Project Mailer - User contributions [en]

User:KJordan

2020-09-30T23:56:04Z

KJordan: I revised my bio.

Hello, everyone. I am KJordan and I am an aspiring writer. Editing in a digital space has taught me a lot about how coding is often used in sites like this. This was my first time working in a digital space. I hope my edits were helpful.

The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer Bibliography: 2007

2020-09-30T23:51:17Z

KJordan: I added my article to the bibliogarphy

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{{Byline|last=Holmes|first=Constance E.|last1=Wilson|first1=Kristine A.|note=Much of the following has been incorporated into ''[[NM:WD|Norman Mailer: Works and Days]]''.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08bib}}
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==ADDENDA through 2006==
===PRIMARY===
====Letters====
Letter to the Editors. Copy of letter to Leonid I. Brezhnev, with other signatories. “Protest.” ''New York Review of Books'' 10:5. 14 Mar. 1968.

Letter to the Editors, with other signatories. “Violence in Oakland.” ''New York Review of Books'' 10:9. 9 May 1968.

Letter to the Editors. Copy of telegram to Hon. U Thant, with other signatories. “Protest.” ''New York Review of Books'' 12:6. 27 Mar. 1969.

Letter to the Editors, with other signatories. “The Committee to Defend the Conspiracy.” ''New York Review of Books'' 12:12. 19 June 1969.

Letter to the Editors, with other signatories. “Ford’s Better Idea.” ''New York Review of Books'' 19:11 & 12. 25 Jan. 1973.

Letter to the Editors. Open letter to the Prime Minister of Iran, with other signatories. “Words for the Shah.” ''New York Review of Books'' 24:19. 24 Nov. 1977.

Letter to the Editors, with other signatories. “In a Cuban Prison.” ''New York Review of Books'' 25:19. 7 Dec. 1978.

Letter to the Editors. Copy of letter to Mr. A. M. Rekunov, Procurator General of the USSR, with other signatories. “The Case of Alexandr Bogolovski.” ''New York Review of Books'' 31:15. 11 Oct. 1984.

Letter to the Editors, with other signatories. “Arrests in Poland.” ''New York Review of Books'' 33:13. 13 August 1986.

Letter to the Editors, with other signatories. “Celebrating Mencken.” ''New York Review of Books'' 37:4. 15 Mar. 1990.

Letter to President Clinton, with other signatories. “An Urgent Appeal from Pen American Center.” ''New York Review of Books'' 40:4. 11 Feb. 1993.

Letter to the Editors, with other signatories. AN OPEN LETTER to Prime Minister Paul Keating et al. “The Case of Wei Jingsheng.” ''New York Review of Books'' 43:3. 15 Feb. 1996.

Letter to the Editor, with other signatories. “JFK’s Assassination.” ''New York Review of Books'' 50:20. 18 Dec. 2003.

Letter; one of a series solicited by the Editors. “The Election and America’s Future.” ''The New York Review of Books'' 51:17. 4 Nov. 2004.

Letter to the Editors, as author of ''Oswald’s Tale'', with other signatories. “Blocked.” ''New York Review of Books'' 52:13. 11 Aug. 2005.

==2007==
===Primary===
====Books====
Commentary. ''Knockout: The Art of Boxing.'' By Ken Regan. San Rafael, CA: Insight Editions, 2007.

Introduction. ''Marilyn Monroe.'' By Lawrence Schiller. Los Angeles: East End Editions KLS, 2007.

====Book Contributions====
Commentary. ''Knockout: The Art of Boxing''. By Ken Regan. San Rafael, CA: Insight Editions, 2007.

Introduction. ''Marilyn Monroe''. By Lawrence Schiller. Los Angeles: East End Editions KLS, 2007.

====Interviews====
"The Art of Fiction No. 193, Norman Mailer." By Andrew O’Hagan. ''The Paris Review'' 49.181 (Summer 2007): 44+.

“The Author at Home.” Extract from Essay-Interview by Robert McCrum. ''The Observer'' [England] 11 Nov 2007: 28.

“The Devil in Norman Mailer.” By Michael Lee. ''Literary Review'' 50.4 (Summer 2007): 202–217.

“Devilish Motives.” Essay-Interview by John Freeman. ''Sydney Morning Herald'' [Australia] 20 Jan 2007: 30.

“Even at 84, Norman Mailer Refuses to Pull His Punches.” By Sue Fox. ''Sunday Express'' 8 July 2007, UK first ed.: 55.

“Get Your Ass off My Pillow.” By Andrew O’Hagan. ''Harper’s Magazine'' 315.1888 (Sep 2007): 22–24.

“In Conversation ... ; with Norman Mailer.” By Daniel Asa Rose. ''Washington Post'' 21 Jan 2007, final ed.: T07.

“The Lion in Winter: Norman Mailer Talks about Writing His First Novel in a Decade.” Essay-Interview by Caro Llewellyn. ''Weekend Australian'' 31 Mar 2007, pre-prints ed.: 1.

“Living like Heroes.” By Richard Wollheim. New Statesman 137.4871 (19 Nov 2007): 62. Abridged reprint of a 1961 interview promoting ''Advertisements for Myself''.

“Mailer on Bush, Obama & Writing.” By Colin Miner. ''New York Sun'' 22 Jan 2007: 15.

“Mailer’s Novel Ideas about Hitler.” By Judy Stoffman. ''The Toronto Star'' 28 Jan 2007: C04.

“Norman Mailer.” By Mark Binelli. ''Rolling Stone'' 1025/1026 (3–17 May 2007): 69–70.

“Norman Mailer.” Survey-Interview by unknown author. ''Vanity Fair 557'' (Jan 2007): 166.

“Now Age 84....” Essay-Interview by Allen Pierleoni. ''Sacramento Bee'' 4 Feb 2007, metro final ed.: TK22.

“A Portrait of the Devil as a Young Man.” By Dylan Foley. ''Star-Ledger'' 28 Jan 2007, final ed.: 6.

“The Rise of Mailerism.” Article-Interview by Michael Lennon. ''New York'' 40.36 (15 Oct 2007): 24+. Mailer discusses ''On God''.

“The Sound and the Baby Führer.” By Gene Santaro. ''World War II'' 22.2 (May 2007): 23–25.

Tough Guys Don’t Quit.” By Gregory Kirschling. ''Entertainment Weekly'' 916 (19 Jan 2007): 48.

“Writing with the Devil.” Q & A with Nan Goldberg. ''Boston Globe'' 4 Feb 2007, Magazine: 15.

===Secondary===

====Essays, Articles, Book Chapters, and Dissertations====
“Sex-Mad Mailer Enraged Rival.” ''New York Post'' 17 Jan 2007, Page Six: 12. Article discussing Ralph Ellison’s attitude toward Mailer, according to Ellison’s biographer.

Bancroft, Collette.“A Man of Many Letters.” ''St. Petersburg Times'' [Florida] 16 Oct 2007: 1E. A look at Mailer and Mailer scholarship on the occasion of both the publication of ''On God'' and the launch of ''Mailer Review''.

Beach, Patrick. “Mailer’s Memories about to Open at Ransom Center.”''Austin American-Statesman'' 23 Dec 2007, final ed.: J5.

Bennett, Bruce. “Mailer at the Movies.” ''New York Sun'' 20 July 2007: 11. Overview of Mailer’s films.

Brokaw, Leslie. “HFA Salutes Norman Mailer on Film.” ''Boston Globe'' 16 Sep 2007, third ed.: N11.

Bufithis, Philip. “''The Executioner’s Song'': A Life Beneath Our Conscience.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 77–79.

Burns, Paul C. “Transformation of Biblical Methods and Godhead in Norman Mailer’s Gospel.” ''In Jesus in Twentieth-Century Literature, Art, and Movies''. Ed. Paul C. Burns. New York: Continuum, 2007.

Chaiken, Michael. “The Master’s Mercurial Mistress: How Norman Mailer Courted Chaos 24 Frames per Second.” ''Film Comment'' 43.4 (Jul/Aug 2007): 36–42.

Crook, Zeba. “Fictionalizing Jesus: Story and History in Two Recent Jesus Novels.” ''Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus'' 5.1 (Jan 2007): 33–55.

Dickstein, Morris. “How Mailer Became ‘Mailer’: The Writer as Private and Public Character.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 118–31.

Duguid, Scott.“The Addiction of Masculinity: Norman Mailer’s ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' and the Cultural Politics of Reaganism.” ''Journal of Modern Literature'' 30.1 (2007): 23–30.

Freeman, John. “Writers Remain a Robust Bunch.” ''St. Petersburg Times'' [Florida] 28 Jan 2007: 1E. Article about the continued productivity of aging “literary giants” Mailer, Updike, and Roth.

Gottlieb, Akiva. “Norman Mailer, Auteur.” ''Forward'' 20 Jul 2007: B1+. Article on Mailer’s films, on the occasion of the New York exhibit “The Mistress and the Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer.”

James, Clive. “Norman Mailer.” In ''Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts''. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007. 409–413.

Goldfarb, Reuven. “The Jewish Mailer.” Jerusalem Post 20 Nov 2007: 14. Henderson, Cathy, Richard W. Oram, Molly Schwartzburg, and Molly Hardy.
“Mailer Takes on America: Images from the Ransom Center Archive.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 141–75.

Holmes, Constance E. and J. Michael Lennon.“Norman Mailer: Supplemental Bibliography through 2006.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 234–60.

Houpt, Simon. “Still a Brawler at Heart.” ''Globe and Mail'' [Canada] 27 Jan 2007: R4.

Howard, Gerald. “Mailer Gets Hammered.” ''New York Times Book Review'' 26 Aug 2007, late ed. final: 27. Essay discussing Mailer’s films, focusing on ''Maidstone''.

Howley, Ashton. “Mailer Again: Heterophobia in ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance''.” ''Journal of Modern Literature'' 30.1 (2007): 31–46.

J. C. “White Mischief.” ''TLS: Times Literary Supplement'' 26 Oct 2007: 36. Includes brief mention of ''Mailer Review''.

Junod, Tom. “The Last Man Standing.” ''Esquire'' 147.1 (Jan 2007): 108–133.

Kachka, Boris. “Mr. Tenditious.” ''New York'' 40.2 (15 Jan 2007): 62. Recaps Mailer’s history of responding negatively—even violently—to criticism.

Kaufmann, Donald L. “An American Dream: The Singular Nightmare.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 194–205.

Kennedy, William. “Norman Mailer as Occasional Commentator in a Self-Interview and Memoir.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 11–26.

Kriegel, Leonard. “Mailer’s Hitler: Round One.” ''Sewanee Review'' 115.4 (Fall 2007): 615–620.

Lennon, J. Michael. “Gallery Talk: The Mailer Archive.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 132–40.

———. “Norman Mailer: Novelist, Journalist, or Historian?” ''Journal of Modern Literature'' 30.1 (2007): 91–103.

———. (ed. and note): “‘A Series of Tragicomedies’: Mailer’s Letters on The Deer Park, 1954–55.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 45–79.

Long, Karen Haymon. “Mailer in Review.” ''Tampa Tribune'' 18 Nov 2007, final ed., Baylife: 1. Discusses the formation of the Mailer Society and the annual conference, focusing on Tampa-area members and the launch of the Mailer Review out of USF.

Lucid, Robert F. “[Boston State Hospital: The Summer of 1942].” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 27–33. Excerpt from incomplete authorized biography.

Masters, Brian. “So Are Some People Really Born Evil?” Daily Mail [London] 19 April 2007, first ed.: 14. Article discussing ''The Castle in the Forest'' in relation to an actual scientific study on evil and genetics.

McDonald, Brian. “Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the ‘Very Jewish Jesus’ of Norman Mailer’s ''The Gospel According to the Son''.” ''Journal of Modern Literature'' 30.1 (2007): 78–90.

Meloy, Michael. ''Sex Fiends of the Fifties: Intersections of Violence, Sexuality, and Masculinity in the Work of Norman Mailer, William Styron, and Ken Kesey''. Diss. U of South Carolina, 2007. Ann Arbor: UMI, 2007. AAT 3280339.

Middlebrook, Jonathan: “Five Notes toward a Reassessment of Norman Mailer.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 179–83.

Partridge, Jeffrey F. L. “''The Gospel According to the Son and Christian Belief''.” ''Journal of Modern Literature'' 30.1 (2007): 64–77.

Petigny, Alan.“Norman Mailer,‘The White Negro,’ and New Conceptions of the Self in Postwar America.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 184–93.

Rampton, David. “Plexed Artistry: The Formal Case for Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost.” ''Journal of Modern Literature'' 30.1 (2007): 47–63.

Rodwin, John G. "Fighters and Writers". ''The Mailer Review''. Fall 2008. 396-406.

