https://projectmailer.net/api.php?action=feedcontributions&user=ChristinaPinkston&feedformat=atomProject Mailer - User contributions [en]2024-03-28T12:48:23ZUser contributionsMediaWiki 1.39.0https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/Norman_Mailer_Bibliography:_2007&diff=11955The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer Bibliography: 20072020-10-05T19:25:29Z<p>ChristinaPinkston: finished secondary section</p>
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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}}<br />
{{TOC right|width=25%}}<br />
==Addenda through 2006==<br />
===Primary===<br />
====Letters====<br />
<!-- Use LETTER template per examples. Chronological order is appropriate here. --><br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=''New York Review of Books'' |subject=Protest |location=10:5 |date=March 4, 1968 |url= |access-date= |author-mask= |ref=harv }} Copy of letter to Leonid I. Brezhnev, with other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=Violence in Oakland |location=10:9 |date=May 9, 1968 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1968/05/09/violence-in-oakland/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=''New York Review of Books'' |subject=Protest |location=12:6 |date=March 27, 1969 |url= |accessdate= |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} Copy of telegram to Hon. U Thant, with other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=The Committee to Defend the Conspiracy |location=12:12 |date=June 19, 1969 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1969/06/19/the-committee-to-defend-the-conspiracy/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=Ford’s Better Idea |location=19:11 & 12 |date=January 25, 1973 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1973/01/25/fords-better-idea/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=Words for the Shah |location=24:19 |date=November 24, 1977 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1977/11/24/words-for-the-shah/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} Open letter to the Prime Minister of Iran, with other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=In a Cuban Prison |location=25:19 |date=December 7, 1978 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1978/12/07/in-a-cuban-prison/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=The Case of Alexandr Bogolovski |location=31:15 |date=October 11, 1984 |url= |accessdate= |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} Copy of letter to Mr. A. M. Rekunov, Procurator General of the USSR, with other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=Arrests in Poland |location=33.13 |date=August 13, 1986 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1986/08/14/arrests-in-poland/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=Celebrating Mencken |location=37:4 |date=March 15, 1990 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1990/03/15/celebrating-mencken/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=President Clinton. ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=An Urgent Appeal from Pen American Center |location=40:4 |date=February 11, 1993 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1993/02/11/an-urgent-appeal-from-pen-american-center/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=to Prime Minister Paul Keating et al. ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=The Case of Wei Jingsheng |location=43:3 |date=February 15, 1996 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1996/02/15/the-case-of-wei-jingsheng/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories. An open letter.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=JFK’s Assassination |location=50:20 |date=December 18, 2003 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2003/12/18/jfks-assassination/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=The Election and America’s Future |location=51:17 |date=November 4, 2004 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2004/11/04/the-election-and-americas-future/ |url-access=subscription |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} Letter; one of a series solicited by the Editors.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject= Blocked |location=52:13 |date=August 11, 2005 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2005/08/11/blocked/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} As author of ''Oswald’s Tale'', with other signatories.<br />
<br />
==2007==<br />
<!--TEMPLATES should be used from this point forward. See talk page.--><br />
===Primary===<br />
====Books====<br />
{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite book |last1=Mailer |first1=Norman |author-mask=1 |last2=Lennon |first2=J. Michael |date=2007 |title=On God: An Uncommon Conversation |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
====Book Contributions====<br />
{{cite book |contributor-last=Mailer |contributor-first=Norman |contribution=Commentary |last=Regan |first=Ken |date=2007 |title=Knockout: The Art of Boxing |url= |location=San Rafael, CA |publisher=Insight Editions |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite book |contributor-last=Mailer |contributor-first=Norman |contributor-mask=1 |contribution=Introduction |last=Schiller |first=Lawrence |date=2007 |title=Marilyn Monroe |url= |location=Los Angles, CA |publisher=East End Editions KLS |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
====Interviews====<br />
<!-- Unlike the original, these should probably be ordered by INTERVIEWER’S LAST NAME. We need to use TEMPLATES with all of these entries, please. See the talk page.--><br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Binelli |first=Mark |date=May 2007 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |magazine=Rolling Stone |pages=3–17 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Foley |first=Dylan |date=January 28, 2007 |title=A Portrait of the Devil as a Young Man |url= |work=Star-Ledger |location=final ed. |page=6 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Fox |first=Sue |date=July 8, 2007 |title=Even at 84, Norman Mailer Refuses to Pull His Punches |url=https://www.pressreader.com/uk/sunday-express-1070/20070708/282346855399714 |work=Sunday Express |location=UK first ed. |page=55 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Freeman |first=John |date=January 20, 2007 |title=Devilish Motives |url=https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/devilish-motives-20070120-gdp9x7.html |work=Sydney Morning Herald |location=Australia |access-date=2020-10-01 |page=30 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Goldberg |first=Nan |date= |title=Writing with the Devil |url=http://archive.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2007/11/10/writing_with_the_devil/ |work=Boston Globe |location=Magazine |page=15 |access-date=2020-10-02 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Kirschling |first=Gregory |date=January 19, 2007 |title=Tough Guys Don’t Quit |url= |magazine=Entertainment Weekly |issue=916 |page=48 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Lee |first=Michael |title=The Devil in Norman Mailer |url=https://search.proquest.com/openview/5bff77fb5c089c0b3d810827ee4686c7/1.pdf?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=40852 |journal=Literary Review |volume=50 |issue=4 |date=Summer 2007 |pages=202–217 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Lennon |first=Michael |date=October 5, 2007 |title=The Rise of Mailerism |url=https://nymag.com/news/features/38961/ |magazine=New York |issue=40.36 |pages=24+ |access-date=2020-10-02 |ref=harv }} Mailer discusses ''On God''.<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Llewellyn |first=Caro |author-mask= |title=The Lion in Winter: Norman Mailer Talks about Writing His First Novel in a Decade |url= |magazine=Weekend Australian |location=pre-prints ed. |date=March 31, 2007 |pages=1 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=McCrum |first=Robert |date=November 11, 2007 |title=The Author at Home |url= |work=The Observer |location=England |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Miner |first=Colin |date=January 22, 2007 |title=Mailer on Bush, Obama & Writing |url=https://www.nysun.com/arts/mailer-on-bush-obama-writing/47109/ |work=New York Sun |page=15 |access-date=2020-10-02 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=O’Hagan |first=Andrew |title=The Art of Fiction No. 193, Norman Mailer |url=https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5775/the-art-of-fiction-no-193-norman-mailer |journal=The Paris Review |volume=49 |issue=181 |date=Summer 2007 |pages=44+ |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=O’Hagan |first=Andrew |author-mask=1 |title=Get Your Ass off My Pillow |url=https://harpers.org/archive/2007/09/get-your-ass-off-my-pillow/ |url-access=subscription |magazine=Harper’s Magazine |issue=315.1888 |date=September 2007 |pages=22–24 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Pierleoni |first=Allen |date=February 7, 2007 |title=Now Age 84.... |url= |work=Sacramento Bee |location=metro final ed.: TK22 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |author=<!--Unknown--> |date=January 2007 |title=Proust Questionnaire: Norman Mailer |url=https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2007/01/proust_mailer200701 |magazine=Vanity Fair |issue=557 |page=166 |access-date=2020-10-02 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Rose |first=Daniel Asa |date=January 21, 2007 |title=In Conversation ... ; with Norman Mailer |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/18/AR2007011802000_pf.html |work=Washington Post |location=Final ed.: T07 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Santaro |first=Gene |title=The Sound and the Baby Führer |url=https://www.historynet.com/interview-sound-baby-fuhrer.htm |journal=World War II |volume=22 |issue=2 |date=May 2007 |pages=23–25 |access-date=2020-10-02 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Stoffman |first=Judy |date=January 28, 2007 |title=Mailer’s Novel Ideas about Hitler |url=https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/2007/01/28/mailers_novel_ideas_about_hitler.html |work=The Toronto Star |page=C04 |access-date=2020-10-02 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Wollheim |first=Richard |title=Living like Heroes |url=https://www.newstatesman.com/society/2007/11/violence-hip-mailer-1961 |magazine=New Statesman |issue=137.4871 |date=November 19, 2007 |pages=62 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }} Abridged reprint of a 1961 interview promoting ''Advertisements for Myself''.<br />
<br />
===Secondary===<br />
<!-- Secondary lists should use appropriate templates when possible, like our articles’ standard bibliographies. --><br />
====Essays, Articles, Book Chapters, and Dissertations====<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--PageSix.com Staff--> |date=January 17, 2007 |title=Sex-Mad Mailer Enraged Rival |url=https://pagesix.com/2007/01/25/sex-mad-mailer-enraged-rival/ |work=New York Post |location=Page Six |page=12 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }} Article discussing Ralph Ellison’s attitude toward Mailer, according to Ellison’s biographer.<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=Bancroft, Collette |date=October 16, 2007 |title=A Man of Many Letters |url=https://www.tampabay.com/archive/2007/10/16/a-man-of-many-letters/ |work=St. Petersburg Times |location=Florida 1E |page= |access-date= |ref=harv }} A look at Mailer and Mailer scholarship on the occasion of both the publication of ''On God'' and the launch of ''Mailer Review''.<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=Beach, Patrick |date=December 23, 2007 |title=Mailer’s Memories about to Open at Ransom Center |url= |work=Austin American-Statesman |location=final ed. |page=J5 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=Bennett, Bruce |date=July 20, 2007 |title=Mailer at the Movies |url=https://www.nysun.com/arts/mailer-at-the-movies/58850/ |work=New York Sun |location=11 |page= |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }} Overview of Mailer’s films.<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=Brokaw, Leslie |date=September 16, 2007 |title=HFA Salutes Norman Mailer on Film |url=http://archive.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2007/09/16/hfa_salutes_norman_mailer_on_film/ |work=Boston Globe |location=third ed. |page=N11 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |author=Bufithis, Philip |date=2007 |title=''The Executioner’s Song'': A Life Beneath Our Conscience |url=https://prmlr.us/mr07bufi |work=Mailer Review |volume=1 |edition=1 |location= |page=77-79 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite book |last=Burns |first=Paul C. |date=2007 |title=In Jesus in Twentieth-Century Literature, Art, and Movies |chapter=Transformation of Biblical Methods and Godhead in Norman Mailer’s Gospel |location=New York |publisher=Continuum |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Chaiken |first=Michael |title=The Master’s Mercurial Mistress: How Norman Mailer Courted Chaos 24 Frames per Second |journal=Film Comment |url=http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/25897522/the-masters-mercurial-mistress-how-norman-mailer-courted-chaos-24-frames-per-second |url-access=subscription |volume=43 |issue=4 |date=July 2007 |pages=36–42 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Crook |first=Zeba |date=January 2007 |title=Fictionalizing Jesus: Story and History in Two Recent Jesus Novels |url=https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249573018_Fictionalizing_Jesus_Story_and_History_in_Two_Recent_Jesus_Novels |url-access=subscription |work=Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus |volume=5 |issue=1 |page=33-55 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2007 |title=How Mailer Became ‘Mailer’: The Writer as Private and Public Character |url=https://prmlr.us/mr07dick |work=Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |page=118-31 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Duguid |first=Scott |date=2007 |title=The Addiction of Masculinity: Norman Mailer’s ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' and the Cultural Politics of Reaganism |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/4619310 |url-access=subscription |work=Journal of Modern Literature |volume=30 |issue=1 |page=23-30 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Freeman |first=John |date=January 28, 2007 |title=Writers Remain a Robust Bunch |work=St. Petersburg Times |page=B1+ |location=Florida |access-date= |ref=harv }} Article about the continued productivity of aging “literary giants” Mailer, Updike, and Roth.<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Goldfarb |first=Reuven |date=November 20, 2007 |title=The Jewish Mailer |url=https://www.jpost.com/opinion/op-ed-contributors/the-jewish-mailer |work=Jerusalem Post |volume=14 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Gottlieb |first=Akiva |date=July 20, 2017 |title=Norman Mailer, Auteur |url=http://old.forward.com/articles/11164/norman-mailer-auteur-00143/index.html |work=Forward |location=B1+ |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }} Article on Mailer’s films, on the occasion of the New York exhibit “The Mistress and the Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer.”<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Henderson |first=Cathy |last2=Oram |first2=Richard W. |last3=Schwartzburg |first3=Molly |last4=Hardy |first4=Molly |title=Mailer Takes on America: Images from the Ransom Center Archive |url=https://prmlr.us/mr07hend |journal=Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |date=2007 |pages=141-75 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Holmes |first=Constance E. |last2=Lennon |first2=J. Michael |title=Norman Mailer: Supplemental Bibliography through 2006 |url=https://prmlr.us/mr06bib |journal=Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |date=Fall 2007 |pages=234-60 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Houpt |first=Simon |date=January 27, 2007 |title=Still a Brawler at Heart |url=https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/still-a-brawler-at-heart/article677847/ |work=Globe and Mail |location=Canada |page=R4 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Howard |first=Gerald |title=Mailer Gets Hammered |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/books/review/Howard-t.html |work=New York Times Book Review |issue=late ed, final |date=August 2007 |pages=27 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }} Essay discussing Mailer’s films, focusing on ''Maidstone''.<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Howley |first=Ashton |title=Mailer Again: Heterophobia in ''Tough Guys Don't Dance'' |url= |journal=Journal of Modern Literature |volume=30 |issue=1 |date=2007 |pages=31-46 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
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{{cite book |last=James |first=Clive |date=2007 |title=Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts |url= |location=New York |publisher=W. W. Norton |pages=409-413 |ref=harv }}<br />
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{{cite journal |author=J. C. |title=White Mischief |url= |journal=TLS: Times Literary Supplement |volume= |issue= |date=October 26, 2007 |pages=36 |access-date= |ref=harv }} Includes brief mention of ''Mailer Review''.<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Junod |first=Tom |date=January 2007 |title=The Last Man Standing |magazine=Esquire |volume=147 |issue=1|pages=108-133 |url=https://classic.esquire.com/article/2007/1/1/the-last-man-standing |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
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{{cite magazine |last=Kachka |first=Boris |date=January 15, 2007 |title=Mr. Tenditious |url= |magazine=New York |volume=40 |issue=2 |pages=62 |access-date= |ref=harv }} Recaps Mailer’s history of responding negatively—even violently—to criticism.<br />
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{{cite journal |last=Kaufmann |first=Donald L. |date=Fall 2007 |title=An American Dream: The Singular Nightmare |url=https://prmlr.us/mr07kauf |work=Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |page=194-205 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
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{{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=William |date=Fall 2007 |title=Norman Mailer as Occasional Commentator in a Self-Interview and Memoir |url=https://prmlr.us/mr07kenn |work=Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |page=11-26 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
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{{cite journal |last=Kriegel |first=Leonard |date=Fall 2007 |title=Mailer’s Hitler: Round One |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/40211658|url-access=subscription |work=Sewanee Review |volume=115 |issue=4 |page=615-620 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=Fall 2007 |title=Gallery Talk: The Mailer Archive |url=https://prmlr.us/mr07lenn |work=Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |page=132-40 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |author-mask=1 |date=2007 |title=Norman Mailer: Novelist, Journalist, or Historian? |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/4619315|url-access=subscription |work=Journal of Modern Literature |volume=30 |issue=1 |page=91-103 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |editor-mask=1 |date=Fall 2007 |title=‘A Series of Tragicomedies’: Mailer’s Letters on ''The Deer Park'', 1954–55 |url=https://prmlr.us/mr07lenn1 |work=Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |page=45-79 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Long |first=Karen Haymon |title=Mailer in Review |url= |work=Tampa Tribune |issue=final ed., Baylife: 1 |date=November 18, 2007 |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }} 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.<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Lucid |first=Robert F. |date=Fall 2007 |title=[Boston State Hospital: The Summer of 1942] |url=https://prmlr.us/mr07luci |work=Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |page=27–33 |access-date=2020-10-05 |ref=harv }} Excerpt from incomplete authorized biography.<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Masters |first=Brian |title=So Are Some People Really Born Evil? |url=https://www.pressreader.com/uk/daily-mail/20070207/281749854885237 |work=Daily Mail [London] |issue=first ed.: 14 |date=April 19, 2007 |pages= |access-date=2020-10-05 |ref=harv }} Article discussing ''The Castle in the Forest'' in relation to an actual scientific study on evil and genetics.<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=McDonald |first=Brian |date=2007 |title=Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the ‘Very Jewish Jesus’ of Norman Mailer’s ''The Gospel According to the Son'' |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/4619314 |url-access=subscription |work=Journal of Modern Literature |volume=30 |issue=1 |page=78–90 |access-date=2020-10-05 |ref=harv }} Excerpt from incomplete authorized biography.<br />
<br />
{{cite thesis |last=Meloy |first=Michael |date=2007 |title=Sex Fiends of the Fifties: Intersections of Violence, Sexuality, and Masculinity in the Work of Norman Mailer, William Styron, and Ken Kesey |type=Diss. U of South Carolina, 2007 |chapter= |publisher=Ann Arbor: UMI |docket=AAT 3280339 |oclc= |url= |access-date= }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Middlebrook |first=Jonathan |date=Fall 2007 |title=Five Notes toward a Reassessment of Norman Mailer |url=https://prmlr.us/mr07midd |work=Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |page=179–83 |access-date=2020-10-05 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Partridge |first=Jeffrey F. L. |date=2007 |title=''The Gospel According to the Son and Christian Belief'' |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/4619313 |url-access=subscription |work=Journal of Modern Literature |volume=30 |issue=1 |page=64–77 |access-date=2020-10-05 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Petigny |first=Alan |date=Fall 2007 |title=Norman Mailer,‘The White Negro,’ and New Conceptions of the Self in Postwar America |url=https://prmlr.us/mr07peti |work=Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |page=184–93 |access-date=2020-10-05 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Rampton |first=David |date=2007 |title=Plexed Artistry: The Formal Case for Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/4619312 |url-access=subscription |work=Journal of Modern Literature |volume=30 |issue=1 |page=47–63 |access-date=2020-10-05 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Rodwin |first=John G. |date=Fall 2008 |title=Fighters and Writers |url=https://prmlr.us/mr08rodw |work=Mailer Review |volume=2 |issue=1 |page=396-406 |access-date=2020-10-05 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Rollyson |first=Carl |title=Mailer’s Other Career |url=https://www.villagevoice.com/2007/07/10/norman-mailers-other-career/ |work=Village Voice |issue=52.29 |date=July 18, 2007 |pages=68 |access-date=2020-10-05 |ref=harv }} On the occasion of the New York exhibit, “The Mistress and the Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer.”<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Rose |first=Daniel Asa |date=February 5, 2007 |title=Advertisements for a Gay Self |url=https://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/26999/ |magazine=New York |volume=40 |issue=4 |pages=9 |access-date=2020-10-05 |ref=harv }} Brief comment praising Mailer’s treatment of homosexuality in ''The Castle in the Forest''.<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Ryan |first=James Emmett |date=2007 |title=‘Insatiable as Good Old America’: Tough Guys Don’t Dance and Popular Criminality |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/4619309 |url-access=subscription |work=Journal of Modern Literature |volume=30 |issue=1 |page=17–22 |access-date=2020-10-05 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Scott |first=A.O. |title=Norman Mailer Unbound |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/20/movies/20norm.html |work=Village Voice |issue=late ed. final, east coast: E1. |date=July 20, 2007 |pages= |access-date=2020-10-05 |ref=harv }} Discuss/reviews Mailer’s films in anticipation of a screening at Lincoln Center. <br />
<br />
{{cite thesis |last=Severs |first=Jeffrey Frank |date=2007 |title=Reinventing Totalitarianism in the Postwar American Novel |type=Diss. Harvard U, 2007 |chapter= |publisher=Ann Arbor: UMI |docket=AAT 3265089 |oclc= |url= |access-date= }}<br />
<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
====Book Reviews====<br />
=====Reviews of ''The Castle in the Forest''=====<br />
<!--Ordered by AUTHOR’S LAST NAME and first letter of article name when there is no author. Search for full-text online, please.--><br />
{{cite magazine |last=Abell |first=Stephen |date=February 16, 2007 |title=The Anality of Evil |url= |magazine=TLS: Times Literary Supplement |pages=21–22 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Allen |first=Bruce |date=January 28, 2007 |title=Mailer Asks: Who Made Hitler? |url= |work=News & Observer |edition=final |page=G5 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{cite news |last=Allington |first=Patrick |date=May 12, 2007 |title=Devil’s Disciple |url= |work=Advertiser |location=Australia |edition=state |page=W10 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Amidon |first=Stephen |date=February 4, 2007 |title=Portrait of a Monster |url=https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/portrait-of-a-monster-nr77qrvvxqg |url-access=subscription |work=Sunday Times |location=London |page=54 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Anderson |first=Don |date=April 7, 2007 |title=Devil of a Time |url= |work=Weekend Australian |edition=Qld Review |page=10 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Anshen |first=D. |title=An Enigmatic Development |url=https://muse.jhu.edu/article/485260/pdf |url-access=subscription |journal=American Book Review |volume=28 |issue=6 |date=September 2007 |page=18 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Arditti |first=Michael |date=February 16, 2007 |title=New Fiction |url= |work=Daily Mailer |location=London |edition=first |page=72 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Bainbridge |first=Beryl |date=February 10, 2007 |title=Devil’s Plaything: Norman Mailer has Produced an Electrifying Inquiry into the Nature of Evil |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/feb/10/fiction.berylbainbridge |work=The Guardian |location=London |edition=final |page=16 |access-date=2020-10-05 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Bancroft |first=Colette |date=February 4, 2007 |title=Hitler: the Intimacy of Evil |url=https://www.tampabay.com/archive/2007/02/04/hitler-the-intimacy-of-evil/ |work=St. Petersburg Times |location=Florida |page=10L |access-date=2020-10-05 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Barron |first=John |date=January 21, 2007 |title=The Devil Made Hitler Do It, According to Norman Mailer |url=http://www.pressreader.com/usa/chicago-sun-times/20070121/283407712255383 |work=Chicago Sun-Times |edition=final |page=B12 |access-date=2020-10-05 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Bate |first=Jonathan |date=February 11, 2007 |title=Fiction: Jonathan Bate is Dismayed by Norman Mailer’s Account of Hitler in Short Trousers |url= |work=Sunday Telegraph |location=London |edition=sec. Seven |page=41 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Battersby |first=Eileen |date=February 10, 2007 |title=Young Hitler Defeats Mailer |url=https://www.irishtimes.com/news/young-hitler-defeats-mailer-1.1194613 |work=Irish Times |edition=Weekend |page=11 |access-date=2020-10-05 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Begiebing |first=Robert J. |title=Castle Mailer |url=https://promlr.us/mr07begi |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |date=2007 |pages=215–22 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Boyagoda |first=Randy |date=January 27, 2007 |title=Mailer on Hitler Still No Moby-Dick |url=https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/mailer-on-hitler-still-no-moby-dick/article721277/ |work=The Globe and Mail |location=Canada |page=D6 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Boyd |first=William |date=January 21, 2007 |title=Hitler Youth |url= |work=Washington Post |edition=final |page=T07 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Boyd |first=William |author-mask=1 |date=January 21, 2007 |title=Mailer Takes on a Juvenile Hitler |url= |work= |location=St. Louis Post-Dispatch |edition=fourth |page=F8 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |author=<!--None stated--> |title=His Perfect Sense of the Other |url=https://newcriterion.com/issues/2007/2/ldquohis-perfect-sense-of-the-otherrdquo |journal=New Criterion |volume=25 |issue=6 |date=February 2007 |pages=1–2 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |author=<!--None stated--> |date=January 20, 2007 |title=Little Hitler |url=https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2007/01/18/little-hitler |magazine=Economist |location=Books & Arts |page=92 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=August 8, 2007 |title=Mailer Brings out the Devil in Hitler |url= |work=Times |location=London |page=21 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=January 27, 2007 |title=Norman Mailer Digs into Hitler’s Childhood |url=https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7040474 |work=Weekend Edition: All Things Considered |location=NPR |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |author=<!--None stated--> |date=January 27, 2007 |title=Norman Mailer Writes a Novel about Adolf Hitler’s Childhood |url= |magazine=Gleaner |location=New Brunswick |pages=C4 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
====Obituaries and Retrospectives====<br />
<!--Ordered by AUTHOR’S LAST NAME and first letter of article name when there is no author. Search for full-text online, please.--><br />
{{cite news |last=Allen-Mills |first=Tony |date=November 11, 2007 |title=Norman Mailer, Literary Rebel, Dies |url=https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/norman-mailer-literary-rebeldies-zkhkhdbchfw |work=Sunday Times |location=London |pages=1+ |access-date=2020-10-01 |url-access=subscription |ref=harv }} [Note: Also printed in the ''Australian'' under a different headline.]<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Ambrose |first=Jay |date=November 25, 2007 |title=Remembering Mailer |url= |work=Knoxville News |location= |page=73 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Andriani |first=Lynn |date=November 19, 2007 |title=A Prolific Life to the End |url=https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/20071119.html |magazine=Publishers Weekly |location= |publisher= |access-date=2020-10-03 |url-access=subscription }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--Staff writer(s); no by-line.--> |title=Literary Lion Sparked American Debate |url= |work=Daily Variety |agency=Associated Press |date=November 12, 2007 |access-date= }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--Staff writer(s); no by-line.--> |title=Writers Remember Mailer |url= |work=Times Union |agency=Associated Press |date=November 13, 2007 |access-date= }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 11, 2007 |title=The Bad Boy of U.S. Literature |url= |work=Sunday Times |location=London |page=20 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Baddiel |first=David |date=November 17, 2007 |title=For Norman Mailer, Authenticity was all about Masculinity |url= |work=Times |location=London |page=3 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Bancroft |first=Colette |date=November 11, 2007 |title=‘He was Much More’ than a Writer |url= |work=St. Petersburg Times |location=Florida |page=1A |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Barnes |first=Bart |date=November 11, 2007 |title=A Blustery Force in Life and Letters |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/norman-mailer-blustery-force-in-life-and-letters-dies-at-84/2019/01/24/56b92688-2031-11e9-9145-3f74070bbdb9_story.html |work=Washington Post |location= |page=A01 |access-date=2020-10-04 |url-access=subscription |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Bernstein |first=Mashey |date=December 2007 |title=In Different Way, Norman Mailer was a Deeply Jewish Writer |url= |magazine=Deep South Jewish Voice |location= |publisher= |access-date= }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last1=Blau |first1=Rosie |last2=Mulligan |first2=Martin |date=November 12, 2007 |title=Pulling No Punches to the End |url=https://www.ft.com/content/aa64fec6-9085-11dc-a6f2-0000779fd2ac |work=London Financial Times |location= |page=13 |access-date=2020-10-04 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Boyd |first=Herb |date=November 15, 2007 |title=When James Baldwin Met Norman Mailer |url= |work=New York Amsterdam News |location= |page=1+ |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last1=Burke |first1=Cathy |last2=Venezia |first2=Todd |date=November 11, 2007 |title=Literary Pug and Original Hipster Mailer, 84, Dies |url=https://nypost.com/2007/11/11/literary-pug-original-hipster-mailer-84-dies/ |work=New York Post |location= |page=November 11, 2007 |access-date=2020-10-04 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date= November 12, 2007 |title=A Brawler who Never Pulled a Punch |url=https://www.irishtimes.com/news/a-brawler-who-never-pulled-a-punch-1.981221 |work=Irish Times |location= |page=10 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Calabrese |first=Erin |date=November 19, 2007 |title=Widow Defends Mailer, Says He ‘Loved Women’ |url=https://nypost.com/2007/11/19/widow-defends-mailer-says-he-loved-women/ |work=New York Post |location= |page=14 |access-date=2020-10-04 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Campbell |first=James |date=November 12, 2007 |title=Norman Mailer: Pugnacious Journalist and Author |url=https://www.theguardian.com/news/2007/nov/12/guardianobituaries.usa |work=Guardian |location=London |page=34 |access-date=2020-10-04 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Cappell |first=Ezra |date=November 16, 2007 |title=Norman Mailer: A Man of Letters Inspired by the People of the Book |url=https://forward.com/news/12032/norman-mailer-a-man-of-letters-inspired-by-the-pe-00800/ |work=Forward |location= |page=A1+ |access-date=2020-10-04 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Clark |first=Roy Peter |date=November 15, 2007 |title=Two Minutes with Mailer |url=https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2007/two-minutes-with-mailer/ |work=St. Petersburg Times |location=Florida |page=1E |access-date=2020-10-04 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Clarke |first=Toni |date=November 12, 2007 |title=Writer Norman Mailer dies at 84 |url=https://www.irishtimes.com/news/writer-norman-mailer-dies-at-84-1.981225 |work=Irish Times |location= |page=10 |access-date=2020-10-04 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Craig |first=Olga |date=November 11, 2007 |title=A Life of Books, Bars, Brawling |url=https://www.pressreader.com/canada/montreal-gazette/20071111/textview |work=Gazette |location=Montreal |page=A3 |access-date=2020-10-04 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Crosbie |first=Lynn |date=November 12, 2007 |title=Believe it: This was the Man who Loved Women |url=https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/believe-it-this-was-the-man-who-loved-women/article726268/ |work=Globe and Mail |location=Canada |page=R1 |access-date=2020-10-04 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Crossen |first=Cynthia |date=November 15, 2007 |title=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 |url= |work=Wall Street Journal Online |location= |page= |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last1=Cryer |first1=Dan |last2=Jacobson |first2=Aileen |date=November 11, 2007 |title=Norman Mailer 1923–2007: A Literary Icon Dies |url= |work=Newsday |location= |page=A08 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=D’Alessio |first=Jeff |title=A Life Written and Lived on a Large Scale: Norman Mailer 1923–2007 |url= |journal=Atlanta Journal-Constitution |volume= |issue= |date=November 11, 2007 |page=A5 |access-date= |ref=harv }} Reactions from Atlanta residents on the life and death of Mailer.<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Deignan |first=Tom |title=Mailer: More Irish than the Irish |url= |magazine=Irish Voice |volume=21 |issue=47 |date=November 21, 2007 |pages=11 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Demirel |first=Selçuk |title=Norman Mailer |url= |magazine=Nation |volume=285 |issue=18 |date=December 3, 2007 |page=8 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |title=The Nijinsky of Ambivalence |url= |magazine=Nation |volume=285 |issue=19 |date=December 10, 2007 |pages=48–52 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |author-mask=1 |title=The Un-generation |url= |work=Los Angeles Times |volume= |issue= |date=December 30, 2007 |page=R4 |access-date= |ref=harv }} Retrospective comparing the lives and careers of Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut and Grace Paley, who all died in 2007 at the age of 84.<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Duggan |first=Keith |title=Two-Fisted Mailer Finally Counter Out |url= |magazine=Irish Times |volume= |issue= |date=November 7, 2007 |page=12 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Epstein |first=Jason |title=Norman Mailer (1923–2007) |url= |magazine=New York Review of Books |volume=54 |issue=20 |date=December 20, 2007 |page=10 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Eyman |first=Scott |title=Mailer’s Works Made Deep Impression on Post-WWII Political, Cultural Landscape |url= |magazine=Palm Beach Post |volume= |issue= |date=November 11, 2007 |page= |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last1=Fee |first1=Gayle |last2=Raposa |first2=Laura |title=Mailer's Car Tale Resurrected |url=https://www.bostonherald.com/2007/11/14/mailers-car-tale-resurrected/ |work=Boston Herald |location=News |date=November 14, 2007 |page=20 |access-date=2020-10-05 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Feeney |first=Mark |title=Norman Mailer, Self-titled King of the Literary Hill, Dies at 84 |url=http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/obituaries/articles/2007/11/11/norman_mailer_self_titled_king_of_the_literary_hill_dies_at_84/ |work=Boston Globe |edition=third |location=Obituaries |date=November 11, 2007 |page=A1 |access-date=2020-10-05 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Fields |first=Suzanne |title=Recalling My Mailer Crush |url=https://www.creators.com/read/suzanne-fields/11/07/recalling-my-mailer-crush |work=Washington Times |date=November 15, 2007 |page=A21 |access-date=2020-10-05 |ref=harv }} Versions of this article also appear elsewhere under similar headlines.<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Fulford |first=Robert |title=The Failed Career of Norman Mailer |url=http://www.robertfulford.com/2007-11-12-mailer.html |work=National Post |location=Canada |edition=national |issue= |date=November 12, 2007 |page=A13 |access-date=2020-10-05 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Gagen |first=Thomas |title=Advertisements for Himself |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/opinion/13iht-edmailer.1.8314248.html |work=Boston Globe |volume=third |issue= |date=November 13, 2007 |page=A14 |access-date=2020-10-05 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Gallo |first=Bill |title=Norman Mailer was a True Heavyweight |url=https://www.nydailynews.com/sports/more-sports/norman-mailer-true-heavyweight-article-1.258682?pgno=1 |work=Daily News |location=New York |edition=sports final |issue= |date=November 18, 2007 |page=94 |access-date=2020-10-05 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 14, 2007 |title=Heavyweight: Mailer’s Life and Work Were Outsized |url=https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/2007/11/14/Heavyweight-Mailer-s-life-and-work-were-outsized/stories/200711140262 |work=Pittsburgh Post-Gazette |location= |page=B6 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 12, 2007 |title=Legendary Writer with Particular Love for the Irish |url=https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/legendary-writer-with-particular-love-for-the-irish-26331219.html |work=Irish Independent |location= |page=unknown |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 11, 2007 |title=A Life of Writing, Boozing and Brawling |url= |work=Edmonton Journal |location= |page=A3 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 19, 2007 |title=Mailer won pair of Pulitzers |url= |work=Variety |location= |page=55 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |author=<!--Staff writer(s); no by-line.--> |title=Mailer's Ghost |url=https://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/41004/ |magazine=New York |location= |publisher= |date=November 26, 2007 |access-date=2020-10-02 }} [Note: Revisits the seven covers of ''New York Magazine'' that have featured Mailer, either as author or subject.]<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 15, 2007 |title=Norman Mailer |url=https://www.economist.com/obituary/2007/11/15/norman-mailer |work=Economist |location=US |page=103 |access-date=2020-10-02 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 11, 2007 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |work=Sunday Independent |location=Ireland |page= |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 12, 2007 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |work=Times |location=London |page=53 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 13, 2007 |title=Norman Mailer |url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/norman-mailer-400006.html |work=Independent |location=London |page=34 |access-date=2020-10-02 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 15, 2007 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |work=Times Union |location= |page=A12 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 12, 2007 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |work=Cincinnati Post |location= |page=C10 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |author=<!--Staff writer(s); no by-line.--> |title=Norman Mailer, 84 |url= |magazine=Newsweek |location= |publisher= |date=December 31, 2007 |access-date= }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 12, 2007 |title=Obituary of Norman Mailer |url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1569056/Norman-Mailer.html |work=Daily Telegraph |location=London |page2= |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 11, 2007 |title=Pulitzer Prize Author Norman Mailer Dies at 84 |url= |work=Providence Journal |location= |page=A6 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
