceptual overload
would induce the sensation of floating in the viewer. I was trying to locate
myself as a painter, and I thought that the number eight resonated with
the eight cardinal directions. It never occurred to me that I was making portraits
of my eight siblings. I see now that I was trying to accommodate eight
or nine possible viewpoints, and anything less felt wrong.

Here is a subsequent series of nine landscapes that I later understood as
portraits of the nine of us in our varied terrain and palettes. I like connecting
things that are not sure that they want to be connected: Arranged marriages
of colors, materials, and ideas. The conversations are wide ranging
and at times chaotic: palettes argue with one another; ideas overlap and interlope.
The revolving personalities in my family template have become standard
bearers for all my decisions about color, composition, and number. In
this way, landscapes become psychological terrain, siblings and stepmothers
become open fields and barren hillsides, and our family tree emerges as a
guiding spirit in my creative processes.

placeholder for Figure 10 - Scissors Language 2

placeholder for Figure 11 - The Dream Life of My Siblings

I will close with the piece I read at Carnegie Hall at Dad’s memorial.
(show of hands: who heard it there?) I think it offers what the rest of the
speech may have missed: My Father. We could say, this was one time I met
him. It is called, ''Fellow Geniuses:''

I am going to share with you a seminal work of non-fiction by my father:
until now a hidden literary gem, and one that helped me get started as an
artist. I was fifteen and was spending the summer in Provincetown with Dad,
Norris, and my eight siblings. Privacy was scarce but, somehow, a two-week
stretch emerged in which I had my own room.

As an only child living with my mother the rest of the year, I was well
equipped psychologically to spread out. I decided that I would tackle a sculpture
that I had been thinking about for some time. As any serious contemplative
will do, I began by collecting large pieces of driftwood. Buckets of
sand and seaweed piled up on the floor, which also happened to be covered
in wall to wall carpeting that my stepmother had chosen. I think, at one
point in a moment of annoyance with her, and imagining the deepening
bond with my father over our shared aversion to carpeted floors, I may have
dumped some of the sand onto the wall to wall and formed a Carl Andrelike
floor piece.

From the Army Navy store in town I collected buckets full of brass buttons,
and rusted machine gun bullets, which I thought were strangely beautiful,
and they looked to me like beads for a necklace. I think, subconsciously,
I was recreating scenes from ''The Naked and the Dead'', even though I had not
read it.

Meanwhile, deep in artistic fervor, clothes and wet bathing suits and towels
were landing in various locations around the room. I will say, and my
husband can attest, that our house today does perhaps bear a resemblance
at times to events described here.

At fifteen, I was still too shy to speak easily with my father. Days might
pass without conversing, but we would always exchange meaningful looks.
We were both absorbed in our work and I felt that we shared the unspoken
understanding of artists. I was sure, too, that he recognized in me a fellow genius.
So I was not surprised on the day when, returning to my room, I found
a note from Dad, placed at the entrance, so as not to disturb me. “He must
be really impressed to put it in writing” I thought, and eagerly read his assessment
of my work. (See Figure 12)

When I read this note at the Carnegie Hall tribute, I wasn’t sure about
saying “Asshole” out loud, and perhaps I did not want to make him look bad
during his Memorial, so I substituted the word, “Twit.” But here it is in its
original wording.

My father was always superstitious about giving anyone compliments.
And I knew this—but after reading his note I was devastated. Only partially
devastated, though. After all, Norman did teach the art of parsing emotional
states into percentages. Perhaps I was 80% devastated. The other 20% was
hopeful. The other 20% realized, with something like happiness, that my
habits mattered to my father. And on some level, he had stopped being Norman
Mailer and become, simply, my father. I cleaned up my room.

Dad had a great generosity whereby, if he felt that you were serious or excited
about something, he would forget his anger, and give you his full at-

placeholder for Figure 12 - Young Maggie's Note from Dad

tention. He found me a little later and said, “Listen, I didn’t realize you were
up to something in there. I took another look, and I’m pleased. I think you
may be an artist. Finish the sculpture, I’d like to live with it a while. Maybe
we’ll put it in the Living Room.”

To which I now say: Thanks, Dad.

I miss you.

===Work Cited===
{{Refbegin}}
*{{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Maggie |title=Prism Break |journal=The Mailer Review
|volume=13 |issue=No. 1|date=2019 |pages=65-84 |access-date=2021 |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Prism Break }}

[[Category:V.13 2019]]