Rollyson, Carl. “Mailer’s Other Career.” ''Village Voice'' 52.29 (18–24 Jul 2007): 68. On the occasion of the New York exhibit, “The Mistress and the Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer.”

Rose, Daniel Asa. “Advertisements for a Gay Self.” ''New York'' 40.4 (5 Feb 2007): 9. Brief comment praising Mailer’s treatment of homosexuality in ''The Castle in the Forest''.

Ryan, James Emmett. “‘Insatiable as Good Old America’: Tough Guys Don’t Dance and Popular Criminality.” ''Journal of Modern Literature'' 30.1 (2007): 17–22.

Scott, A.O. “Norman Mailer Unbound.” ''New York Times'' 20 Jul 2007, late ed. final, east coast: E1!. Discuss/reviews Mailer’s films in anticipation of a screening at Lincoln Center.

Severs, Jeffrey Frank. ''Reinventing Totalitarianism in the Postwar American Novel''. Diss. Harvard U, 2007. Ann Arbor: UMI, 2007. AAT 3265089.

====Book Reviews====

. . .

====Obituaries and Retrospectives====
“The Bad Boy of U.S. Literature.” ''Sunday Times'' [London] 11 Nov 2007: 20.

“A Brawler who Never Pulled a Punch.” ''Irish Times'' 12 Nov 2007: 10.

“Heavyweight: Mailer’s Life and Work Were Outsized.” ''Pittsburgh Post-Gazette'' 14 Nov 2007: B6.

“Legendary Writer with Particular Love for the Irish.” ''Irish Independent'' 12 Nov 2007: page unknown.

“A Life of Writing, Boozing and Brawling.” ''Edmonton Journal'' 11 Nov 2007, final ed.: A3.

“Mailer won pair of Pulitzers.” ''Variety'' 409.1 (19–25 Nov 2007): 55.

“Mailer’s Ghost.” ''New York'' 40.42 (26 Nov 2007): 32. Revisits the seven covers of ''New York Magazine'' that have featured Mailer, either as author or subject.

“Norman Mailer.” ''Economist'', US ed. 385.8555 (17 Nov 2007): 103.

“Norman Mailer.” ''Sunday Independent'' [Ireland] 11 Nov 2007: page unknown.

“Norman Mailer.” ''Times'' [London] 12 Nov 2007: 53.

“Norman Mailer.” ''Independent'' [London] 13 Nov 2007, first ed.: 34.

“Norman Mailer.” ''Times Union'' 15 Nov 2007, one star ed.: A12.

“Norman Mailer, 1923–2007.” ''Cincinnati Post'' 12 Nov 2007: C10.

“Norman Mailer, 84.” ''Newsweek'' 151.1 (31 Dec 2007): 106.

“Obituary of Norman Mailer.” ''Daily Telegraph'' [London] 12 Nov 2007: 25.

“Pulitzer Prize Author Norman Mailer Dies at 84.” ''Providence Journal'' 11 Nov 2007: A6.

Allen-Mills, Tony. “Norman Mailer, Literary Rebel, Dies.” ''Sunday Times''
[London] 11 Nov 2007: 1+. [Note: Also printed in the ''Australian'' under a different headline.]

Ambrose, Jay. “Remembering Mailer.” ''Knoxville News Sentinel'' 25 Nov 2007: 73.

Andriani, Lynn. “A Prolific Life to the End.” ''Publishers Weekly'' 254.56 (19 Nov 2007): 8.

Associated Press. “Literary Lion Sparked American Debate.” ''Daily Variety'' 12 Nov 2007: 2.

———. “Writers Remember Mailer.” ''Times Union'' 13 Nov 2007, one star ed.: E5. Comments on Mailer by New York authors and journalists, on the occasion of his death.

Baddiel, David. “For Norman Mailer, Authenticity was all about Masculinity.” ''Times'' [London] 17 Nov 2007: 3.

Bancroft, Colette. “‘He was Much More’ than a Writer.” ''St. Petersburg Times'' [Florida] 11 Nov 2007, South Pinellas ed.: 1A.

Barnes, Bart. “A Blustery Force in Life and Letters.” ''Washington Post'' 11 Nov 2007, Met 2 Ed.: A01. [Note: Version of this article also printed elsewhere under different headlines.]

Bernstein, Mashey. “In Different Way, Norman Mailer was a Deeply Jewish
Writer.” ''Deep South Jewish Voice'' 18.1 (Dec 2007): 100+.

Blau, Rosie and Martin Mulligan. “Pulling No Punches to the End.” ''London Financial Times'' 12 Nov 2007, U.S. ed.: 13.

Boyd, Herb. “When James Baldwin Met Norman Mailer.” ''New York Amsterdam News'' 15 Nov 2007: 1+.

Burke, Cathy and Todd Venezia. “Literary Pug and Original Hipster Mailer,
84, Dies.” ''New York Post'' 11 Nov 2007, News: 7.

Calabrese, Erin. “Widow Defends Mailer, Says He ‘Loved Women.’” ''New York Post'' 19 Nov 2007, News: 14.

Campbell, James. “Norman Mailer: Pugnacious Journalist and Author.”
''Guardian'' [London] 12 Nov 2007, final ed.: 34.

Cappell, Ezra. “Norman Mailer: A Man of Letters Inspired by the People of
the Book.” ''Forward'' 16 Nov 2007: A1+.

Clark, Roy Peter. “Two Minutes with Mailer.” ''St. Petersburg Times'' [Florida] 15 Nov 2007: 1E.

Clarke, Toni.“Writer Norman Mailer dies at 84.” ''Irish Times'' 12 Nov 2007: 10.

Craig, Olga. “A Life of Books, Bars, Brawling.” ''Gazette'' [Montreal] 11 Nov 2007, final ed.: A3.

Crosbie, Lynn. “Believe it: This was the Man who Loved Women.” ''Globe and Mail'' [Canada] 12 Nov 2007: R1.

Crossen, Cynthia. “Readback: When Normal Mailer Was Nobody: 1948’s ‘The
Naked and the Dead’ Was Written Before He Was Famous, And That Is Its
Greatest Blessing.” ''Wall Street Journal Online'' (15 Nov 2007). http://
www.wallstreetjournal.com.

Cryer, Dan and Aileen Jacobson. “Norman Mailer 1923–2007: A Literary Icon
Dies.” ''Newsday'' 11 Nov 2007, Nassau and Suffolk ed.: A08

. . .

{{Review|state=expanded}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Norman Mailer Bibliography: 2007}}
[[Category:Bibliographies (MR)]]

User:KJordan

2020-09-29T23:56:00Z

KJordan: This is my bio.

Hello, everyone. I am KJordan and I am a student in Dr. Gerald Lucas' NMAC course for fall 2020. We were required to edit articles as an assignment and I have learned a great deal from participating. Editing in a digital space has taught me a lot about how coding is often used in sites like this. I hope you enjoy our articles.

The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer in “God’s Attic”

2020-09-29T00:02:18Z

KJordan: I found and fixed a few typos here.

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{{byline|last=Kaufmann|first=Donald L.|abstract=An eyewitness to Norman Mailer’s five-day visit to Alaska in 1965 chronicles
the details of the only visit Mailer made to Alaska.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08kauf}}

{{dc|dc=T|he post-climax of Norman Mailer’s ''An American Dream''}} (1965) features
Stephen Rojack (some might say the author’s virtual alter ego) in the desert,
outside Vegas, in a surreal phone booth, ideal for a celestial call to his dead
lover, Cherry, now with Marilyn Monroe. But Rojack, uncharacteristically,
remains speechless, hangs up the phone, and makes no phone call the next
morning because this Mailer protagonist was “something like sane again.”
Moreover, he is headed due south to the jungles of Guatemala and Yucatan.
The starting point for such a seminal exit from America is the Vegas desert,
just a casino chip’s throw from America’s real nadir point, Death Valley.

There was nothing Arctic about Mailer’s 1965 novel, or was there?

This Maileresque literary fallout was conceived before Mailer’s flash, five-day visit to Alaska in April 1965. Imagine a literary mind experiencing such a one-man, in-house American culture shock from hot sandy Nevada to the 49th state the size of Texas, California and Montana combined, including three million lakes. And a coastline double the size of all the Lower 48 states. Alaska also boasts of its one glacier—the size of Holland—and its outdoor adventures with animals far outnumbering humans, a mere 300,000 plus, the population of a single mid-sized Lower 48 city. Alaska, indeed, is a huge hunk of wild Americana.

Mailer, Brooklyn bred, literary celebrity, seasoned traveler, and existential doer, was interviewed in London about his Alaska Odyssey two weeks after his Arctic visit. Mailer said: “There are one or two places a man can visit
in his lifetime that affect him as an existential experience. Alaska was one of
those places for me.”

I had yet to ask Mailer, “Where’s the other place?” I had my opportunities. I might have been the first to ask because I witnessed Mailer’s Day Two
in Anchorage, and his three-day ''finale'' in Fairbanks. There, at the State University of Alaska, I was an assistant professor in the English Department,
teaching while turning a Mailer dissertation into a Mailer book. I was there,
live. I was also one of the few who were “hip” to the Alaskan academic magic
that prompted (virtually tricked) a reluctant Mailer to visit Alaska.

Edmund Skellings (later to become a Messiah of high tech art, a.k.a. the
“Electric Poet”) was my best friend and fellow PhD candidate at the State
University of Iowa. There, Ed and I first met the Norman Mailer.

''Esquire'' (the home magazine of Mailer’s eight-part serialization [Jan–Aug
1964] of ''An American Dream'') had sponsored a college road show, “Symposium for Writers,” a panel that included Mailer, Mark Harris, Dwight Macdonald, and others. During its Iowa City stopover, and after the panel
presentation, Ed and I pressed the flesh with Mailer—who responded with
warm wit and a promise to keep this mellow threesome mood going that
night at the party at Donald Justice’s home.

I arrived a bit late at the poet’s house. Don Justice told me that Mailer and
Mark Harris had shouted and wrestled and that Mailer, in a huff, had exited
the party with Ed Skellings—seemingly gone for good.

The next morning Ed had news. He and Mailer had hit it off. After verbal sparring and some marijuana, Mailer was exposed to what he later, smilingly, called: “Skelling’s formidable breeziness,” and at its inception, instant
friendship. Skellings added that Mailer was not his but “our” friend.

Ed graduated from Iowa and stationed himself in a lively English Department at Fairbanks, about 140 miles south of the Arctic Circle. I had remained
in Iowa City to finish up my last year in the doctorate program when, suddenly, I received this message: “Come north, Good Buddy, and share in my
high professorial adventures.” Ed really tempted me when he flew to New
York and fell flush into one of those famous Norman Mailer Brooklyn
Heights parties. At one of them, this conversation took place:

“Norman,” Skellings said, “you’re going to Alaska.”

Mailer replied, “The hell I am.”

Those in the Mailer inner circle then, as always, said, “No one tells Norman Mailer what to do.” I got the Iowa City jitters. How formidable could
a best friend be? Upon graduation, I joined Ed in Fairbanks, September 1964.

What an operatic happening it was when two former Massachusetts high school friends reunited in Alaska, Ed Skellings and Mike Gravel. How fortuitous. Gravel, a liberal Democrat, was the Speaker of the Alaskan Lower House and, except for the governor, was the most powerful politician in Alaska. Gravel was on the lookout for likely staffers and bumped into (supposedly) two word-rich academics. Immediately, Mike, Ed, and I became friends.

Our University English Department was well funded. We were told:
“Bring up that Norman Mailer and Ralph Ellison to celebrate our next early
snowy spring.”

How could Mailer snub such a bountiful invitation? He almost did.
He responded with three “existential stipulations.”

(Late 1964 was the onset of Mailer’s more distinct political phase. There
was the earlier [1963] ''The Presidential Papers''. ''Esquire'' [November 1964] published ''In the Red Light: A History of the Republican Convention''; then the celebrated ''The Armies of the Night'' [1968], culminating in the 1969 Mailer-Breslin ticket in the Democrat Primary for the New York City Mayoralty.)

When the Alaskan offer arrived, Mailer was probably in a high-risk political existential mood. Hence, three stipulations. His counteroffer: “Do the
undoable, or else!” Mailer would visit Alaska only if:

* Bulleted list item
He must be greeted at the Juneau Airport by the governor;

* Bulleted list item
He must be escorted to the state capitol building and be permitted to address both Houses in session (a real political challenge);

* Bulleted list item
He must be allowed to attend a Democratic Party caucus meeting.

All these “musts” sounded to Ed and me like a Mailer-esque “Catch-22.” These
details were sent to us by Mailer saying, in essence, that he had vetoed the
visit and was having ''realpolitik'' fun.