{{Review|state=expanded}}<br />
{{DEFAULTSORT:Norman Mailer Bibliography: 2007}}<br />
[[Category:Bibliographies (MR)]]</div>ChristinaPinkstonhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/Norman_Mailer_Bibliography:_2007&diff=11935The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer Bibliography: 20072020-10-04T00:36:07Z<p>ChristinaPinkston: added a couple more in secondary section</p>
<hr />
<div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}<br />
{{Working}}<br />
{{MR02}}<br />
{{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}}<br />
{{TOC right|width=25%}}<br />
==Addenda through 2006==<br />
===Primary===<br />
====Letters====<br />
<!-- Use LETTER template per examples. Chronological order is appropriate here. --><br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=''New York Review of Books'' |subject=Protest |location=10:5 |date=March 4, 1968 |url= |access-date= |author-mask= |ref=harv }} Copy of letter to Leonid I. Brezhnev, with other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=Violence in Oakland |location=10:9 |date=May 9, 1968 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1968/05/09/violence-in-oakland/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=''New York Review of Books'' |subject=Protest |location=12:6 |date=March 27, 1969 |url= |accessdate= |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} Copy of telegram to Hon. U Thant, with other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=The Committee to Defend the Conspiracy |location=12:12 |date=June 19, 1969 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1969/06/19/the-committee-to-defend-the-conspiracy/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=Ford’s Better Idea |location=19:11 & 12 |date=January 25, 1973 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1973/01/25/fords-better-idea/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=Words for the Shah |location=24:19 |date=November 24, 1977 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1977/11/24/words-for-the-shah/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} Open letter to the Prime Minister of Iran, with other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=In a Cuban Prison |location=25:19 |date=December 7, 1978 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1978/12/07/in-a-cuban-prison/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=The Case of Alexandr Bogolovski |location=31:15 |date=October 11, 1984 |url= |accessdate= |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} Copy of letter to Mr. A. M. Rekunov, Procurator General of the USSR, with other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=Arrests in Poland |location=33.13 |date=August 13, 1986 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1986/08/14/arrests-in-poland/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=Celebrating Mencken |location=37:4 |date=March 15, 1990 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1990/03/15/celebrating-mencken/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=President Clinton. ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=An Urgent Appeal from Pen American Center |location=40:4 |date=February 11, 1993 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1993/02/11/an-urgent-appeal-from-pen-american-center/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=to Prime Minister Paul Keating et al. ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=The Case of Wei Jingsheng |location=43:3 |date=February 15, 1996 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1996/02/15/the-case-of-wei-jingsheng/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories. An open letter.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=JFK’s Assassination |location=50:20 |date=December 18, 2003 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2003/12/18/jfks-assassination/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=The Election and America’s Future |location=51:17 |date=November 4, 2004 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2004/11/04/the-election-and-americas-future/ |url-access=subscription |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} Letter; one of a series solicited by the Editors.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject= Blocked |location=52:13 |date=August 11, 2005 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2005/08/11/blocked/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} As author of ''Oswald’s Tale'', with other signatories.<br />
<br />
==2007==<br />
<!--TEMPLATES should be used from this point forward. See talk page.--><br />
===Primary===<br />
====Books====<br />
{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite book |last1=Mailer |first1=Norman |author-mask=1 |last2=Lennon |first2=J. Michael |date=2007 |title=On God: An Uncommon Conversation |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
====Book Contributions====<br />
{{cite book |contributor-last=Mailer |contributor-first=Norman |contribution=Commentary |last=Regan |first=Ken |date=2007 |title=Knockout: The Art of Boxing |url= |location=San Rafael, CA |publisher=Insight Editions |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite book |contributor-last=Mailer |contributor-first=Norman |contributor-mask=1 |contribution=Introduction |last=Schiller |first=Lawrence |date=2007 |title=Marilyn Monroe |url= |location=Los Angles, CA |publisher=East End Editions KLS |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
====Interviews====<br />
<!-- Unlike the original, these should probably be ordered by INTERVIEWER’S LAST NAME. We need to use TEMPLATES with all of these entries, please. See the talk page.--><br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Binelli |first=Mark |date=May 2007 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |magazine=Rolling Stone |pages=3–17 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
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{{cite news |last=Foley |first=Dylan |date=January 28, 2007 |title=A Portrait of the Devil as a Young Man |url= |work=Star-Ledger |location=final ed. |page=6 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Fox |first=Sue |date=July 8, 2007 |title=Even at 84, Norman Mailer Refuses to Pull His Punches |url=https://www.pressreader.com/uk/sunday-express-1070/20070708/282346855399714 |work=Sunday Express |location=UK first ed. |page=55 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Freeman |first=John |date=January 20, 2007 |title=Devilish Motives |url=https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/devilish-motives-20070120-gdp9x7.html |work=Sydney Morning Herald |location=Australia |access-date=2020-10-01 |page=30 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Goldberg |first=Nan |date= |title=Writing with the Devil |url=http://archive.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2007/11/10/writing_with_the_devil/ |work=Boston Globe |location=Magazine |page=15 |access-date=2020-10-02 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Kirschling |first=Gregory |date=January 19, 2007 |title=Tough Guys Don’t Quit |url= |magazine=Entertainment Weekly |issue=916 |page=48 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Lee |first=Michael |title=The Devil in Norman Mailer |url=https://search.proquest.com/openview/5bff77fb5c089c0b3d810827ee4686c7/1.pdf?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=40852 |journal=Literary Review |volume=50 |issue=4 |date=Summer 2007 |pages=202–217 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Lennon |first=Michael |date=October 5, 2007 |title=The Rise of Mailerism |url=https://nymag.com/news/features/38961/ |magazine=New York |issue=40.36 |pages=24+ |access-date=2020-10-02 |ref=harv }} Mailer discusses ''On God''.<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Llewellyn |first=Caro |author-mask= |title=The Lion in Winter: Norman Mailer Talks about Writing His First Novel in a Decade |url= |magazine=Weekend Australian |location=pre-prints ed. |date=March 31, 2007 |pages=1 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=McCrum |first=Robert |date=November 11, 2007 |title=The Author at Home |url= |work=The Observer |location=England |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Miner |first=Colin |date=January 22, 2007 |title=Mailer on Bush, Obama & Writing |url=https://www.nysun.com/arts/mailer-on-bush-obama-writing/47109/ |work=New York Sun |page=15 |access-date=2020-10-02 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=O’Hagan |first=Andrew |title=The Art of Fiction No. 193, Norman Mailer |url=https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5775/the-art-of-fiction-no-193-norman-mailer |journal=The Paris Review |volume=49 |issue=181 |date=Summer 2007 |pages=44+ |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=O’Hagan |first=Andrew |author-mask=1 |title=Get Your Ass off My Pillow |url=https://harpers.org/archive/2007/09/get-your-ass-off-my-pillow/ |url-access=subscription |magazine=Harper’s Magazine |issue=315.1888 |date=September 2007 |pages=22–24 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Pierleoni |first=Allen |date=February 7, 2007 |title=Now Age 84.... |url= |work=Sacramento Bee |location=metro final ed.: TK22 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |author=<!--Unknown--> |date=January 2007 |title=Proust Questionnaire: Norman Mailer |url=https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2007/01/proust_mailer200701 |magazine=Vanity Fair |issue=557 |page=166 |access-date=2020-10-02 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Rose |first=Daniel Asa |date=January 21, 2007 |title=In Conversation ... ; with Norman Mailer |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/18/AR2007011802000_pf.html |work=Washington Post |location=Final ed.: T07 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }}<br />
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{{cite journal |last=Santaro |first=Gene |title=The Sound and the Baby Führer |url=https://www.historynet.com/interview-sound-baby-fuhrer.htm |journal=World War II |volume=22 |issue=2 |date=May 2007 |pages=23–25 |access-date=2020-10-02 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Stoffman |first=Judy |date=January 28, 2007 |title=Mailer’s Novel Ideas about Hitler |url=https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/2007/01/28/mailers_novel_ideas_about_hitler.html |work=The Toronto Star |page=C04 |access-date=2020-10-02 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Wollheim |first=Richard |title=Living like Heroes |url=https://www.newstatesman.com/society/2007/11/violence-hip-mailer-1961 |magazine=New Statesman |issue=137.4871 |date=November 19, 2007 |pages=62 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }} Abridged reprint of a 1961 interview promoting ''Advertisements for Myself''.<br />
<br />
===Secondary===<br />
<!-- Secondary lists should use appropriate templates when possible, like our articles’ standard bibliographies. --><br />
====Essays, Articles, Book Chapters, and Dissertations====<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--PageSix.com Staff--> |date=January 17, 2007 |title=Sex-Mad Mailer Enraged Rival |url=https://pagesix.com/2007/01/25/sex-mad-mailer-enraged-rival/ |work=New York Post |location=Page Six |page=12 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }} Article discussing Ralph Ellison’s attitude toward Mailer, according to Ellison’s biographer.<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=Bancroft, Collette |date=October 16, 2007 |title=A Man of Many Letters |url=https://www.tampabay.com/archive/2007/10/16/a-man-of-many-letters/ |work=St. Petersburg Times |location=Florida 1E |page= |access-date= |ref=harv }} A look at Mailer and Mailer scholarship on the occasion of both the publication of ''On God'' and the launch of ''Mailer Review''.<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=Beach, Patrick |date=December 23, 2007 |title=Mailer’s Memories about to Open at Ransom Center |url= |work=Austin American-Statesman |location=final ed. |page=J5 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=Bennett, Bruce |date=July 20, 2007 |title=Mailer at the Movies |url=https://www.nysun.com/arts/mailer-at-the-movies/58850/ |work=New York Sun |location=11 |page= |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }} Overview of Mailer’s films.<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=Brokaw, Leslie |date=September 16, 2007 |title=HFA Salutes Norman Mailer on Film |url=http://archive.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2007/09/16/hfa_salutes_norman_mailer_on_film/ |work=Boston Globe |location=third ed. |page=N11 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |author=Bufithis, Philip |date=2007 |title=''The Executioner’s Song'': A Life Beneath Our Conscience |url=https://prmlr.us/mr07bufi |work=Mailer Review |volume=1 |edition=1 |location= |page=77-79 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite book |last=Burns |first=Paul C. |date=2007 |title=In Jesus in Twentieth-Century Literature, Art, and Movies |chapter=Transformation of Biblical Methods and Godhead in Norman Mailer’s Gospel |location=New York |publisher=Continuum |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Chaiken |first=Michael |title=The Master’s Mercurial Mistress: How Norman Mailer Courted Chaos 24 Frames per Second |journal=Film Comment |url=http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/25897522/the-masters-mercurial-mistress-how-norman-mailer-courted-chaos-24-frames-per-second |url-access=subscription |volume=43 |issue=4 |date=July 2007 |pages=36–42 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Crook |first=Zeba |date=January 2007 |title=Fictionalizing Jesus: Story and History in Two Recent Jesus Novels |url=https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249573018_Fictionalizing_Jesus_Story_and_History_in_Two_Recent_Jesus_Novels |url-access=subscription |work=Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus |volume=5 |issue=1 |page=33-55 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2007 |title=How Mailer Became ‘Mailer’: The Writer as Private and Public Character |url=https://prmlr.us/mr07dick |work=Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |page=118-31 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Duguid |first=Scott |date=2007 |title=The Addiction of Masculinity: Norman Mailer’s ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' and the Cultural Politics of Reaganism |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/4619310 |url-access=subscription |work=Journal of Modern Literature |volume=30 |issue=1 |page=23-30 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Freeman |first=John |date=January 28, 2007 |title=Writers Remain a Robust Bunch |work=St. Petersburg Times |page=B1+ |location=Florida |access-date= |ref=harv }} Article about the continued productivity of aging “literary giants” Mailer, Updike, and Roth.<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Goldfarb |first=Reuven |date=November 20, 2007 |title=The Jewish Mailer |url=https://www.jpost.com/opinion/op-ed-contributors/the-jewish-mailer |work=Jerusalem Post |volume=14 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Gottlieb |first=Akiva |date=July 20, 2017 |title=Norman Mailer, Auteur |url=http://old.forward.com/articles/11164/norman-mailer-auteur-00143/index.html |work=Forward |location=B1+ |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }} Article on Mailer’s films, on the occasion of the New York exhibit “The Mistress and the Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer.”<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Henderson |first=Cathy |last2=Oram |first2=Richard W. |last3=Schwartzburg |first3=Molly |last4=Hardy |first4=Molly |title=Mailer Takes on America: Images from the Ransom Center Archive |url=https://prmlr.us/mr07hend |journal=Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |date=2007 |pages=141-75 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Holmes |first=Constance E. |last2=Lennon |first2=J. Michael |title=Norman Mailer: Supplemental Bibliography through 2006 |url=https://prmlr.us/mr06bib |journal=Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |date=Fall 2007 |pages=234-60 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Houpt |first=Simon |date=January 27, 2007 |title=Still a Brawler at Heart |url=https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/still-a-brawler-at-heart/article677847/ |work=Globe and Mail |location=Canada |page=R4 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Howard |first=Gerald |title=Mailer Gets Hammered |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/books/review/Howard-t.html |work=New York Times Book Review |issue=late ed, final |date=August 2007 |pages=27 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }} Essay discussing Mailer’s films, focusing on ''Maidstone''.<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Howley |first=Ashton |title=Mailer Again: Heterophobia in ''Tough Guys Don't Dance'' |url= |journal=Journal of Modern Literature |volume=30 |issue=1 |date=2007 |pages=31-46 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite book |last=James |first=Clive |date=2007 |title=Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts |url= |location=New York |publisher=W. W. Norton |pages=409-413 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=J.C. |first= |title=White Mischief |url= |journal=TLS: Times Literary Supplement |volume= |issue= |date=October 26, 2007 |pages=36 |access-date= |ref=harv }} Includes brief mention of ''Mailer Review''.<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Junod |first=Tom |date=January 2007 |title=The Last Man Standing |magazine=Esquire |volume=147 |issue=1|pages=108-133 |url=https://classic.esquire.com/article/2007/1/1/the-last-man-standing |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Kachka |first=Boris |date=January 15, 2007 |title=Mr. Tenditious |url= |magazine=New York |volume=40 |issue=2 |pages=62 |access-date= |ref=harv }} Recaps Mailer’s history of responding negatively—even violently—to criticism.<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Kaufmann |first=Donald L. |date=Fall 2007 |title=An American Dream: The Singular Nightmare |url=https://prmlr.us/mr07kauf |work=Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |page=194-205 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=William |date=Fall 2007 |title=Norman Mailer as Occasional Commentator in a Self-Interview and Memoir |url=https://prmlr.us/mr07kenn |work=Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |page=11-26 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Kriegel |first=Leonard |date=Fall 2007 |title=Mailer’s Hitler: Round One |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/40211658|url-access=subscription |work=Sewanee Review |volume=115 |issue=4 |page=615-620 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=Fall 2007 |title=Gallery Talk: The Mailer Archive |url=https://prmlr.us/mr07lenn |work=Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |page=132-40 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=——— |first= |date=2007 |title=Norman Mailer: Novelist, Journalist, or Historian? |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/4619315|url-access=subscription |work=Journal of Modern Literature |volume=30 |issue=1 |page=91-103 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=——— (ed. and note) |first= |date=Fall 2007 |title=‘A Series of Tragicomedies’: Mailer’s Letters on The Deer Park, 1954–55 |url=https://prmlr.us/mr07lenn1 |work=Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |page=45-79 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Lucid, Robert F. “[Boston State Hospital: The Summer of 1942].” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 27–33. Excerpt from incomplete authorized biography.<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Middlebrook, Jonathan: “Five Notes toward a Reassessment of Norman Mailer.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 179–83.<br />
<br />
Partridge, Jeffrey F. L. “''The Gospel According to the Son and Christian Belief''.” ''Journal of Modern Literature'' 30.1 (2007): 64–77.<br />
<br />
Petigny, Alan.“Norman Mailer,‘The White Negro,’ and New Conceptions of the Self in Postwar America.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 184–93.<br />
<br />
Rampton, David. “Plexed Artistry: The Formal Case for Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost.” ''Journal of Modern Literature'' 30.1 (2007): 47–63.<br />
<br />
Rodwin, John G. "Fighters and Writers". ''The Mailer Review''. Fall 2008. 396-406.<br />
<br />
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.”<br />
<br />
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''.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Severs, Jeffrey Frank. ''Reinventing Totalitarianism in the Postwar American Novel''. Diss. Harvard U, 2007. Ann Arbor: UMI, 2007. AAT 3265089.<br />
<br />
====Book Reviews====<br />
=====Reviews of ''The Castle in the Forest''=====<br />
<!--Ordered by AUTHOR’S LAST NAME and first letter of article name when there is no author. Search for full-text online, please.--><br />
{{cite magazine |last=Abell |first=Stephen |date=February 16, 2007 |title=The Anality of Evil |url= |magazine=TLS: Times Literary Supplement |pages=21–22 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Allen |first=Bruce |date=January 28, 2007 |title=Mailer Asks: Who Made Hitler? |url= |work=News & Observer |location=final ed. |page=G5 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Allington |first=Patrick |date=May 12, 2007 |title=Devil’s Disciple |url= |work=Advertiser |location=Australia, state ed. |page=W10 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Amidon |first=Stephen |date=February 4, 2007 |title=Portrait of a Monster |url=https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/portrait-of-a-monster-nr77qrvvxqg |url-access=subscription |work=Sunday Times |location=London |page=54 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Anderson |first=Don |date=April 7, 2007 |title=Devil of a Time |url= |work=Weekend Australian |location=Qld Review ed. |page=10 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Anshen |first=D. |title=An Enigmatic Development |url=https://muse.jhu.edu/article/485260/pdf |url-access=subscription |journal=American Book Review |volume=28 |issue=6 |date=September 2007 |page=18 |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Arditti |first=Michael |date=February 16, 2007 |title=New Fiction |url= |work=Daily Mailer |location=London, first ed. |page=72 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |author=<!--None stated--> |title=His Perfect Sense of the Other |url=https://newcriterion.com/issues/2007/2/ldquohis-perfect-sense-of-the-otherrdquo |journal=New Criterion |volume=25 |issue=6 |date=February 2007 |pages=1–2 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |author=<!--None stated--> |date=January 20, 2007 |title=Little Hitler |url=https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2007/01/18/little-hitler |magazine=Economist |location=Books & Arts |page92= |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=August 8, 2007 |title=Mailer Brings out the Devil in Hitler |url= |work=Times |location=London |page=21 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=January 27, 2007 |title=Norman Mailer Digs into Hitler’s Childhood |url=https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7040474 |work=Weekend Edition: All Things Considered |location=NPR |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |author=<!--None stated--> |date=January 27, 2007 |title=Norman Mailer Writes a Novel about Adolf Hitler’s Childhood |url= |magazine=Gleaner |location=New Brunswick |pages=C4 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
====Obituaries and Retrospectives====<br />
<!--Ordered by AUTHOR’S LAST NAME and first letter of article name when there is no author. Search for full-text online, please.--><br />
{{cite news |last=Allen-Mills |first=Tony |date=November 11, 2007 |title=Norman Mailer, Literary Rebel, Dies |url=https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/norman-mailer-literary-rebeldies-zkhkhdbchfw |work=Sunday Times |location=London |pages=1+ |access-date=2020-10-01 |url-access=subscription |ref=harv }} [Note: Also printed in the ''Australian'' under a different headline.]<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Ambrose |first=Jay |date=November 25, 2007 |title=Remembering Mailer |url= |work=Knoxville News |location= |page=73 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Andriani |first=Lynn |date=November 19, 2007 |title=A Prolific Life to the End |url=https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/20071119.html |magazine=Publishers Weekly |location= |publisher= |access-date=2020-10-03 |url-access=subscription }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--Staff writer(s); no by-line.--> |title=Literary Lion Sparked American Debate |url= |work=Daily Variety |agency=Associated Press |date=November 12, 2007 |access-date= }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--Staff writer(s); no by-line.--> |title=Writers Remember Mailer |url= |work=Times Union |agency=Associated Press |date=November 13, 2007 |access-date= }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 11, 2007 |title=The Bad Boy of U.S. Literature |url= |work=Sunday Times |location=London |page=20 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date= November 12, 2007 |title=A Brawler who Never Pulled a Punch |url=https://www.irishtimes.com/news/a-brawler-who-never-pulled-a-punch-1.981221 |work=Irish Times |location= |page=10 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 14, 2007 |title=Heavyweight: Mailer’s Life and Work Were Outsized |url=https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/2007/11/14/Heavyweight-Mailer-s-life-and-work-were-outsized/stories/200711140262 |work=Pittsburgh Post-Gazette |location= |page=B6 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 12, 2007 |title=Legendary Writer with Particular Love for the Irish |url=https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/legendary-writer-with-particular-love-for-the-irish-26331219.html |work=Irish Independent |location= |page=unknown |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 11, 2007 |title=A Life of Writing, Boozing and Brawling |url= |work=Edmonton Journal |location= |page=A3 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 19, 2007 |title=Mailer won pair of Pulitzers |url= |work=Variety |location= |page=55 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |author=<!--Staff writer(s); no by-line.--> |title=Mailer's Ghost |url=https://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/41004/ |magazine=New York |location= |publisher= |date=November 26, 2007 |access-date=2020-10-02 }} [Note: Revisits the seven covers of ''New York Magazine'' that have featured Mailer, either as author or subject.]<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 15, 2007 |title=Norman Mailer |url=https://www.economist.com/obituary/2007/11/15/norman-mailer |work=Economist |location=US |page=103 |access-date=2020-10-02 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 11, 2007 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |work=Sunday Independent |location=Ireland |page= |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 12, 2007 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |work=Times |location=London |page=53 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 13, 2007 |title=Norman Mailer |url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/norman-mailer-400006.html |work=Independent |location=London |page=34 |access-date=2020-10-02 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 15, 2007 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |work=Times Union |location= |page=A12 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 12, 2007 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |work=Cincinnati Post |location= |page=C10 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |author=<!--Staff writer(s); no by-line.--> |title=Norman Mailer, 84 |url= |magazine=Newsweek |location= |publisher= |date=December 31, 2007 |access-date= }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 12, 2007 |title=Obituary of Norman Mailer |url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1569056/Norman-Mailer.html |work=Daily Telegraph |location=London |page2= |access-date=2020-10-03 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 11, 2007 |title=Pulitzer Prize Author Norman Mailer Dies at 84 |url= |work=Providence Journal |location= |page=A6 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Baddiel, David. “For Norman Mailer, Authenticity was all about Masculinity.” ''Times'' [London] 17 Nov 2007: 3.<br />
<br />
Bancroft, Colette. “‘He was Much More’ than a Writer.” ''St. Petersburg Times'' [Florida] 11 Nov 2007, South Pinellas ed.: 1A.<br />
<br />
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.]<br />
<br />
Bernstein, Mashey. “In Different Way, Norman Mailer was a Deeply Jewish<br />
Writer.” ''Deep South Jewish Voice'' 18.1 (Dec 2007): 100+.<br />
<br />
Blau, Rosie and Martin Mulligan. “Pulling No Punches to the End.” ''London Financial Times'' 12 Nov 2007, U.S. ed.: 13.<br />
<br />
Boyd, Herb. “When James Baldwin Met Norman Mailer.” ''New York Amsterdam News'' 15 Nov 2007: 1+.<br />
<br />
Burke, Cathy and Todd Venezia. “Literary Pug and Original Hipster Mailer,<br />
84, Dies.” ''New York Post'' 11 Nov 2007, News: 7.<br />
<br />
Calabrese, Erin. “Widow Defends Mailer, Says He ‘Loved Women.’” ''New York Post'' 19 Nov 2007, News: 14.<br />
<br />
Campbell, James. “Norman Mailer: Pugnacious Journalist and Author.”<br />
''Guardian'' [London] 12 Nov 2007, final ed.: 34.<br />
<br />
Cappell, Ezra. “Norman Mailer: A Man of Letters Inspired by the People of<br />
the Book.” ''Forward'' 16 Nov 2007: A1+.<br />
<br />
Clark, Roy Peter. “Two Minutes with Mailer.” ''St. Petersburg Times'' [Florida] 15 Nov 2007: 1E.<br />
<br />
Clarke, Toni.“Writer Norman Mailer dies at 84.” ''Irish Times'' 12 Nov 2007: 10.<br />
<br />
Craig, Olga. “A Life of Books, Bars, Brawling.” ''Gazette'' [Montreal] 11 Nov 2007, final ed.: A3.<br />
<br />
Crosbie, Lynn. “Believe it: This was the Man who Loved Women.” ''Globe and Mail'' [Canada] 12 Nov 2007: R1.<br />
<br />
Crossen, Cynthia. “Readback: When Normal Mailer Was Nobody: 1948’s ‘The<br />
Naked and the Dead’ Was Written Before He Was Famous, And That Is Its<br />
Greatest Blessing.” ''Wall Street Journal Online'' (15 Nov 2007). http://<br />
www.wallstreetjournal.com.<br />
<br />
Cryer, Dan and Aileen Jacobson. “Norman Mailer 1923–2007: A Literary Icon<br />
Dies.” ''Newsday'' 11 Nov 2007, Nassau and Suffolk ed.: A08<br />
<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=D’Alessio |first=Jeff |title=A Life Written and Lived on a Large Scale: Norman Mailer 1923–2007 |url= |journal=Atlanta Journal-Constitution |volume= |issue= |date=November 11, 2007 |page=A5 |access-date= |ref=harv }} Reactions from Atlanta residents on the life and death of Mailer.<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Deignan |first=Tom |title=Mailer: More Irish than the Irish |url= |magazine=Irish Voice |volume=21 |issue=47 |date=November 21, 2007 |pages=11 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Demirel |first=Selçuk |title=Norman Mailer |url= |magazine=Nation |volume=285 |issue=18 |date=December 3, 2007 |page=8 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |title=The Nijinsky of Ambivalence |url= |magazine=Nation |volume=285 |issue=19 |date=December 10, 2007 |pages=48–52 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |author-mask=1 |title=The Un-generation |url= |work=Los Angeles Times |volume= |issue= |date=December 30, 2007 |page=R4 |access-date= |ref=harv }} Retrospective comparing the lives and careers of Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut and Grace Paley, who all died in 2007 at the age of 84.<br />
<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
<br />
{{Review|state=expanded}}<br />
{{DEFAULTSORT:Norman Mailer Bibliography: 2007}}<br />
[[Category:Bibliographies (MR)]]</div>ChristinaPinkstonhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/Norman_Mailer_Bibliography:_2007&diff=11921The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer Bibliography: 20072020-10-02T19:24:07Z<p>ChristinaPinkston: worked on some of secondary section</p>
<hr />
<div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}<br />
{{Working}}<br />
{{MR02}}<br />
{{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}}<br />
{{TOC right|width=25%}}<br />
==Addenda through 2006==<br />
===Primary===<br />
====Letters====<br />