How was Mailer expected to fully comprehend our Mike Gravel “connection”?

Try to imagine Mailer’s surprise when, on February 6, 1965, Governor
William Egan wrote to him:

<blockquote>I am sure that your visit to the University of Alaska in Fairbanks as a lecturer during the 1965 Festival of Arts will benefit the University and the State. May I invite you to be my guest for a day in Juneau prior to your appearance in Fairbanks? We look forward to your stay with us.</blockquote>

In ''The Presidential Papers'', Mailer defined politics as “the art of the possible.” Mike Gravel, indeed, was Alaska’s supreme artist.

Skellings immediately wrote to Mailer that Mike Gravel, Speaker of the
Alaska House, would take care of all his arrangements in Juneau and
Anchorage before Mailer came to Fairbanks. Skellings wrote: “I imagine you
should arrive Juneau on April 1 for the day with the Governor and Demo
party caucusing on the second. Anchorage on the third. Then here for lecture with Ellison.”

I did not witness, firsthand, Mailer’s initial ground-time in Alaska, but
Mike Gravel did. On the next day in Anchorage, where Ed and I were still
preparing for Day Two’s festivities, Mike told me that he and Bill Egan had
greeted Mailer at the Juneau Airport and that Mailer was escorted on a comprehensive tour of the capital, climaxed with more than polite applause when the state’s guest of honor appeared at a joint session of both Houses of
the Alaskan State Legislature: There was thunderous applause before and
after Mailer’s undoubtedly tasty and serendipitous remarks. The finale
included Mailer attending a meeting of the Democrat Party Caucus (a non-member was usually considered unimportant) which, undoubtedly, made Mailer feel like a real politician.

The happy endings of those three stipulations continued on into that evening at the governor’s home, where Mr. and Mrs. Egan hosted an unpretentious dinner, which Mailer described as “pleasant.” House Speaker Gravel did
not have to say that Mailer’s Juneau stopover was both political and peaceful.

Anchorage, the next stop, was no Juneau (the latter, tiny, inaccessible by
road, a political microcosm and little else). Anchorage was Alaska’s largest
city and cosmopolitan center. There, in a flight from Juneau, Gravel and
Mailer landed at what was also the Speaker’s home city, which Mailer, after
one fulsome day, would later in Fairbanks label Anchorage as “Little Las
Vegas.”

Mailer was not a one-night tourist. On the contrary, he was an in-depth
observer and, in retrospect, I sensed what Mailer would soon perceive: just
ignore those majestic seas and mountains and you could imagine yourself
being in any small city in Nevada or Montana. Fairbanks, a real wilderness
city, awaited Mailer, reputedly the leading urban American exponent of the
German psychologist and existentialist philosopher, Karl Jaspers (1883–1969).
High risk behavior with a dash of violence was Mailer’s literary reputation.
Anchorage and Fairbanks awaited.

Anchorage offered little time for unscripted events. Norman, Ed, and I
took a few catnaps and slept over at the spacious home of Tom Bischel, a
Gravel friend, influential businessman, and maestro of the Mailer visit.
Gravel, however, was the official Anchorage host. He and Bischel asked
Mailer about his urban wants and places he wanted to visit. Mailer was
mindful of his notoriety, spawned by his violence-prone essay, “The White
Negro,” and the live Black Power racial violence swirling in the Lower 48.
Ralph Ellison, author of ''Invisible Man'', was going to debate this upstart
“White Negro” in Fairbanks. Mailer’s one-day preoccupation was with
minorities. We did some brief sightseeing, but mostly short stops in black
neighborhoods where Mailer met with local residents and politicians. In
mid-afternoon, we rushed to an Anchorage TV station for a scheduled videotaping of a Mailer-Gravel-Skellings-Kaufmann panel discussion for a statewide audience. The next stop was a media-inspired Mailer farewell.

Anchorage’s Western Hotel was the site for a well-advertised, open door
reception or “Come Meet Controversial Norman Mailer.” The most civilized segment of the Alaskan populace was about to press the flesh with America’s most reputed belligerent literary celebrity, off and on the page. I was the official host. I was positioned at the entrance to greet the friendly and the curious. They glared and spoke the same tongue.

“Where’s that tough guy?”

“Where’s that wife-knifer?”

Just then, the vast reception room became surreal. I made the rounds for
a few hours, keeping my eyes on the crowd. Each time Mailer was accosted,
he remained gentlemanly and conciliatory. Then, suddenly, Mailer was out
of the circle and into a ring, involved in a crazy sort of fisticuffs, mostly
lunges and misses, but uniformed security made instant peace, and Mailer
swaggered back into his inner circle, with an Irish smile and a fresh drink.

By the end, I was a mixture of alcohol and fatigue, but I could decipher
Gravel’s and Bischel’s smiles. Tonight had been an unforgettable success. A
nightcap celebration was in order. Why not duplicate our daytime travels, the
canvas of black precincts, with a midnight session at Anchorage’s prize black
nightclub?

I vaguely recall dim lights and faces, and piping-hot Soul music and a full rocking dance floor and I think I sat at a big table, full of converging “I-know-Norman-faces.” All was a murky mood. Then I saw the rarest of sights. I nudged Ed Skellings and said, “Look, Norman Mailer is dancing.”

His partner was a woman much taller and more rubbery. As for her partner, was he boxing or dancing? Mailer, the music notwithstanding, was doing a crouch; his feet doing gymnasium shuffles; his arms extended at eye-level, and his ungloved fists jabbing (rat-a-tat-tat) the air. I said to myself: “Norman Mailer, the worst dancer in this room, if he stayed on that dance floor long enough would invent a New American Dance.” The rest of the night was a blur.

Early in the morning after the Anchorage reception, four passengers
(Mailer, Bischel, a hitchhiker, Skellings, and Kaufmann) were picked up for a private and direct flight into the heart of interior Alaska and what remained of the American Frontier. Barney Gottstein, another Anchorage tycoon and Gravel friend, provided his private Beechcraft Baron and a pilot.

Mailer’s fact-finding quest turned more existential and mystical in Fairbanks. Gone was picturesque and politicized Juneau and would-be urbanized Anchorage. Fairbanks was an oxymoronic microcosm, a “Wilderness City.”

Imagine brand-new real estate next to log cabins, swank motels (two) next to Eskimo strip-joints, a musk ox farm next to a state university, and, the civic eyesore—a mammoth suburban junkyard. And those downtown streets, frequented in summer by overfed tourists and, in winter, by underfed dog packs. A Fairbanks illustrated “city directory” could have been a best seller. Mailer, in three mere days, could not experience all this aberrant
Americana. However, he sensed it.

On the April 4 arrival, Mother Nature had her own welcome mat. Mailer got off Barney Gottstein’s plane and stepped onto snow, compact winter permanent, snow. Spring in Fairbanks happens when the ice-locked Chena and Tanana rivers break and the skies above Creamer Field darken with southern birds. Mailer also experienced more culture shock. That’s what usually happens when a newcomer first breathes in Fairbanks’s super-clean air. Mailer remarked about enhanced visibility. He was ecstatic. “I can’t even breathe in Brooklyn,” he said.

With renewed lungs, eyes, and an aired-out brain, Mailer introduced himself to this wilderness city. He was a quick study and I surmised that he was initially on the prowl for more data and lore concerning minorities, priming himself for the main event—the Ellison Debate.

Mailer’s Alaskan fascination also included Fairbanks’s more mundane aspects. It was Alaska’s second-largest city (population about 35,000), called the “Chicago of Alaska,” being the goods-and-services supply hub for the vast upper two-thirds of the entire state. Fairbanks was also the Interior’s media and military capital. Of all fifty states, during our Vietnam controversy, Alaska sported the highest “hawkish” mind-set because the Vietnam War was viewed as a pursuit of common sense. Win or leave. Fairbanks also served as the entertainment center for soldiers and civilians alike. From outlying Interior bases, military personnel would converge on Alaska’s “Sin City,” joining up with local hedonists, losing themselves in the too-good-to-be-true Wild West.

Clearly, this city was ripe for a Norman Mailer visit. Mailer led the way with a flexible agenda: (1) literary work and play plus good booze and conviviality; (2) Big speech and debate; (3) A farewell bash.

Activities were carefully planned and time was devoted to the Alaskan Writer’s Workshop. Mailer visited the campus and spent hours counseling and critiquing student writers with wisdom and wit.

Mailer’s prime focus was minorities, yet Fairbanks had no black unrest, no black precincts, nary a black presence, except at Wainwright and Eielson. The city’s only sizeable black presence was military, not residential.

Fairbanks may strike some visitors as alien or weird, but not newcomer Mailer, who seemed instantly homegrown. Tommy’s Elbow Room, a stellar downtown pleasure center, famed for its giant live fireplace and its livelier cocktails and music, where artsy revelers congregated, was ideal turf for an inquisitive and philosophical writer. Mailer was at his best. It was the same for his encore at the International Hotel & Bar, which offered a galaxy of foreign brews, a lure for the connoisseur suds-tippler.

Alcohol use in Fairbanks was a way of life, like eating and breathing—a daily ritual. Mailer, drink in hand, heard “timber” instead of “cheers.” A local legend, Big Bill King, lavish spender, had spoken to the patrons of the bar. Everyone within earshot received, gratis, a refill. Yelling “timber” meant buying the house. Mailer, along with a newly arrived drink, pressed the flesh with the Mysterious Spender. (No one knew “Big Bill’s” money source or motivation.) Mailer was then introduced to barroom poker-dice, a throwback to pre-statehood gambling. Almost every place that sold liquor over the bar offered the buyer a choice of payment: cash or poker-dice with the barkeep— essentially double-or-nothing. Mailer must have concluded that drinking in Alaska was an art and, like politics, the art of the possible. Mailer remained, drink after drink, the existential visitor, welcoming the unpredictable.

The main event of Mailer’s visit to Alaska was the debate with Ellison. Ironically, no real or formal debate ensued. The term “debate” was mere advertisement for the University of Alaska’s Spring Festival of Arts. Instead of a boxing ring, two celebrity authors shared the same podium. The joint topic for these prominent writers was billed as “Conflicts in Culture.” Yet there was minimal conflict. Ellison, as expected, remained the gentlemanly
academic author. Mailer, full of Alaskan magic, was quite mellow. The audience of eighteen hundred enthusiasts was in a good mood.

I was there and I introduced Mailer.

Mailer and Ellison each spoke for about thirty minutes, followed by moderate rebuttals, subsequently followed by a question and answer session. Mailer became author-prophet. In his Arctic odyssey, he had discovered a medicine for a cancerous “other” America. He had arrived with existential minorities on his mind and in search of a possible cultural template. Tonight, Mailer had come to predict and to warn: “In the future, Alaska could become the very best or the very worst of states.” After my introduction, I heard Mailer say: “God’s attic holds the message.” And then he made the following statements:

<blockquote>All the messages of North America go up to the Brooks Range. That land above the circle, man, is the land of icy wilderness and the lost peaks and the unseen deeps and spires, the crystal receiver of the continent.
{{* * *}}
The extraordinary aspect of the Alaskan psyche is that the future of this state is totally unknown. But it is an unknown in extremes, for the end result will be one of two opposites, the best or the worst.
{{* * *}}
You could become the psychic leader of America, revitalizing all the dead circuits and dead fuses. It is a responsibility Alaskans should face up to.</blockquote>

Mailer then shifted to “Existential Minorities,” an original offshoot of his “The White Negro,” and racial strife in that “other” America:

<blockquote>A minority group is caught between two basic conflicts of culture. This conflict has meaning and takes substance only within the minority group, of course, and perhaps you could say that one culture exists within the other culture, creating the conflict.
{{* * *}}
I am a one-man minority group. I have to contend with two opposing forces, two cultures. In a minority group we have a life psychology built upon two rocks sometimes dangerously far apart.
{{* * *}}
We’re forced to go through life with a psychology profoundly different from most people—a very divided existential psychology.
{{* * *}}
To balance the conflict, we consider ourselves in two different ways, as superior or inferior, and this can be a conflict within itself.
{{* * *}}
When you’re within a minority group, your ego is always on edge—always on an elevator going up or down. When you walk along the street the people you meet and see, depending on who they are, cause your ego to rise or fall and splinter in different ways. It’s up and down all the time, and never stable.
{{* * *}}
According to this notion, everyone in Alaska can be said to be a member of a minority group. This state has more of a divided sense of itself than any state I’ve ever been in. Alaskans have sort of a vast, group inferiority complex, feeling themselves backward and behind the cultural development of other states. Yet, at the same time Alaskans are intensely proud. There are people willing to die for this state.
{{* * *}}
And so, as a minority group, you spend your life constantly redefining your role within the dominating group.</blockquote>

Mailer deftly linked the Two Americas and Alaska’s “divided sense” to similar split- personality situations in rural Lower 48 towns: “In one sense, you feel inferior, and think of yourselves as hicks. You feel a lack of security as inferiors to the big-city sophisticates. Yet, in the other sense, you feel yourself as the “best goddam-people-in-America.” Such was the crux or soul of the Mailer message. I could well imagine the Alaskan psyches a-buzz with becoming either the “very best” or the “very worst.” As for Mailer, there was but one “final adventure.”