<!-- Use LETTER template per examples. Chronological order is appropriate here. --><br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=''New York Review of Books'' |subject=Protest |location=10:5 |date=March 4, 1968 |url= |access-date= |author-mask= |ref=harv }} Copy of letter to Leonid I. Brezhnev, with other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=Violence in Oakland |location=10:9 |date=May 9, 1968 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1968/05/09/violence-in-oakland/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=''New York Review of Books'' |subject=Protest |location=12:6 |date=March 27, 1969 |url= |accessdate= |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} Copy of telegram to Hon. U Thant, with other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=The Committee to Defend the Conspiracy |location=12:12 |date=June 19, 1969 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1969/06/19/the-committee-to-defend-the-conspiracy/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=Ford’s Better Idea |location=19:11 & 12 |date=January 25, 1973 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1973/01/25/fords-better-idea/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=Words for the Shah |location=24:19 |date=November 24, 1977 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1977/11/24/words-for-the-shah/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} Open letter to the Prime Minister of Iran, with other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=In a Cuban Prison |location=25:19 |date=December 7, 1978 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1978/12/07/in-a-cuban-prison/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=The Case of Alexandr Bogolovski |location=31:15 |date=October 11, 1984 |url= |accessdate= |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} Copy of letter to Mr. A. M. Rekunov, Procurator General of the USSR, with other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=Arrests in Poland |location=33.13 |date=August 13, 1986 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1986/08/14/arrests-in-poland/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=Celebrating Mencken |location=37:4 |date=March 15, 1990 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1990/03/15/celebrating-mencken/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=President Clinton. ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=An Urgent Appeal from Pen American Center |location=40:4 |date=February 11, 1993 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1993/02/11/an-urgent-appeal-from-pen-american-center/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=to Prime Minister Paul Keating et al. ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=The Case of Wei Jingsheng |location=43:3 |date=February 15, 1996 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1996/02/15/the-case-of-wei-jingsheng/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories. An open letter.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=JFK’s Assassination |location=50:20 |date=December 18, 2003 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2003/12/18/jfks-assassination/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=The Election and America’s Future |location=51:17 |date=November 4, 2004 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2004/11/04/the-election-and-americas-future/ |url-access=subscription |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} Letter; one of a series solicited by the Editors.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject= Blocked |location=52:13 |date=August 11, 2005 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2005/08/11/blocked/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} As author of ''Oswald’s Tale'', with other signatories.<br />
<br />
==2007==<br />
<!--TEMPLATES should be used from this point forward. See talk page.--><br />
===Primary===<br />
====Books====<br />
{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite book |last1=Mailer |first1=Norman |author-mask=1 |last2=Lennon |first2=J. Michael |date=2007 |title=On God: An Uncommon Conversation |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
====Book Contributions====<br />
{{cite book |contributor-last=Mailer |contributor-first=Norman |contribution=Commentary |last=Regan |first=Ken |date=2007 |title=Knockout: The Art of Boxing |url= |location=San Rafael, CA |publisher=Insight Editions |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite book |contributor-last=Mailer |contributor-first=Norman |contributor-mask=1 |contribution=Introduction |last=Schiller |first=Lawrence |date=2007 |title=Marilyn Monroe |url= |location=Los Angles, CA |publisher=East End Editions KLS |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
====Interviews====<br />
<!-- Unlike the original, these should probably be ordered by INTERVIEWER’S LAST NAME. We need to use TEMPLATES with all of these entries, please. See the talk page.--><br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Binelli |first=Mark |date=May 2007 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |magazine=Rolling Stone |pages=3–17 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Foley |first=Dylan |date=January 28, 2007 |title=A Portrait of the Devil as a Young Man |url= |work=Star-Ledger |location=final ed. |page=6 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Fox |first=Sue |date=July 8, 2007 |title=Even at 84, Norman Mailer Refuses to Pull His Punches |url=https://www.pressreader.com/uk/sunday-express-1070/20070708/282346855399714 |work=Sunday Express |location=UK first ed. |page=55 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Freeman |first=John |date=January 20, 2007 |title=Devilish Motives |url=https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/devilish-motives-20070120-gdp9x7.html |work=Sydney Morning Herald |location=Australia |access-date=2020-10-01 |page=30 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Goldberg |first=Nan |date= |title=Writing with the Devil |url=http://archive.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2007/11/10/writing_with_the_devil/ |work=Boston Globe |location=Magazine |page=15 |access-date=2020-10-02 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Kirschling |first=Gregory |date=January 19, 2007 |title=Tough Guys Don’t Quit |url= |magazine=Entertainment Weekly |issue=916 |page=48 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Lee |first=Michael |title=The Devil in Norman Mailer |url=https://search.proquest.com/openview/5bff77fb5c089c0b3d810827ee4686c7/1.pdf?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=40852 |journal=Literary Review |volume=50 |issue=4 |date=Summer 2007 |pages=202–217 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Lennon |first=Michael |date=October 5, 2007 |title=The Rise of Mailerism |url=https://nymag.com/news/features/38961/ |magazine=New York |issue=40.36 |pages=24+ |access-date=2020-10-02 |ref=harv }} Mailer discusses ''On God''.<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Llewellyn |first=Caro |author-mask= |title=The Lion in Winter: Norman Mailer Talks about Writing His First Novel in a Decade |url= |magazine=Weekend Australian |location=pre-prints ed. |date=March 31, 2007 |pages=1 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=McCrum |first=Robert |date=November 11, 2007 |title=The Author at Home |url= |work=The Observer |location=England |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Miner |first=Colin |date=January 22, 2007 |title=Mailer on Bush, Obama & Writing |url=https://www.nysun.com/arts/mailer-on-bush-obama-writing/47109/ |work=New York Sun |page=15 |access-date=2020-10-02 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=O’Hagan |first=Andrew |title=The Art of Fiction No. 193, Norman Mailer |url=https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5775/the-art-of-fiction-no-193-norman-mailer |journal=The Paris Review |volume=49 |issue=181 |date=Summer 2007 |pages=44+ |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=O’Hagan |first=Andrew |author-mask=1 |title=Get Your Ass off My Pillow |url=https://harpers.org/archive/2007/09/get-your-ass-off-my-pillow/ |url-access=subscription |magazine=Harper’s Magazine |issue=315.1888 |date=September 2007 |pages=22–24 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Pierleoni |first=Allen |date=February 7, 2007 |title=Now Age 84.... |url= |work=Sacramento Bee |location=metro final ed.: TK22 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |author=<!--Unknown--> |date=January 2007 |title=Proust Questionnaire: Norman Mailer |url=https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2007/01/proust_mailer200701 |magazine=Vanity Fair |issue=557 |page=166 |access-date=2020-10-02 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Rose |first=Daniel Asa |date=January 21, 2007 |title=In Conversation ... ; with Norman Mailer |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/18/AR2007011802000_pf.html |work=Washington Post |location=Final ed.: T07 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Santaro |first=Gene |title=The Sound and the Baby Führer |url=https://www.historynet.com/interview-sound-baby-fuhrer.htm |journal=World War II |volume=22 |issue=2 |date=May 2007 |pages=23–25 |access-date=2020-10-02 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Stoffman |first=Judy |date=January 28, 2007 |title=Mailer’s Novel Ideas about Hitler |url=https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/2007/01/28/mailers_novel_ideas_about_hitler.html |work=The Toronto Star |page=C04 |access-date=2020-10-02 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Wollheim |first=Richard |title=Living like Heroes |url=https://www.newstatesman.com/society/2007/11/violence-hip-mailer-1961 |magazine=New Statesman |issue=137.4871 |date=November 19, 2007 |pages=62 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }} Abridged reprint of a 1961 interview promoting ''Advertisements for Myself''.<br />
<br />
===Secondary===<br />
<!-- Secondary lists should use appropriate templates when possible, like our articles’ standard bibliographies. --><br />
====Essays, Articles, Book Chapters, and Dissertations====<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--PageSix.com Staff--> |date=January 17, 2007 |title=Sex-Mad Mailer Enraged Rival |url=https://pagesix.com/2007/01/25/sex-mad-mailer-enraged-rival/ |work=New York Post |location=Page Six |page=12 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }} Article discussing Ralph Ellison’s attitude toward Mailer, according to Ellison’s biographer.<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=Bancroft, Collette |date=October 16, 2007 |title=A Man of Many Letters |url=https://www.tampabay.com/archive/2007/10/16/a-man-of-many-letters/ |work=St. Petersburg Times |location=Florida 1E |page= |access-date= |ref=harv }} A look at Mailer and Mailer scholarship on the occasion of both the publication of ''On God'' and the launch of ''Mailer Review''.<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=Beach, Patrick |date=December 23, 2007 |title=Mailer’s Memories about to Open at Ransom Center |url= |work=Austin American-Statesman |location=final ed.: J5 |page= |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=Bennett, Bruce |date=July 20, 2007 |title=Mailer at the Movies |url=https://www.nysun.com/arts/mailer-at-the-movies/58850/ |work=New York Sun |location=11 |page= |access-date= |ref=harv }} Overview of Mailer’s films.<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=Brokaw, Leslie |date=September 16, 2007 |title=HFA Salutes Norman Mailer on Film |url=http://archive.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2007/09/16/hfa_salutes_norman_mailer_on_film/ |work=Boston Globe |location=third ed.: N11 |page= |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |author=Bufithis, Philip |date=Fall 2007 |title=''The Executioner’s Song'': A Life Beneath Our Conscience |url=https://prmlr.us/mr07bufi |work=Mailer Review |location=1.1 |page=77-79 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite book |last=Burns |first=Paul C. |date=2007 |title=In Jesus in Twentieth-Century Literature, Art, and Movies |chapter=Transformation of Biblical Methods and Godhead in Norman Mailer’s Gospel |location=New York |publisher=Continuum |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Chaiken |first=Michael |title=The Master’s Mercurial Mistress: How Norman Mailer Courted Chaos 24 Frames per Second |url=http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/25897522/the-masters-mercurial-mistress-how-norman-mailer-courted-chaos-24-frames-per-second |url-access=subscription |issue=43.4 |date=July-August 2007 |pages=36–42 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |author=Crook, Zeba |date=January 2007 |title=Fictionalizing Jesus: Story and History in Two Recent Jesus Novels |url=https://prmlr.us/mr07bufi |work=Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus |location=5.1 |page=33-55 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |author=Dickstein, Morris |date=Fall 2007 |title=How Mailer Became ‘Mailer’: The Writer as Private and Public Character |url=https://prmlr.us/mr07dick |work=Mailer Review |location=1.1 |page=118-31 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |author=Duguid, Scott |date=2007 |title=The Addiction of Masculinity: Norman Mailer’s ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' and the Cultural Politics of Reaganism |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/4619310 |url-access=subscription |work=Journal of Modern Literature |location=30.1 |page=23-30 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.”<br />
<br />
James, Clive. “Norman Mailer.” In ''Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts''. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007. 409–413.<br />
<br />
Goldfarb, Reuven. “The Jewish Mailer.” Jerusalem Post 20 Nov 2007: 14. Henderson, Cathy, Richard W. Oram, Molly Schwartzburg, and Molly Hardy.<br />
“Mailer Takes on America: Images from the Ransom Center Archive.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 141–75.<br />
<br />
Holmes, Constance E. and J. Michael Lennon.“Norman Mailer: Supplemental Bibliography through 2006.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 234–60.<br />
<br />
Houpt, Simon. “Still a Brawler at Heart.” ''Globe and Mail'' [Canada] 27 Jan 2007: R4.<br />
<br />
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''.<br />
<br />
Howley, Ashton. “Mailer Again: Heterophobia in ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance''.” ''Journal of Modern Literature'' 30.1 (2007): 31–46.<br />
<br />
J. C. “White Mischief.” ''TLS: Times Literary Supplement'' 26 Oct 2007: 36. Includes brief mention of ''Mailer Review''.<br />
<br />
Junod, Tom. “The Last Man Standing.” ''Esquire'' 147.1 (Jan 2007): 108–133.<br />
<br />
Kachka, Boris. “Mr. Tenditious.” ''New York'' 40.2 (15 Jan 2007): 62. Recaps Mailer’s history of responding negatively—even violently—to criticism.<br />
<br />
Kaufmann, Donald L. “An American Dream: The Singular Nightmare.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 194–205.<br />
<br />
Kennedy, William. “Norman Mailer as Occasional Commentator in a Self-Interview and Memoir.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 11–26.<br />
<br />
Kriegel, Leonard. “Mailer’s Hitler: Round One.” ''Sewanee Review'' 115.4 (Fall 2007): 615–620.<br />
<br />
Lennon, J. Michael. “Gallery Talk: The Mailer Archive.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 132–40.<br />
<br />
———. “Norman Mailer: Novelist, Journalist, or Historian?” ''Journal of Modern Literature'' 30.1 (2007): 91–103.<br />
<br />
———. (ed. and note): “‘A Series of Tragicomedies’: Mailer’s Letters on The Deer Park, 1954–55.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 45–79.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Lucid, Robert F. “[Boston State Hospital: The Summer of 1942].” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 27–33. Excerpt from incomplete authorized biography.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Middlebrook, Jonathan: “Five Notes toward a Reassessment of Norman Mailer.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 179–83.<br />
<br />
Partridge, Jeffrey F. L. “''The Gospel According to the Son and Christian Belief''.” ''Journal of Modern Literature'' 30.1 (2007): 64–77.<br />
<br />
Petigny, Alan.“Norman Mailer,‘The White Negro,’ and New Conceptions of the Self in Postwar America.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 184–93.<br />
<br />
Rampton, David. “Plexed Artistry: The Formal Case for Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost.” ''Journal of Modern Literature'' 30.1 (2007): 47–63.<br />
<br />
Rodwin, John G. "Fighters and Writers". ''The Mailer Review''. Fall 2008. 396-406.<br />
<br />
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.”<br />
<br />
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''.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Severs, Jeffrey Frank. ''Reinventing Totalitarianism in the Postwar American Novel''. Diss. Harvard U, 2007. Ann Arbor: UMI, 2007. AAT 3265089.<br />
<br />
====Book Reviews====<br />
<!--Ordered by AUTHOR’S LAST NAME and first letter of article name when there is no author. Search for full-text online, please.--><br />
{{cite journal |author=<!--None stated--> |title=His Perfect Sense of the Other |url=https://newcriterion.com/issues/2007/2/ldquohis-perfect-sense-of-the-otherrdquo |journal=New Criterion |volume=25 |issue=6 |date=February 2007 |pages=1–2 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }} Rev. of ''The Castle in the Forest''.<br />
<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
====Obituaries and Retrospectives====<br />
<!--Ordered by AUTHOR’S LAST NAME and first letter of article name when there is no author. Search for full-text online, please.--><br />
{{cite news |last=Allen-Mills |first=Tony |date=November 11, 2007 |title=Norman Mailer, Literary Rebel, Dies |url=https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/norman-mailer-literary-rebeldies-zkhkhdbchfw |work=Sunday Times |location=London |pages=1+ |access-date=2020-10-01 |url-access=subscription |ref=harv }} [Note: Also printed in the ''Australian'' under a different headline.]<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 11, 2007 |title=The Bad Boy of U.S. Literature |url= |work=Sunday Times |location=London |page=20 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date= November 12, 2007 |title=A Brawler who Never Pulled a Punch |url=https://www.irishtimes.com/news/a-brawler-who-never-pulled-a-punch-1.981221 |work=Irish Times |location= |page=10 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 14, 2007 |title=Heavyweight: Mailer’s Life and Work Were Outsized |url=https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/2007/11/14/Heavyweight-Mailer-s-life-and-work-were-outsized/stories/200711140262 |work=Pittsburgh Post-Gazette |location= |page=B6 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 12, 2007 |title=Legendary Writer with Particular Love for the Irish |url=https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/legendary-writer-with-particular-love-for-the-irish-26331219.html |work=Irish Independent |location= |page=unknown |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 11, 2007 |title=A Life of Writing, Boozing and Brawling |url= |work=Edmonton Journal |location= |page=A3 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
“Mailer won pair of Pulitzers.” ''Variety'' 409.1 (19–25 Nov 2007): 55.<br />
<br />
“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.<br />
<br />
“Norman Mailer.” ''Economist'', US ed. 385.8555 (17 Nov 2007): 103.<br />
<br />
“Norman Mailer.” ''Sunday Independent'' [Ireland] 11 Nov 2007: page unknown.<br />
<br />
“Norman Mailer.” ''Times'' [London] 12 Nov 2007: 53.<br />
<br />
“Norman Mailer.” ''Independent'' [London] 13 Nov 2007, first ed.: 34.<br />
<br />
“Norman Mailer.” ''Times Union'' 15 Nov 2007, one star ed.: A12.<br />
<br />
“Norman Mailer, 1923–2007.” ''Cincinnati Post'' 12 Nov 2007: C10.<br />
<br />
“Norman Mailer, 84.” ''Newsweek'' 151.1 (31 Dec 2007): 106.<br />
<br />
“Obituary of Norman Mailer.” ''Daily Telegraph'' [London] 12 Nov 2007: 25.<br />
<br />
“Pulitzer Prize Author Norman Mailer Dies at 84.” ''Providence Journal'' 11 Nov 2007: A6.<br />
<br />
Ambrose, Jay. “Remembering Mailer.” ''Knoxville News Sentinel'' 25 Nov 2007: 73.<br />
<br />
Andriani, Lynn. “A Prolific Life to the End.” ''Publishers Weekly'' 254.56 (19 Nov 2007): 8.<br />
<br />
Associated Press. “Literary Lion Sparked American Debate.” ''Daily Variety'' 12 Nov 2007: 2.<br />
<br />
———. “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.<br />
<br />
Baddiel, David. “For Norman Mailer, Authenticity was all about Masculinity.” ''Times'' [London] 17 Nov 2007: 3.<br />
<br />
Bancroft, Colette. “‘He was Much More’ than a Writer.” ''St. Petersburg Times'' [Florida] 11 Nov 2007, South Pinellas ed.: 1A.<br />
<br />
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.]<br />
<br />
Bernstein, Mashey. “In Different Way, Norman Mailer was a Deeply Jewish<br />
Writer.” ''Deep South Jewish Voice'' 18.1 (Dec 2007): 100+.<br />
<br />
Blau, Rosie and Martin Mulligan. “Pulling No Punches to the End.” ''London Financial Times'' 12 Nov 2007, U.S. ed.: 13.<br />
<br />
Boyd, Herb. “When James Baldwin Met Norman Mailer.” ''New York Amsterdam News'' 15 Nov 2007: 1+.<br />
<br />
Burke, Cathy and Todd Venezia. “Literary Pug and Original Hipster Mailer,<br />
84, Dies.” ''New York Post'' 11 Nov 2007, News: 7.<br />
<br />
Calabrese, Erin. “Widow Defends Mailer, Says He ‘Loved Women.’” ''New York Post'' 19 Nov 2007, News: 14.<br />
<br />
Campbell, James. “Norman Mailer: Pugnacious Journalist and Author.”<br />
''Guardian'' [London] 12 Nov 2007, final ed.: 34.<br />
<br />
Cappell, Ezra. “Norman Mailer: A Man of Letters Inspired by the People of<br />
the Book.” ''Forward'' 16 Nov 2007: A1+.<br />
<br />
Clark, Roy Peter. “Two Minutes with Mailer.” ''St. Petersburg Times'' [Florida] 15 Nov 2007: 1E.<br />
<br />
Clarke, Toni.“Writer Norman Mailer dies at 84.” ''Irish Times'' 12 Nov 2007: 10.<br />
<br />
Craig, Olga. “A Life of Books, Bars, Brawling.” ''Gazette'' [Montreal] 11 Nov 2007, final ed.: A3.<br />
<br />
Crosbie, Lynn. “Believe it: This was the Man who Loved Women.” ''Globe and Mail'' [Canada] 12 Nov 2007: R1.<br />
<br />
Crossen, Cynthia. “Readback: When Normal Mailer Was Nobody: 1948’s ‘The<br />
Naked and the Dead’ Was Written Before He Was Famous, And That Is Its<br />
Greatest Blessing.” ''Wall Street Journal Online'' (15 Nov 2007). http://<br />
www.wallstreetjournal.com.<br />
<br />
Cryer, Dan and Aileen Jacobson. “Norman Mailer 1923–2007: A Literary Icon<br />
Dies.” ''Newsday'' 11 Nov 2007, Nassau and Suffolk ed.: A08<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=D’Alessio |first=Jeff |title=A Life Written and Lived on a Large Scale: Norman Mailer 1923–2007 |url= |journal=Atlanta Journal-Constitution |volume= |issue= |date=11 Nov 2007 |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=<br />
Deignan |first=Tom |title=Mailer: More Irish than the Irish |url= |journal=Irish Voice |volume=21 |issue=47 |date=Nov 2007 |pages=21–27 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Demirel |first=Selçuk |title=Norman Mailer |url= |journal=Nation |volume=285 |issue=18 |date=3 Dec 2007 |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |title=The Nijinsky of Ambivalence |url= |journal=Nation |volume=285 |issue=19 |date=10 Dec 2007 |pages=48-52 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |authormask=1 |title=The Un-generation |url= |journal=Los Angeles Times |volume= |issue= |date=30 Dec 2007 |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
<br />
{{Review|state=expanded}}<br />
{{DEFAULTSORT:Norman Mailer Bibliography: 2007}}<br />
[[Category:Bibliographies (MR)]]</div>ChristinaPinkstonhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/Norman_Mailer_Bibliography:_2007&diff=11905The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer Bibliography: 20072020-10-02T01:45:05Z<p>ChristinaPinkston: added a couple more in interview section, removed completed works from bottom of interviews list</p>
<hr />
<div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}<br />
{{Working}}<br />
{{MR02}}<br />
{{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}}<br />
{{TOC right|width=25%}}<br />
==Addenda through 2006==<br />
===Primary===<br />
====Letters====<br />
<!-- Use LETTER template per examples. Chronological order is appropriate here. --><br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=''New York Review of Books'' |subject=Protest |location=10:5 |date=March 4, 1968 |url= |access-date= |author-mask= |ref=harv }} Copy of letter to Leonid I. Brezhnev, with other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=Violence in Oakland |location=10:9 |date=May 9, 1968 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1968/05/09/violence-in-oakland/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=''New York Review of Books'' |subject=Protest |location=12:6 |date=March 27, 1969 |url= |accessdate= |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} Copy of telegram to Hon. U Thant, with other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=The Committee to Defend the Conspiracy |location=12:12 |date=June 19, 1969 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1969/06/19/the-committee-to-defend-the-conspiracy/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=Ford’s Better Idea |location=19:11 & 12 |date=January 25, 1973 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1973/01/25/fords-better-idea/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=Words for the Shah |location=24:19 |date=November 24, 1977 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1977/11/24/words-for-the-shah/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} Open letter to the Prime Minister of Iran, with other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=In a Cuban Prison |location=25:19 |date=December 7, 1978 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1978/12/07/in-a-cuban-prison/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=The Case of Alexandr Bogolovski |location=31:15 |date=October 11, 1984 |url= |accessdate= |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} Copy of letter to Mr. A. M. Rekunov, Procurator General of the USSR, with other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=Arrests in Poland |location=33.13 |date=August 13, 1986 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1986/08/14/arrests-in-poland/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=Celebrating Mencken |location=37:4 |date=March 15, 1990 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1990/03/15/celebrating-mencken/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=President Clinton. ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=An Urgent Appeal from Pen American Center |location=40:4 |date=February 11, 1993 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1993/02/11/an-urgent-appeal-from-pen-american-center/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=to Prime Minister Paul Keating et al. ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=The Case of Wei Jingsheng |location=43:3 |date=February 15, 1996 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1996/02/15/the-case-of-wei-jingsheng/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories. An open letter.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=JFK’s Assassination |location=50:20 |date=December 18, 2003 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2003/12/18/jfks-assassination/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} With other signatories.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject=The Election and America’s Future |location=51:17 |date=November 4, 2004 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2004/11/04/the-election-and-americas-future/ |url-access=subscription |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} Letter; one of a series solicited by the Editors.<br />
<br />
{{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |recipient=the Editors, ''New York Review of Books'' |subject= Blocked |location=52:13 |date=August 11, 2005 |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2005/08/11/blocked/ |accessdate=2020-10-01 |author-mask=1 |ref=harv }} As author of ''Oswald’s Tale'', with other signatories.<br />
<br />
==2007==<br />
<!--TEMPLATES should be used from this point forward. See talk page.--><br />
===Primary===<br />
====Books====<br />
{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite book |last1=Mailer |first1=Norman |author-mask=1 |last2=Lennon |first2=J. Michael |date=2007 |title=On God: An Uncommon Conversation |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
====Book Contributions====<br />
{{cite book |contributor-last=Mailer |contributor-first=Norman |contribution=Commentary |last=Regan |first=Ken |date=2007 |title=Knockout: The Art of Boxing |url= |location=San Rafael, CA |publisher=Insight Editions |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite book |contributor-last=Mailer |contributor-first=Norman |contributor-mask=1 |contribution=Introduction |last=Schiller |first=Lawrence |date=2007 |title=Marilyn Monroe |url= |location=Los Angles, CA |publisher=East End Editions KLS |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
====Interviews====<br />
<!-- Unlike the original, these should probably be ordered by INTERVIEWER’S LAST NAME. We need to use TEMPLATES with all of these entries, please. See the talk page.--><br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Fox |first=Sue |date=July 8, 2007 |title=Even at 84, Norman Mailer Refuses to Pull His Punches |url=https://www.pressreader.com/uk/sunday-express-1070/20070708/282346855399714 |work=Sunday Express |location=UK first ed. |page=55 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Freeman |first=John |date=January 20, 2007 |title=Devilish Motives |url=https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/devilish-motives-20070120-gdp9x7.html |work=Sydney Morning Herald |location=Australia |access-date=2020-10-01 |page=30 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=Lee |first=Michael |title=The Devil in Norman Mailer |url=https://search.proquest.com/openview/5bff77fb5c089c0b3d810827ee4686c7/1.pdf?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=40852 |journal=Literary Review |volume=50 |issue=4 |date=Summer 2007 |pages=202–217 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Llewellyn |first=Caro |author-mask= |title=The Lion in Winter: Norman Mailer Talks about Writing His First Novel in a Decade |url= |magazine=Weekend Australian |issue= |date=March 31, 2007 |pages=1 |access-date= |ref=harv }} pre-prints ed.<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=McCrum |first=Robert |date=November 11, 2007 |title=The Author at Home |url= |work=The Observer |location=England |access-date= |ref=harv }} Essay-Interview.<br />
<br />
{{cite journal |last=O’Hagan |first=Andrew |title=The Art of Fiction No. 193, Norman Mailer |url=https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5775/the-art-of-fiction-no-193-norman-mailer |journal=The Paris Review |volume=49 |issue=181 |date=Summer 2007 |pages=44+ |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=O’Hagan |first=Andrew |author-mask=1 |title=Get Your Ass off My Pillow |url=https://harpers.org/archive/2007/09/get-your-ass-off-my-pillow/ |url-access=subscription |magazine=Harper’s Magazine |issue=315.1888 |date=September 2007 |pages=22–24 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Rose |first=Daniel Asa |date=January 21, 2007 |title=In Conversation ... ; with Norman Mailer |url= |work=Washington Post |location=T07 |access-date= |ref=harv }} Final ed.<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Wollheim |first=Richard |title=Living like Heroes |url=https://www.newstatesman.com/society/2007/11/violence-hip-mailer-1961 |magazine=New Statesman |issue=137.4871 |date=November 19, 2007 |pages=62 |access-date= |ref=harv }} Abridged reprint of a 1961 interview promoting ''Advertisements for Myself''<br />
<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
<br />
“Mailer on Bush, Obama & Writing.” By Colin Miner. ''New York Sun'' 22 Jan 2007: 15.<br />
<br />
“Mailer’s Novel Ideas about Hitler.” By Judy Stoffman. ''The Toronto Star'' 28 Jan 2007: C04.<br />
<br />
“Norman Mailer.” By Mark Binelli. ''Rolling Stone'' 1025/1026 (3–17 May 2007): 69–70.<br />
<br />
“Norman Mailer.” Survey-Interview by unknown author. ''Vanity Fair 557'' (Jan 2007): 166.<br />
<br />
“Now Age 84....” Essay-Interview by Allen Pierleoni. ''Sacramento Bee'' 4 Feb 2007, metro final ed.: TK22.<br />
<br />
“A Portrait of the Devil as a Young Man.” By Dylan Foley. ''Star-Ledger'' 28 Jan 2007, final ed.: 6.<br />
<br />
“The Rise of Mailerism.” Article-Interview by Michael Lennon. ''New York'' 40.36 (15 Oct 2007): 24+. Mailer discusses ''On God''.<br />
<br />
“The Sound and the Baby Führer.” By Gene Santaro. ''World War II'' 22.2 (May 2007): 23–25.<br />
<br />
Tough Guys Don’t Quit.” By Gregory Kirschling. ''Entertainment Weekly'' 916 (19 Jan 2007): 48.<br />
<br />
“Writing with the Devil.” Q & A with Nan Goldberg. ''Boston Globe'' 4 Feb 2007, Magazine: 15.<br />
<br />
===Secondary===<br />
<!-- Secondary lists should use appropriate templates when possible, like our articles’ standard bibliographies. --><br />
====Essays, Articles, Book Chapters, and Dissertations====<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--PageSix.com Staff--> |date=January 17, 2007 |title=Sex-Mad Mailer Enraged Rival |url=https://pagesix.com/2007/01/25/sex-mad-mailer-enraged-rival/ |work=New York Post |location=Page Six |page=12 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }} Article discussing Ralph Ellison’s attitude toward Mailer, according to Ellison’s biographer.<br />
<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
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''.<br />
<br />
Beach, Patrick. “Mailer’s Memories about to Open at Ransom Center.”''Austin American-Statesman'' 23 Dec 2007, final ed.: J5.<br />
<br />
Bennett, Bruce. “Mailer at the Movies.” ''New York Sun'' 20 July 2007: 11. Overview of Mailer’s films.<br />
<br />
Brokaw, Leslie. “HFA Salutes Norman Mailer on Film.” ''Boston Globe'' 16 Sep 2007, third ed.: N11.<br />
<br />
Bufithis, Philip. “''The Executioner’s Song'': A Life Beneath Our Conscience.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 77–79.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dickstein, Morris. “How Mailer Became ‘Mailer’: The Writer as Private and Public Character.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 118–31.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.”<br />
<br />
James, Clive. “Norman Mailer.” In ''Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts''. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007. 409–413.<br />
<br />
Goldfarb, Reuven. “The Jewish Mailer.” Jerusalem Post 20 Nov 2007: 14. Henderson, Cathy, Richard W. Oram, Molly Schwartzburg, and Molly Hardy.<br />
“Mailer Takes on America: Images from the Ransom Center Archive.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 141–75.<br />
<br />
Holmes, Constance E. and J. Michael Lennon.“Norman Mailer: Supplemental Bibliography through 2006.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 234–60.<br />
<br />
Houpt, Simon. “Still a Brawler at Heart.” ''Globe and Mail'' [Canada] 27 Jan 2007: R4.<br />
<br />
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''.<br />
<br />
Howley, Ashton. “Mailer Again: Heterophobia in ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance''.” ''Journal of Modern Literature'' 30.1 (2007): 31–46.<br />
<br />
J. C. “White Mischief.” ''TLS: Times Literary Supplement'' 26 Oct 2007: 36. Includes brief mention of ''Mailer Review''.<br />
<br />
Junod, Tom. “The Last Man Standing.” ''Esquire'' 147.1 (Jan 2007): 108–133.<br />
<br />
Kachka, Boris. “Mr. Tenditious.” ''New York'' 40.2 (15 Jan 2007): 62. Recaps Mailer’s history of responding negatively—even violently—to criticism.<br />
<br />
Kaufmann, Donald L. “An American Dream: The Singular Nightmare.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 194–205.<br />
<br />
Kennedy, William. “Norman Mailer as Occasional Commentator in a Self-Interview and Memoir.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 11–26.<br />
<br />
Kriegel, Leonard. “Mailer’s Hitler: Round One.” ''Sewanee Review'' 115.4 (Fall 2007): 615–620.<br />
<br />
Lennon, J. Michael. “Gallery Talk: The Mailer Archive.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 132–40.<br />
<br />
———. “Norman Mailer: Novelist, Journalist, or Historian?” ''Journal of Modern Literature'' 30.1 (2007): 91–103.<br />
<br />
———. (ed. and note): “‘A Series of Tragicomedies’: Mailer’s Letters on The Deer Park, 1954–55.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 45–79.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Lucid, Robert F. “[Boston State Hospital: The Summer of 1942].” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 27–33. Excerpt from incomplete authorized biography.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Middlebrook, Jonathan: “Five Notes toward a Reassessment of Norman Mailer.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 179–83.<br />
<br />
Partridge, Jeffrey F. L. “''The Gospel According to the Son and Christian Belief''.” ''Journal of Modern Literature'' 30.1 (2007): 64–77.<br />
<br />
Petigny, Alan.“Norman Mailer,‘The White Negro,’ and New Conceptions of the Self in Postwar America.” ''Mailer Review'' 1.1 (Fall 2007): 184–93.<br />
<br />
Rampton, David. “Plexed Artistry: The Formal Case for Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost.” ''Journal of Modern Literature'' 30.1 (2007): 47–63.<br />
<br />
Rodwin, John G. "Fighters and Writers". ''The Mailer Review''. Fall 2008. 396-406.<br />
<br />
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.”<br />
<br />
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''.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Severs, Jeffrey Frank. ''Reinventing Totalitarianism in the Postwar American Novel''. Diss. Harvard U, 2007. Ann Arbor: UMI, 2007. AAT 3265089.<br />
<br />
====Book Reviews====<br />
<!--Ordered by AUTHOR’S LAST NAME and first letter of article name when there is no author. Search for full-text online, please.--><br />
{{cite journal |author=<!--None stated--> |title=His Perfect Sense of the Other |url=https://newcriterion.com/issues/2007/2/ldquohis-perfect-sense-of-the-otherrdquo |journal=New Criterion |volume=25 |issue=6 |date=February 2007 |pages=1–2 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }} Rev. of ''The Castle in the Forest''.<br />
<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
====Obituaries and Retrospectives====<br />
<!--Ordered by AUTHOR’S LAST NAME and first letter of article name when there is no author. Search for full-text online, please.--><br />
{{cite news |last=Allen-Mills |first=Tony |date=November 11, 2007 |title=Norman Mailer, Literary Rebel, Dies |url=https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/norman-mailer-literary-rebeldies-zkhkhdbchfw |work=Sunday Times |location=London |pages=1+ |access-date=2020-10-01 |url-access=subscription |ref=harv }} [Note: Also printed in the ''Australian'' under a different headline.]<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 11, 2007 |title=The Bad Boy of U.S. Literature |url= |work=Sunday Times |location=London |page=20 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date= November 12, 2007 |title=A Brawler who Never Pulled a Punch |url=https://www.irishtimes.com/news/a-brawler-who-never-pulled-a-punch-1.981221 |work=Irish Times |location= |page=10 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 14, 2007 |title=Heavyweight: Mailer’s Life and Work Were Outsized |url=https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/2007/11/14/Heavyweight-Mailer-s-life-and-work-were-outsized/stories/200711140262 |work=Pittsburgh Post-Gazette |location= |page=B6 |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 12, 2007 |title=Legendary Writer with Particular Love for the Irish |url=https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/legendary-writer-with-particular-love-for-the-irish-26331219.html |work=Irish Independent |location= |page=unknown |access-date=2020-10-01 |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |author=<!--None stated--> |date=November 11, 2007 |title=A Life of Writing, Boozing and Brawling |url= |work=Edmonton Journal |location= |page=A3 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
“Mailer won pair of Pulitzers.” ''Variety'' 409.1 (19–25 Nov 2007): 55.<br />
<br />
“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.<br />
<br />
“Norman Mailer.” ''Economist'', US ed. 385.8555 (17 Nov 2007): 103.<br />
<br />
“Norman Mailer.” ''Sunday Independent'' [Ireland] 11 Nov 2007: page unknown.<br />
<br />
“Norman Mailer.” ''Times'' [London] 12 Nov 2007: 53.<br />
<br />
“Norman Mailer.” ''Independent'' [London] 13 Nov 2007, first ed.: 34.<br />
<br />
“Norman Mailer.” ''Times Union'' 15 Nov 2007, one star ed.: A12.<br />
<br />
“Norman Mailer, 1923–2007.” ''Cincinnati Post'' 12 Nov 2007: C10.<br />
<br />
“Norman Mailer, 84.” ''Newsweek'' 151.1 (31 Dec 2007): 106.<br />
<br />
“Obituary of Norman Mailer.” ''Daily Telegraph'' [London] 12 Nov 2007: 25.<br />
<br />
“Pulitzer Prize Author Norman Mailer Dies at 84.” ''Providence Journal'' 11 Nov 2007: A6.<br />
<br />
Ambrose, Jay. “Remembering Mailer.” ''Knoxville News Sentinel'' 25 Nov 2007: 73.<br />
<br />
Andriani, Lynn. “A Prolific Life to the End.” ''Publishers Weekly'' 254.56 (19 Nov 2007): 8.<br />
<br />
Associated Press. “Literary Lion Sparked American Debate.” ''Daily Variety'' 12 Nov 2007: 2.<br />
<br />
———. “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.<br />
<br />
Baddiel, David. “For Norman Mailer, Authenticity was all about Masculinity.” ''Times'' [London] 17 Nov 2007: 3.<br />
<br />
Bancroft, Colette. “‘He was Much More’ than a Writer.” ''St. Petersburg Times'' [Florida] 11 Nov 2007, South Pinellas ed.: 1A.<br />
<br />
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.]<br />
<br />
Bernstein, Mashey. “In Different Way, Norman Mailer was a Deeply Jewish<br />
Writer.” ''Deep South Jewish Voice'' 18.1 (Dec 2007): 100+.<br />
<br />
Blau, Rosie and Martin Mulligan. “Pulling No Punches to the End.” ''London Financial Times'' 12 Nov 2007, U.S. ed.: 13.<br />
<br />
Boyd, Herb. “When James Baldwin Met Norman Mailer.” ''New York Amsterdam News'' 15 Nov 2007: 1+.<br />
<br />
Burke, Cathy and Todd Venezia. “Literary Pug and Original Hipster Mailer,<br />
84, Dies.” ''New York Post'' 11 Nov 2007, News: 7.<br />
<br />
Calabrese, Erin. “Widow Defends Mailer, Says He ‘Loved Women.’” ''New York Post'' 19 Nov 2007, News: 14.<br />
<br />
Campbell, James. “Norman Mailer: Pugnacious Journalist and Author.”<br />
''Guardian'' [London] 12 Nov 2007, final ed.: 34.<br />
<br />
Cappell, Ezra. “Norman Mailer: A Man of Letters Inspired by the People of<br />
the Book.” ''Forward'' 16 Nov 2007: A1+.<br />
<br />
Clark, Roy Peter. “Two Minutes with Mailer.” ''St. Petersburg Times'' [Florida] 15 Nov 2007: 1E.<br />
<br />
Clarke, Toni.“Writer Norman Mailer dies at 84.” ''Irish Times'' 12 Nov 2007: 10.<br />
<br />
Craig, Olga. “A Life of Books, Bars, Brawling.” ''Gazette'' [Montreal] 11 Nov 2007, final ed.: A3.<br />
<br />
Crosbie, Lynn. “Believe it: This was the Man who Loved Women.” ''Globe and Mail'' [Canada] 12 Nov 2007: R1.<br />
<br />
Crossen, Cynthia. “Readback: When Normal Mailer Was Nobody: 1948’s ‘The<br />
Naked and the Dead’ Was Written Before He Was Famous, And That Is Its<br />
Greatest Blessing.” ''Wall Street Journal Online'' (15 Nov 2007). http://<br />
www.wallstreetjournal.com.<br />
<br />
Cryer, Dan and Aileen Jacobson. “Norman Mailer 1923–2007: A Literary Icon<br />
Dies.” ''Newsday'' 11 Nov 2007, Nassau and Suffolk ed.: A08<br />
<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
<br />
{{Review|state=expanded}}<br />
{{DEFAULTSORT:Norman Mailer Bibliography: 2007}}<br />
[[Category:Bibliographies (MR)]]</div>ChristinaPinkstonhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/Norman_Mailer_Bibliography:_2007&diff=11837The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer Bibliography: 20072020-09-30T19:25:47Z<p>ChristinaPinkston: not done with interview section, feel free to add to it</p>
<hr />
<div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}<br />
{{Working}}<br />
{{MR02}}<br />
{{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}}<br />
{{TOC right|width=25%}}<br />
==Addenda through 2006==<br />
===Primary===<br />
====Letters====<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Letter to the Editors, with other signatories. “Violence in Oakland.” ''New York Review of Books'' 10:9. 9 May 1968.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Letter to the Editors, with other signatories. “The Committee to Defend the Conspiracy.” ''New York Review of Books'' 12:12. 19 June 1969.<br />
<br />
Letter to the Editors, with other signatories. “Ford’s Better Idea.” ''New York Review of Books'' 19:11 & 12. 25 Jan. 1973.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Letter to the Editors, with other signatories. “In a Cuban Prison.” ''New York Review of Books'' 25:19. 7 Dec. 1978.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Letter to the Editors, with other signatories. “Arrests in Poland.” ''New York Review of Books'' 33:13. 13 August 1986.<br />
<br />
Letter to the Editors, with other signatories. “Celebrating Mencken.” ''New York Review of Books'' 37:4. 15 Mar. 1990.<br />
<br />
Letter to President Clinton, with other signatories. “An Urgent Appeal from Pen American Center.” ''New York Review of Books'' 40:4. 11 Feb. 1993.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Letter to the Editor, with other signatories. “JFK’s Assassination.” ''New York Review of Books'' 50:20. 18 Dec. 2003.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Letter to the Editors, as author of ''Oswald’s Tale'', with other signatories. “Blocked.” ''New York Review of Books'' 52:13. 11 Aug. 2005.<br />
<br />
==2007==<br />
===Primary===<br />
====Books====<br />
{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite book |last1=Mailer |first1=Norman |author-mask=1 |last2=Lennon |first2=J. Michael |date=2007 |title=On God: An Uncommon Conversation |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
====Book Contributions====<br />
{{cite book |contributor-last=Mailer |contributor-first=Norman |contribution=Commentary |last=Regan |first=Ken |date=2007 |title=Knockout: The Art of Boxing |url= |location=San Rafael, CA |publisher=Insight Editions |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite book |contributor-last=Mailer |contributor-first=Norman |contributor-mask=1 |contribution=Introduction |last=Schiller |first=Lawrence |date=2007 |title=Marilyn Monroe |url= |location=Los Angles, CA |publisher=East End Editions KLS |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
====Interviews====<br />
<!-- Unlike the original, these should probably be ordered by interviewer’s last name. --><br />
{{cite magazine |last=O’Hagan |first=Andrew |date=Summer 2007 |title=The Art of Fiction No. 193, Norman Mailer |url= |magazine=The Paris Review 49.181 |pages=44+ |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=McCrum |first=Robert |date=11 Nov 2007 |title=The Author at Home |url= |work=The Observer |location=England |pages=28 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite magazine |last=Lee |first=Michael |date=Summer 2007 |title=The Devil in Norman Mailer |url= |magazine=Literary Review 50.4 |pages=202–217 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
{{cite news |last=Freeman |first=John |date=20 Jan 2007 |title=Devilish Motives |url= |work=Sydney Morning Herald |location=Australia |pages=30 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
===Secondary===<br />
<!-- Secondary lists should use appropriate templates when possible, like our articles’ standard bibliographies. --><br />
====Essays, Articles, Book Chapters, and Dissertations====<br />
<br />
====Book Reviews====<br />
<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
====Obituaries and Retrospectives====<br />
<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
<br />
{{Review|state=expanded}}<br />
{{DEFAULTSORT:Norman Mailer Bibliography: 2007}}<br />
[[Category:Bibliographies (MR)]]</div>ChristinaPinkstonhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=User:ChristinaPinkston&diff=11828User:ChristinaPinkston2020-09-30T18:36:11Z<p>ChristinaPinkston: </p>
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<div>Christina Pinkston is from Macon, Georgia and currently a junior at Middle Georgia State University. She is pursuing a degree in Media and Communication and anticipates entering the broadcasting field. She also worked with KnightVision News as news anchor, field reporter, production assistant, and video editor.</div>ChristinaPinkstonhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/From_Monroe_to_Picasso:_Norman_Mailer_and_the_Life-Study&diff=11771The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/From Monroe to Picasso: Norman Mailer and the Life-Study2020-09-26T21:34:26Z<p>ChristinaPinkston: fixed a line break and added a space between one quotation</p>
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{{byline|last=Glenday|first=Michael K.|abstract=Mailer found an authority of visual presentment in the Picasso’s work that gave a new imperative to his own culture-readings. In his relationship with the lives of Marilyn Monroe and Pablo Picasso, Mailer gives us an example of what he has sometimes referred to as “an imaginary memoir.” Readers will either find them legitimate, or will accept, even relish the prospect of encountering not just the memoir, but also the vitality of interaction between Mailer’s imagination and his subject.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08glen}}<br />
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====1. “What I have to say about Picasso may not be so dull.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=261}}====<br />
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Readers of Norman Mailer’s ''[[Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man|Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man: An Interpretive Biography]]'' (1995) are in the Preface directed to one of the book’s main sources, Mailer’s 1966 essay collection ''[[Cannibals and Christians]]''. There, in the quirky, sometimes amusing “imaginary dialogues” that give form to such pieces as “The Political Economy of Time” and “The Metaphysics of the Belly” (from which latter dialogue the opening quotation above is taken), those readers will find an early indication of what was to become a lifelong concern with Picasso. “The Metaphysics of the Belly” was published in ''[[The Presidential Papers]]'' (1963), where, in Appendix B, Mailer tells us that it “is part of a longer manuscript on Picasso which was worked on in June and early July 1962, in Provincetown. It was never submitted for publication.”{{sfn|Mailer|1963|p=308}} Contracted by Macmillan in 1962 to write a biography of the artist, Mailer in his Preface to ''Picasso'' yet offers little in the way of an explicit rationale for his eventual failure to complete the project at that time. For though he acknowledges that both of the above dialogues were “done consecutively as two chapters of a projected book on Picasso.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=261}} that book was not to be completed for a further three decades. One main reason may well be that exposure to at least fifteen thousand of Picasso’s artworks in the “eight happy weeks”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=xi}} he spent in the library of the Museum of Modern Art was an experience so radical in its effects upon his own imagination that Mailer found it difficult to achieve any biographical “distance” from his subject. So much, at least, is suggested by the results of that exposure: “my mind was left one hair unhinged.”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=xi}} If this description suggests the typology of the wild artist, as exemplified by the visionary of [[w:Samuel Taylor Coleridge|Coleridge]]’s “[[w:Kubla Khan|Kubla Khan]]” with “his flashing eyes, his floating hair,” then we may not be surprised to find that having absorbed the thirty-three volumes of [[w:Christian Zervos|Christian Zervos]]’s ''Pablo Picasso'', Mailer was indeed released into a fundamental reappraisal of his own relationship with reality: “after such immersion, one can hardly sustain one’s previous view of existence.”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=xi}} The life-studyist was forced to study his own life. Washed clean and able to achieve that frank reorientation, he suddenly felt absolved of any biographical responsibility, even seeming to recollect “giving back my advance to Macmillan.”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=xi}} Yet the new balance sheet had little reciprocity about it, since although “the ambitious dialogues”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=261}} in both ''The Presidential Papers'' and ''Cannibals and Christians'' owe much to the stimulating influence of Picasso’s art, still they “contain hardly a word about Picasso. . .. [O]ne had insights into the extremities of one’s own thinking but few biographical perceptions about him.”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=xi}} <br />
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Perhaps not, but the writer found an authority of visual presentment in the artist’s work that gave a new imperative to his own culture-readings. Although he may not at that time have produced any extensive biographic study of Picasso, his writing of those years undoubtedly begins to express a very similar response to reality. In his essay “Eros and Idiom” (1975), George Steiner cites the work of Mailer, along with that of William Burroughs and Jean Genet, as expressions of “the political character of the age.”{{sfn|Steiner|1980|p=125}} Such writers “have said that the bestialities recounted in their work mirror the crisis of inhumanity through which we appear to be living since 1914. A literature which failed to reflect modern barbarism, the widespread return of torture in political life, the programmatic degradation of the human person in concentration camps and colonial wars, would be a lie.”{{sfn|Steiner|1980|p=125}} Steiner is right, and in the broken limbs and fractured forms of Guernica and Picasso’s autopsical portraits Mailer found more than a glimpse of that dark vision, paintings imbued with what he described as “a sense of their authority and our horror.”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=27}} His writing would soon begin to build upon a similar idiom. If he saw in Picasso’s art a determination to “tear apart the world of appearances and leave us with a secret fear that the soul behind the face of each person we meet is more hideous than any tale told by his features,”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=243}} then in “The Metaphysics of the Belly” he would also testify that “the modern condition may be psychically so bleak [. . .] that studies of loneliness, silence, corruption, scatology, abortion, monstrosity, decadence, orgy and death can give life, can give a sentiment of beauty.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=269}} In the honesty of Picasso’s explorations into the “fair and dark psyche”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=255}} of humanity — such as appeared in “the great dichotomy”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=260}} of ''[[w:Les Demoiselles d’Avignon|Les Demoiselles d’Avignon]]'' — Mailer could still find a statement of hope and possibility. <br />
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Yet if the biographer, like the critic, must maintain the capacity to be both within and without his subject, then Mailer’s role as Picasso’s biographer was at that time seriously compromised. By his own admission he was “not ready to write about Picasso.”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=xi}} Instead, in those years Picasso became the ''eminence gris'' in Mailer’s own creative life. But this admission leads us to a crucial consideration: must it be that such readiness to write about an artist as complex and powerful as Picasso is dependent upon the biographer feeling himself to be free from ''active'' influence by his subject? If so, does this only apply to biographers who are themselves practicing artists? It is a moot point as to whether Mailer was ever able to achieve that balance between the within and the without, and in any case it may be that writing a life-study ought to be a life-changing experience, involving risk to oneself and one’s beliefs. While we do not find anything like the cool objectivity of a Penrose or a Richardson in the life of Picasso that Mailer did eventually produce, as is sometimes the case with the work of artists who write biographies or appreciations of other artists (Randall Jarrell’s wondrous appreciation of Whitman in his ''Poetry and the Age'' would be a case in point), there are gratifications of a different order, such as a double helping of genius. In his relationship with the lives of Marilyn Monroe and Pablo Picasso, Mailer gives us an example of what he has sometimes referred to as “an imaginary memoir.”{{sfn|Mailer|1980|p=293}} Readers of those memoirs will either find them legitimate, and will accept, even relish the prospect of encountering not just the memoir, but also the vitality of interaction between Mailer’s imagination and his subject, or on grounds of illegitimacy they will refuse him admission into the academy of biographers.<br />
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====2. “But why not assume Marilyn Monroe opens up the entire problem of biography?”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=19}}====<br />
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If in 1962–1963 his first pass at biography writing was deferred, a decade later in ''[[Marilyn: A Biography]]'', Mailer returned to complete the touchdown with sovereign ease. The reasons have to do both with the subject as well as his revision of conventional biographic form. Looking back we can now see that Mailer was never more fully centered in the flux and force of American energy than he was by that time, never more completely the voice of its subterranean reaches. In those years of creative flood he was producing what many now regard as his most memorable works, a record of extraordinary absorption in and interpretation of America’s cultural revolution. As Hilary Mills states in her biography of Mailer, “the cumulative effect of his life and writing career had brought him to the height of his fame,”{{sfn|Mills|1982|p=411}} endowing him with celebrity and notoriety. Assessing ''Marilyn'' for the ''New York Times Book Review'', Pauline Kael recognized that its author had inherited Hemingway’s title as America’s “official literary celebrity.”{{sfn|Mills|1982|p=411}} In that celebrity sense he had become as close as he ever would to the condition of his new biographical subject and knew he was fastening onto a figure not only iconic and tragic, but also one who was capable of defining a larger arc of American sensibility. Her death was, he felt sure, a symbol of a more national dying fall. Could it be, as he so much wished, that “she knew better than anyone that she was the last of the myths to thrive in the long evening of the American dream?”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=16}} <br />
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Mailer’s biography launches itself with a brilliant span of Marilyns, a spray of colors and forms, “a child-girl, yet an actress to loose a riot by dropping her glove at a premiere . . . a lover of life and a cowardly hyena of death who drenched herself in chemical stupors . . . she was certainly more and less than the silver witch of us all.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=16-17}} While this expresses the complexity of his subject, it also serves to prepare us for Mailer’s engagement with what he takes to be the generic problem that confronts all biographers. In concluding the first section of the first chapter, “A Novel Biography,” he must have seized upon Virginia Woolf’s words with some pleasure: “A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as one thousand.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=18}} His next question suggests, however, that the reach of his inquiry will be even larger, and if it fails it will not be because of a reductively factual approach: “But why not assume Marilyn Monroe opens the entire problem of biography? The question is whether a person can be comprehended by the facts of the life, and this does not even begin to take into account that abominable magnetism of facts. They always attract polar facts.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=18}}<br />
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From the start then, this book provides a determinedly innovative approach to its methods, and in so doing it shows Mailer overcoming much of the resistance he encountered at the time of the Picasso biography in 1962. The resistance is overcome by finding the common ground between biography and art and so developing a rationale for himself as an artist-biographer. The “entire problem of biography” is located in this province, and once he has moved life-study away from its dependence upon the factual record alone, he is free to occupy the ground of a psychohistory that leaves room for both romantic and magical explanations of human behavior. Liberated from procrustean strictures he is able to insist on the distinction between biography as a species of reportage and the higher ground of “great biography.” This superior form is capable of exploring the depths of personality which are essentially mysterious: “the facts live, but Marilyn does not.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=19}} The lives of exceptional people demand exceptional biographers to interpret them and, moreover, biographers who are not afraid to enter the realms of the irrational, since those same “exceptional people (often the most patriotic, artistic, heroic, or prodigious) had a way of living with opposites in themselves.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=19}} Facts can only get us so far. Great biography must be capable of transcending that record, since like the astronauts (“what had a movie star like Monroe in common with an astronaut?”){{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=19}} exceptional people were themselves capable of transcending dualisms, and of coexisting with opposites within themselves, such as, say, nobility and evil. Moreover the factual archive is especially limited in the case of an actor like Monroe, “for an actor lives with the lie as if it were truth.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=18}} Faced by these impediments the biographer may become a type of secret sharer with his subject, since “by the logic of transcendence, it was exactly in the secret scheme of things that a man should be able to write about a beautiful woman.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=19}} Finally, “there is no instrument more ready to capture the elusive quality of her nature than a novel. Set a thief to catch a thief, and put an artist on an artist.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=20}} <br />
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Here then is the ultimate rationale for Mailer’s life-studies. Biography in his hands has passed into the repertoire of grand imagining, becoming not so much one further window in the house of fiction as one further room; the question is whether the result can pass for anything other than the most liberal assimilation of biographic norms. In a period when most of the energies of prose fiction were being assimilated by documentary forms, Mailer invested the documentary form of biography with a new poetics capable of exploiting the classic divisions between narratives of fact and fiction. Part metaphysics, part memoir, part reverie, ''Marilyn'' gives us a life whose resonance deepens and multiplies as we read; it tries for an integrity of human response and remembrance, as do most considerable works of art. Biographers will commonly seek to explain a life by attending, for instance, to the childhood of their subject, and so too does Mailer, though along with other specific energies in the tragic drama. Modern biography has accepted the possibilities of post-Freudian psychology, but ''Marilyn'' goes further to incorporate metaphysical influences such as karma and reincarnation,{{efn| Mailer’s belief in reincarnation is reiterated in his recent book ''[[Why Are We at War?]]''{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=21}}}} insisting that “we must question the fundamental notion of modern psychiatry—that we have but one life and one death.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=22}} Conventional biography and perhaps the contemporary imagination might be skeptical of such notions, but in working the ground of the possible Mailer insists that “the reductive voice speaks with no more authority than the romantic”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=23}} and his biography frequently asks readers for reorientations of rational consciousness. “There are a million dumb and dizzy broads with luck and none come near to Monroe, no. To explain her at all, let us hold to that karmic notion as one more idea to support in our mind.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=23}} <br />
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The above comment asks us to consider Monroe as the particular case that transcends the generic type, yet throughout this book Mailer very often uses the particular case to support the generic, allowing him to build towards what he calls “a working hypothesis” of American cultural dysfunction.{{sfn|Mailer|1973|pp=27-28}} So as Della Monroe Grainger—Monroe’s grandmother—turns to accelerating psychosis and attempts to murder the baby Marilyn (at least according to Marilyn herself), Mailer can intimate the presence of a larger malaise in the culture. ''Marilyn'' suggests that America, and particularly West Coast America, is but precariously situated in the land of sanity:<br />
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<blockquote>If a void in one’s sense of identity is equal to a mental swamp where insane growths begin, then America is an insane swamp more than other lands . . . Los Angeles had to be the focus within such focus, the deepest swamp of the national swamp, the weed of weeds . . . And there in Hawthorne in 1927, the weed Della Hogan Monroe Grainger, festering in the psychic swamp life of quiet Hawthorne, is believed to have crossed the street one afternoon, picked up the baby, taken her to her home, and there begun to suffocate her with a pillow.{{sfn|Mailer|1973|pp=27-28}}</blockquote><br />
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In Mailer’s analysis, the dramatic plot of Monroe’s life becomes a lucid shorthand for American neurosis and breakdown. And if Della Grainger in her psychotic behavior “was as American as most,”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=29}} so Ida and Wayne Bolender, who fostered Marilyn for the first seven years of her life, were not only “hymn and fundament, flesh and spine” of middle-America’s Silent Majority, but also exemplified its characteristic weakness, being “absolutely terrified of the lividity of the American air in the street outside.” This “Silent Majority [that] lives in dread of the danger which lies beneath appearances”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=30}} may have a premonition of its own demise, its silence a fluent outpouring of bad faith, of frontier dreams running to seed on suburban lawns. <br />
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Amongst the horrors of Monroe’s childhood, Mailer counts the shooting of her pet dog as one of the most traumatic, a horror that blighted any notion of being at home in “the other world outside the Bolender house”:<br />
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<blockquote>In 1932, when Norma Jean was almost six, Tippy began to get out of the house on spring evenings and make his run in the dark. One night a blast rolled down the street, and the milkman found the dog’s body in the dawn . . . a neighbor, sitting on his porch, had waited for Tippy with a shotgun. For three nights running Tippy had rolled in the neighbor’s garden. On the third night the neighbor shot him. We can sense that man. There is dog heat and dog body, dog funk leaving its odor on his new greens, rolling dog lusts on the garden crop. That’s one night for you, dog, he counts to himself; two nights for you, dog; on the third night—with what backed-up intensity of the frontier jammed at last into a suburban veranda we can only hear in the big blast—the dog is dead. The fears of the Bolenders have stood on real ground. And their timidity also stands revealed. For there is no record of confronting the neighbor and his shotgun. So to the child, a catastrophic view of history must have begun.{{sfn|Mailer|1973|pp=32-33}}</blockquote><br />
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Throughout the biography Mailer gives priority to such decisive vignettes and cumulatively provides a devastating critique of a culture in collapse. For behind the white picket-fence and “at the end of every sweet and quiet passage of love, amputation or absurdity is waiting.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=33}} Again he shows here the influence of Picasso, master of semblances. In the brief essay “An Eye on Picasso,” published as early as 1959 in ''[[Advertisements for Myself]]'', there is already recognition of the moral necessity of the painter’s combative assaults on the form and appearance of the conventional world: <br />
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<blockquote>For the last fifty years . . . Picasso has used his brush like a sword. . .. Up and down the world of appearances he has marched, sacking and pillaging and tearing and slashing, a modern-day Cortez conquering an empire of appearances. It is possible that there has never been a painter who will leave the intimate objects of the world so altered by the swath of his work . . . He is the first painter to bridge the animate and the inanimate.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=461}}</blockquote><br />
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The first painter perhaps, but soon followed by a writer, for certainly this is also Mailer’s bailiwick. We have only to think of “[[The White Negro]]” to realize his espousal of a similar approach. Of course that essay and a great deal of his thinking at that time is also rooted in an existential ethic of necessary confrontation with one’s own weakness, and with the individual’s challenge to the post war consensus in American culture. This had all but succeeded in placing its brand on a population who existed in a state of clammy cowardice and totalitarian control—“[a] stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life, and we suffer from a collective failure of nerve.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=338}} <br />
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''Marilyn'', in addition to being a great biography, is a seminal chapter in Mailer’s lifelong critique of American mores. It presents Monroe both as a victim of those values and as one who, in her courage and all but Faustian ambition, offered a challenge to them. For when “the luminous life of her face grew ten feet tall” on the movie screen, then to her audiences “Marilyn was deliverance.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|pp=15, 16}} Yet that image was also “the magnified mirror of ourselves, our exaggerated and now all but defeated generation.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=17}} As a girl she witnessed men like her “Uncle” Wayne Bolender, who did nothing to defend against the cruel abrasions of the world beyond domesticity; her life would often show the scars of exposure to those moments of catastrophe and cowardice: Whole washes of the apathy that would sit upon her in later years, that intolerable dull and dead round she passed through in the year after her marriage to Miller was over, “is probably sealed in the reflex of sorrowing for Tippy.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=33}} If “psychosis, like death, move[s] back into the past,”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=213}} then this life-study provides us with a harvest of possibilities from which to choose. Little wonder that in his final paragraph as he writes “Goodbye Norma Jean,” Mailer above all wishes that her spirit finds its resting place and that it “be rather in one place and not scattered in pieces across the firmament; let us hope her mighty soul and the mouse of her little one are both recovering their proportions in some fair and gracious home.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=248}}<br />
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====3. “God, catastrophe, and the language of form were all manifests to Picasso of another world beneath the world of appearances.”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=83}}====<br />
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''Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man: An Interpretive Biography'' was eventually published in 1995 and its subtitle is a clear indication that since 1962 Mailer had learned that in writing biographies the approach of “no original scholarship, much personal interpretation”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=xii}} was the way forward. Once again, as with ''Marilyn'', his prefatory pages promise a life-study based upon an imaginative and idiosyncratic reconstruction of his subject. Yet in his interpretation of Picasso’s work, readers will find much that is central to the thinking of Norman Mailer:<br />
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<blockquote>[T]he desire to make Picasso as real as any good character in life or in art has been the literary virtue sought after here. Which is equal to saying that the interpretation of Picasso’s life and work as a young man is my individual understanding of him, and I will rest on such a claim.{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=xii}}</blockquote><br />
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It is mainly this willingness to foreground the personal view that marks the contrast with his first attempt more than 30 years earlier. And though he tells readers of the Preface that in this biography very little survives from his early attempt, only “a page of notes I had written back in 1962,” still “[I]t was nice to know that a part of oneself was still playing the same tune three decades later.”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=xiii}} There is, however, a good deal more than that single page of notes that links the two projects. Above all, both in Picasso and in the dialogue “The Political Economy of Time,” published in ''Cannibals and Christians'' (this dialogue itself being one of those works which, according to Mailer, had been “stimulated” by his earlier, unfinished book on Picasso’s art), we find his abiding interest in the nuances of form. This interest is remembered in the second paragraph of the Preface to ''Picasso'': “I spent the summer writing a dialogue between an imaginary interviewer and myself dealing with such questions as ‘What is the distinction between soul and spirit?’ and ‘How do we decide on the nature of form?{{' "}}{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=xi}} <br />
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Writing in 1972, [[w:Richard Poirier|Richard Poirier]] found that Mailer’s responses to this question were so various as to be well-nigh incoherent. He was exasperated by Mailer’s use of the term “form” arguing that it is “like others that are used repeatedly by Mailer, meanderingly in motion.”{{sfn|Poirier|1972|p=15}} It is true that in the dialectic of forces that define Mailer’s theology the term is given a good deal of work to do, but this is very far from rendering it meaningless. For instance, in the following passage from “The Political Economy of Time” we are given a complex, but lucid explanation of the relationship between a culture and its expressive form. That relationship is the physical sign of the culture’s spiritual health and it may not be surprising to find Mailer arguing that in the mid-twentieth century this has been subordinated to a totalitarian imperative:<br />