Yes, with Norman Mailer surprises never end. The farewell bash provided the setting for the second Mailer-esque self-defined moment. The bash itself was anti-climatic. All the “right sorts” appeared: Our mayor (a one-time barber), other community notables, and university people, president included. Even the radical faculty from outlying Dogpatch dropped in.

Expectations were in the air. Ellison, as ever low-keyed and dapper, kept spellbinding his fans. The other guest of honor—as usual, stage center, Irish glint, American drink, pleasantly besieged by well-wishers, and sounding Brooklyn Heights and Provincetown gone native. The bash seemed destined for a peaceable, perhaps merry conclusion.

Earlier, before the bash, there was a commotion outside, an iota of Anchorage violence Mother Nature flashed on cue. Aurora borealis swirled above snow—not too slippery, just right—for fisticuffs. The scene was set for a bout of city wilderness-violence.

Mailer, upon arrival was accosted by an uninvited, downtown attorney, a reputed drunk (once drunk, he became belligerent to everybody). I was left outdoors to defuse this altercation and get Mailer inside, safely into the welcoming arena. What ensued was serio-comedy at the very least. Two mock pugilists were doing a crouch-and-shuffle (shades of an Anchorage dance floor). The inebriated attorney was the aggressor, mouthing words worthy of a roughhouse saloon. Mailer, barely tipsy, responded with alternate growls and purrs, uncharacteristically tentative, hit-or-stop.

What was I to do? I was an impromptu referee for a phantom fight but, each time I tried to be a third party, Mailer shot me a “get lost” look. For one long twenty minutes these two Arctic sluggers kept it peaceful with their shadow-boxing, body-talking. Mailer then said “Some other time.” The attorney said, “No, now, now!”

A drunk is a drunk but Mailer is barely tipsy. Was this encounter just another chapter of the Mailer/Hemingway code—grace under pressure? Drunkenness, however, proved decisive. The attorney slipped and fell, Mailer helped him to his feet, and the attorney said: “O.K. Some other time. Tomorrow, 10 a.m. sharp. At downtown’s Stan’s Cafe.”

Mailer didn’t even blink. The attorney drifted off and I spirited Mailer inside.

In the midst of a busy farewell morning, Mailer took time out to show up at Stan’s Cafe at 10 a.m. sharp, and waited a full twenty minutes. The attorney was a no-show, probably asleep and finally sober. At 10:20 a.m. sharp, no one could read Norman Mailer’s mind. I did not witness this. Norman told me this later on. I can only add—who else but Norman Mailer, under the same circumstances, would have showed up at Stan’s Cafe?

I now turn to afterthoughts about our 49th State and its 1965 essence. Any mere five-day visit can be but only a glimpse of Alaska in its challenges and expectations. In Mailer’s sensibility, Alaska meant unpredictable plus extraordinary, equaling ''existential''. But even a worldly wise Mailer, in five days, could only sample and speculate. Mailer, concluded, for example, that Alaska had the “best air” in America, and this was true most of the time.

Mailer had never experienced Alaska’s ice fog. Such dread winters are unknown in the Lower 48 because ice fog can only form if the temperature remains, for about a week, at or lower than -40°. Such a fog affects Fairbanks about two or three weeks each winter. The longer the -40°, the more massive the fog. Soon, above Alaska’s second-largest city, a cloud would form, filled with carbon monoxide. This, in turn, was caused by an overabundance of autos on Fairbanks’s streets, coughing out warm sooty exhaust fumes quickly freezing into ice crystals. Thus, at ground zero, walking or driving, whether emergency or derring-do, amid all this pea soup toxic fog reminded one of being on an urbanized Moon or Mars.

Mailer had never experienced any of this, and it was America’s worst air. Yet Mailer hinted, during the debate, of such adverse local color as ice fog: “You’re not like other states. You don’t have the same psychological security that the other states have. You’re up here alone and cut off from the rest of your identity and because of this you have to learn to live without security.” With such insight into the exceptional nature of Alaska, Mailer had acutely sensed what Alaskans call Storm Fear—or what Mailer might have called “Existential Mother Nature.”

Nature in Alaska could be picturesque, mellow, sublime, or just plain deadly. Bush pilots, highly skilled and familiar with jagged mountain wind patterns, sometimes just disappeared. Fairbanks’s finest pilot, Don Jonz, my neighbor and friend took off on a highly publicized political junket, with special passenger Louisiana’s Congressman Boggs plus some Alaskan politicians and the plane disappeared. Machine and passengers remain unaccounted for to this day. Mailer was astounded on seeing so many privately owned aircraft, parked in long rows. Alaskans call such planes Alaskan taxicabs.

Mailer, in the Ellison debate, was remarkably prophetic when he warned
the Fairbanks audience: “You could become the very worst; a big Las Vegas
at sixty below. There’s already a priggishness alive in this state, people greedy
to get all the plastic buildings up here just as fast as they can.” If, at the
moment, I could have foreseen Fairbanks’s near future, I would have jotted
and underlined: ''Prudhoe Greed Invasion''.

As for Mailer’s ultimate 1965 Alaskan Mystery—either the “best” or the
“worst” state, I can only add a few more words. No doubt there are still small
pockets of individualized common sense, perhaps, some evolutionary mode
of Mailer’s “existential minority.” Otherwise, 1965 Fairbanks is dead and
gone.

What remains of the ultimate Mailer American Mystery? I cannot imagine Alaska ever becoming the “worst” state without Mother Nature’s full
cooperation. As for Alaska being the “best,” I can only echo the lament:
“Such hope is ‘all over’ up here.” But I’m glad that Norman Mailer experienced five of its last glory days.

What remains to be told of “Mailer in Alaska” is my own memory high spot—and perhaps also was Mailer’s. This experience was truly an epiphany. It occurred above Mount McKinley, at 20,300 feet the highest point in
North America. On the Mailer itinerary, this epiphany was the first of two,
the latter being the mock fisticuffs during the farewell bash, in the snowy
outdoors, where Mailer neutralized a violently drunk attorney, perhaps with
an Arctic display of Papa Hemingway’s “grace under pressure.” I mention
this because I sensed that “Papa’s spirit” joined Mailer’s “big eyes” over
Mount Denali, the Alaskan Native name for Mount McKinley. This epiphany was purely literary.

It was Mailer’s idea, in mid-flight from Anchorage to Fairbanks, not to
bypass, but to say hello to the Big One: Mount Denali. A “hello” from Norman Mailer meant “buzzing the mountain’s top.” When Mailer asked that
this be done, Barney Gottstein’s pilot immediately turned and nodded yes to
Alaska’s guest of honor.

Up to that moment, the pilot’s four passengers were in various degrees of
wakefulness. The seating arrangement was: pilot up front, behind him on the
left sat Skellings, behind him, Mailer; and on the right, across from Skellings, I sat and, behind me, sat Tom Bischel, the millionaire hitchhiker. My vantage point was perfect. I had Mailer in full view all the time. Skellings and
I were dead tired from day and night Anchorage revelry. But Mailer, alone,
seemed primed. The pilot announced that buzzing that high required “sucking oxygen” (mouth-inhalers in small containers). Anyone familiar with the
1960s drug culture knew that this meant “getting high.”

Then, another significant Mailer observation. He put on eyeglasses. A
Provincetown legend held that Mailer was vain about his imperfect vision
and that eyeglasses equaled unmanly or, as a takeoff on the (“don’t dance”)
title of Mailer’s later (1984) novel, ''Tough Guys Don’t Wear Glasses''. And, so the
legend went, when Norman Mailer puts on his spectacles, he is expecting
nothing less than an epiphany.

For twenty long minutes, Barney’s pilot made low passes around the peak
or higher, and with each pass, buzz, or mind-skimming of Denali’s top, I
looked down and wondered what Mailer was imagining or seeing, as he
sucked oxygen with an extra pair of eyes.

During that twenty-minute hello to Denali, I could not foresee Mailer’s
next novel, ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' (1967), oddly entitled because the word
“Vietnam” appears but once—in the book’s final phrase, “Vietnam, hot
dam.” Most of the novel’s “hot dams” took place in Alaska and mostly in
remote, stark wilderness—the Brooks Range.

There, reincarnations of “Big Oil” and “Big Greed” in the guise of yahoo
Texan hunters (with a zero hunter’s code) visited the Arctic for hi-tech
slaughter of the wildlife. With such “messy” tactics, someone like Papa Hemingway would have “offed” those Texans. Mailer, instead, used literary
ammunition—a novel, a pop culture acerbic comedy of Arctic wilderness
being despoiled by the mechanistic arts of a so-called American Civilization gone berserk.

Above Denali, with Mailer just an arm’s length away, I lost myself in
simultaneous images of Papa Hemingway peering down on Kilimanjaro, seeing a frozen leopard, and Mailer (on Alaskan oxygen plus magic) peering
down on Denali, seeing (and believing) what? “Would there have been a
Mailer Vietnam novel without us being here?”

Such literary fancy has an afterlife. My belief that twenty minutes over
Denali was the genesis of Mailer’s Vietnam novel causes me to wonder how
Stephen Rojack, the protagonist-narrator of ''An American Dream'' (1965)
would have behaved had Mailer created him after—and not before—his
five-day Alaskan visit.

There are ample literary cues. The somewhat tight time line between
the writing and publishing of two key novels (''An American Dream'' and
''Why are We in Vietnam?'') and, at approximate mid-point, the Alaskan
visit. There was also an autobiographical linkage. Rojack, of all the protagonists, remains the most “authorial self,” in J. Michael Lennon’s
phrase. Lennon also refers to Rojack as “Mailer’s fictional cousin”. {{sfn|Lennon|1986|p=9}}
Rojack, pointedly, is Lower 48–rooted, a professor of existential psychology, with a fondness for magic, not Alaska styled. However, with a
five-day booster shot of Alaskan magic inside Mailer the Creator, how
would Rojack have acted and ended? I leave the “acts” for future Mailer
scholars.

As for an Alaska-inspired ending of Mailer’s ''An American Dream'', a “new”
Rojack must have a new “post-climax”—or call it epilogue. Let him redo the
Vegas exit. Keep the surreal desert phone booth. But before he dials, imagine that he knows what his fictional cousin now knows—that wilderness cities may come and go, but there’s always authentic wilderness up north in the
Brooks Range.

Rojack’s departure time is now, not tomorrow, but his destination is not
foreign jungles but deep inside America, and this time he’s not speechless
when he phones some “wilderness city,” somewhere, to say Hi to Cherry and Marilyn, before exiting due north, direct, to the Brooks Range to say hello
and press the flesh with God.

===Three Postscripts===
# Soon after Mailer’s departure, Anne Barry, his former office assistant (now freelancing for ''Esquire'') was assigned to cover Alaska. Mailer phoned Skellings and me and said: “Show Anne around.” This we did, showing her all the high spots, some still alive with the Mailer scent. Anne Barry was enthralled with Alaska. She, surprisingly, said that she might decide to permanently live up here. She never did nor did Mailer ever come back for a follow-up visit.
# ''Time'' magazine, shortly thereafter, decided to do a special Mailer front cover issue. A ''Time'' staff writer was to assigned to wine and dine Skellings and me. We provided photo-ops, interviews, and local color comments. We were ecstatic. (Imagine being in such a prestigious American magazine.) ''Time'' then soon reported that the Mailer cover issue was put on hold. Much later, I was told that Mailer refused all cooperation and ''Time'' subsequently killed the project.
# House Speaker Mike Gravel went on to serve two terms (1969–1981) as Alaska’s Senator. Most recently (2008) Gravel was a Democratic Party candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

=== Citations ===
{{Reflist}}

=== Work Cited ===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes}}
* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=1986 |title=Critical Essays on Norman Mailer |location=Boston |publisher=G. K. Hall |pages=9 |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Norman Mailer in "God's Attic"}}
[[Category:V.2 2008]]
[[Category:Articles]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer in “God’s Attic”

2020-09-28T23:54:48Z

KJordan:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR02}}
{{byline|last=Kaufmann|first=Donald L.|abstract=An eyewitness to Norman Mailer’s five-day visit to Alaska in 1965 chronicles
the details of the only visit Mailer made to Alaska.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08kauf}}

{{dc|dc=T|he post-climax of Norman Mailer’s ''An American Dream''}} (1965) features
Stephen Rojack (some might say the author’s virtual alter ego) in the desert,
outside Vegas, in a surreal phone booth, ideal for a celestial call to his dead
lover, Cherry, now with Marilyn Monroe. But Rojack, uncharacteristically,
remains speechless, hangs up the phone, and makes no phone call the next
morning because this Mailer protagonist was “something like sane again.”
Moreover, he is headed due south to the jungles of Guatemala and Yucatan.
The starting point for such a seminal exit from America is the Vegas desert,
just a casino chip’s throw from America’s real nadir point, Death Valley.

There was nothing Arctic about Mailer’s 1965 novel, or was there?

This Maileresque literary fallout was conceived before Mailer’s flash, five-day visit to Alaska in April 1965. Imagine a literary mind experiencing such a one-man, in-house American culture shock from hot sandy Nevada to the 49th state the size of Texas, California and Montana combined, including three million lakes. And a coastline double the size of all the Lower 48 states. Alaska also boasts of its one glacier—the size of Holland—and its outdoor adventures with animals far outnumbering humans, a mere 300,000 plus, the population of a single mid-sized Lower 48 city. Alaska, indeed, is a huge hunk of wild Americana.

Mailer, Brooklyn bred, literary celebrity, seasoned traveler, and existential doer, was interviewed in London about his Alaska Odyssey two weeks after his Arctic visit. Mailer said: “There are one or two places a man can visit
in his lifetime that affect him as an existential experience. Alaska was one of
those places for me.”

I had yet to ask Mailer, “Where’s the other place?” I had my opportunities. I might have been the first to ask because I witnessed Mailer’s Day Two
in Anchorage, and his three-day ''finale'' in Fairbanks. There, at the State University of Alaska, I was an assistant professor in the English Department,
teaching while turning a Mailer dissertation into a Mailer book. I was there,
live. I was also one of the few who were “hip” to the Alaskan academic magic
that prompted (virtually tricked) a reluctant Mailer to visit Alaska.

Edmund Skellings (later to become a Messiah of high tech art, a.k.a. the
“Electric Poet”) was my best friend and fellow PhD candidate at the State
University of Iowa. There, Ed and I first met the Norman Mailer.

''Esquire'' (the home magazine of Mailer’s eight-part serialization [Jan–Aug
1964] of ''An American Dream'') had sponsored a college road show, “Symposium for Writers,” a panel that included Mailer, Mark Harris, Dwight Macdonald, and others. During its Iowa City stopover, and after the panel
presentation, Ed and I pressed the flesh with Mailer—who responded with
warm wit and a promise to keep this mellow threesome mood going that
night at the party at Donald Justice’s home.

I arrived a bit late at the poet’s house. Don Justice told me that Mailer and
Mark Harris had shouted and wrestled and that Mailer, in a huff, had exited
the party with Ed Skellings—seemingly gone for good.

The next morning Ed had news. He and Mailer had hit it off. After verbal sparring and some marijuana, Mailer was exposed to what he later, smilingly, called: “Skelling’s formidable breeziness,” and at its inception, instant
friendship. Skellings added that Mailer was not his but “our” friend.

Ed graduated from Iowa and stationed himself in a lively English Department at Fairbanks, about 140 miles south of the Arctic Circle. I had remained
in Iowa City to finish up my last year in the doctorate program when, suddenly, I received this message: “Come north, Good Buddy, and share in my
high professorial adventures.” Ed really tempted me when he flew to New
York and fell flush into one of those famous Norman Mailer Brooklyn
Heights parties. At one of them, this conversation took place:

“Norman,” Skellings said, “you’re going to Alaska.”

Mailer replied, “The hell I am.”

Those in the Mailer inner circle then, as always, said, “No one tells Norman Mailer what to do.” I got the Iowa City jitters. How formidable could
a best friend be? Upon graduation, I joined Ed in Fairbanks, September 1964.

What an operatic happening it was when two former Massachusetts high school friends reunited in Alaska, Ed Skellings and Mike Gravel. How fortuitous. Gravel, a liberal Democrat, was the Speaker of the Alaskan Lower House and, except for the governor, was the most powerful politician in Alaska. Gravel was on the lookout for likely staffers and bumped into (supposedly) two word-rich academics. Immediately, Mike, Ed, and I became friends.

Our University English Department was well funded. We were told:
“Bring up that Norman Mailer and Ralph Ellison to celebrate our next early
snowy spring.”

How could Mailer snub such a bountiful invitation? He almost did.
He responded with three “existential stipulations.”

(Late 1964 was the onset of Mailer’s more distinct political phase. There
was the earlier [1963] ''The Presidential Papers''. ''Esquire'' [November 1964] published ''In the Red Light: A History of the Republican Convention''; then the celebrated ''The Armies of the Night'' [1968], culminating in the 1969 Mailer-Breslin ticket in the Democrat Primary for the New York City Mayoralty.)

When the Alaskan offer arrived, Mailer was probably in a high-risk political existential mood. Hence, three stipulations. His counteroffer: “Do the
undoable, or else!” Mailer would visit Alaska only if:

# He must be greeted at the Juneau Airport by the governor;
# He must be escorted to the state capitol building and be permitted to address both Houses in session (a real political challenge);
# He must be allowed to attend a Democratic Party caucus meeting.

All these “musts” sounded to Ed and me like a Maileresque “Catch-22.” These
details were sent to us by Mailer saying, in essence, that he had vetoed the
visit and was having ''realpolitik'' fun.

How was Mailer expected to fully comprehend our Mike Gravel “connection”?

Try to imagine Mailer’s surprise when, on February 6, 1965, Governor
William Egan wrote to him:

<blockquote>I am sure that your visit to the University of Alaska in Fairbanks as a lecturer during the 1965 Festival of Arts will benefit the University and the State. May I invite you to be my guest for a day in Juneau prior to your appearance in Fairbanks? We look forward to your stay with us.</blockquote>

In ''The Presidential Papers'', Mailer defined politics as “the art of the possible.” Mike Gravel, indeed, was Alaska’s supreme artist.

Skellings immediately wrote to Mailer that Mike Gravel, Speaker of the
Alaska House, would take care of all his arrangements in Juneau and
Anchorage before Mailer came to Fairbanks. Skellings wrote: “I imagine you
should arrive Juneau on April 1 for the day with the Governor and Demo
party caucusing on the second. Anchorage on the third. Then here for lecture with Ellison.”

I did not witness, firsthand, Mailer’s initial ground-time in Alaska, but
Mike Gravel did. On the next day in Anchorage, where Ed and I were still
preparing for Day Two’s festivities, Mike told me that he and Bill Egan had
greeted Mailer at the Juneau Airport and that Mailer was escorted on a comprehensive tour of the capital, climaxed with more than polite applause when the state’s guest of honor appeared at a joint session of both Houses of
the Alaskan State Legislature: There was thunderous applause before and
after Mailer’s undoubtedly tasty and serendipitous remarks. The finale
included Mailer attending a meeting of the Democrat Party Caucus (a non-member was usually considered unimportant) which, undoubtedly, made Mailer feel like a real politician.

The happy endings of those three stipulations continued on into that evening at the governor’s home, where Mr. and Mrs. Egan hosted an unpretentious dinner, which Mailer described as “pleasant.” House Speaker Gravel did
not have to say that Mailer’s Juneau stopover was both political and peaceful.

Anchorage, the next stop, was no Juneau (the latter, tiny, inaccessible by
road, a political microcosm and little else). Anchorage was Alaska’s largest
city and cosmopolitan center. There, in a flight from Juneau, Gravel and
Mailer landed at what was also the Speaker’s home city, which Mailer, after
one fulsome day, would later in Fairbanks label Anchorage as “Little Las
Vegas.”

Mailer was not a one-night tourist. On the contrary, he was an in-depth
observer and, in retrospect, I sensed what Mailer would soon perceive: just
ignore those majestic seas and mountains and you could imagine yourself
being in any small city in Nevada or Montana. Fairbanks, a real wilderness
city, awaited Mailer, reputedly the leading urban American exponent of the
German psychologist and existentialist philosopher, Karl Jaspers (1883–1969).
High risk behavior with a dash of violence was Mailer’s literary reputation.
Anchorage and Fairbanks awaited.

Anchorage offered little time for unscripted events. Norman, Ed, and I
took a few catnaps and slept over at the spacious home of Tom Bischel, a
Gravel friend, influential businessman, and maestro of the Mailer visit.
Gravel, however, was the official Anchorage host. He and Bischel asked
Mailer about his urban wants and places he wanted to visit. Mailer was
mindful of his notoriety, spawned by his violence-prone essay, “The White
Negro,” and the live Black Power racial violence swirling in the Lower 48.
Ralph Ellison, author of ''Invisible Man'', was going to debate this upstart
“White Negro” in Fairbanks. Mailer’s one-day preoccupation was with
minorities. We did some brief sightseeing, but mostly short stops in black
neighborhoods where Mailer met with local residents and politicians. In
mid-afternoon, we rushed to an Anchorage TV station for a scheduled videotaping of a Mailer-Gravel-Skellings-Kaufmann panel discussion for a statewide audience. The next stop was a media-inspired Mailer farewell.

Anchorage’s Western Hotel was the site for a well-advertised, open door
reception or “Come Meet Controversial Norman Mailer.” The most civilized segment of the Alaskan populace was about to press the flesh with America’s most reputed belligerent literary celebrity, off and on the page. I was the official host. I was positioned at the entrance to greet the friendly and the curious. They glared and spoke the same tongue.

“Where’s that tough guy?”

“Where’s that wife-knifer?”

Just then, the vast reception room became surreal. I made the rounds for
a few hours, keeping my eyes on the crowd. Each time Mailer was accosted,
he remained gentlemanly and conciliatory. Then, suddenly, Mailer was out
of the circle and into a ring, involved in a crazy sort of fisticuffs, mostly
lunges and misses, but uniformed security made instant peace, and Mailer
swaggered back into his inner circle, with an Irish smile and a fresh drink.

By the end, I was a mixture of alcohol and fatigue, but I could decipher
Gravel’s and Bischel’s smiles. Tonight had been an unforgettable success. A
nightcap celebration was in order. Why not duplicate our daytime travels, the
canvas of black precincts, with a midnight session at Anchorage’s prize black
nightclub?

I vaguely recall dim lights and faces, and piping-hot Soul music and a full rocking dance floor and I think I sat at a big table, full of converging “I-know-Norman-faces.” All was a murky mood. Then I saw the rarest of sights. I nudged Ed Skellings and said, “Look, Norman Mailer is dancing.”

His partner was a woman much taller and more rubbery. As for her partner, was he boxing or dancing? Mailer, the music notwithstanding, was doing a crouch; his feet doing gymnasium shuffles; his arms extended at eye-level, and his ungloved fists jabbing (rat-a-tat-tat) the air. I said to myself: “Norman Mailer, the worst dancer in this room, if he stayed on that dance floor long enough would invent a New American Dance.” The rest of the night was a blur.

Early in the morning after the Anchorage reception, four passengers
(Mailer, Bischel, a hitchhiker, Skellings, and Kaufmann) were picked up for a private and direct flight into the heart of interior Alaska and what remained of the American Frontier. Barney Gottstein, another Anchorage tycoon and Gravel friend, provided his private Beechcraft Baron and a pilot.

Mailer’s fact-finding quest turned more existential and mystical in Fairbanks. Gone was picturesque and politicized Juneau and would-be urbanized Anchorage. Fairbanks was an oxymoronic microcosm, a “Wilderness City.”

Imagine brand-new real estate next to log cabins, swank motels (two) next to Eskimo strip-joints, a musk ox farm next to a state university, and, the civic eyesore—a mammoth suburban junkyard. And those downtown streets, frequented in summer by overfed tourists and, in winter, by underfed dog packs. A Fairbanks illustrated “city directory” could have been a best seller. Mailer, in three mere days, could not experience all this aberrant
Americana. However, he sensed it.

On the April 4 arrival, Mother Nature had her own welcome mat. Mailer got off Barney Gottstein’s plane and stepped onto snow, compact winter permanent, snow. Spring in Fairbanks happens when the ice-locked Chena and Tanana rivers break and the skies above Creamer Field darken with southern birds. Mailer also experienced more culture shock. That’s what usually happens when a newcomer first breathes in Fairbanks’s super-clean air. Mailer remarked about enhanced visibility. He was ecstatic. “I can’t even breathe in Brooklyn,” he said.

With renewed lungs, eyes, and an aired-out brain, Mailer introduced himself to this wilderness city. He was a quick study and I surmised that he was initially on the prowl for more data and lore concerning minorities, priming himself for the main event—the Ellison Debate.