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<blockquote>Form is the deepest clue we possess to the nature of time in any epoch, to the style of the time, to the mode by which reality is perceived in the time, to the way time moves in the consciousness of man, where it possesses grace, where it is hobbled, how strength addresses itself to weakness. Time is all but equal to creativity, for time is the potential to create as it resides in each of us. So form is the clue to the vitality or lethargy of time, and the most pervasive forms of the modern world now speak of an absence of invention, a pall upon good spirit, an erosion of memory. Only in the corners is there preoccupation with complexity of form, with those interruptions of time we comprehend in the absurd. Full of feverish creativity and feverish destruction are the forms in the corners and the edges—in the center is nothing but an aesthetic desert, those pillars of salt which rise out of . . . the triumph of that totalitarian spirit whose impulse is to betray form, to abstract form, until the meanings in its creation are lost.{{sfn|Mailer|1965|pp=304-305, 367-368}}</blockquote><br />
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It is surely significant that in this essay, widely recognized as a key to Mailer’s thinking (even by Poirier, who allows that it “is one of three pieces that are probably indispensable to any understanding of Mailer’s oeuvre”),{{sfn|Poirier|1972|p=15}} Picasso is the only artist mentioned. His special significance is further highlighted in that the citation appears not only in the essay’s final paragraph, but is also one of the very few references to the book’s title throughout ''Cannibals and Christians'': “Cannibals are Christians. And forms which look alike are alike. In some mysterious way. Or at least they are alike until the souls which create them become the spirit of treachery. So says Picasso, I suspect.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=375}} <br />
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Mailer’s lifelong concern with the necessary probity of form finds in Picasso the perfect artist. Far from being obtuse, the preamble to “The Political Economy of Time” has admirable clarity: “a future to life depends on creating forms of an intensity which will capture the complexity of modern experience and dignify it.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=311}} The image of “capture” recalls the earlier essay, “An Eye on Picasso,” in which the painter is hailed as a victorious commander who has achieved a “conquest of form so complete that all modern painting including the relative emancipation from form of such artists as Hofmann and Pollock derive from his Napoleonic marches.”{{efn|Mailer also applies the personification to Monroe: “She is a female Napoleon.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|pp=210, 226}}}}{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=461}} Mailer’s Picasso is all of that as well as a demiurge,{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=83}} subordinate only to God but invested with His supreme power. This is made even clearer in the biography, wherein the artist and the deity are shown to be in deep collaboration:<br />
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<blockquote>We have to assume that he is not only God-driven in his ambitions . . . but that he feels an uncomfortable intimacy with the Deity . . . <br />
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When Picasso draws, the line that delineates a limb seems to spring up out of some graceful collaboration between his hand and the power that conceived the design of that limb-God may be as amorphous as a cloud, but God is also as clear as a well defined form. . . . <br />
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The key is to be found in form. Form is the language that God has decided to share with a few painters, the very best painters. They are apostles serving the mystery of form.{{sfn|Mailer|1995|pp=205-206}}</blockquote><br />
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If Picasso “saw his mission as coming ever closer to the mind of God,” it was specifically with regard to “neither His spiritual secrets nor His pain but His engineering . . . Picasso was . . . looking to discover how God might have put it all together.”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|pp=273-274}} Mailer also presents Picasso’s fundamental revision of form as a part of his growing mutual rivalry with Matisse whose passionate, explosive use of color reached apotheosis with his painting ''[[w:Le Bonheur de Vivre|Le Bonheur de Vivre]]'' (1905–1906), hailed by the Paris art world as a bold embodiment of the modern (it was bought by Leo Stein who regarded it as “the most important painting done in our time.”){{sfn|Flam|1986|p=163}} If Picasso’s ultimate aim was to “depict the savagery of the form beneath the form,” then spurred on by Matisse’s success he would insist on doing this “with considerable independence from color.”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=243}} <br />
<br />
At first in ''Les Demoiselles d’Avignon'' and then through that portal into cubism, Mailer shows Picasso’s determination to explore the revelations of form. The stress is always upon freedom, for as Picasso said, “If we give spirits a form, we become independent . . . I understood why I was a painter.”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=258}} [[w:Cubism|Cubism]] developed into an ultimate expression of the freedom to translate the deep structures of reality, eventually sculpting both landscape and human shape as related, intimate. Yet Mailer is right to find that Picasso’s dense cubist paintings of 1912 (such as ''The Aficionado'', ''Sorgues, summer 1912'') are also exemplary as ''memento mori'', their “coalescence of forms”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=271}} a striking play on the meaning of death—another theme that links Picasso with Marilyn. As Monroe’s death was “covered over with ambiguity,”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=15}} so for Picasso, the forms of “[a] tree, a plant, a nude, a mountain . . . draw toward one another” even as he “lives in all-but-constant fear of his own death.”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=272}} Both are on familiar terms with what Mailer calls “Mr. Dread,”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=248}} and both perhaps used such knowledge as a means of artistic stimulation. “[I]n fear and trembling [and] [i]n dread,”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=17}} Monroe wrote in her own dressing room notebook, {{" '}}What am I afraid of? Why am I so afraid? Do I think I can’t act? I know I can act but I am afraid. I am afraid and I should not be and I must not be.{{' "}}{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=17}} And amidst some of “the most miserable days of his life” Picasso also “had a gift for making use of his own dread.”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|pp=87-88}} But whereas he “could live with dread” and “[c]ontrolled amounts encouraged him to work in order to exorcise the sensation,”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=88}} Monroe had in the end been living too long “in fear of some unnamed disaster to come.”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=248}} In contrast Picasso was able to confront such dread by objectifying it; his heroic cubist masterpieces of 1910–1912 are uncompromising in their descent to the heart of death. So Mailer is absolutely right to find in those paintings “an exploration of death” and to see in them “the appearance of corpses, their flesh in strips and tatters, organs open.”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=311}}<br />
<br />
====4. Attacking Reality====<br />
While cubism may be seen as “an exploration of death,”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=311}} this is very far from Mailer’s total reading of Picasso’s work. Years ago in ''Advertisements for Myself'' he demanded that American novelists “dare a new art of the brave,”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=473}} and throughout his own life it is precisely this capacity to set himself such challenges that has kept his own career so exuberantly engaging. It should not surprise us therefore that Picasso is Mailer’s hero, protean and courageous, a genius of energy and reach who contrived a bold art of the possible, always “looking to paint stasis and motion, growth and decomposition, the perceptions of infancy and the dissolutions of death, and do them all at once and in each painting.”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=312}} The accolade is complete:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>The twentieth-century artist who conceivably had the most influence on my work was not a writer but Picasso. He kept changing the nature of his attack on reality. It’s as if he felt there is a reality to be found out there but it’s not a graspable object like a rock. Rather, it is a creature who keeps changing shape. And if I, Picasso, have been trying to delineate this creature by means of a particular aesthetic style and have come only this far, then I am going to look for another style altogether. And off Picasso goes into a new mode of attack on reality . . . In line with Picasso, what I find most interesting in writing at this point is to keep making a new attack on the nature of reality.{{sfn|Mailer|2003a|p=156}}</blockquote><br />
<br />
This is the rationale for life-study: which is the life of art, and which can be, as in the case of ''Marilyn: A Biography'' and ''Picasso: An Interpretive Biography'', the art of life. Both Mailer and Picasso may have returned to a central circle of themes as most artists do, but always with new intimations of how the centre may be approached. This essay has therefore focused on the form of such approaches, for just as “[i]t was not like [Picasso] to use a model over and over in the same pose,”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=205}} so for Mailer style is always provisional, always driven by the demands of the subject. In a 1995 interview he divided American writers into two camps, those who write “with an air that is inimitable” such as “Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, Melville and James,” and others “who go along in a variety of modes. I’m in the latter camp.” He quickly followed this with a comparison between himself and Picasso, noting that “Matisse painted in one recognizable vein, while Picasso entered a hundred before he was done. Style was the cutting tool by which he could delineate a reality. He saw it as a tool rather than as an extension of his identity. I’ve found his attitude to be useful for myself.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003a|p=78}}<br />
<br />
These two life-studies portray Marilyn Monroe and Picasso as narcissists, and again, perhaps only those who could be so described have the freedom to inhabit a variety of personae and voice. Certainly, Mailer has often argued that modern society will always tend towards a monolithic utterance, and in the logic of totalitarianism Picasso’s dissidence was anathema. During the Second World War Picasso had “a bad record with the Nazis, and could be interned, deported, taken hostage,” his works condemned as “degenerate” and “Bolshevik.”{{sfn|Brassaï|2002|p=89}} There may even be little to dismay us in the news that recently discovered Paris police files (returned to France after 55 years in Soviet KGB archives) show that Picasso (who continued to live his life as a Catalan patriot) was refused French citizenship on the grounds of being an anarchist and a threat to the state.{{efn|The details of Picasso’s unsuccessful 1940 request for citizenship emerge from Paris police dossiers covering four decades of his life in France. They have been published by Pierre Daix and Armand Israel as ''Pablo Picasso: Dossiers de la Préfecture de Police 1901–1940'' (Lausanne: Acatos, 2004). “The times of his comings and goings are very irregular . . . Sometimes he even stays out all night . . . As a result of all the information which has been gathered, this foreigner has no qualification for being naturalised . . . He must be considered as a suspect from the state’s point of view.”{{sfn|Bremner|2003|p=16}}}} After that war ended many beat a path to his door since “his courageous attitude made him a standard bearer, and the whole world wanted to salute him as the symbol of recovered freedom.”{{sfn|Brassaï|2002|p=205}} <br />
<br />
And indeed it is their freedom and courage that Mailer admires most of all in his two subjects. In Monroe’s case, he represents it as a freedom constrained, but part of an innate complex, “her liberation and her tyrannical desires”{{sfn|Mailer|1973|p=17}} together driving an ambition described on several occasions as Napoleonic,{{sfn|Mailer|1973|pp=210, 226}} an adjective he applies also to Picasso. In Picasso it was also freedom that shone through, a native idiom in which his genius found expression. Indeed the epigraph to ''Picasso'' presents freedom as existential high-wire and artistic necessity. There Mailer chooses the artist’s own words: “Painting is freedom. If you jump, you might fall on the wrong side of the rope. But if you are not willing to take the risk of breaking your neck, what good is it? You don’t jump at all. You have to wake people up. To revolutionize their way of identifying things. ”Substitute writing for painting and in Picasso’s statement we have the Mailer aesthetic too. His own art was also famously committed to the possibility of bringing about “a revolution in the consciousness of our time.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=71}} For if, as Kahnweiler put it, “in seeking his own mode of expression, [Picasso] daringly breaks new ground in every process and brings it to perfection,”{{sfn|Brassaï|2002|p=347}} so too should biographic form entail such freedom, and the biographer venture a relationship with his subject which is both seminal and unique. And when we read that Mailer recognizes in Picasso “the embodiment of a mighty ego,”{{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=304}} we are reminded that writing biographies can also be a species of self recognition and self-approval. In a life-study that exploits a primary bond of interaction between author and subject, there is palpable awe for this artist whose youthful self-belief would eventually become Promethean, until finally he could see himself as a dynamic link between humankind and the forces that created the world as well as those that kept it in convulsive disarray. ''Picasso'' joins with ''Marilyn'' and Mailer to become life-study, enlarging the repertoire of purist biography and liberating its strictures.<br />
<br />
===Notes===<br />
{{notelist}}<br />
<br />
===Citations===<br />
{{Reflist|15em}}<br />
<br />
===Works Cited===<br />
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Brassaï |title=Conversations with Picasso |translator-first=Jane Marie |translator-last=Todd |location=Chicago |publisher=U of Chicago P|date=2002 |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite news |last=Bremner |first=Charles |date=17 May 2003 |title=French Saw Picasso as an Enemy of the State |newspaper=The Times |page=16 |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Flam |first=Jack |date=1986 |title=Matisse: The Man and His Art 1869-1918 |location=Ithaca |publisher=Cornell UP |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |location=New York |publisher=Putnam |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1965 |title=Cannibals and Christians |location=New York |publisher=Dial |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1973 |title=Marilyn: A Biography |location=New York |publisher=Grosset & Dunlap |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1980 |title=Of Women and Their Elegance |location=New York |publisher=Simon & Schuster |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1995 |title=Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man: An Interpretive Biography |location=New York |publisher=Atlantic Monthly Press |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1963 |title=The Presidential Papers |location=New York |publisher= Putnam |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2003a |title=The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |location=New York |publisher= Random House |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2003 |title=Why Are We at War? |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Manso |first=Peter |date=1986 |title=Mailer: His Life and Times |location=Harmondsworth, Middlesex |publisher=Penguin |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mills |first=Hilary |date=1982 |title=Mailer: A Biography |location=New York |publisher=Empire |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Poirier |first=Richard |date=1972 |title=Mailer |location=London |publisher=Fontana |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Steiner |first=George |date=1980 |title=On Difficulty and Other Essays |location=Oxford |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}</div>ChristinaPinkstonhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/Author,_Auteur:_A_Conversation_with_Norman_Mailer&diff=11763The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Author, Auteur: A Conversation with Norman Mailer2020-09-26T00:59:12Z<p>ChristinaPinkston: fixed italics, added space after period, fixed some line breaks</p>
<hr />
<div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>Author, ''Auteur'': A Conversation with Norman Mailer}}<br />
{{Working}}<br />
{{MR02}}<br />
{{byline|last= Chaiken| first= Michael|abstract=A film specialist interviews Norman {{NM}} about his long-term interest in cinema, including his work as a filmmaker.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08chai}}<br />
{{dc|dc=I|n may 2005, at the time this interview was conducted,}} I was working as the Program Director for Film at International House Philadelphia, a non-profit arts center immediately adjacent to the University of Pennsylvania. Earlier that year I had organized a series of films directed by noted authors which included works by [[w:Yukio Mishima|Yukio Mishima]], [[w:Alain Robbe-Grillet|Alain Robbe-Grillet]], [[w:Susan Sontag|Susan Sontag]], [[w:William Burroughs|William Burroughs]], and [[w:Samuel Beckett|Samuel Beckett]] among others. Norman’s films were central to the series and, with his consent, we were loaned his personal 35mm prints of ''[[w:Maidstone (film)|Maidstone]]'' and ''[[w:Tough Guys Don’t Dance|Tough Guys Don’t Dance]]''. Around that time I discussed with Norman the possibility of organizing a broader series, one that might include all four of the films he directed in addition to the<br />
numerous documentaries made about him: films based on his writing, films in which he appeared as an actor and films that he helped to inspire. I proposed the idea to my colleagues at Film at Lincoln Center in New York and they were intrigued, particularly if Mailer might come to present his films.<br />
<br />
This expanded series, which was titled “The Mistress & The Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer” (the cinema being the mistress tempting Norman away from his literary muse), ran for two weeks in July/August 2007 and was divided between two supporting venues in New York, The Anthology Film Archives and Film at Lincoln Center, which opened the series with a double bill of ''Maidstone'' and ''Tough Guys'' and concluded the event with [[w:Lawrence Schiller|Larry Schiller]]’s ''[[w:The Executioner's Song (film)|The Executioner’s Song]]'', followed by a post-screening discussion with director Larry Schiller, [[Norris Church Mailer]], and [[w:Roseanna Arquette|Roseanna Arquette]]. Joined by [[J. Michael Lennon]], film critic and Lincoln Center programmer Kent Jones, and me, Mailer took the stage of Lincoln Center on July 22, 2007, in between sold-out screenings of ''Tough Guys'' and ''Maidstone'', in order to take questions from the audience.<br />
<br />
In the space of forty-five minutes, Norman managed to eviscerate [[w:Jean-Luc Godard|Jean-Luc Godard]] as the “second most evil person I’d ever met in my life” ([[w:Ronald Reagan|Reagan]] being the first), greatly offend at least a half dozen members of the audience (“Well, you can find friends... ,” was his reply to one woman’s generally negative comments on the merits of ''Tough Guys''), and unman yours truly after mumbling out my first question (“Chaiken, you have a voice better suited to talking to women at 2 a.m. than asking anybody anything from the stage of Lincoln Center”). Norman also spoke powerfully and eloquently about his years directing films, the pleasure it had brought him, and the seriousness in<br />
which he endeavored to make them.<br />
<br />
The interview contains many of the themes Norman elaborated on that afternoon in July 2007. It was conducted in Norman’s Brooklyn Heights apartment on May 11, 2005. Parts of this interview were included in an article I wrote surveying Norman’s directing career for ''Film Comment'' magazine published in their July/August 2007 issue under the title “The Master’s Mercurial Mistress: How Norman Mailer Courted Chaos 24 Frames per Second.”<br />
<br />
'''Chaiken:''' You were a voracious reader as kid. How central was the moviegoing experience for you growing up?<br />
<br />
'''Mailer:''' Movies were dessert. I used to read and read and read as a child. I remember seeing ''Captain Blood'' [1935] with Errol Flynn in a movie theater that was 10 blocks away from my home in Brooklyn on one of the coldest winter nights New York ever had. Walking home that night, I got frostbite on my thighs that lasted for a month. My thighs got discolored it was so cold, but it was worth it because that movie was so wonderful. That movie probably gave me more pleasure than any I have ever seen. Put it this way, if a meal at a given time could alter your life—it’s not as easy for a dessert to do that. But this dessert did. I think ''Captain Blood'' affected me permanently. It’s a fabulous film.<br />
<br />
'''Chaiken:''' After ''The Naked and the Dead'', you went out to Hollywood. Were there any thoughts back then of possibly giving up writing for a career as a<br />
director?<br />
<br />
'''Mailer:''' I went out there with Jean Malaquais who was already my best friend—or second best friend. We went out there to look around and try to write scripts. My lawyer Cy Rembar, who at the time didn’t know a lot about Hollywood, had heard of one agent, a very nice man named George Landy, but he was a minor agent. He didn’t have clout. So we hung around and hung around and finally Landy got us a job with Sam Goldwyn to write a script that was supposed to have been based on Nathanael West’s ''Miss Lonelyhearts''. We got fired about a month after we started working. Deservedly. Then I decided I was going to make a film myself in Hollywood. I was 26 and thought I would first become a famous screenwriter, then a director. We worked and worked and worked to try to get a script going, but simply<br />
couldn’t. This was the script that was going to make Goldwyn sad that he had fired us. In the end, he was right and we were wrong. The script was dreadful and ultimately never got finished. Malaquais and I, although we remained great friends, simply couldn’t work together. So I came back to New York with my metaphorical tail between my legs. Hollywood for me was a failure. A total failure, though I guess what stayed with me was this idea of making movies.<br />
<br />
'''Chaiken:''' You were one of the editors of Irving Howe’s ''Dissent'' magazine along with Cinema 16 film society founders Amos and Marcia Vogel in the Fifties. Did you attend any of the Cinema 16 screenings?<br />
<br />
'''Mailer:''' Yeah, I used to go there. That was an interesting place, and I was fascinated with the poetic documentaries Amos used to show. That probably had a lot of influence on me in one way or another. It wasn’t that I was totally innocent of documentaries when I started making my own films. It was that I thought that most documentaries were locked into one essential difficulty—that very few people can act when they are playing themselves. I truly believe that half the people alive are natural actors, but when you have to play yourself it really turns you inside out psychologically. It’s very unpleasant. If you are playing yourself then you stiffen up. What I found is that practically everyone who is in a documentary who is playing themselves is very stiff. So I got the idea, why not use these techniques? I loved the camera techniques in documentary, particularly that of Pennebaker and the Maysles Brothers, so I thought, “Why not use them for fictional situations?” The cameramen I worked with loved it because they got to try anything. So yes, I did go to Cinema 16, but don’t ask me what films I saw. I do remember seeing Cassavetes and Maya Deren.<br />
<br />
'''Chaiken:''' Did you know Cassavetes? I’m curious to hear what you make of his films.<br />
<br />
'''Mailer:''' Cassavetes’s work I never really liked. I always thought it was false improvisation. It was semi-improvisation. They knew where the scene was going. My whole feeling was that the one thing you didn’t want—the lock I wanted to get out of—is the knowledge of when a scene is coming to an end. Primarily because when a scene comes to an end a skilled actor puts the book down. That’s exactly what I wanted to avoid. I wanted to be able to cut to the middle of a scene and swing into another scene. The cutting in ''Maidstone'' shows that all over the place. Of course, Cassavetes’s stuff was much more successful than mine so obviously envy and scorn were intrinsic elements in this, but I felt his stuff was too close to scripted movies.<br />
<br />
'''Chaiken:''' After Cinema 16 closed, you attended some of Jonas Mekas’s screenings at the Filmmaker’s Cinematheque.<br />
<br />
'''Mailer:''' Mekas definitely had an influence. I saw films by Stan Brakhage, Ron Rice, Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger. Of course, I didn’t have a close relationship with any of those guys. We were all simpatico, but casual. We’d see each<br />
other at gatherings.<br />
<br />
'''Chaiken:''' Was Warhol any kind of direct influence?<br />
<br />
'''Mailer:''' I hated Warhol’s work. Hated it. I thought he was on to something, but it wasn’t worth it. Although, I thought one of his movies, ''Kitchen'' [1965], had something in it that was incontestable. If in a hundred years from now<br />
they wanted to know what the bottom side of twentieth-century culture was like, all they would have to do was see that movie. The boredom, the aphasia, the apathy, the endlessness of repetitive action, the sense that you don’t know where you are going, the vicissitudes of modern drugs were all in that movie. That was damn good, but very hard to look at. See, I didn’t like Warhol as an artist. I thought he was the most overrated painter of the twentieth century. However, I thought he was a genius at understanding public taste, which I resented because I certainly had very little skill in that direction.<br />
<br />
'''Chaiken:''' ''Wild 90'' was your first film. How did it come about?<br />
<br />
'''Mailer:''' When my play ''The Deer Park'' was on at the Theatre de Lys in 1966 and 1967, afterwards Mickey Knox, Buzz Farber, and I, who were my best two friends in the cast, would drink for a couple of hours after the show. We started talking to each other as gangsters and developed these riffs and characters. I was “The Prince,” Knox was “Twenty Years,” and Farber was “Buzz Cameo.” I absolutely loved playing The Prince. All three of us grew up in<br />
Brooklyn and Mickey Knox is one of my oldest friends. I met him when I was out in Hollywood in 1949. Buzz came later. Backstage those two were a team. They developed stances that they could play off against one another. Mickey would play off the size of Buzz’s nose. And Buzz would play off of Mickey’s stinginess and they would keep the dressing room laughing because Buzz was always borrowing Mickey’s make up powder. And Mickey would say, “I can’t afford it. I can’t give up that much powder. Your nose is so fucking big! I have to go out and buy powder everyday!” Then Buzz would say, “You are so fucking stingy....” So, they would play with each other that way.<br />
<br />
Then I got into it. Then the three of us would play these riffs while we were drinking at places like Casey’s on 10th Street in the Village around the corner from the Theatre de Lys. Slowly I got the idea this is too good to have fun<br />
with. Why don’t we film it? Buzz, who worked for CBS, said I know a man named Don Pennebaker, etc., etc. I had seen ''Monterey Pop'' [1968] and thought the cinematography extraordinary. Pennebaker came in and said for $1,000 he’d film it. He had some film he’d throw in which was unused stock. Not the highest quality he told us, but good enough. So we did that. We started with $1,000 and we filmed for four nights. Don enjoyed it. We had huge fun during the nights we made it. We were drunk. It really was a continuation of the drinking at the bar. We each had enough imagination to assume we were really mafia types hiding out and getting on each others nerves.<br />
<br />
That’s what we really enjoyed—getting on each other’s nerves. We enjoyed the very vanities we could play off that were genuine. For example Buzz, bless his heart he is now long gone, had a lazy streak. So at a certain point he got bored and went to sleep. Although he is the most arresting figure perhaps in the early part of the film, by the end of the film he just about disappeared. He complained and groaned over that and we kept saying, “Well, it’s your<br />
own fucking fault! You are such a lazy bastard so you went to sleep.” Then, of course, Myra Conrad came on and she was marvelous. She was married to Harold Conrad, who was a publicist for fights. A real shrewd, smart guy. Myra was an understudy for Carol Channing. So she was very good. And Beverly Bentley was very good along with a lot of other people we picked up in passing. So, that again gave me the idea of how well everyone can act. So then I got ambitious with the notion.<br />
<br />
'''Chaiken:''' Can you elaborate on how you selected the actors for your films?<br />
<br />
'''Mailer:''' I have this notion that half the people in the world are potential actors. It seems to me that people spend most of their time dissembling what their true feelings are. So, if you can get them to take that one little step in playing someone who is not themselves, they can give you some very interesting results. I always use the example of two businessmen sitting down for a business lunch. They are always pretending to be more or less prosperous than they really are. It’s a premise that I still think is valid. If you choose your people with enough instinct, you can get some amazing results. Particularly when the premise is simple. For instance, in ''Beyond the Law'' I had a notion that everybody alive has a cop and a crook in them. The trick was almost to look at someone and in an instant say “cop or crook.” For instance, if I were casting you I’d say, “Well, he could play either.” And it could be very interesting.<br />
<br />
You could play a stressed-out junkie who would absolutely kill for the next fix or you could play a cop used to infiltrate the junkies. Either way, you would do a wonderful job. So that premise worked beautifully for ''Beyond the Law''. With ''Maidstone'' I ran into trouble because I was dealing with a concept that was not familiar to people. I was asking people to be part of various kinds of CIA groups, and Rat Pack groups, and involved in various kinds<br />
of loyalties and treacheries. The fundamental error I made was that most people take it for granted that they are loyal so they have a lot of trouble with treachery. So, what I didn’t realize at the time is that I was giving them something that was not going to be easy to play.<br />
<br />
'''Chaiken:''' In terms of the acting, do you feel ''Beyond the Law'' is the most successful of the early films?<br />
<br />
'''Mailer:''' The relative success of ''Beyond the Law'' all came down to the simple, concise, premise that allowed people who were not actors to suddenly become wonderful actors. Like Eddie Bonetti, who confesses to killing his wife with an ax. I think maybe it’s the one true insight I had psychologically into what enables people to act well. Which is, to go back to it, that everybody has a cop or crook in them. You ask people to play either—most people can do it. People who can’t act at all or improvise at all will be able to play a cop or a crook. Very often, more one than the other. Some people—absolutely both. It’s just a matter of casting. So I had this marvelous time casting ''Beyond the Law''. And it worked. Most of that worked.<br />
<br />
'''Chaiken:''' The performances in that film are extraordinary.<br />
<br />
'''Mailer:''' Yeah, really extraordinary. We all went half crazy playing it. Playing a cop brought out a side of me that I didn’t even know existed. You remember the guy, the rather delicate fellow in the film, who is furious for being arrested in the men’s room for soliciting? Well, he was a good friend of mine who was not gay. He had resolutely gotten married and paid the wages of being married when you really are not altogether happy with the idea of being married. The major passion in his life was not to be perceived as being gay. I didn’t warn him in advance about what he was going to be accused of in the film<br />
and then suddenly he’s in the line up and it became immensely real for him. It was humiliating. The cruelty in me to be willing to do that to a pretty good friend still gives me pause. But the movie took over. The movie is all.<br />
<br />
When you are making a movie, the ruthlessness of the movie itself excites your own ruthlessness. It’s almost like you are now paying abeyance to a Dionysian God—that what is important absolutely is the expression of the work at all costs. Whatever it takes. So I remember I’m interrogating him, scolding him, overbearing as Lt. Francis X. Pope and he is getting furious. So at a given movement he starts touching me. This was such a violation of police procedure that I took off my hat and I was going to hit him. I was going to pistol-whip him with the hat. At which point he realized how angry I was and he backed off a little. That these sort of emotions came out, the sort of emotions that actors will work very often for three weeks of rehearsal in order to be able to tap, were coming out immediately made me immensely ambitious about the possibility of improvised film. What I didn’t understand is that I had lucked into a fundamental premise and this premise worked for that film. In fact, the film was good enough, in its own small way, to be at Lincoln Center at the New York Film Festival. I must say, the end of it gets a little lame—a little soft. I was expecting a lot of cheers and instead I got a lot of boos. I was learning about film audiences. Anyways, all of this excited me to try something very ambitious—''Maidstone''.<br />
<br />
'''Chaiken:''' Before we get into ''Maidstone'', there is a second version of ''Beyond the Law''. Could we talk about that?<br />
<br />
'''Mailer:''' Yeah, ''Beyond the Law (Blue)''. We could talk about it, but nobody is ever going to see it. It exists, but I think I got it under lock and key. It was my venture into porny. I’ll tell you the reason why it can’t be shown. My role in it is routine. In other words, I could be hired as one of the backups for a porny movie. Believe me I wasn’t a porny star in the film, but adequate. The thing is, there is a girl in it who let herself be used in that film and I don’t think.... She was a reasonably good, middle-class, girl. And really, I can’t show that film.<br />
<br />
'''Chaiken:''' Does it go deeper into the wicked double life of the cops?<br />
<br />
'''Mailer:''' Well, Pope ends up killing this girl. I decided that after the boos at Lincoln Center we needed more at the end of it. That it was too soft and sentimental. So he goes off and he sees a girl he knows and he screws her. This is Pope and the other cop played by Mickey Knox. So we both screw the girl. I’m alone with her at the end and I go crazy and kill her. You don’t literally see the killing. What you see is blood all over the sheets and her dead.<br />
<br />
'''Chaiken:''' This version was never shown?<br />
<br />
'''Mailer:''' Never. I was going to show it publicly, but I felt I had crossed the line and that people’s lives were going to be changed profoundly if it were shown.<br />
People who had trusted me. It was the Sixties afterall. We were ready to do anything, but then I realized afterward that in crossing that line, unless it was great art ... and this wasn’t great art it was a fairly interesting porny film.... People’s lives were gonna be absolutely affected by it. Possibly ruined and years were gonna be spent talking about it. So I buried it. I wish I could put a sticker on it: “Fifty years after I’m gone—take it out of the well.”<br />
<br />
'''Chaiken:''' Around this time you were in two ''vérité'' documentaries, both directed by Dick Fontaine, ''Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up?'' [1968] and ''Norman Mailer vs. Fun City, USA'' [1970]. Did either of these experiences inform the way you worked with your actors?<br />
<br />
'''Mailer:''' Dick was an extraordinarily deft documentarian. He was sort of like Zelig. He’d pop up at the most incredible moments with his crew. For instance, I’d be arrested at the Pentagon and thrown into a bus. There was Dick. I’d get out of jail. There was Dick. I ended up with a huge respect for the ability that a documentarian needs. They need all the skills of a top cameraman, all the skills of a top investigative report and all the skills of a<br />
“Johnny on the Spot” reporter. Dick had all of these. For me, though, being in these kinds of things is never easy. At a certain point you go into overdrive and you feel something ugly in your ego functioning. You are selling something you don’t quite believe in. Why? To keep the movie moving and to keep it interesting so you aren’t a bore like other people you see in documentaries. The moment you are playing yourself you’re phony. If you want to know what you are like—play a part. Play enough parts and you’ll get some sense of where your center is.<br />
<br />
'''Chaiken:''' Was ''Maidstone'' conceived immediately after the assassination of Robert Kennedy or had you been thinking of making the film before that?<br />
<br />
'''Mailer:''' The assassination of Bobby Kennedy unmanned me. I remember shrieking into the phone “No! No!” I immediately thought “I gotta make this movie.” I decided to take on the premise of a man who had made semipornographic films—exotic films—who had decided to run for president despite all. He had a group supporting him called The Cashbox who were sort of like Sinatra’s Rat Pack. Then you had this other organization called PAXC, The Prevention of Assassination Experiment Control, and it’s unclear whether they are there to protect him or assassinate him. This was the basic premise. So, I set up these groups and I had some very intelligent people working in PAXC and some fairly tough guys working in The Cashbox. Anyway, the idea was we’d descend on Long Island. I think it was the only time in my life where I could of sold a project like that. I’m not an impresario, but I was for a couple of weeks there in 1968. To my amazement, with some help from some other people, I got Bobby Gardiner to agree to give us his island. I got Barney Rossett to agree to give us his estate for shooting. There is a woman named Elizabeth Brackman who agreed to let us use her house. And then Alfonso Ossorio allowed us to use his extraordinary mansion. So we worked from mansion to estate back to another mansion<br />
to an island.<br />
<br />
'''Chaiken:''' How did you cast the film?<br />
<br />
'''Mailer:''' I interviewed maybe 20 fairly good-looking young women who were<br />
not actresses, and I ended up using all of them because they were all somewhat interesting. The year before, I had seen a director casting an actress for a play of mine and he was terribly cruel to her. He said to her, “Well if you want to go anywhere in your career you are going to have to have a nose job.” She was a lovely girl, but this shattered her. That stayed with me. I didn’t know much about other directors. In fact, I hardly knew any of them. So I thought that’s how directors act. There was something always very simple in me when I was making these movies. Like an innocent youth—a character out of Goethe in an odd way. The world is there. The only way we learn anything about it is by exploring. So, I decided to play a very mean director. Of course, in ''Maidstone'' all the interviews are with women and each is crueler than the next. I paid for that for 40 years. The women’s movement picked it<br />
up as if it were manna from heaven. They had found their number-one sexist pig in America. ''Maidstone'' came out in 1971. It couldn’t have had better timing. It went absolutely into the cavern’s mouth of the Women’s Liberation Movement.<br />
<br />
'''Chaiken:''' I got the sense that the interrogation of the actresses was some kind of riff on the casting couch in Hollywood.<br />
<br />
'''Mailer:''' Sure, we all knew about the casting couch in Hollywood. We all knew the story about Marilyn Monroe signing a certain big contract and saying, “That’s the last cock I will ever suck.” We all heard that. Whether true or not—we had all heard that. So I took it for granted that the cruelty was immense. And I think I was right. But the point was—the acting was too good. I was too good an actor at that point. I was convincing as that kind of director and everybody thought, “That’s him. That’s who he is.” Analogous to this, I remember when Warren Beatty played Bugsy. Afterward I was interviewing him and I said, “Aren’t you a little bit concerned that some of your friends will be nervous about you now?” He said, “No, my friends are all actors and they know that all you need to play a part is to have 5 percent of it in your character.” Then he grins and says, “Of course, if you got 75 percent it’s a big help. But all you need is 5 percent.” I had that 5 percent and I used it. I’ve been paying for it ever since.<br />
<br />
'''Chaiken:''' How much footage was shot on ''Maidstone''?<br />
<br />
'''Mailer:''' On ''Maidstone'' we shot 45 hours of sound and film, but only seven<br />
hours of that was remotely usable. The 45 hours consisted mainly of people<br />
repeating what I told them about the plot. It was just awful. I think if Rip hadn’t hit me over the head with a hammer I would have been in a whole<br />
series of explanations at the end of the film about why the film did not work.<br />
That was my fail-safe. I figured I’d make this film and if it doesn’t work there<br />
will be some very interesting dialogue about why it doesn’t work.<br />
<br />
'''Chaiken:''' The attack by Rip Torn at the end certainly raises some interesting moral questions.<br />
<br />
'''Mailer:''' Oh boy! Especially when your kids are there. They were kind of marked by it. It’s something they go back to over and over. Rip and I made up a long time ago.<br />
<br />
'''Chaiken:''' Immediately after the attack you tell Rip in the film that none of it was going to end up in the movie. What made you change your mind?<br />
<br />
'''Mailer:''' When I saw it, I realized I had to put it in. It was just too damn good. I hated it, but I felt I had to put it in. Rip was right. I was making a movie about assassination. How could I not have an assassination in it?<br />
<br />
'''Chaiken:''' Did you feel afterwards that Don [D.A. Pennebaker] had any kind of obligation to put the camera down and intervene?<br />
<br />
'''Mailer:''' [''Mishearing the question''] I always assume God to be much too occupied. I see God as a tired general.<br />
<br />
'''Chaiken:''' No, not God. Don. D.A. Pennebaker.<br />
<br />
'''Mailer:''' Oh! Boy, I thought we really getting into top gear fast. I think Don<br />
was bothered by it. I remember afterwards I was furious with him and I went<br />
up to him and said, “Well, would you photograph my last gasps?” He had a<br />
work ethic just as I did and we discovered that his work ethic and mine had<br />
nothing to do with one another. At that point my work ethic was, the film’s<br />
over, let’s congratulate the director. His work ethic is finding a scene so he<br />
stayed with the scene. On balance, he may have been right. I think he probably would have intervened at some point, but it would have been way down<br />
the road. I can guarantee it. In any event, Beverly Bentley intervened so that<br />
was that!<br />
<br />
'''Chaiken:''' ''Maidstone'' took a long time to edit. How many different edits were there of the film before you decided on its final version?<br />
<br />
'''Mailer:''' I can enumerate them. There was a totally hopeless 7½ hour version that was edited down from the 45 hours. It took us three weeks just to see the rushes from the 45 hours. Then it took about a half year to arrive at the 7½ hours. We worked on the 7½ hours for a long time before we were able to get it down to about 3½ hours. At that point, down from 7½ hours, it’s a totally different film. It was endlessly long and slow and had all sorts of interesting corners, pursued all sorts of angles, that never quite got developed enough.<br />
<br />
'''Chaiken:''' Does that version still exist?<br />
<br />
'''Mailer:''' No, I don’t think so. I remember with the 3½ hour version most people who saw it in advance groupings tended to leave the theater before the film was finished. A few people—mainly French movie intellectuals—came up to me afterwards and said that it was one of the finest movies they’d ever seen. ''Maidstone'' has that polarizing quality. If you were able to stand 3½ hours it was a very interesting film—perhaps more interesting than the final result.<br />
But it was still much too long. So we started cutting it down. We got it to a pretty good version at 2½ hours and another reasonably good version at about 2¼ hours.<br />
<br />
Then we started trying to find a market for it. Sam Cohn, our agent at the time, loved the film and wanted to show it to United Artists who owed him a favor. Sam came back to me and told us that the top guy at UA had turned it down. When I asked him why, Sam was fuming and said, “The top guy wanted to show it to his second and the second really didn’t like it.” So I said, “Well, he’s Number One. Why is he listening to his second?” Sam looked at me like I was an idiot and says, “Hey—the Number Two man hated the fucking thing!” I learned a great lesson that day. The Number One man will never go against the Number Two man because he has nothing to gain by going against him. If the Number Two man is right—then the Number One man will never forgive him and become threatened. If he’s wrong, he’s very happy that the Number Two man made a mistake and the power balance is maintained. The Number One man never goes against the Number Two man. This is part of the fatherly wisdom I’m always offering my children. Always, seduce the attention of the Number Two man.<br />
<br />
'''Chaiken:''' Sage advice. So how did the final edit come about?<br />
<br />
'''Mailer:''' Right. So people kept telling me that I had to get down to 90 minutes if I wanted to find a distributor. I finally saw a way to redo it entirely with a totally different kind of editing. I essentially made the movie twice. The first time through I edited it one way; the second time, what ultimately became the final version, is like the director’s dream where the undercurrents of all the scenes are shown. I was fascinated with that and I loved the idea. So we did it that way. For a lot of people it’s too much of a chopped-up production and too difficult to follow. It really is much better the second, third, and fourth time you see it.<br />
<br />
We previewed this version at the Whitney Museum of American Art. They broke records with it. They used to have a hundred-seat theater where they’d show a movie twice a day. For a hit film they’d have 200 people. With this one they went up to five showings a day for two weeks. Seven thousand people came to see it. After it was over I was really excited. It had broken all house records at the Whitney, so I said, “Well, I still have a little money left....” I always financed these movies myself and I was riding a surplus at that time, but by now I had gotten down to the end of that surplus. So, all right—I’ll take the last $20,000 and we’ll open it at a theater. We opened it someplace called the Lincoln something or other on<br />
57th Street. For seven days, they did the worst business in their history. I couldn’t understand it. Why the best and the worst? I was talking to somebody who knew a lot about film and he said to me, “Norman, the answer is that there were just 7,000 people in New York who were interested in seeing that film.” And that was it. The end. We never got the one great review we were hoping for.<br />
<br />
'''Chaiken:''' After ''Maidstone'' were there other film projects you had in mind or did the reception sour you to making more films? <br />
<br />
'''Mailer:''' It didn’t sour me as much as it wiped me out. I would’ve done as well to have bought a yacht, taken it out to harbor and sunk it. At that point all my money was gone. I entered into years after ''Maidstone'' where I was always playing catch up to pay my income tax. I would’ve loved to have made more movies. Two things had happened. I had no more money and I didn’t want to go out to scout for money. I just thought I wasn’t going to be good at it. I also lost the impetus. I no longer felt that I’ve got a way to make movies that would turn the movie industry inside out. I recognized that to make movies the way I wanted to make them you had to be totally devoted to improvisation all of your life. You had to develop a crew of actors who could work with it and work with it and know the demands of improvisation—each of them developing their own specific, personal genius. I wasn’t prepared to do that. Ultimately, I wanted to be a writer rather than a movie director. I think it’s one of the reasons that I made ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' [1987] many years later. I wanted to see what the other side of the fence was like. I must say, I enjoyed it immensely. It was very hard work, but I had very good people I was working with. It was fun to work with that kind of dialogue, but a much different kind of film from the earlier ones.<br />
<br />
'''Chaiken:''' There’s a growing mystique around your films because they’ve become so very difficult to see.<br />
<br />
'''Mailer:''' That’s probably part of it. On the other hand, I like to think that if they were easier to see they might still have a little vogue. I think they are crazy pictures. Crazy from the point of view of people who come to them cold. They have so many interesting virtues and faults. I made them with immense enthusiasm, a manic enthusiasm, with very little knowledge of the exceptionally stern demands of film. I was aided and abetted by a couple of wild men who nonetheless were very good cameraman—Ricky Leacock and Don Pennebaker. Though, I suppose, you can hardly call Ricky Leacock a madman. He’s almost classical in his style of photography. Pennebaker was always wilder. I remember one time he literally got under a glass table to shoot a scene from underneath. He was always looking for the angle that no<br />
one else had ever thought of. Leacock always had everything well framed and beautifully composed.<br />
<br />
Anyway, the falsehood was that I felt I had discovered something brandnew. It was the only time in my life where I felt like Marco Polo. What I didn’t understand was the immense limitations of improvisation unless you spend your life at it. I must say, once I started making films, with the exception of the more exciting years of my personal life, it was the most exciting stuff I ever did. I loved making movies. I’ve used this image over and over again, but it’s the nearest I ever came to being a general, which I always wanted to be. This was a way of becoming a general, without having to go through West Point and the endless years of crap you got to take, the iron character you need, the stupidity that you have to accumulate, the bravery you have to develop if you don’t have it already. Immediately you are a general. People treat you like a general when you are a director. The best part of it is, there is very little blood.<br />
<br />
{{Review|state=expanded}}<br />
{{DEFAULTSORT:Author, Auteur: A Conversation with Norman Mailer}}<br />
[[Category:Interviews (MR)]]</div>ChristinaPinkstonhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/Identity_Crisis:_A_State_of_the_Union_Address&diff=11737The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Identity Crisis: A State of the Union Address2020-09-25T01:55:14Z<p>ChristinaPinkston: fixed spacing on one quote, one typo, and capitalized one cited work</p>
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{{Byline|last=Broer|first=Lawrence R.|abstract=No two contemporary writers have looked harder or with greater analytical intelligence at the forces undermining the American Dream than Norman {{NM}} and Kurt Vonnegut. Whatever individual differences of vision or temperament may separate these brooding seers, Mailer, the mystic Existentialist, and Kurt Vonnegut, the comic Absurdist, serve as shamans, spiritual medicine men whose function is to expose various forms of societal madness—dispelling the evil spirits of greed, irresponsible mechanization, and aggression while encouraging reflection and the will to positive change.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08broe}}<br />
<br />
{{dc|dc=N|o two contemporary writers have looked harder}} or with greater analytical intelligence at the forces undermining the American Dream than [[Norman Mailer]] and [[w:Kurt Vonnegut|Kurt Vonnegut]]. Whatever individual differences of vision or temperament may separate these brooding seers, Mailer, the mystic Existentialist, and Kurt Vonnegut, the comic Absurdist, serve as shamans, spiritual medicine men whose function is to expose various forms of societal madness—dispelling the evil spirits of greed, irresponsible mechanization, and aggression while encouraging reflection and the will to positive change. It is this almost mystical vision of the writer as spiritual medium and healer that Vonnegut intends by calling himself a “canary bird in the coal mine”—one who provides spiritual illumination, offering us warnings about the dehumanized future not as it must necessarily be, but as it surely would become if based on the materialism, government corruption, and promiscuous technology of the present.{{sfn|Vonnegut|1965|p=238}} In books Mailer might call existential errands, like ''[[Why Are We in Vietnam?]]'', ''[[The Armies of the Night]]'', ''[[Of a Fire on the Moon]]'', and ''[[Miami and the Siege of Chicago]]'', Mailer’s particular genius has been to penetrate the facade of contemporary events to show us who we are, where we are, and where we are likely to go, pointing up the significant in the most trivial of events, and conversely placing in perspective the truly momentous acts of our time.<br />
<br />
Canary birds notwithstanding, of course, Mailer and Vonnegut have been as painfully conscious of the fundamental absurdities of their age as any of their contemporaries: the stockpiling of doomsday weapons to keep the world safe, the brutalities of World Wars, the quest for God through material acquisitions and technological advance, uncritical patriotism—the list goes on. Both see the atrocities of the death camps and those that followed Auschwitz as symbolizing the spiritual devastation of our age. In his essay “[[The White Negro]],” Mailer describes the Holocaust as a mirror to the human condition that “blinded anyone who looked into it.” “Probably,” Mailer says, "We will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. For the first time in civilized history, perhaps for the first time in all of history, we have been forced to live with the suppressed knowledge ... that we might ... be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation in which our teeth would be counted, and our hair would be saved, but our death itself would be unknown, unhonored, and unremarked, a death which could not follow with dignity as a possible consequence to serious actions we had chosen, but rather a death by ''[[w:Deus ex machina|deus ex machina]]'' in a gas chamber or a radioactive city.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=338}} In an address at Bennington College in 1970, Vonnegut said, “I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientists, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty and sold it to ''Popular Mechanics'' magazine. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima."{{sfn|Vonnegut|1965|p=161}} Vonnegut acknowledges that in the wake of Hiroshima and the death camps, faith in human improvement has not come easily, pointing out that he and his fellow canary-bird artists chirped and chirped and keeled over in protest of the war in Vietnam, but it made no difference whatsoever. “Nobody cared.” But, he says, “I continue to think that artists—all artists—should be treasured as alarm systems”{{sfn|Vonnegut|1965|p=239}} That’s what our minds were designed to do. <br />
<br />
In their latest analyses of America’s ills, Mailer’s ''[[Why Are We at War?]]'' (2003) and Vonnegut’s ''[[w:A Man Without a Country|A Man Without a Country]]'' (2005), Mailer and Vonnegut reaffirm their love of democracy and the U.S. Constitution as civilization’s best hopes for a more orderly and saner world. As always, both labor hard on behalf of a society, as Vonnegut writes, “dedicated to the proposition that all men, women and children are created equal and should not starve.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=11}} “It so happens,” Vonnegut says, “that idealism enough for anyone is not made of perfumed clouds. It is the law. It is the U.S. Constitution.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=98}} He praises his two favorite spokesmen for democratic freedoms, [[w:Carl Sandburg|Carl Sandburg]] and [[w:Eugene Victor Debs|Eugene Victor Debs]]: “I would have been tongue-tied,” he says, “in the presence of such national treasures.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=13}} He encourages us all to read Tocqueville’s ''[[w:Democracy in America|Democracy in America]]'' as the best book ever written on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in American democracy. Vonnegut asks, “Want a taste of that great book?” Tocqueville says, “and he said it 169 years ago, that in no country other than ours has love of money taken a stronger hold on the affections of men. Okay?”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=8}} Mailer hails democracy as God’s most noble and beautiful experiment, but always “in peril.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=16}}, an existential venture whose delicacy makes it dangerously vulnerable, a “state of grace” attained only by those ready to suffer and even to perish for its freedoms.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=71}} We’ll see later how at the end of ''Why Are We at War?'' this forewarning takes a complex and troubling turn.<br />
<br />
But, for the moment, troubling enough is Mailer’s admonition that “([freedom] has to be kept alive every day of our existence,”) because we can all “be swallowed by our miseries ... become weary, give up.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=100,16-17}} The note of futility present in the reference to “giving up” runs throughout ''Why Are We at War?'' and ''A Man without a Country'', a foreboding, deeply personal sense on the part of both writers that because of the tragic events of 9/11 and what Mailer calls the inestimable “spiritual wreckage”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=23}} that has followed, the state of the union is in terrible and perhaps irremediable trouble. “The notion,” Mailer reports, “that we have an active democracy that controls our fate is not true.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=104}} “Nobody,” he says, “ever said ... that a democracy should be a place where the richest people in the country earn a thousand times more than the poorest.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=103}} The problem is, he adds, that “[t]he people who feel this lack of balance probably make up two thirds of the country, but they don’t want to think about it. They can’t, after all, do a damn thing about it.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=104}} Vonnegut feels that his own personal democratic dream of a community with kindness, fairness, mercy, and mutual respect at its core has been so betrayed by the forces of selfishness and greed that he is now, as his title suggests, a man without a country. "I myself,” he says "feel that our country, for whose constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it was. What has happened is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable,{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=98-99}} which “disconnected all the burglar alarms prescribed by the Constitution, which is to say The House and Senate and the Supreme Court.” Vonnegut observes that “our daily news sources, newspapers and TV are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books do we learn what’s really going on.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=103}} Mailer decries the same lack of courage and will on the part of the liberal media and prominent liberal senators.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=65}}<br />
<br />
Like Mailer, Vonnegut also despairs that “I don’t think people give a damn whether the planet goes or not ... I know of very few people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=70-71}} What he says is probably making him “unfunny” now for the rest of his life is that he knows that “there is not a chance in hell” of America becoming the humane and reasonable place of which so many of his generation used to dream.{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=71-72}}<br />
<br />
Quoting a remark by [[w:John le Carré|John le Carré]] that “America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but [that] this is the worst I can remember.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=43}} Mailer suggests that too many shocks and too many disappointments have caused him and Vonnegut to conclude that this time there may be no solution to democracy’s ills, that America has embarked on a course of madness Mailer calls “an international cancer we cannot cure.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=29}} “Here’s the truth,” Vonnegut says, “We have squandered our planet’s resources, including air and water, as though there were no tomorrow, so now there isn’t going to be one. So there goes the Junior Prom.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=45}} Vonnegut concludes, “Like my distant betters, Einstein and Twain, I now give up on people, too.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=130}} He proposes that the planet’s epitaph should read: “The Good Earth—We could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=122}} The question I eventually try to answer in this paper is whether such despair has not tipped for the worse that delicate balance between optimism and pessimism in these shamans who have for so long not only critiqued our missteps but also shaped us a more benign and creative future and, if it has, whether such a diminution of faith in democracy’s viability has compromised their determination to serve as healers and agents of change at a time when our morale is lowest and we need them most.<br />
<br />
For Mailer, the phantasmagoric events of 9/11 bear comparison to the nightmare of [[w:Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki|Hiroshima]] and the death camps, if not in magnitude, in terms of the equivalent shock to the American psyche and shattering of our national identity, creating spiritual wounds of infinite proportions, fragmenting Americans inwardly and dividing them against one another and against the world. “9/11,” Mailer says, “is one of those events that will never fade out of our history, for it was not only a cataclysmic disaster but a symbol, gargantuan and mysterious, of we know not what, an obsession that will return through decades to come.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=4}} The visual impact of the planes striking the twin towers and the hellish devastation at [[w:Ground zero|Ground Zero]] raises for Mailer the specter of Yeats’s rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born, or is it Washington? Where we are now, Mailer feels, is the world Yeats was describing: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere / (talk about propensity) The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” The momentous question, Mailer says, is who exactly was the “beast”? Were we not who we thought we were? To be capable of wrongdoing would be un-American, but how could anyone hate us so much, the bastions of justice and liberty for all, so as to be ready to immolate themselves to destroy us? Now, says Mailer, there was still less chance that Americans would come to understand the contradictions that had always split the good Christian psyche—the half that saw itself as charitable and the other half that was ruthlessly competitive—“Jesus and Evel Knievel ... in one psyche.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=46}} This war, Mailer says, could prove worse than any we have yet experienced because “we will never know just what we are fighting for.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=81-82}} Muslim and Christian fundamentalism seemed mirror reflections. Whatever good these religions might possess, Mailer argues, “[their] present exercise, in the world seems to be a study in military power and greed.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=27}} “We are speaking,” he says, “of a war then between two essentially ... inauthentic theologies.... A vast conflict of powers is at the core, and the motives of both sides do not bear close examination. At bottom, the potential for ill is so great that we can wonder if we will get through this century. We could come apart—piece by piece, disaster after disaster, small and large, long before a final conflagration.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=82}} Mailer concludes that “[t]he wars we have known until this era, no matter how horrible, could offer at least the knowledge that they would come to an end. Terrorism, however, is not attracted to negotiation.” Only victory is acceptable,{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=66}} and people who were ready to kill themselves for their beliefs were also ready to destroy the world.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=18}} For Mailer, the randomness of terrorism augurs a deeply personal spiritual wound, the prospect of life as ultimately meaningless. “Nightmares,” he says, “tell us that life is absurd, unreasonable, unjust, warped, [and] crazy.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=18}} If life could be erased so suddenly and gratuitously by such a pointless death, then our ability to find meaning in our lives is lost. The prospect of an absurd death is still more terrifying for Mailer than Vonnegut. For Vonnegut, death is the end to what is primarily an absurd existence to begin with—an existence only made purposeful by the humanity of our actions. For Mailer, however, who professes to believe in reincarnation in a “next existence” where was there to be the “comprehension of our death” that would provide the logical spiritual connection between this life and the next that “we have worked to obtain.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=20}}<br />
<br />
For Vonnegut, Bernard Shaw’s bemused observation that some alien planet must be using the earth for its insane asylum has become a disturbingly literal explanation of the insanity of our post-9/11 world.{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=121}} Vonnegut sees America—its government, its corporations, and, perhaps most unsettling, its media—run by psychopathic personalities he calls “PPs,” persons “without consciences, without senses of pity or shame,” who “have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and made it their own.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=88-89}} “To say somebody is a PP,” Vonnegut explains, “is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=99}} Apropos of Mailer’s assertion that Evil means having “a pretty good idea of the irreparable damage you’re going to do and then proceed to do it”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=22}}, Vonnegut explains that PPs are “fully aware of how much suffering their actions will inflict on others but do not care. They cannot care.... An American PP at the head of a corporation, for example, could enrich himself by ruining his employees and investors and still feel pure as the driven snow. A PP, should he attain a post near the top of our federal government, might feel that taking the country into an endless war with casualties in the millions was simply something decisive to do today.”{{sfn|Hoppe|2005}} “Unlike normal people,” Vonnegut says, “PPs are never filled with doubts for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next.... Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes to the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club ... and kiss my ass.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2003}} Faced with the daunting prospect that his country was now headed by C— students from Yale whom Vonnegut calls “boisterous guessers,” “haters of information”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=86}} who knew no history or geography and, worse, who were “pitiless war-lovers”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=87}} with appallingly powerful weaponry, Vonnegut declares: “I am now eighty-two. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the planet would be named Bush, Dick, and Colon.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=40}} “Do you know why Bush is so pissed off at Arabs?” Vonnegut asks. “They brought us Algebra.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=77}}<br />
<br />
Vonnegut’s diagnosis of our leaders as pathological personalities coincides perfectly with Doctor Mailer’s description of the warped skills Republicans seemed to possess for dirty legal fighting, that which Mailer and Vonnegut both view as accounting for, as Vonnegut puts it, the “shamelessly rigged election in Florida which disenfranchised thousands of African Americans.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=86}} Such “Republicans,” Mailer says, “[were] descended from 125 years of lawyers and bankers with the cold nerve and fired-up greed to foreclose on many a widow’s house or farm. Nor did these lawyers and bankers walk about suffused with guilt. They had the moral equivalent of Teflon on their souls. Church on Sunday, foreclosure on Monday.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=44}} Mailer explains, “The Democrats still believed there were cherished rules to the game. They did not understand that rules no longer apply when the stakes are [so] immense.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=45}}<br />
<br />
The following paradigm reminds me of an old Greek proverb passed to me by a retired federal judge in Tarpon Springs, Florida, that “the fish always rots from the head.” Mailer and Vonnegut show that the insanity of greed and cruelty at the top is part of an all-inclusive national sickness, what Mailer calls a “cognitive stew,” composed of a corrupt Corporate America, aggressive Christian militants Mailer calls “flag conservatives,” and a military Mailer says is, of course, composed of crazier than average people.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=52-53}} We know of course that Mailer and Vonnegut have never been fans of Corporate America, whose “polyglot oligarchs,” as Vonnegut calls them, are our new ruling class{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=51}}, and whose dehumanizing technologies and impersonal “electronic communities”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=61}} are, in Mailer’s words, our only real culture, a culture with tyrannical people in the seats of power, run for the wealthy with the poor getting less and less, and a culture that had succeeded only in making the world a more dangerous and uglier place to live.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=48}} “There were no new cathedrals being built for the poor,” Mailer says, “only sixteen-story urban-renewal housing projects that sat on the soul like jail.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=49}} And now we were exporting our “crud,” this “all-pervasive aesthetic emptiness”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=49}} all over the globe, reason enough, Mailer reasons, for the world of Islam, into whose own culture we had encroached, to hate us so. While Mailer clearly loathes terrorism, he falls just short of endorsing Islamic culture as a civilization superior to ours. Those who understand his cosmic view of a primitivistic God and a technological Devil struggling for possession of the soul of mankind cannot mistake where his sympathies lie when he writes, “I’ll go so far as to say that this is a war between those who believe the advance of technology is the best solution for human ills and those who believe that we got off the track somewhere a century [or more] ago.... [T]he purpose of human beings on earth is not to obtain more and more technological power but to refine our souls.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=28}}<br />
<br />
Mailer sees that the same advertising mendacity and manipulative marketing strategies that frame the CEO scandals—and which he and Vonnegut feel now own the television industry—explain [[w:George W. Bush|George W. Bush’s]] capacity for “absolute lying” and his power over the “flag conservatives.” Bush, Mailer says, knew never to speak to his political base in specifics but in mottos and platitudes, sprinkled with “an incomparably holy touch of mendacity.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=88}} Bush knew they loved words like “evil,” which the President would use like a “button” or a “narcotic.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=51}} Fight evil, fight it to the death! Use the word fifteen times in every speech.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=53}} Keep them thinking in generalities. “September 11 was evil, Saddam is evil, all evil is connected. Ergo, Iraq.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=55}} Even, by the way, as I was writing this, Bush was in the news admonishing Muslims for exploiting religion for political purposes and for pursuing evil in the name of God.<br />
<br />
The unifying dream of these “congenitally defective human beings,” as Vonnegut calls them{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=100}}—the mega corporations, the flag conservatives, the military, and the Bushites—and what is in Mailer’s view the “ever- denied subtext beneath the Iraqi project” was their long deferred desire for world domination.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=53}} Their purpose was, and the Hitleresque parallels were plain to see, to have a huge military presence in the Middle East as a stepping-stone to taking over the rest of the world.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=5}} The administration would seize the opportunity for global empire afforded by the fall of the Soviet Union, even if it meant becoming the “ ‘American imperialists’ that our enemies always claimed we were.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=59}} Never mind that using violence to impose our will on others would encourage fascism at home, and that we no longer had an honest democratic product to transport abroad. The Bushites would rationalize their aggression as the best solution to terrorism at home, and the exportation of American democracy as the only hope for world peace through their police-keeping mission around the globe. If such moral certainty supported Mailer’s contention that culturally and emotionally Americans were growing ever more arrogant and vain. George W. Bush’s answer, when asked what if America’s imposing its will winds up alienating the whole world in the process, was, “That’s okay with me. We are American.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=73}}<br />
<br />