Mailer’s Alaskan fascination also included Fairbanks’s more mundane aspects. It was Alaska’s second-largest city (population about 35,000), called the “Chicago of Alaska,” being the goods-and-services supply hub for the vast upper two-thirds of the entire state. Fairbanks was also the Interior’s media and military capital. Of all fifty states, during our Vietnam controversy, Alaska sported the highest “hawkish” mind-set because the Vietnam War was viewed as a pursuit of common sense. Win or leave. Fairbanks also served as the entertainment center for soldiers and civilians alike. From outlying Interior bases, military personnel would converge on Alaska’s “Sin City,” joining up with local hedonists, losing themselves in the too-good-to-be-true Wild West.

Clearly, this city was ripe for a Norman Mailer visit. Mailer led the way with a flexible agenda: (1) literary work and play plus good booze and conviviality; (2) Big speech and debate; (3) A farewell bash.

Activities were carefully planned and time was devoted to the Alaskan Writer’s Workshop. Mailer visited the campus and spent hours counseling and critiquing student writers with wisdom and wit.

Mailer’s prime focus was minorities, yet Fairbanks had no black unrest, no black precincts, nary a black presence, except at Wainwright and Eielson. The city’s only sizeable black presence was military, not residential.

Fairbanks may strike some visitors as alien or weird, but not newcomer Mailer, who seemed instantly homegrown. Tommy’s Elbow Room, a stellar downtown pleasure center, famed for its giant live fireplace and its livelier cocktails and music, where artsy revelers congregated, was ideal turf for an inquisitive and philosophical writer. Mailer was at his best. It was the same for his encore at the International Hotel & Bar, which offered a galaxy of foreign brews, a lure for the connoisseur suds-tippler.

Alcohol use in Fairbanks was a way of life, like eating and breathing—a daily ritual. Mailer, drink in hand, heard “timber” instead of “cheers.” A local legend, Big Bill King, lavish spender, had spoken to the patrons of the bar. Everyone within earshot received, gratis, a refill. Yelling “timber” meant buying the house. Mailer, along with a newly arrived drink, pressed the flesh with the Mysterious Spender. (No one knew “Big Bill’s” money source or motivation.) Mailer was then introduced to barroom poker-dice, a throwback to pre-statehood gambling. Almost every place that sold liquor over the bar offered the buyer a choice of payment: cash or poker-dice with the barkeep— essentially double-or-nothing. Mailer must have concluded that drinking in Alaska was an art and, like politics, the art of the possible. Mailer remained, drink after drink, the existential visitor, welcoming the unpredictable.

The main event of Mailer’s visit to Alaska was the debate with Ellison. Ironically, no real or formal debate ensued. The term “debate” was mere advertisement for the University of Alaska’s Spring Festival of Arts. Instead of a boxing ring, two celebrity authors shared the same podium. The joint topic for these prominent writers was billed as “Conflicts in Culture.” Yet there was minimal conflict. Ellison, as expected, remained the gentlemanly
academic author. Mailer, full of Alaskan magic, was quite mellow. The audience of eighteen hundred enthusiasts was in a good mood.

I was there and I introduced Mailer.

Mailer and Ellison each spoke for about thirty minutes, followed by moderate rebuttals, subsequently followed by a question and answer session. Mailer became author-prophet. In his Arctic odyssey, he had discovered a medicine for a cancerous “other” America. He had arrived with existential minorities on his mind and in search of a possible cultural template. Tonight, Mailer had come to predict and to warn: “In the future, Alaska could become the very best or the very worst of states.” After my introduction, I heard Mailer say: “God’s attic holds the message.” And then he made the following statements:

<blockquote>All the messages of North America go up to the Brooks Range. That land above the circle, man, is the land of icy wilderness and the lost peaks and the unseen deeps and spires, the crystal receiver of the continent.
{{* * *}}
The extraordinary aspect of the Alaskan psyche is that the future of this state is totally unknown. But it is an unknown in extremes, for the end result will be one of two opposites, the best or the worst.
{{* * *}}
You could become the psychic leader of America, revitalizing all the dead circuits and dead fuses. It is a responsibility Alaskans should face up to.</blockquote>

Mailer then shifted to “Existential Minorities,” an original offshoot of his “The White Negro,” and racial strife in that “other” America:

<blockquote>A minority group is caught between two basic conflicts of culture. This conflict has meaning and takes substance only within the minority group, of course, and perhaps you could say that one culture exists within the other culture, creating the conflict.
{{* * *}}
I am a one-man minority group. I have to contend with two opposing forces, two cultures. In a minority group we have a life psychology built upon two rocks sometimes dangerously far apart.
{{* * *}}
We’re forced to go through life with a psychology profoundly different from most people—a very divided existential psychology.
{{* * *}}
To balance the conflict, we consider ourselves in two different ways, as superior or inferior, and this can be a conflict within itself.
{{* * *}}
When you’re within a minority group, your ego is always on edge—always on an elevator going up or down. When you walk along the street the people you meet and see, depending on who they are, cause your ego to rise or fall and splinter in different ways. It’s up and down all the time, and never stable.
{{* * *}}
According to this notion, everyone in Alaska can be said to be a member of a minority group. This state has more of a divided sense of itself than any state I’ve ever been in. Alaskans have sort of a vast, group inferiority complex, feeling themselves backward and behind the cultural development of other states. Yet, at the same time Alaskans are intensely proud. There are people willing to die for this state.
{{* * *}}
And so, as a minority group, you spend your life constantly redefining your role within the dominating group.</blockquote>

Mailer deftly linked the Two Americas and Alaska’s “divided sense” to similar split- personality situations in rural Lower 48 towns: “In one sense, you feel inferior, and think of yourselves as hicks. You feel a lack of security as inferiors to the big-city sophisticates. Yet, in the other sense, you feel yourself as the “best goddam-people-in-America.” Such was the crux or soul of the Mailer message. I could well imagine the Alaskan psyches a-buzz with becoming either the “very best” or the “very worst.” As for Mailer, there was but one “final adventure.”

Yes, with Norman Mailer surprises never end. The farewell bash provided the setting for the second Maileresque self-defined moment. The bash itself was anti-climatic. All the “right sorts” appeared: Our mayor (a one-time barber), other community notables, and university people, president included. Even the radical faculty from outlying Dogpatch dropped in.

Expectations were in the air. Ellison, as ever low-keyed and dapper, kept spellbinding his fans. The other guest of honor—as usual, stage center, Irish glint, American drink, pleasantly besieged by well-wishers, and sounding Brooklyn Heights and Provincetown gone native. The bash seemed destined for a peaceable, perhaps merry conclusion.

Earlier, before the bash, there was a commotion outside, an iota of Anchorage violence Mother Nature flashed on cue. Aurora borealis swirled above snow—not too slippery, just right—for fisticuffs. The scene was set for a bout of city wilderness-violence.

Mailer, upon arrival was accosted by an uninvited, downtown attorney, a reputed drunk (once drunk, he became belligerent to everybody). I was left outdoors to defuse this altercation and get Mailer inside, safely into the welcoming arena. What ensued was serio-comedy at the very least. Two mock pugilists were doing a crouch-and-shuffle (shades of an Anchorage dance floor). The inebriated attorney was the aggressor, mouthing words worthy of a roughhouse saloon. Mailer, barely tipsy, responded with alternate growls and purrs, uncharacteristically tentative, hit-or-stop.

What was I to do? I was an impromptu referee for a phantom fight but, each time I tried to be a third party, Mailer shot me a “get lost” look. For one long twenty minutes these two Arctic sluggers kept it peaceful with their shadow-boxing, body-talking. Mailer then said “Some other time.” The attorney said, “No, now, now!”

A drunk is a drunk but Mailer is barely tipsy. Was this encounter just another chapter of the Mailer/Hemingway code—grace under pressure? Drunkenness, however, proved decisive. The attorney slipped and fell, Mailer helped him to his feet, and the attorney said: “O.K. Some other time. Tomorrow, 10 a.m. sharp. At downtown’s Stan’s Cafe.”

Mailer didn’t even blink. The attorney drifted off and I spirited Mailer inside.

In the midst of a busy farewell morning, Mailer took time out to show up at Stan’s Cafe at 10 a.m. sharp, and waited a full twenty minutes. The attorney was a no-show, probably asleep and finally sober. At 10:20 a.m. sharp, no one could read Norman Mailer’s mind. I did not witness this. Norman told me this later on. I can only add—who else but Norman Mailer, under the same circumstances, would have showed up at Stan’s Cafe?

I now turn to afterthoughts about our 49th State and its 1965 essence. Any mere five-day visit can be but only a glimpse of Alaska in its challenges and expectations. In Mailer’s sensibility, Alaska meant unpredictable plus extraordinary, equaling ''existential''. But even a worldly wise Mailer, in five days, could only sample and speculate. Mailer, concluded, for example, that Alaska had the “best air” in America, and this was true most of the time.

Mailer had never experienced Alaska’s ice fog. Such dread winters are unknown in the Lower 48 because ice fog can only form if the temperature remains, for about a week, at or lower than -40°. Such a fog affects Fairbanks about two or three weeks each winter. The longer the -40°, the more massive the fog. Soon, above Alaska’s second-largest city, a cloud would form, filled with carbon monoxide. This, in turn, was caused by an overabundance of autos on Fairbanks’s streets, coughing out warm sooty exhaust fumes quickly freezing into ice crystals. Thus, at ground zero, walking or driving, whether emergency or derring-do, amid all this pea soup toxic fog reminded one of being on an urbanized Moon or Mars.

Mailer had never experienced any of this, and it was America’s worst air. Yet Mailer hinted, during the debate, of such adverse local color as ice fog: “You’re not like other states. You don’t have the same psychological security that the other states have. You’re up here alone and cut off from the rest of your identity and because of this you have to learn to live without security.” With such insight into the exceptional nature of Alaska, Mailer had acutely sensed what Alaskans call Storm Fear—or what Mailer might have called “Existential Mother Nature.”

Nature in Alaska could be picturesque, mellow, sublime, or just plain deadly. Bush pilots, highly skilled and familiar with jagged mountain wind patterns, sometimes just disappeared. Fairbanks’s finest pilot, Don Jonz, my neighbor and friend took off on a highly publicized political junket, with special passenger Louisiana’s Congressman Boggs plus some Alaskan politicians and the plane disappeared. Machine and passengers remain unaccounted for to this day. Mailer was astounded on seeing so many privately owned aircraft, parked in long rows. Alaskans call such planes Alaskan taxicabs.

Mailer, in the Ellison debate, was remarkably prophetic when he warned
the Fairbanks audience: “You could become the very worst; a big Las Vegas
at sixty below. There’s already a priggishness alive in this state, people greedy
to get all the plastic buildings up here just as fast as they can.” If, at the
moment, I could have foreseen Fairbanks’s near future, I would have jotted
and underlined: ''Prudhoe Greed Invasion''.

As for Mailer’s ultimate 1965 Alaskan Mystery—either the “best” or the
“worst” state, I can only add a few more words. No doubt there are still small
pockets of individualized common sense, perhaps, some evolutionary mode
of Mailer’s “existential minority.” Otherwise, 1965 Fairbanks is dead and
gone.

What remains of the ultimate Mailer American Mystery? I cannot imagine Alaska ever becoming the “worst” state without Mother Nature’s full
cooperation. As for Alaska being the “best,” I can only echo the lament:
“Such hope is ‘all over’ up here.” But I’m glad that Norman Mailer experienced five of its last glory days.

What remains to be told of “Mailer in Alaska” is my own memory high
spot—and perhaps also was Mailer’s. This experience was truly an epiphany. It occurred above Mount McKinley, at 20,300 feet the highest point in
North America. On the Mailer itinerary, this epiphany was the first of two,
the latter being the mock fisticuffs during the farewell bash, in the snowy
outdoors, where Mailer neutralized a violently drunk attorney, perhaps with
an Arctic display of Papa Hemingway’s “grace under pressure.” I mention
this because I sensed that “Papa’s spirit” joined Mailer’s “big eyes” over
Mount Denali, the Alaskan Native name for Mount McKinley. This epiphany was purely literary.

It was Mailer’s idea, in mid-flight from Anchorage to Fairbanks, not to
bypass, but to say hello to the Big One: Mount Denali. A “hello” from Norman Mailer meant “buzzing the mountain’s top.” When Mailer asked that
this be done, Barney Gottstein’s pilot immediately turned and nodded yes to
Alaska’s guest of honor.