In the view of Mailer and Vonnegut, the more likely explanation for occupying Iraq—among a host of more subtle and speculative reasons, a reaffirmation of American machismo is my personal favorite—was that we were there less to oppose tyranny than to guarantee a chokehold on Saudi Arabia and the world’s oil resources below the sands of the Persian Gulf. A World Empire would satisfy the avarice of Corporate America by safeguarding those “great and quickly acquired gains” of the obscenely wealthy upper class to which Bush catered.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=64}} “In the 1930s,” Mailer says, “you could be respected if you earned a living. In the Nineties, you had to demonstrate that you were a promising figure in the ranks of greed.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=64}} “[I]t can also be,” he asks, “that the disproportionate wealth which collected through the Nineties [had] created an all but irresistible pressure at the top to move from democracy to Empire? ... Can it be that George W. Bush knows what he’s doing for the future of [the] Empire by awarding these huge tax credits to the rich?"{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=64}} This war, adds Vonnegut, “made billionaires out of millionaires, and trillionaires out of billionaires, and they own television, and they bankroll George Bush."{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=100}}<br />
<br />
And of course, Mailer says, once we became a twentieth-century embodiment of the Old Roman Empire, fascism at home was a foregone conclusion. That totalitarian state against which he and Vonnegut had so long warned would quickly be a ''fait accompli''. “Homeland Security,” Mailer says, “has put the machinery in place.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=105}} Reminding us that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts us absolutely,” Vonnegut views our leaders as “power drunk” chimpanzees{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=71-72}} with “an international military machine huge enough to conquer all adversaries,” and assuring a stronger police presence at home that Mailer calls a “species of most powerful censor over civilian life.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=153}}<br />
<br />
What, then, does such a dire message about the precarious if not moribund state of our union bode for the ability of Mailer and Vonnegut to continue serving as healers and providers of spiritual direction when their own spiritual wound—their deepening pessimism, I mean—appears so grave? As we’ve seen, their prognosis for a national cure is not cheery. “There’s just too much anger here,” Mailer says, “ . . . too much shock, too much identity crisis.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=105}} He argues that to protect against fascism, we must hold freedom to be more important than security and thus learn to live with anxiety—a “tolerable level to terror.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=107}} Yet, the people who are running the country, he believes, “simply do not have the character or wisdom to fight for the concept of freedom if we suffer horrors ... not if we suffer dirty bombs, terrorist attacks on a huge scale, virulent diseases.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=105-106}} Nevertheless, Mailer continues to affirm the existential principle that has informed his work from first to last—that at any time life can come together again and mankind can be regenerated. Mailer grants that 9/11 was clearly a day on which the Devil won a great battle, but sees the greater struggle between God and Satan for dominion over the earth and mankind’s embattled soul as undetermined.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=111}} “There are pro-democratic forces in America,” he says, “that assert themselves when you don’t expect them to.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=105}} On a more personal level, he asks, how he can hate a country that has given him the opportunities he’s had, “the extraordinary freedom to be able to think the way I think” and not be hauled off in chains.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=109}} <br />
<br />
Mailer’s hopes rest mainly in prospects for a political turnaround in the 2008 election. In a recent essay entitled, “Empire Building: America and Its War with the Invisible Kingdom of Satan,” Mailer proposes that what must happen is that candidates be found with sufficient zeal to convince the flag conservatives that “these much-derided liberals live much more closely than the Republicans in the real spirit of Jesus. Whether they believe every word of Scripture or not, it is still these liberals rather than the Republicans who worry about the fate of the poor, the afflicted, the needy, and the disturbed.... They are more ready to save the forests, refresh the air of the cities and clean up the rivers.”{{sfn|Mailer|2005}} Such sentiments are of course Vonnegutian to the core. If Vonnegut’s reckoning of America’s future at this point is notably darker than Mailer’s, Vonnegut’s heroes are still Abraham Lincoln, Eugene V. Debs, and Jesus Christ, and Vonnegut still touts the message of mercy and pity in the Sermon on the Mount as the world’s best hope for moral reform. He praises librarians all over the country for resisting the “anti-democratic bullies” who tried to remove books from their shelves.{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=102}} And however demoralized, he continued to speak out against the war in rallies and countless interviews. On his own personal note, he says that “no matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, and our media ... may become, the music will still be wonderful.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=66}} He still finds creativity, practicing a work of art, as rewarding in itself, however sparse the audience.<br />
<br />
On the one hand, it is clear to me that ''Why Are We at War?'' and ''A Man without a Country'' read more funereally than as prescriptions for a better world. Equally clear is that neither writer believes they had the power now either personally or artistically to repair or elevate the American soul, so vast, complex, and divided. “Let’s not have a false notion of our possibilities,” Mailer says. “We’re not noble enough to fulfill that scheme. Let’s live at the level we’re at.” Those are words said in an earlier interview about the country,{{sfn|American Masters|2000}} but they apply dolefully for the role of shaman. So why with such scant reason to cheer was it not depression or remorse I heard in the canary bird’s diminished voice but something curiously buoyant and relieved, as if the shaman had been freed from some great burden? Why, for instance, would Vonnegut speak not of personal hopelessness, but of a process of becoming—an existential condition to which Mailer would readily relate? Vonnegut declares, “I really don’t know what I’m going to become from now on. I don’t think I can control my life or my writing ... I’m simply becoming.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=130}} Why would Mailer declare almost unequivocally that he was not unhappy, a discouraged shaman, yes, but not an unhappy man? I found the answer in Mailer’s self-interview called “Mailer on Mailer.” He explains, “I’ve always felt that my relationship to America is analogous to a marriage. I love this country. I hate it. I get angry at it. I feel close to it. I’m charmed by it. I’m repelled by it. It’s a marriage that has gone on for at least the fifty years of my writing life. And in the course of that marriage what’s happened is the marriage has gotten worse. It is not what it used to be."{{sfn|American Masters|2000}} Mailer was a man without a country, too, at least the country he had loved, and ''Why Are We at War?'' and ''A Man without a Country'' are divorce proclamations. One thinks of Fitzgerald and his protagonist Dick Diver, men who must separate from hopelessly schizophrenic women to save their own sanity. If I am not taking the affirmation of ''Why Are We at War?'' and ''A Man without a Country'' too far, this severing from what D. H. Lawrence called the “bitch goddess success,” whose seductive wiles are power and material lusts, constitutes not only self-preservation, lest the healer become the patient, but an act of personal and artistic renewal. This is the classic resolution of identity in turmoil that rescues Stephen Dedalus at the end of ''[[w:A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man|A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man]]''. Repudiating a country whose ideals had been grotesquely betrayed by cultural [[w:Philistinism|philistinism]], degraded religion, and wholly corrupt politics, Stephen achieves the necessary independence and self-possession to fulfill his destiny as artist. “So be it,” Stephen says, “Welcome, O Life!” As for Mailer and Vonnegut, who knows what new thinking or new art might come from such self-possession and rededication to the muse within? Wasn’t this what Vonnegut meant at the end of ''[[w:Fates Worse Than Death|Fates Worse Than Death]]'' when he says, “Hopelessness is the mother of Originality.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|1991|p=237}} “As you grow older,” Mailer says, “you have other things in your life besides your country. I have my family and I have my work.”{{sfn|American Masters|2000}} If his country is not as great or noble as he had hoped it is, it allowed him the freedom to think and write as he wished. If, as for Vonnnegut, that greatest of all human dreams were already behind him, it would be enough to serve as witness, if not to change the world—to meditate upon the perversities and wonders of his times.<br />
<br />
===Citations===<br />
{{Reflist|15em}}<br />
<br />
===Works Cited===<br />
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}<br />
* {{cite book ||last=Broer |first=Lawrence R. |date=1994 |chapter=Images of the Shaman in the Works of Kurt Vonnegut |title=Dionysus in Literature |url= |location=Bowling Green, KY |publisher=Bowling Green State UP |editor-last=Rieger |editor-first=Branimir M. |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite web |url=http://www.alternet.org/story/14919/ |title=Vonnegut at 80 |last= Hoppe|first= David |date= October 2005 |website= AlterNet 2|publisher= |access-date= February 24, 2008|quote= |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last= Joyce|first= James|date= 1916|title= Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. |url= |location= New York|publisher= Viking |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite news |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 23 January 2005|title= Empire Building: America and Its War with the Invisible Kingdom of Satan|url= |work= The Sunday Times|location= London|access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman |authormask=1 |chapter= The White Negro|url= |title= Advertisements for Myself|date= 1959|pages=337-358 |publisher= Putnam |location= New York|access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman |authormask=1 |date= 2003|title= Why Are We at War?|url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite AV media|title= Norman Mailer: Mailer on Mailer.|date= 2000|series= American Masters Series|medium= Windstar DVD|publisher= PBS| ref={{sfnref|American Masters|2000}} }}<br />
* {{cite book |last= Vonnegut|first= Kurt|date= 1991|title= Fates Worse Than Death|url= |location= New York|publisher= Berkley Books |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite web |url=https://inthesetimes.com/article/kurt-vonnegut-vs-the |title= Kurt Vonnegut vs. the !&#*!@: Interview with Joel Bleifuss|last= Vonnegut|first= Kurt |authormask=1 |date= 27 January 2003|website= In These Times|publisher= |access-date= February 24, 2008|quote= |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last= Vonnegut|first= Kurt |authormask=1 |date= 2005|title= A Man Without a Country|url= |location= New York|publisher= Seven Stories Press|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Vonnegut |first=Kurt |authormask=1 |date=1965 |title=Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (Opinions) |url= |location=New York |publisher=Dell |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
{{Refend}}</div>ChristinaPinkstonhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/The_Wise_Blood_of_Norman_Mailer:_An_Interpretation_and_Defense_of_Why_Are_We_in_Vietnam%3F&diff=11724The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/The Wise Blood of Norman Mailer: An Interpretation and Defense of Why Are We in Vietnam?2020-09-24T16:47:29Z<p>ChristinaPinkston: added italics with one title, fixed misspelled word in works cited</p>
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<div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>The Wise Blood of Norman Mailer: An Interpretation and Defense of ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''}}<br />
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{{Byline|last=Fulgham|first=Richard Lee|abstract=''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' is a novel that calls for reassessment four decades after its appearance, particularly as a work of satiric allegory.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08fulg|}}<br />
{{dc|dc=A|mong the imperceptive and raucous}} commentaries on Mailer’s novels, this remark by [[w:Anatole Broyard|Anatole Broyard]] stands out as refreshingly clear: “the rock he throws usually has a message tied to it.”{{sfn|Broyard|1967|p=4}} In the case of ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'', the rock has been given much more attention than the message because it hit us at the wrong time and in an extraordinarily sensitive spot.<br />
<br />
When the novel appeared in 1967 we were freshly engaged in a frightening confrontation between what we perceived as the primitive savagery of an undeveloped nation and the sophisticated savagery of our so-called developed one. We were simply too busy analyzing our moral integrity to pay heed to a warning that we had collectively embarked on a bizarre “bear hunt.”<br />
<br />
Most of us who read the novel at the time of its publication were properly stunned by the impact; but few of us, if any, fully comprehended the tragic implications hidden within. Perhaps at the time it was most convenient not to understand this darkest of Mailer’s satiric allegories.<br />
<br />
In retrospect, however, it becomes increasingly clear that Mailer is worth the extra thought it takes to interpret his writing. This is particularly true in the case of ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' because its fundamental point is hidden beneath an obvious and simplistic plot. Even the most casual reader can immediately spot the parallel between [[w:Vietnam War|our military adventure in Vietnam]] and the hunting trip of Mailer’s characters. And it is even easier to presume Mailer is blaming our presence in Southeast Asia on our collective heart of the hunter. But this is seeing only the reflection on the surface of the well. The actual waters run much much deeper.<br />
<br />
Before our descent into these depths, however, it will pay us to take a quick look at the basic story. Two Texas teenagers, D.J. and Tex, fly to Alaska’s frigid [[w:Brooks Range|Brook’s Range]] with D.J.’s father, Rusty, and two “yes men.”<br />
<br />
Rusty is a corporate executive, ruling a vast conglomerate based on the manufacture of plastic cigarette filters. He is ultra-aggressive, bullying, pompous, territorial, and boastful. His code of conduct is comparable to that of an alpha male in a baboon troop.<br />
<br />
He brings along the two “yes men”—called “medium asses” in the book—to act as witnesses when he slaughters a bear. His only motive for the hunt is to ensure that he is respected and feared as a sexually superior and merciless leader. In order to impress his prowess upon his peers, he must bring back a “grizzer.” Concepts like “sporting chance” and “grace under pressure” have no meaning to him. He operates on a grossly animalistic level, considering ruthlessness and sexual domination as supreme virtues.<br />
<br />
In D.J.’s words, “He sings the song of the swine.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=34}} And in Mailer’s estimation, Rusty is analogous to the American corporate mind which would seek out a Vietnam to attack in order to release an explosive, repressed sexuality and reaffirm its status as pack leader of the world.{{efn|This metaphor is further expounded in {{harvtxt|Mailer|1971|}}, in which the author suggests that the American expedition to the moon was analogous to an ejaculation of spermatozoa towards the waiting egg cell.}} In Rusty—and the American corporate mind—Mailer sees the worst kind of genetic tyranny and conditioning by tribal mores.<br />
<br />
His son, D.J. (self proclaimed “disk jockey to the world”) stands in great contrast to the uncompromising animal values embraced by Rusty. Sixteen at the beginning of the hunt, his mind has been so riddled and scrambled by the constant electronic chatter of modem media that he can only think in a non-stop breathless stream of obscene monologue.<br />
<br />
As he is telling the story, we are bombarded by a curious, often annoying, adolescent style and a series of naive boasts. (This may be the one most disturbing aspect of an otherwise well-conceived satire.) In certain ways he does resemble his father: sneering boastfulness, shallow sexuality, arrogance, domineering stance. But he differs in a drastic way that forever separates the two from each other. D.J. knows the anxiety of self-awareness. As he puts it, he is a victim of “Herr Dread.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=122}}{{efn|Though Mailer refers to his personal concept of dread, he apparently obtained his basic idea of “Herr Dread” from [[w:Søren Kierkegaard|Søren Kierkegaard]]’s dark philosophical classic, ''The Concept of Dread''. It is this awareness of spiritual emptiness which separates D.J. from his father.}} His intimacy with his own rationality produces a free-floating fear which plagues him constantly, nibbling at his confidence like a rat trapped within his chest. In his own words, D.J. “sees through to the stinking root of things” and “can watch his own ass being created. . . . ”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=35}}<br />
<br />
He neither admires nor loves his father, feeling instead a horror when he looks into Rusty’s eyes. There he sees “voids, man, and gleams of yellow fire....”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=37}} Students of Mailer will quickly recognize D.J. as the personification of “The White Negro.” He is a hipster, a sensitive psychopath who operates only in the present, with no precedents, no preconceptions. <br />
<br />
Mailer had used this theme before. Virtually all of his fiction up till and including ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' is centered on this one fixed idea: <br />
<br />
{{quote|If the fate of twentieth-century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=304}}}}<br />
<br />
D.J. is so different from his father primarily because he grew up in a super-accelerated society where no sooner is one standard established than it is destroyed and superseded by another. No value system lasts for more than a few months before it must be dismantled and replaced. To infinitely compound matters, he must exist in a society that is literally held hostage by its own government, with the subsequent threat of impending annihilation.<br />
<br />
To exist as a free individual in such a society means waging eternal war against the rigid conformity imposed by the state and corporate bosses. D.J., if he is to retain his personal integrity, has to face American life as a “white Negro,” forever on the edge of life, tottering as it were on the brink of Nietzsche’s abyss.{{efn|My use of Nietzsche’s abyss here refers to the anxiety associated with endless falling as conceived by Nietzsche in ''Beyond Good and Evil'' (New York: Boni and Liveright, no date), Chapter IV, aphorism 146: “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”}} Though this interpretation of D.J. might be debatable, Mailer himself hints at such a relationship between D.J. and the existential hipster. Many times D.J. interrupts his monologue to suggest that he is not really a “Texas Wasp,” but rather a “black-ass cripple Spade and sending from Harlem.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=224}}<br />
<br />
This singular literary device not only accentuates the existential state of D.J., it implies that American youth as personified by D.J. is hopelessly divided in half, with two separate and distinct personalities. In this sense especially, D.J. becomes a valid microcosm of the macrocosmic youth rebellion of the 1960s, where even the most bitter protester was torn between love of country and love of individual freedom. We who have survived long enough to peer into the twenty-first century can still relate. We love the country but hate the scene.<br />
<br />
We have spent so much space on D.J. with good reason. He represents more than the divided youth of high-technology America in the 1960s. Indeed, he represents more than Mailer’s embattled existential hero. He represents as well the inescapable Catch-22 of modem times: divorcing one’s self from society means loss of security. But being part of society means loss of freedom, because society is still ruled by the dictates of other people or of Nature. You’re either in lock-step with humanity or you’re all alone. One means a loss of self; the other means to live in perpetual anxious isolation.<br />
<br />
It is only with Mailer’s maturing mind that we find a third possibility— that the individual can be free without alienating himself from human society. This freedom comes with the understanding that humanity is not necessarily in the dictates of Nature. Mankind can choose between good and evil. (Hence the importance of democracy.) Mailer’s variance from the existentialism of the post war French intellectuals is profound. Man is not alone in the Universe. Morals are not moot. Good and Evil not only exist in the eternal moment, they suggest the existence of a not allegorical God and Devil!<br />
<br />
This astonishing conclusion can be seen in Mailer’s 2007 novel ''The Castle in the Forest'' (New York: Random House, 2007) and his nonfiction interview about God with his authorized biographer Dr. Michael Lennon, appropriately entitled ''On God: An Uncommon Conversation'' (New York: Random House, 2007). We have to pay attention because Norman Mailer’s genius cannot be denied.<br />
<br />
But there is no such realization seen in Mailer’s 1968 novel ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' In it, protagonist D.J. gives up his freedom of choice by acquiescing to the “wisdom of the blood.”{{efn|It is interesting to compare D.J.’s decision to obey his instinctive impulses to Emil Sinclair’s decision to accept the “wisdom of the blood” in Herman Hesse’s classic ''Demian''. Though both Enoch of ''Wise Blood'' and D.J. of ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' ultimately become less than human by accepting their instinctive “wisdom,” Emil Sinclair becomes more than human.}} By submitting to the dictates of Nature (that is,“instinct”), D.J. loses all control of the hunt, to say nothing of his life. He learns nothing from his encounter with “that Cannibal Emperor of Nature’s Psyche.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=200}} And having learned nothing, he is subsequently doomed perforce to confronting life with the animalistic shallowness of his father. In the end, he lacks the courage to be free and voluntarily gives his will over to instinct.<br />
<br />
Returning to the basic story, Rusty and D.J. arrive at the Brooks Range with the two “medium asses” and Tex Hyde, D.J.’s best friend. They are met by a half-breed Indian guide named Big Luke and his assistant Ollie. Big Luke warns them that the exposure to modem technology has driven the big grizzlies mad; now they are doubly wily and dangerous.<br />
<br />
None of the American group is particularly impressed by this. They are equipped with rifles powerful enough to down rhinoceros. (This of course<br />
refers to the overmatching of American weapons against those of the North Vietnamese.) And predictably, the large animals encountered are mown down without the slightest chance given to the animal. A helicopter is used to frighten them to a spot where hunters lay in wait. The slaughter is described without sentiment from Mailer; but it is obvious enough that the Americans brought with them some virulent, malignant evil. The savagery of Nature seems real only as it festers within the armored hearts of men.<br />
<br />
This intentional parody of Hemingway’s claim that killing a big animal was somehow noble is one of the most vital messages Mailer gives us. As we experience the mindless slaughter, we are aware only of the cold insensibility of the killers. The animals—wolves, caribou, bear—show agonizing emotion as they die, peering at their executors through fading yellow eyes. But the emotion we are told wells up in the hunters is just the smug satisfaction of proving one’s sexual supremacy in the presence of one’s friends.<br />
<br />
A wolf is killed and its blood becomes the beverage of ritual as the two boys and guide drink it from a cup. Oh well, they tried. The magic does not work and they remain alienated by both Nature and humanity. Thus another wolf killed with neither ceremony nor feeling, not even a pretense. A majestic caribou is shot off of a ridge and the hunters are angry because the necessity of gutting it spoils their killing spree for the rest of the day.<br />
<br />
The next day, with the use of the helicopter (a “Cop Turd” in D.J.’s lingo), a bear couple is spotted, male and female. Both are riddled with massive bullets from every rifle. Big Luke grants the credit of the kill to Tex and “one of the medium asses.” The female has twelve slugs in her. D.J. is pleased to see her covered with “her last shit.” But Rusty is hardly pleased. He is furious and panicky. He will look and feel ridiculous if a “medium ass” brings home a kill and he does not.<br />
<br />
The next day Rusty and D.J. go hunting without the others. They track down a huge grizzly and D.J. shoots it twice. The bear has enough anger and energy left to charge the terrified D.J., stopping only ten yards away. The teenager has “faced death and acted with great courage, again parodying Hemingway. But he does not experience a “cold moment in time.” For him the moment is all too hot. He trembles and sweats, having stepped “into dark and smelling pig shit ....” We realize that D.J. has defecated in his pants. It was not nobility that enabled him to face the charging bear. It was sheer panic. D.J. had frozen.<br />
<br />
But this is a small revelation compared to the next. When the grizzly proves to be alive and escapes into the forest, the father and son have to follow it. Neither would go if they had been alone; together they are shamed into pursuing the wounded bear. They find it where it lies dying and helpless. As D.J. approaches, Rusty nervously and cowardly lags behind. He is all too willing to allow his son the dubious pleasure of confronting the unknown.<br />
<br />
But if Rusty is ultimately a coward he is nevertheless a determined one. Rusty not only has his honor at stake; he has invested over six thousand dollars! When D.J. is only a few yards away, Rusty lifts his rifle and places a sad and pointless round between the dead bear’s eyes. There is one last spasmodic paroxysm, “legs thrashing, brain exploding from new galvanizing and overloadings of massive damage report, and one last heuuuuuuuuu, all forgiveness gone.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=156}} Back at the camp of Big Luke, D.J. has to admit that Rusty indeed placed the last shot. Rusty is silent for a few moments, perhaps embarrassed, but then says, “Yeah, I guess it’s mine, but one of its sweet legs belongs to D.J.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=157}}<br />
<br />
In the early 1960s, Vietnam was still seen as a technologically primitive country that would fall like a wild animal under the vastly superior weapons of the United States. The corporate mind of America presumed itself intellectually and morally so far above the Vietnamese that the war was not even considered a real war, but only a minor “police action,” which was undertaken ostentatiously for the good of civilized mankind. Mailer’s bizarre bear hunt took this red-herring justification of the fathers, turned it inside out, and revealed that it was red from the bloodiest kind of deceptions.<br />
<br />
The result of such probing insight is the realization of an exquisite irony. While the corporate minded fathers spoke of civilization and technology, their true motives lay in the coarsest kind of savagery: animal instinct. Just as Rusty must slaughter a grizzly to reaffirm his dominancy among his “tribal” peers, so must corporate America reaffirm its dominancy among its global peers. And just as Rusty intentionally sacrifices the honor of his son to maintain his dominancy, so the corporate state willingly sacrifices its young citizens for the same bestial purpose.<br />
<br />
In the end, Mailer implies and perhaps confesses that there is nothing civilized about violence. The roots of murder and warfare are imbedded in the soil of our animal ancestry. As long as we justify our blood lust and hunger for sexual dominancy, we are not civilized men, but baboons and hyenas and wolves—at the best, monkeys.{{efn|It is possible that Mailer was heavily influenced by the anthropological theories popularized by the late Robert Ardrey in his 1965 best seller ''African Genesis'' (New York: Dell, 1961), in which it was postulated that mankind evolved from “killer apes.”}}<br />
<br />
Rusty and his group do not find savagery and slaughter in the “wilds” of Alaska. Rather, they bring savagery and slaughter with them. They do not absorb some natural energy that forces them to live on “bestial” terms with a cruel Nature. Rather, they bring with them a distinctly human violence, a cultivated horror of human hubris and an inability to empathize with living creatures.<br />
<br />
If ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' ended at this point, the allegory would stand as beautifully elegant and simple. But Mailer, unlike his predecessor Ernest Hemingway, has always preferred to elaborate upon his elaborations. Having made his two fundamental points, he continues to extend his allegorical bear hunt into more mysterious, even occult, areas.<br />
<br />
Feeling poisoned and contaminated by his father’s betrayal, D.J. sets out with Tex to confront Nature without weapons. They leave early in the morning without telling the others of their intentions. Alone and unarmed they experience a humbling fear, a shocking revelation of their own nakedness. When the earlier hunting party had spotted a wolf, the animal had been quickly shot and its blood drunk. When the unarmed boys spot a wolf, they are paralyzed with fright.<br />
<br />
In the Freudian sense, they have been emasculated and incapable of violence without their huge guns. They’ve lost their erection for life. But<br />
in a more mundane sense, without their technological superiority, they sink even lower than the animals they disdain. A bear is heard in the<br />
brush and the boys climb a tree. They sense their loss of power over Nature without their big guns because “this mother nature is as big and dangerous and mysterious as a beautiful castrating cunt when she’s on the edge between murder and love.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=197}}{{efn|It is significant that Mailer uses the word “castrating” in reference to “mother” Nature. Without his rifle, D.J. is no longer dominant over Nature, and thereby sexually impotent.}} (Mailer’s distrust and downright hatred of technology comes through—his point is clarified perhaps more than is necessary.)<br />
<br />
Here we have a clue into the disturbing and unhealthy attitude toward animals (that is, “Nature”), shown by not only the boys but Rusty and his<br />
group as they personify the attitude of their country. Though the boys, when alone in the forest, experience a fear of a “red in tooth and claw” Nature, they experience neither understanding nor compassion for its purity and beauty. As from the beginning, the animals are only a means to easing inner tensions through violence. In fact, both boys regret not being armed in order to kill while they are “loving” Nature. Mailer seems to suggest that what hunters experience through Nature is not love at all, but rather a tremendously satisfying justification of one’s instinctive and overwhelming need for violence.<br />
<br />
This would partially explain the apparent contradiction occurring in the subsequent episode. When night comes, D.J. and Tex form camp and try to sleep. As D.J. lays next to his friend, he is immersed in the grandeur and majesty of the night time mountain forest. In his own words, D.J. “could have wept for a secret was near, some mystery in the secret of things, of trees and forest all in dominion to one another.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=211}} At last he seems to be understanding the wild!<br />
<br />
Up until this moment Mailer’s novel has been written in an obsessive stream of obscene language and electronic-media jargon. The description of<br />
the night, however, is delivered in a reverent, almost corny, passage of classical Nature writing worthy of a Thoreau or Wordsworth.<br />
<br />
But the similarity to other books about Nature ends abruptly, changing into a strange and ominous parody. As D.J. experiences the “secret” drawing nearer, he simultaneously feels a sexual desire for Tex. This odd dealing with latent homosexuality at first seems to destroy the sense of serenity Mailer has so painstakingly described.<br />
<br />
At first glance, he seems to have thrown in an innocuous homosexual scene just to meet some politically correct requisite. But on second glance, this sexuality comes into focus as a natural force within D.J.—and by inference, all the sons of the American State. As might be expected, it is a violent sexual urge and D.J. considers the dominancy he would prove over Tex if he forced his friend into a role of subservient sexual partner. He is refrained from action only by the fear of failure to dominate. By now, it should be obvious that Mailer equates sex and violence as forever spliced in the American mind. They are two branches with the same root mired in the psychology of the beast.<br />
<br />
Up until this very moment, there seems to have been hope for D.J. He has seen through the hypocrisy of his father, rejected the Darwinian biological imperatives of his country, proven his personal courage in the face of death, and found a type of grace in Nature.<br />
<br />
But with the welling up of his violent and sexual “urges” comes the end of hope for D.J. He never grasps the full meaning of his experiences. Instead of recognizing that he is tyrannized by his own “wise blood” (or “urges”), he mistakenly assumes that he is receiving messages from a God of the cosmos. Instead of understanding that his violence is something to be overcome, he accepts it as not only natural but divine. He comes within a hair of finding the true meaning of his experience, only to misinterpret the entire lesson. D.J. finally finds God, but instead of psalms, he hears the command, “Go out and kill—fulfill my will, go and kill.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=219}} God is not there for him—only the Beast.<br />
<br />
And for that reason, all the violence and domineering sex in him seems to be justified and affirmed. Like the Nazi gunners with ''Gott mit uns'' inscribed on their belts, D.J. believes that God is “on his side” so long as he follows his natural impulses, even if it means constant fighting and killing if necessary to remain on top of the human herd and get what he wants in the sexual and material sense.<br />
<br />
In this sad way, D.J. becomes his own father, with the same sad hypocrisies and the same sad justifications. The book ends with D.J. and Tex waiting to go to war in a fever of happy anticipation. Their last words are “Vietnam, hot dam.”{{efn|Compare this to the last line of Mailer’s 1948 war novel, ''The Naked and the Dead'', which exclaims, “Hot dog!” A good argument could be drawn that the two books convey the same message: naturalistic forces so overwhelm the individual that willed action is futile and pointless.}}<br />
<br />
''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' is Mailer’s most profoundly pessimistic book. Mankind as allegory fails to realize that he has a choice to lift himself<br />
above the brutishness of raw Nature. Instead, he allows himself to be a subject of Nature, thus becoming just another brute. He fails to discern good from evil. He fails to understand that he—personifying mankind—is becoming a force as powerful as God and the Devil because he can<br />
choose.<br />
<br />
This was Mailer’s maturing perception of a “good” God and an “evil” Devil in the late sixties. Perhaps the root of this belief can be found in this statement in ''Advertisements for Myself'', from an essay written a few years earlier: <br />
<br />
{{quote|God’s destiny is flesh and blood with ours, and so, far from conceiving of a God who sits in judgment and allows souls, lost souls, to leave purgatory and be reborn again, there is the greater agony of God at the mercy of man’s fate, God determined by man’s efforts, man who has a free will....{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=91}}{{efn|Norman Mailer, “A Public Notice on ''Waiting for Godot'',” essay in {{harvtxt|Mailer|1959|p=289}}.}}}}<br />
<br />
This conception is precisely the one presented in Mailer’s 1968 bear hunt and his 2007 portrait of Adolf Hitler as a boy. God, Man, and Nature are not one, not made up of the same substance. Man is neither the consciousness nor the conscience of God. Mankind is a third determining force in the Universe.<br />
<br />