Up to that moment, the pilot’s four passengers were in various degrees of
wakefulness. The seating arrangement was: pilot up front, behind him on the
left sat Skellings, behind him, Mailer; and on the right, across from Skellings, I sat and, behind me, sat Tom Bischel, the millionaire hitchhiker. My vantage point was perfect. I had Mailer in full view all the time. Skellings and
I were dead tired from day and night Anchorage revelry. But Mailer, alone,
seemed primed. The pilot announced that buzzing that high required “sucking oxygen” (mouth-inhalers in small containers). Anyone familiar with the
1960s drug culture knew that this meant “getting high.”

Then, another significant Mailer observation. He put on eyeglasses. A
Provincetown legend held that Mailer was vain about his imperfect vision
and that eyeglasses equaled unmanly or, as a takeoff on the (“don’t dance”)
title of Mailer’s later (1984) novel, ''Tough Guys Don’t Wear Glasses''. And, so the
legend went, when Norman Mailer puts on his spectacles, he is expecting
nothing less than an epiphany.

For twenty long minutes, Barney’s pilot made low passes around the peak
or higher, and with each pass, buzz, or mind-skimming of Denali’s top, I
looked down and wondered what Mailer was imagining or seeing, as he
sucked oxygen with an extra pair of eyes.

During that twenty-minute hello to Denali, I could not foresee Mailer’s
next novel, ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' (1967), oddly entitled because the word
“Vietnam” appears but once—in the book’s final phrase, “Vietnam, hot
dam.” Most of the novel’s “hot dams” took place in Alaska and mostly in
remote, stark wilderness—the Brooks Range.

There, reincarnations of “Big Oil” and “Big Greed” in the guise of yahoo
Texan hunters (with a zero hunter’s code) visited the Arctic for hi-tech
slaughter of the wildlife. With such “messy” tactics, someone like Papa Hemingway would have “offed” those Texans. Mailer, instead, used literary
ammunition—a novel, a pop culture acerbic comedy of Arctic wilderness
being despoiled by the mechanistic arts of a so-called American Civilization gone berserk.

Above Denali, with Mailer just an arm’s length away, I lost myself in
simultaneous images of Papa Hemingway peering down on Kilimanjaro, seeing a frozen leopard, and Mailer (on Alaskan oxygen plus magic) peering
down on Denali, seeing (and believing) what? “Would there have been a
Mailer Vietnam novel without us being here?”

Such literary fancy has an afterlife. My belief that twenty minutes over
Denali was the genesis of Mailer’s Vietnam novel causes me to wonder how
Stephen Rojack, the protagonist-narrator of ''An American Dream'' (1965)
would have behaved had Mailer created him after—and not before—his
five-day Alaskan visit.

There are ample literary cues. The somewhat tight time line between
the writing and publishing of two key novels (''An American Dream'' and
''Why are We in Vietnam?'') and, at approximate mid-point, the Alaskan
visit. There was also an autobiographical linkage. Rojack, of all the protagonists, remains the most “authorial self,” in J. Michael Lennon’s
phrase. Lennon also refers to Rojack as “Mailer’s fictional cousin”. {{sfn|Lennon|1986|p=9}}
Rojack, pointedly, is Lower 48–rooted, a professor of existential psychology, with a fondness for magic, not Alaska styled. However, with a
five-day booster shot of Alaskan magic inside Mailer the Creator, how
would Rojack have acted and ended? I leave the “acts” for future Mailer
scholars.

As for an Alaska-inspired ending of Mailer’s ''An American Dream'', a “new”
Rojack must have a new “post-climax”—or call it epilogue. Let him redo the
Vegas exit. Keep the surreal desert phone booth. But before he dials, imagine that he knows what his fictional cousin now knows—that wilderness cities may come and go, but there’s always authentic wilderness up north in the
Brooks Range.

Rojack’s departure time is now, not tomorrow, but his destination is not
foreign jungles but deep inside America, and this time he’s not speechless
when he phones some “wilderness city,” somewhere, to say Hi to Cherry and Marilyn, before exiting due north, direct, to the Brooks Range to say hello
and press the flesh with God.

===Three Postscripts===
# Soon after Mailer’s departure, Anne Barry, his former office assistant (now freelancing for ''Esquire'') was assigned to cover Alaska. Mailer phoned Skellings and me and said: “Show Anne around.” This we did, showing her all the high spots, some still alive with the Mailer scent. Anne Barry was enthralled with Alaska. She, surprisingly, said that she might decide to permanently live up here. She never did nor did Mailer ever come back for a follow-up visit.
# ''Time'' magazine, shortly thereafter, decided to do a special Mailer front cover issue. A ''Time'' staff writer was to assigned to wine and dine Skellings and me. We provided photo-ops, interviews, and local color comments. We were ecstatic. (Imagine being in such a prestigious American magazine.) ''Time'' then soon reported that the Mailer cover issue was put on hold. Much later, I was told that Mailer refused all cooperation and ''Time'' subsequently killed the project.
# House Speaker Mike Gravel went on to serve two terms (1969–1981) as Alaska’s Senator. Most recently (2008) Gravel was a Democratic Party candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

=== Citations ===
{{Reflist}}

=== Work Cited ===
{{Refbegin|indent=yes}}
* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=1986 |title=Critical Essays on Norman Mailer |location=Boston |publisher=G. K. Hall |pages=9 |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}
{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Norman Mailer in "God's Attic"}}
[[Category:V.2 2008]]
[[Category:Articles]]

User talk:Grlucas

2020-09-23T00:13:14Z

KJordan: /* Final edits */

{{Talk header}}

== Article Errors ==

I've added the body of the article to my sandbox page. What errors do I need to specifically change in order to make it correct?[[User:CDucharme|CDucharme]] ([[User talk:CDucharme|talk]]) 17:04, 14 September 2020 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|CDucharme}} Mostly you need to add the notes, citation, and read for typos. It’s meticulous, but that’s the job. (Thanks for signing.) —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:08, 14 September 2020 (EDT)

== Final edits ==

Hello, Dr. Lucas, I finished editing my article. May I have the banner removed?[[User:KJordan|KJordan]] ([[User talk:KJordan|talk]]) 20:13, 22 September 2020 (EDT)KJordan

2020-09-22T23:15:28Z

KJordan:

Torres believes that boxing is “not really a contest of physical ability.” He elaborated his ideas in a subsequent meeting: “I felt it was a contest always of character and intelligence. And I always felt what made a champion and an ordinary fighter was that, the character, the will to win, more than the physicality. Because when you are up there, among the best, the physicality is the same.” Torres takes evident pleasure in explaining why Ali was not the greatest boxer, but was a genius in the ring. Doing so affords him the opportunity to recall fond memories of Ali and legendary trainer [[w:Cus D’Amato|Cus D’Amato]] while also illustrating his point about boxers being liars. In his book on Ali,he starts the story with D’Amato, the guide to three world champions: Floyd
Patterson, Torres himself, and Mike Tyson.“[Ali] is not a good fighter, so says
D’Amato, much less a great fighter. But he is champion of the world.Which,
believing Cus, and I do, makes Ali a genius....” He continues, in virtually the
same words he spoke to me decades after the 1971 book appeared:

<blockqoute>Ali is not a great fighter in the conventional sense that Sugar Ray
Robinson, Willie Pep and Joe Louis were. Each of these fighters
knew every punch and every move and added some tricks to the
book, that unwritten book whose teachings are passed on from
gym to gym and are the nearest thing we have to our own culture.... We have a man who does not have the physical greatness of the greatest men of other times, yet no professional has been
able to beat him.... The explanation is simple. Muhammad Ali
is a genius.... Don’t watch Ali’s gloves, arms or legs when he’s
fighting. Watch his brains.</blockquote>

Other writers have made similar claims in connection with other fighters.
Jack Dempsey’s “overwhelming power made many people overlook the calculation that went into every punch he threw,” Roger Kahn writes in ''A Flame of Pure Fire''. “In that regard, he was a thinking, even intellectual boxer.” In the
first volume of ''A Man without Qualities'', published not long after Dempsey’s reign as heavyweight champion ended, novelist Robert Musil prefigured Torres and D’Amato with observations like this one: “the tricks and
dodges used by an inventive mind in going through the logical operations of
a mathematical problem are really not very different from the ring-craft displayed by a well-trained body.” A. J. Liebling, who composed numerous entertainingly digressive, erudite articles on boxing for The New Yorker in the
1950s and early 1960s, distinguishes between “the ruffian approach” and that
of “the reasoner inside the ring.”

Part of boxers’ “culture,” in the view of Torres and his fellow thinkers, is
the ability to lie successfully. As Jeremy Campbell notes in his so-called history of falseness, ''A Liar’s'' ''Tale'', “when winning is the important factor, deceitfulness is a kind of ethic....” From a technical standpoint, Ali did plenty
“wrong,” but excelled nonetheless because of his cleverness, his ability to con
his opponents. He perfected the liar’s ethic.

Of course, eventually Ali did meet opponents who could beat him, but
even then his genius was evident. ''Sting Like a Bee'' ends with Ali’s first
bout with Joe Frazier, which Ali lost. Frazier’s trainer, Eddie Futch, told Ali’s
biographer, Thomas Hauser, that Ali still successfully tricked his fighter
during the bout: “Joe should have knocked him out in the eleventh round,
but Ali conned him out of it. We teased Joe about that later, because he
didn’t realize at the time that he was being conned. Ali was in trouble.
He got hit with a left hook, and was hurt very badly, and he exaggerated the
fact that he was hurt like he was clowning. He gave Joe exaggerated moves,
and Joe walked casually to Ali all the way across the ring. We call that ‘The
Long March.’ It gave Ali extra time and kept Joe from scoring a knockout.
By exaggerating, Ali made Joe think that he was fooling. He conned him
good.”
Ali did eventually regain the championship, and he did so by again digging into his bag of tricks. He prevailed over George Foreman by fighting a very different fight than most expected. Rather than dancing around the
ring, using his speed to outmaneuver the famously hard-hitting Foremen, Ali
positioned himself on the ropes, allowing Forman to tire himself out throwing punches. While the “rope-a-dope” might not have been a good practice if concern for long-term health had been a primary concern, it was a successful tactic that morning in Zaire. Looking back on “Rumble in the Jungle,” Foreman conceded that Ali had him fooled.

The sport, as Ali so skillfully showed, shares elements with confidence
games. In ''The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man'', David Mauer
observes that such deceptions are not as simple as unscrupulous exploitation of the naïve. Con men prey not on the gullible and good but on the devious. A mark must have more than money ready for the taking. As Mauer
puts it, “he must also have what grifters term ‘larceny in his veins’—in other
words, he must want something for nothing, or be willing to participate in
an unscrupulous deal.” The delicious irony of this is that con men are themselves susceptible to swindles. They have the very trait, the “thieves’ blood,”
that they try to exploit in others.

Confidence games would not be so compelling if they were as simple as
taking candy from a baby. Cons, whether big or small, take some ingenuity;
otherwise they would be mere thievery. Con men and their targets navigate
a world in which not everyone is honest and not everything is as it appears.
Thus, confidence games have provided artists such as Herman Melville and
David Mamet with material because they entail questions of practical epistemology: Who can you trust? How do you know your information is reliable? And how can you use it to your advantage?

The same is true with boxing at its best, at least according to one way of
looking at it. Boxing is much more than two brutes beating up on each other.
It is also more complicated than one fighter tricking an unprepared dupe:
mismatches may be a part of the game, but they are boring. When the fighters are well matched physically and also shrewd strategists, with each seeking to exploit the other’s desire to find an opening, an advantage, a
weakness—then the sport rises to the level of art.

An art with very real consequences. As Mauer observes, a confidence man
“cannot fool his associates for long. Either he takes off the scores or he
doesn’t, and he stands or falls in his profession by the record he makes for
himself.” The importance of cunning in boxing doesn’t lessen the very real
physical perils. Boxing is not professional wrestling; the violence is real. The
sport’s mental aspect, which Torres so prizes, comes into play when physical abilities are comparable. Ali, the “Louisville Lip,” was able to back up his bluster, even if he did so with an unorthodox style.

The idea that boxers, individuals who choose to engage in a brain damaging game, are smart might strike the uninitiated as peculiar if not
ridiculous. Indeed, the strangeness of associating fighters with intelligence
cause some to doubt that Torres actually wrote his books ~he also published
a biography of Tyson!. A rumor suggested that Mailer actually wrote Torres’s
portions of the Ali book. Jonathan Rendell, in his brilliantly titled ''This''
''Bloody Mary Is the Last Thing I Own'', recounts hearing a version of it. “Mailer
wrote it for him,” the man on the next barstool explained to Rendell. “That
was the deal they had. Torres taught Mailer how to box and Mailer wrote
Sting Like a Bee for him. Ain’t that something?” Mailer and Torres were
friends, and Mailer admitted to providing editorial aid to the fighter, who did
give the novelist some boxing pointers. Still, Mailer insists that the book is
genuine and not another instance of a boxer’s con game. For he did share his
friend’s views about pugilistic trickery. In his 1975 account of the AliForeman fight, Mailer explicitly invokes the D’Amato-Torres philosophy, a key component of which is that a skilled boxer can block or evade any punch
they can see coming. “Champions were great liars,” Mailer explains in ''The''''Fight'' “They had to be. Once you knew what they thought, you could hit them. So their personalities became masterpieces of concealment.”

However, Mailer elsewhere expresses the other widely held view of boxing, the one in which fighters are heroic warriors, which is precisely how
Mailer imagined writers, or at least himself. Although the solitary writer
slouching at a desk seems worlds apart from a well-conditioned fighter confronting an opponent in a ring, Mailer saw them as very similar. In The
Spooky Art, he insists the demands writing makes on a novelist, including
physical ones, are much like those a fighter confronts:

<blockqoute>Only a writer can know how much damage writing a novel can
do to you. It’s an unnatural activity to sit at a desk and squeeze
words out of yourself. Various kinds of poisons—essences of
fatigue—get secreted through your system. As you age it grows
worse. I believe that is one of the reasons I’ve been so interested
in prizefighters. I think often of the aging boxer who has to get
into shape for one more fight and knows the punishment it will
wreak on his body.... Even if he wins the fight—even if he wins
it well—he is not going to get a new purchase on life out of a
dazzling success, not in the way he did as a young fighter. That’s also true of my profession. Often, you have to make grave decisions: Am I going to attempt this difficult venture or not?</blockquote>

Put another way, writing is hard, just as boxing, more obviously, is hard. In
this comparison of fighters and writers, Mailer does not invoke cunning and
craftiness. Instead, he stresses earnest exertion.

Mailer goes even further in his search for commonality, arguing that boxers and writers are similar not only in the rigors they put themselves through
but also in their willingness to hurt others:
<blockqoute>Just as a fighter has to feel that he possesses the right to do physical damage to another man, so a writer has to be ready to take
chances with his readers’ lives. If you’re trying for something at
all interesting or difficult, then you cannot predict what the
results of your work will be. If it’s close enough to the root, people can be physically injured reading you. Full of heart, he was
also heartless—a splendid oxymoron. That can be the epitaph
for many a good novelist.</blockquote>

Mailer’s “splendid oxymoron” clearly applies to many a good boxer. However, he almost certainly exaggerates both the challenges a novelist faces and
the effect he or she can have on a reader. Yet he clearly liked the idea of having a fighter’s heartless heart—his will, determination, drive and
competitiveness—beating in his chest. For him, boxing serves as a handy
metaphor for what he imagined was his risky, intensely masculine style of
writing.

Like Mailer, another friend of Torres also gave expression to both conceptions of the sport without achieving a synthesis of them. When the
boxing-as-trickery notion was useful, journalist Jack Newfield used it. When
he wanted to point to a model of certain virtues, boxing again offered
handy examples. Newfield believed the deceitful personalities involved in
boxing provide a reason for writers’ unflagging interest in the sport. “As in
the record business and horse racing, almost everyone in boxing seems like
a character,” he writes in Only in America: The Life and Crimes of Don King.
“That’s why writers and filmmakers are drawn to it. Almost everyone in
boxing is a colorful story teller with a touch of lunacy or larceny.” It is certainly true that he chose to focus on one of boxing’s colorful characters in King. A former numbers runner who killed two men, King became fabulously wealthy by using the rhetoric of racial solidarity to sign black boxers to his promotional company and then exploit them mercilessly, according to Newfield’s account. Newfield finds conniving and cunning not
only on the business side of the sport, but in the fights themselves. He discusses the Ali-Foreman bout in terms very similar to Mailer’s, writing: “Boxing is based on deceit. Fighters are taught to lie—to conceal fatigue, mask
pain, disguise intent with a feint, deny an injury, look one way and punch
another.” As the fights with Frazier and Foreman illustrate, the trickery
extends beyond concealing intentions in order to avoid being hit; for Ali, it
also meant baffling expectations.

Newfield changes tack when relating his own work to that of boxers, who
then become paragons. For instance, in Somebody’s Gotta Tell It, the story of
his life as a newspaperman, Newfield, following Mailer’s example, finds
fighters worth emulating, but at the keyboard rather than the gym. Boxers’
bravery and relentlessness ought to characterize a dogged journalist as well.
He promotes what he calls the “Joe Frazier method” of journalism: “keep
coming forward. Don’t get discouraged. Be relentless. Don’t stop moving
your hands. Break the others guy’s will.”
One of Newfield’s intellectual heroes writes about boxing as though it
reflects the process of finding or creating meaning in an absurd world.
Albert Camus describes boxers as “gods with cauliflower ears,” giving some
indication of the respect he has for athletes who, like Sisyphus, persevere
through ultimately pointless endeavors. He also transmutes physical combat into the equivalent of a matter of language, viewing a fight as though it were an argument. Fighters’ representative capabilities—their amply
documented tendency to be regarded by spectators as the embodiment
of a race, an ethnicity or a nationality—offers writers plenty of material
to work with beyond mere athleticism. Camus explains how, for those in
attendance at a fight he witnessed in Algeria between Amar from Oran and
Pérez from Algiers, the boxers became stand-ins for their respective cities
and how their bout became an extension of an ongoing rivalry between the
two places. “Thus a page of history is unfolding in the ring. And the tough
Oranese, backed by a thousand yelling voices, is defending against Pérez a
way of life and the pride of a province.” Spectators’ responses to fighters’
struggles often have more to do with such allegiances rather than with
what the contestants actually do in the ring, and in describing boxers’
moves Camus finds a parallel with disputation. “Truth forces me to admit
that Amar is not conducting his discussion well. His argument has a flaw:
he lacks reach. The slugger from Algiers, on the contrary, has the required
reach in his argument. It lands persuasively between his contradictor’s eyes.”
What writer wouldn’t want to have such a reach?

Joyce Carol Oates, for one, expresses impatience with the sort of “hellish-writerly metaphor” in which boxing serves to stand for something else. She concedes that skill, courage and intelligence can all be observed in a boxing match. She even “can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for
boxing.” However, boxing itself is, quite simply, “the most primitive and terrifying of contests.” Her On Boxing does not offer extravagant assertions of fighters as avatars of artistry or as unrecognized geniuses. She briefly surveys other writers’ writing on boxing and is impressed by little of it. She dislikes Liebling and does not think Ernest Hemingway’s boxing stories rank
among his best. She admires aspects of Mailer’s work on the subject, but
concludes that in the end he gets it wrong. “It seems clear to this reader at
least that Mailer cannot establish a connection between himself and the boxers: he tries heroically but he cannot understand them,” she writes. Whereas Camus likens boxing to an argument, Oates stresses its wordlessness, its lack of language. Whereas he sees fighters carrying on historical disputes, she
counters that men fighting and those watching them belong “to no historical time.” For Oates, boxing is not like something else. It is certainly not like writing, as it was for Mailer, Newfield and others. Instead, “boxing is only like boxing.” If she finds truth in boxing, it is of a much more diminished and melancholy sort.

Rendell fell into the Johnson camp, the camp that sought truth in the sport, only to conclude that viewing boxing as expressive of some deep meaning can only lead to disappointment. In ''This Bloody Mary'', his memoir of experiences in the boxing world, he recalls being a teenager looking at the photos in ''Ring'' magazine of ritualistic post-fight events—the announcement of the decision and the victor consoling the vanquished—
and thinking: “It was as if all of them, the winners and losers and the managers and trainers, had touched something that only they could know about, something big, like truth.” Later, when the romance was gone and
he’d seen enough of the fight game, he concludes that its connection to the
truth was very different than he’d initially thought. “Boxing had been leading me to a truth after all, but only to the truth about boxing. And the truth was just a story itself, the first addictive dance under the chandeliers,
and then the doomed roller coaster ride on thousands of blue curves.” The
sort of truth he discovers is fighters dying in their twenties or living but with irreparable damage. For him, too, Ali becomes symbolic of boxing’s truth. Rendell describes meeting the former champion, who required an
hour to eat a bowl of soup. The fighter once famous for his quickness and
prowess now had to move carefully, deliberately, and slowly in order not to
dribble.
The competing views of boxing—the notion that it is an honest expression of man’s nature versus the belief that it entails artful deception as well as the more obvious physical challenges—also appear in W. C. Heinz’s 1958
novel ''The Professional''. Doc Carroll, a boxing manager, holds both, without
acknowledging the paradox of viewing boxing as essentially truthful and involving much trickery. Explaining why he likes boxing, Doc says he sees the “truth of life” in it, and that truth includes “that remnant of the animal in
man.” He says, “I find man revealing himself more completely in fighting than in any other form of expressive endeavor. It’s the war all over again, and they license it and sell tickets to it and people go to see it because, without even realizing it, they see this truth in it.” Later he tells his fighter, Eddie:
“There’s only so many punches. Everybody knows what they are. You’ve got
to con the other guy into walking into them. It’s thinking, first of all.” If Doc’s theories of boxing can be reconciled at all, it is by concluding that the essential truth, as revealed by boxing, is that man is a thinking beast, violent and clever, basic in animal desires and inclined toward misdirection to
satisfy them. Doc favors the fundamental-honesty-of-boxing school, regarding cons as tactical rather then essential elements of the game. Eddie, who admits to Doc that he had not realized role of trickery despite his nine years in boxing, loses the fight at the end of the book.

Another novelist, Darin Strauss, combines elements of history and fiction while mining the deep vein of literary possibilities offered by the idea of an intimate bond between pugilists and tricksters. If in Heinz’s world deception is merely a part of boxing strategy, in Strauss’s it throbs in the very heart of the sport. He very loosely based his 2002 novel ''The Real McCoy'' on the life of Norman Selby (a.k.a. Charles “Kid” McCoy), a crafty boxer who used his skills as a con man both in and out of the ring. Strauss remains faithful to these essential features even if he rearranges some facts to suit his story. (“We can change the normal way of things to fit our case,” McCoy persuades one of the women he marries.) Like the historical McCoy, the fictionalized Kid was born in Indiana in the late nineteenth century, becomes known for his trademark “corkscrew punch,” and has a colorful career as a charlatan.
Strauss departs from the documented record of Selby’s life in various ways. For instance, his “Virgil Selby” assumes the identity of another boxer known as Kid McCoy rather than creating the identity himself. The “real” McCoy won the vacant middleweight title in 1898, whereas Strauss has his McCoy win the welterweight title on January 1, 1900, by tricking the reigning champion into fighting what he thought was a mere exhibition. Strauss not only puts his McCoy in a lower weight division, he stresses his character’s slight build in order to highlight his mendacity in the ring.

Some of the fictional McCoy’s comments about boxing make him sound
like he could have come straight out of D’Amato’s school of boxing philosophy. “I lack in bulk, but I make up for it in guile,” McCoy explains in response to a reporter’s commentary on his skin-and-bones physique. “Boys, artifice is a dignified defense.” After successfully deploying his skin-ripping corkscrew punch in his title bout, McCoy is confronted by the deposed champ’s wife: “Admit it, Mr. McCoy.... You lied to my husband to get the
crown.... Admit your trickery!” “I don’t admit it,” he replies, “I ''relish'' in it.” Of course, Strauss recognizes that boxing requires physical ability and is
more than just deception. “McCoy knocked out Tommy Ryan thanks to real skill and the flimflam.”

The contending views of boxing as either the brutal violence it immediately appears to be or something akin to art and equally complicated and ultimately irreducible to any simple explanation will not be settled for as long as human beings stage combat for enjoyment’s sake. Given that boxing’s roots can be traced back hundreds of years before Virgil and that writers continue to find something of themselves in fighters long after the sport’s
heyday in the twentieth century, imminent resolution seems unlikely. That does not mean the match is even, however. The conclusion of Paul Johnson and José Torres’s well-rehearsed account of their college speaking engagement has the union organizer wondering if he never became a better fighter than he did because he was too honest. It may be that writers and other successful practitioners of artifice (such as Ali) do not suffer from such scrupulousness. An indication of which perspective appears to have the upper hand might be found at Gleason’s, a deliberately spare gym in a once-gritty neighborhood that later transformed itself into one filled with galleries, boutiques, and pricy loft apartments. Almost every time I have visited the place to talk
with its proprietor, Bruce Silverglade, there have been camera crews filming movies or commercials or taking photographs of models. Athletes still train there, but meaning-making and spectacle-creation simultaneously
occur amid the sparring and shadow boxing. Artifice, whether dignified or not, should never be underestimated.

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2020-09-22T23:06:53Z

KJordan:

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2020-09-22T23:01:36Z

2020-09-14T23:16:38Z