Mankind can and must realize itself as a determining factor in the development of life. Curiously, all of Mailer’s literary work, except ''The Naked and the Dead'' and ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'', emphasizes the moral responsibility of the individual to fight the suffocating restrictions of society, especially when society is dominated by the laws of Nature, not man. This more than anything illustrates Mailer’s abhorrence of American interference in Vietnam. “We did it to prove we are the meanest, biggest, baddest dog on the block,” he seems to be saying. We were allowing our natural instincts to rule our actions. Thus, Mailer is not concerned with the destruction of another country so much as he is concerned with our self-destruction.{{efn|This quotation from {{harvtxt|Mailer|1966}} may help clarify Mailer’s position: “[T]he only explanation I can find for the war in Vietnam is that we are sinking into the swamps of a plague and the massacre of strange people seems to relieve this plague. If one were to take the patients in a hospital, give them guns and let them shoot on pedestrians down from hospital windows you may be sure you would find a few miraculous cures.”{{sfn|Mailer|1966|p=91}}}}<br />
<br />
If his allegory holds true throughout the novel, we must conclude that America as a society failed to will itself more sophisticated than the beasts in the woods when it sent its army to Vietnam. America failed to choose attainment of universal justice and compassion. In Mailer’s terminology, especially now at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we must conclude that our attempted bullying of Vietnam was nothing less than demonic, as it represented the antithesis of divine.<br />
<br />
===Notes===<br />
{{Notelist}}<br />
<br />
===Citations===<br />
{{Reflist|15em}}<br />
<br />
===Works Cited===<br />
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}<br />
* {{cite news |last=Broyard |first=Anatole |date=September 17, 1967 |title=A Disturbance of the Peace |url= |work=New York Times |location=3, 4–5 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1966 |title=Cannibals and Christians |url= |location=New York |publisher=Dial |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1971 |title=Of a Fire on the Moon |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1959 |chapter=The White Negro |title=Advertisements for Myself |url= |location=New York |publisher=Putnam |pages=357–358 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1967 |title=Why Are We in Vietnam? |url= |location=New York |publisher=Putnam |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
{{Refend}}<br />
{{Review}}<br />
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wise Blood of Norman Mailer: An Interpretation and Defense of Why Are We in Vietnam?, The}}<br />
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]</div>ChristinaPinkstonhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/%22Their_Humor_Annoyed_Him%22:_Cavalier_Wit_and_Sympathy_for_the_Devil_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest&diff=11723The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/"Their Humor Annoyed Him": Cavalier Wit and Sympathy for the Devil in The Castle in the Forest2020-09-24T16:29:17Z<p>ChristinaPinkston: added italics to one title, removed exclamation mark typo</p>
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{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;>{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>"Their Humor Annoyed Him": Cavalier Wit and Sympathy for the Devil in ''The Castle in the Forest''}}<br />
{{MR12}}<br />
{{Byline|last=Whalen-Bridge|first=John|abstract=Mailer’s innovative device of having a mind-entering demon narrate backgrounds denied to us by the enclosures of history allows Mailer to conflate the epistemological realism of first person narration with the omniscience of third person. Mailer’s Hitler novel recapitulates his karmic unified-field theory of life in a number of ways. We cannot make sense of the last two decades of Mailer’s writing career without paying attention to the ''Castle''’s cavalier wit, which is, at its heart, almost invariably alone.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08whal}}<br />
{{cquote|Himmler subscribed to the theory that the best human possibilities lie close to the worst.}}<br />
<br />
{{dc|dc=T|here is a joke about attorneys}} that goes like this: lots of people were on a boat, which sank in shark-infested waters. It was horrible. The sharks were tearing all the passengers to pieces as they tried to make it to shore. All the passengers were dying. Except one passenger, who was an attorney. He swam right to the shore. As he was shaking himself off, the bewildered people on the beach asked him, “How come the sharks did not eat you?” He said: “Professional courtesy, I suppose.” We don’t like attorneys, such a joke conveys, because they are not like us. They are like sharks, and we are like people. We laugh at the joke, if we do, to commune in our fantasy-rejection of lawyerly cruelty. But Mailer’s last novel, ''The Castle in the Forest'', is organized around a very different sort of humor. Instead of laughing at lawyers to confirm our fantasy that we ourselves are not sharks, Mailer shocks readers, methodically and skillfully, with the knowledge that they are intimately involved with so much of what they—we, I should say—resoundingly reject. The undertow of laughter in this novel won’t necessarily drag you out to sea, but it will make you ask if you share qualities with what is being held up for laughter and judgment.<br />
<br />
Mailer’s narrator in ''The Castle in the Forest'' speaks with courtesy and intelligence.{{efn|Both Steven Poole in his ''New Statesman'' review, “[https://www.newstatesman.com/books/2007/02/norman-mailer-hitler-novel Sympathy for the Devil]” (19 February 2007) and John Freeman in his ''Independent'' review “[https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/sympathy-for-the-devil-norman-mailer-on-his-satanic-new-novel-434647.html Sympathy for the Devil: Norman Mailer on His Satanic New Novel]” (2 February 2007) connect Mailer’s novel and the Rolling Stones’ song in their titles. The Jagger/Richards song, which first appeared on the 1968 album ''Beggers Banquet'', is a dramatic monologue in which Lucifer brags about his achievements, insists on commonalities between himself and his listeners, and demands courtesy if met: he is a “man of wealth and taste,” after all. All criminals are cops, all sinners are saints, and we all killed the Kennedys.}} He calls himself “Dieter” (though it is not clear what he means to “deter”), and he has been a witness to the formation of Adolf Hitler. Dieter explains to the reader that he has been a functionary in the Third Reich, but he has been—long before he came to work for Himmler—part of the Devil’s bureaucracy, with young “Adi” as his most important case. In this way, Mailer manages to bring together the bureaucratic “banality” of evil with the attractions and powers of evil that the word banality cannot subsume.<br />
<br />
Mailer’s final novel (2007) is a concatenation of aesthetic shocks that tells of the formation of Adolf Hitler’s character, beginning with the incestuous influences of his grandfather (about the identity of whom there has been much historical speculation), and continuing through his schooling. Ron Rosenbaum’s ''Explaining Hitler'' can fruitfully be read as a companion-text to Mailer’s novel; its central question is “When and how did Hitler become ''Hitler''?” Mailer’s novel affirms the idea that Hitler developed sociopathic tendencies by his early teens and that these were the foundation for the subsequent obsession with eliminationist anti-Semitism that would come later—but this evolution in Hitler’s darkness is not central to Mailer’s novel. Mailer builds a Hitler to explain a person attracted to murder and deceit, but anti-Semitism is not the driving force of the life Mailer imagines. Mailer does not at all exclude the idea that everything in the novel is tuned toward the Holocaust. The title ''The Castle in the Forest,'' Dieter tells readers in the final pages, is the translation of a death camp called “''Schlossimwald''” by those inmates who would not, even in the face of ultimate pain and evil, surrender their sense of irony.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=465}} That ''irony'' would remain a prized possession under such circumstances will shock some readers, since the phenomena of Hitler and the Holocaust are for many the very limit of irony. In the Rortyean, postmodern, and thoroughly ironic world in which we live, the Holocaust cannot be reduced to a contingent phenomena whose meaning is entirely dependent upon the subject position of the perceiver. Such a way of thinking will earn a comparison with Holocaust deniers. Mailer not only concludes with an homage to ironic camp inmates but also has Dieter-the-demon tell us that the Devil (whom he calls “the Maestro”) is a connoisseur of irony: “All this was uttered by the Maestro with characteristic irony. We never know how serious he might be when he speaks to our mind’s ear. (His voice is a cornucopia of humors.)"{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=78}} Mailer might even be describing himself in this passage.<br />
<br />
A ''New York Times'' article paused to note that a number of recent novels had the odd feature of including bibliographies. The bibliography of ''The Castle in the Forest'' is rich with entries on bee-keeping. Readers of the novel know it is a richly over-determined metaphor, combining elements of modulated brutality and great technical skill. Bee-keeping is perhaps the central metaphor of the novel, and Mailer’s bibliography lists half-a-dozen or so specialist books on the subject. Bee-keeping signifies social order, but order as understood from an awful height, that of humans looking down on potentially profitable insects, or that of God looking down on mischievous creation. The bees themselves are ruthless at maintaining order, and they eliminate all threats to the hive without hesitation. Mailer’s Alois Hitler is presented as a dedicated bee-keeper, and the narrator Dieter—while perhaps disingenuously or even seductively warning readers not to make too much of such events—presents several scenes in which hives are gassed or burned. Readers might wonder how exactly they could ever make “too much” of such a parallel.<br />
<br />
As important as bee-keeping is to Mailer’s larger narrative loops, it competes in the reader’s imagination with a theme that is given equal air-time but which etches the memory more ruthlessly moment for moment and image for image: transgressive sex. Mailer stays true to his fascination with the idea that God and the Devil partake in human lives through dreams and sex acts. The reader must consider a Freudian primal scene in which young Adolf witnesses Alois and Klara in the sixty-nine position, and witnessing the fictional event makes the reader equal, in some imaginative sense, to demons like Dieter who enter minds and bodies in the most intimate situations imaginable.<br />
<br />
Mailer’s innovative device of having a mind-entering demon narrate backgrounds denied to us by the enclosures of history allows Mailer to conflate the epistemological realism of first person narration with the omniscience of third person. By “epistemological realism,” I mean that we can only experience our own minds directly, unless we have supernormal powers, and furthermore we can only draw inferences about other minds.{{efn|I am not using “epistemological realism” in the standard way, which refers specifically to the form of objectivism in which objects exist independently of one’s own mind in support of a correspondence theory of truth. Such objects would then, presumably, be available for apprehension by subjects from various perspectives, ameliorating the ways in which contemporary, post-Nietzschean perspectivism subverts assertions about an objective world. Mailer’s attraction to what I’m calling “epistemological realism,” on the other hand, finds ways of conflating first- and third-person perspectives—such as by resorting to the epistolary novel in the omega manuscript of ''Harlot’s Ghost'' to ensure that all perceptions are grounded in the first-person-singular perspective—precisely because Mailer’s fictions do not construct worlds out of a comfortable, objectivist epistemological realism.}} So first-person-singular narration is as close as fiction can get to what an individual person without telepathic skills can really know. Yet our success in the world depends entirely on having confidence in inferences drawn about other minds, and to develop this confidence we need to develop exactly the sort of imagination found in a convincing social novel. But in ''The Castle in the Forest'', Mailer’s narrator is a demon from hell who takes pride in his work; the associative connection Mailer develops at length does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that all human knowing is damned, but we are privy, as it were, to the intrusions of devils much, much more than we are, in Mailer’s fictional rendition, to the mind-intrusions of angels.<br />
<br />
What are we to make of a carefully wrought fictional scene in which the Hitlers, before young Adi even comes into the world, adventure past ordinary naughty sex into pedal-to-the-metal analingus? In foregrounding sex acts of this sort in a book purportedly about radical evil, Mailer risks being discussed in terms of radical eccentricity.{{efn|Ron Rosenbaum, author of ''Explaining Hitler'',, warns Mailer against pursuing, in a rumored sequel to ''The Castle in the Forest'', a sexual explanation of Hitler’s evil. See his essay “The Last Temptation of Norman Mailer” for a convincing admonition about the limits of psycho-sexual explanations of Hitler.}} Or, one could say that approaching radical evil through sexual obscenity is artistically obscene. However we put it, the novel intentionally jars the reader just as much as ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983), and the central narrative device of ''that'' novel was an act of fellatio between two ghosts in a tomb. Here is the sex act between Alois and Klara that Mailer’s young Hitler witnesses: <br />
<br />
{{quote|We may remember that the last time we saw Alois, he was burying his nose and lips in Klara’s vulva, his tongue as long and demonic as a devil’s phallus. (Be it said: we are not without our contributions to these arts.) Alois was certainly being aided by us. Never before had he given himself so completely to this exercise, and quickly he had become good at it, and so quickly that no explanation is possible unless we are given credit as well. (Which is why we speak of the Evil One when joining in the act—we do have the power to pass these lubricious gifts to men and women even when we are not attempting to convert them into clients.){{sfn|Mailer|1983|p=98}}}}<br />
<br />
What shall we make of this? One possible response will be to link Mailer’s use of the Holocaust with that of Sylvia Plath.{{efn|See Gubar for a discussion of attacks on Plath for reducing the Holocaust to a metaphor.}} One could say each author uses the pain of others to provide historical ballast to pain that is really individual. It would be the height of egotism to use the deaths of six million in order to hide the idiosyncrasy of one’s pain or the eccentricity of one’s ideas.<br />
<br />
Mailer’s Hitler novel recapitulates his karmic unified-field theory of life in a number of ways. He consistently presented himself as an author with an important vision, one worthy of “the mind of Joyce” or Melville, since the mid-1950s, and critics debated whether he ever wrote his ''Ulysses'' or ''Moby Dick''. Mailer’s personal ambition, however, was never in question.<br />
<br />
The cosmological vision has been reiterated in all of Mailer’s major works, including ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983), ''Harlot’s Ghost'' (1991), and ''The Gospel according to the Son'' (1997).{{efn|See Lennon’s “Mailer’s Cosmology” for a discussion of Mailer’s cosmological foundation, which is relatively stable across the decades from the mid-Sixties through Mailer’s final work.}} In each of these novel’s (if we allow for ''The Executioner’s Song'' as a “nonfiction novel”), the struggle between divine forces explains the relation between apparently insignificant actors in ways that factor out what Mailer calls “the Absurd.” The divinity potential of quotidian existence is the binding material in Mailer’s cosmos, with “divinity” meaning extraordinary, magical, and foundational. The experience of the divine overlaps with the extraordinary in the manner of aesthetic wonder, and this commonality allows Mailer to find God in the aesthetic aspects of sexual experience, but the divine must be more than ''merely'' extraordinary. The experience of divinity, which some people achieve and many do not, transcends ordinary experience, meaning that, in Mailer’s Romantic articulation, there is a hierarchy of knowing, and that only some (heroic) persons are able to glimpse the magical foundations of being. Such a vision requires huge risks, which explains why many would prefer not to see what Mailer’s heroic seers may encounter, and those who take such risks are not necessarily good people.<br />
<br />
In ''Ancient Evenings'', which was composed during the Carter presidency, the weak, vacillating pharaoh Ramses IX must decide whether or not to trust the protagonist Menenhetet, a figure who has earned scorn in his attempts to accumulate visionary power through experiments with scatological ceremonies and incest. In this novel Mailer stages his idea that we must make “bargains with evil” into a historical setting that could be called “Before Good and Evil.” Mailer’s setting predates the monotheistic moral codes that undergird our language of morality, thus showing the Eurocentric view to be, in Chakrabarty’s terms, “provincial.” This incarnation of the Mailer vision is, then, radically Manichean, since the Egyptian gods are not centered by a transcendent notion of the Good, against which an evil force defines itself. One could, through cosmological backformation, interpret the theomachy between Osiris and Set as a war between good and evil. In any event, the nature of goodness is never really in question. Artistically modulated growth—a middle way between stagnation and the uncontrolled growth of cancer—has always been the sign of health in Mailer’s universe. Mailer’s praise of Osiris resonates exactly with the adaptations of John Dewey’s “live creature.”<br />
<br />
The existential mystery animating Mailer’s visions has to do not with the existence of good and evil but rather with knowing which is which. Rosenbaum gives a name to the tendency to ground our moral awareness in a false absolute: ''argumentum ad Hitlerum''. When we can no longer endure uncertainties, when we have run out of negative capability, we appeal to Hitler to end the argument: ''Hitler'' was evil. The seduction of absolutist thinking, as Mailer shows in his Cold War articulation, is that we name the world in terms of Good and Evil and then proceed to identify our own actions and interests with the Good in self-interested and thus delusory ways: <br />
<br />
{{quote|<br />
“There is no emotion on earth more powerful than anti-Americanism. To the rest of the world, America is the Garden of Eden. Unmitigated envy, the ugliest emotion of them all.”<br />
<br />
“Yessir.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=340}}}}<br />
<br />
As George Bush put it in the wake of the 9/11 (2001) attack on the World Trade Center, you are either with us or you are against us. You are either with God or the Devil. The tendency and aim of such a formulation is to make everyone into a “yes-man,” just like the CIA analyst in the quotation above who quickly says “Yessir” to Harlot, Mailer’s architect of American postwar paranoia. In ''The Gospel According to the Son'', Mailer resists the equal-and-opposite fallacy, ''argumentum ad Jesus'', in which one identifies self-with-Jesus-with-Goodness. Mailer despises the ways in which the Bush White House rolls together what Dieter of ''The Castle in the Forest'' calls “cheap patriotism” and “cheap prayer,”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=386}} but in ''The Gospel according to the Son'' Mailer wishes not to attack a “cheap” Jesus but to imagine an authentic one.{{efn|See {{harvtxt|Mailer|2003}} if you doubt Mailer despises the mentality and policies of the Bush administration.}} Mailer’s authentic Jesus (as opposed to the authentic Jesus of mainstream Christians) is one who cannot know for sure what the effects of his actions will be. Though Jesus narrates his own gospel, Mailer denies us a text on which to build a fundamentalist worldview. Here is how Brian McDonald presents the narrative uncertainty in “Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the ‘Very Jewish Jesus’ of Norman Mailer’s ''The Gospel according to the Son”'': The story, Mailer’s Jesus reassures us, “is true,” but like a careful witness testifying under oath he is quick to add the caveat, “at least to all that I recall.”{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=2}}<br />
<br />
Mailer’s critics ravaged him for presuming to write in the voice of Jesus, and Mailer clearly anticipates the charge when he has ''his'' Jesus say with nice condescension that the four synoptic gospels were good as far as they went, but they went too far. Mailer’s novelistic hubris, if it should be called that, is in presuming to know the views of God and the Devil and everything in between, but it is presumptuous of the critic to assume that Mailer is ever unaware of the effects of ego, as it is an important theme in all of the “epic” works here discussed:<br />
<br />
{{quote|[W]hen one has become an overseer of death who holds the power to liquidate masses of people, one is also in great need of a very hard shell to the ego in order to feel no intimate horror over the price to one’s soul. Most statesmen who become successful leaders of a country at war have usually risen to such eminence already. They have installed in themselves an ability not to suffer sleepless nights because of casualties on the other side. They now possess the mightiest of all social engines of psychic numbification—patriotism! That is still the most dependable instrument for guiding the masses, although it may yet be replaced by revealed religion. We love fundamentalists. Their faith offers us every promise of developing into the final weapon of mass destruction.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|pp=405–06}}}}<br />
<br />
Dieter provocatively ranks Hitler as a “statesmen,” thus restating the A. J. P. Taylor argument that Hitler would have been counted a great statesmen if only he had died at the right time, but the honorific word is inverted when we see, in context, that the necessary condition for being a statesman is an ego, a psychic callous to protect one’s sleep from meaningful knowledge of one’s actions.{{efn|Readers would be wrong to assume that Mailer is agreeing with A. J. P. Taylor. It is part of Dieter’s worldview and it is in his personal interest to defend the kind of egotism that is an insulation against subtle awareness of the feelings of others. Lest we think—as his typical detractors certainly would—that Mailer is defending egotism of this sort, we should recall the image of Ramses II after the Battle of Kadesh, the pharaoh taking care to heft every single amputated hand of the vanquished Hittite soldiers while the rest of the army enjoy the spoils of war in the most libidinal way. Mailer’s Ramses II is, in this one respect at least, the ethical antipode to contemporary leaders who, according to Dieter’s own political realism, must ''necessarily'' shield themselves from awareness of the consequences of their actions.}} When Dieter stirs in “patriotism” and fundamentalism, it becomes clear that Mailer’s Hitler has been used as a “cudgel” to beat George W. Bush, a president who has been most politely described as “incurious” regarding the facts of the world.{{efn|Cenk Uygur, a blogger from ''The Huffington Post'', has entitled his column on President Bush’s lack of curiosity “The Incredibly, Unbelievably, Stupendously, Incurious George Bush.”}} “Cudgel,” in ''The Castle in the Forest'', is the name devils such as Dieter give to the Angels, who cause beings pain in their sleep when their actions are hateful rather than loving.<br />
<br />
Antithetical elements call attention to one another, reminding readers of nothing so much as the presence of the author himself. Think back to Mailer’s character Roth in ''The Naked and the Dead'', and of Stephen Richards Rojack walking the parapet in ''An American Dream''. Mailer’s writings are full of intentional impasses and voracious chasms. Readers who cannot make the leap will quickly fly from the page and declare Mailer unreadable. How are we to make the leap from the pure (if uncertain) speech of Jesus back to the vulva of Hitler’s mother? Mailer’s narratives are visionary landscapes designed to engulf some readers while allowing others the chance to develop in admittedly idiosyncratic ways—but it is a mindless response to note Mailer’s stylistic self-reference without noting the antipodal contextualization of his stylistic “egotism.”<br />
<br />
Mailer shows every awareness in his artful rendition of the Devil’s shaping hand that ''ego'' is one of the Devil’s most important tools, but then, most shockingly, he will put in a narrative turn that does nothing so much as foreground the author. Authorial egotism comes into the foreground of Hitler’s mind when he chooses among intellectual influences: <br />
<br />
{{quote|He certainly rejected Goethe and Schiller. Their humor annoyed him. It was too personal—as if they were much too pleased with what they were saying. Not serious enough, Adolf decided. The other two, Kant and Schleiermacher, he simply could not read. After Jahn, his highest pleasure came from the fairy tales of the Grimm brothers. That had also been assigned to his class. Those were good stories, and deep!{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=377}}}}<br />
<br />
Adolf uses the stories of Grimm to terrorize his younger brother Edmund, whom Mailer imagines as Hitler’s first murder victim: in a variation of the killing of Abel, jealous Hitler intentionally passes Edmund the measles that will kill him. This passage is one of a dozen or so highly literate moments in ''The Castle in the Forest'' in which Mailer positively revels in the ironies that were once so properly shocking, those attaching to the apparent incongruity of Nazis who loved Beethoven.<br />
<br />
But not all writers and not all ironies are the same—it is not as if Mailer is inviting plague on all the literary houses. Mailer, if I read him rightly, mocks the rectitude with which we have sometimes allowed ourselves to think that literature as such was a proof of superior humanity, when much more is required. Hitler’s literary tastes give some hint of his taste for cruelty, as his sadistic use of the Grimm stories suggests, but even more important is his impatience with queer, unsettling humor, that of Goethe and Schiller. Their humor annoyed him? Mailer’s humor here is profound: he knows—has known since he meditated on the career of Henry Miller in the mid-1970s—that his own unsettling humor would “annoy” many of his readers. Merely to make oneself an antipode to Adolf is the laziest move imaginable, but this is not at all where Mailer leaves the matter. He goes on to reveal why Goethe and Schiller annoyed Adi: they reminded him too much that they exist.<br />
<br />
It cannot be said that this humor is inherently ethical. The freedom of humor (and it is this often disappointing freedom of the other to disappoint you that proves that the other is not a function of your own fantasy) has its horrible uses. Hitler’s ''literary'' torture of Edmund is one of the most grimly funny moments in a novel replete with dark humor. Young Adolf has been reading Edmund terrifying Grimm stories:<br />
<br />
{{quote|<br />
“Do you want another story?”<br />
<br />
"Maybe not."<br />
<br />
“This one is the best,” said Adolf.<br />
<br />
"Is it truly the best?"<br />
<br />
"Yes"<br />
<br />
“Then maybe I don’t want to hear it.”<br />
<br />
“It’s about a young man who is ordered to sleep with a corpse. In time to come you, too, may have to sleep next to a dead man.” <br />
<br />
At this point, Edmund shrieked. Then he fainted.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=379}}}}<br />
<br />
In genuinely frightening ways that inter-leaven the literary and the wicked, Mailer exacerbates our moral consciences; American literature has not been as darkly funny since Twain’s ''Letters from the Earth''. Twain’s and Mailer’s are good stories, and deep!<br />
<br />
Mailer’s laughter in ''The Castle in the Forest'' is not the raucous, adolescent laughter of America’s 1960s black humor fiction, a laughter that is always implicitly the laughter of an overly stable know-it-all ''we''.{{efn|One could say that Yossarian is a character who must act from isolation even when he crucially chooses to act for the sake of others, but I would still characterize the laughter aroused by the novel as more social. This we carried over quite smoothly from the novel to the film ''M*A*S*H'' and to the buddy-scenarios of the television version as well. Consider the narrative situation of ''Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'', Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo narrative: however iconoclastic and anarchic the voice of Raoul Duke, this road novel depends for it’s effects on internalizing the “we,” so Duke is accompanied by Dr. Gonzo, his Samoan attorney (who is based on Oscar Zeta Acosta, the Mexican-American political activist). If we look through ''Castle'' carefully, we will see that Mailer has, again and again, done without the protections of an imaginary men’s club.}} We laugh at the bureaucrats in ''Catch-22''. There’s an unsettling oddity to Mailer’s style, though, an awareness that, like Dieter’s, Mailer’s humor is both on the mark and a bit to one side of the main stream of events. Mailer does not pretend to be in the ethical center, and the rude, cruel, and invasive qualities of his “diabolical” narrative technique are, he will not let us forget, essential elements in our own conventional mind-set. The castle in Mailer’s forest, the redemptive beauty that makes the pain and failures of such unappreciated masterpieces as ''Ancient Evenings'' and ''The Castle in the Forest'' bearable, is always a repetition and ever-free variation of a cavalier wit. As it is in the moment in which Adolf tortures his brother with literature, Mailer’s humor is genuinely funny and, at exactly the same time, resoundingly grim. Putting his own idea that our best is often closest to our worst into the mouth of Himmler, Mailer turns into the pain of his own humor and allows—encourages, actually—the nasty identifications his harshest critics made of himself and his work, that he was violent and cruel and “patriarchal” in the sense in which patriarchy is a synonym for Fascism. We cannot make sense of the last two decades of Mailer’s writing career without paying attention to this cavalier wit, which is, at its heart, almost invariably ''alone''.{{efn|None of this article could have been written if I had not been told the joke about lawyers and sharks by Professor Winfried “the Hun” Schleiner of UC Davis twenty years ago.}}<br />
<br />
===Notes===<br />
{{notelist}}<br />
<br />
===Citations===<br />
{{Reflist|20em}}<br />
<br />
===Works Cited===<br />
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}<br />
* {{cite journal |last=Adamowski |first=T. H. |title=Demoralizing Liberalism: Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman Mailer |url= |journal=University of Toronto Quarterly |volume=75 |issue=3 |date=Summer 2006 |pages=883–904 |access-date= |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite news |last=Bosman |first=Julie |date=December 6, 2006 |title=Literature: Do Novels Really Need Bibliographies? |url=http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/06/features/novels.php |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061208122042/http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/06/features/novels.php |archive-date=December 8, 2006 |work=International Herald Tribune |location= |access-date=2020-09-10 |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Chakrabarty |first=Dipesh |date=2007 |title=Provincializing Europe:Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference |url= |location=Princeton, NJ |publisher=Princeton UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv}} New edition with a new preface by the author.<br />
* {{cite journal |last=Gubar |first=Susan |title=Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her Contemporaries |url= |journal=The Yale Journal of Criticism |volume=14 |issue=1 |date=Spring 2001 |pages=191–215 |access-date= |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite journal|last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |title=Mailer’s Cosmology |url= |journal=Modern Language Studies |volume=12 |issue=3 |date=1982 |pages=18-29 |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1983 |title=Ancient Evenings |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1965 |title=An American Dream |url= |location=New York |publisher=Dial |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1997 |title=The Gospel According to the Son |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1991 |title=Harlot’s Ghost |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first= Norman |authormask=1 |date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |url= |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first= Norman| authormask=1 |date=2003 |title= Why Are We at War |url= |location= New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite journal|last=McCann|first=Sean|title=The Imperiled Republic: Norman Mailer and the Poetics of Anti-Liberalism|url= |journal=English Literary History|volume=67|issue=1|date=2000|pages=293–336|access-date= |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite journal|last=McDonald|first=Brian|title=Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the 'Very Jewish Jesus' of Norman Mailer's ''The Gospel according to the Son|url= |journal=Journal of Modern Literature|volume=30|issue=1|date=2006|pages=78–90|access-date= |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Rorty|first=Richard|date=1989|title=Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity|url= |location=New York|publisher=Cambridge UP|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Rosenbaum|first=Ron|date=March 6, 2007|title=The Last Temptation of Norman Mailer: What Will He Make of 'Hitler's Chappaquiddick'?|url=http://www.slate.com/id/2161302/|location= |publisher=Slate |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Taylor|first=A. J. P |date=1996|title=The Origins of the Second World War|url= |location=New York|publisher=Touchstone|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite web |url= http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/the-incrediblyunbelieva_b_35882.html|title=The Incredibly, Unbelievably, Stupendously, Incurious George Bush |last=Uygur|first=Cenk|date=December 8, 2006|website= |publisher= |access-date=1 August 2008|quote= |ref=harv}}<br />
{{Refend}}<br />
{{Review}}<br />
{{DEFAULTSORT:Their Humor Annoyed Him}}<br />
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]</div>ChristinaPinkstonhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/The_Unknown_and_the_General&diff=11711The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/The Unknown and the General2020-09-24T01:41:56Z<p>ChristinaPinkston: added some need spaces and added italics to ''Strawhead''in one paragraph</p>
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{{Working}}<br />
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{{Byline|last=Morrow|first=Stephan|abstract=An experienced actor recounts his memories of working with Norman Mailer on the productions of ''Strawhead'' and ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'', both directed by Norman Mailer.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08morr}}<br />
<blockquote>''My black T-shirt feels painted onto me with sweat and my fingers are slippery inside the black leather motorcycle gloves as my chest heaves from the exertion, desperate for oxygen. I am going eighty mph on my Harley—and giving it to [[w:Marilyn Monroe|Marilyn]] at the same time. Her back is arched to get as much of me as she can and as she hits a peak, belts out, “Gee Rod, it’s like fireworks on the Fourth of July.” This is how it goes in my mind. Except this is no dream. I’m in a church. No. It’s not a church anymore. It’s been converted into a theater: [[w:The Actors Studio|The Actors Studio]]. And I have just finished performing in a scene from Norman {{NM}}’s play ''Strawhead'' about Marilyn Monroe.''<br />
<br />
''There is a pause before the next scene begins, as if everyone, audience included, has to take a breather after what just unraveled before them. And into this gap rises a husky matron who, with a piercing voice, suddenly launches into a loud harangue: “You don’t know she did that. How dare you? What right have you to take such liberties? I was her first roommate in Hollywood. I was her best friend. You should be ashamed of yourself.”''<br />
<br />
''It is [[w:Shelley Winters|Shelley Winters]]. She seems ready to ream Norman at full blast for quite a while, but before she can completely bring the performance to an untimely halt, an older, bull-necked man with a pronounced nose in a long, deeply lined face, also stands up, turns to her full face, and says “Shelley. Shut up. Sit down.”''<br />
<br />
''And, instantly, she does. It is [[w:Elia Kazan|Elia Kazan]], the moderator of the Playwrights and Directors Unit. So we continued that afternoon and finished the fragment of the play we had prepared. But the next time we presented it, at just about the same moment, another heckler stood up and started a harangue repeating Shelley’s rant almost verbatim and the play again broke down.''<br />
<br />
''Except this time it was Norman who had written it—he had planted her in the audience and was now investigating that uneasy but fascinating theatrical territory of where make-believe ends and reality begins. Talk about turning a disaster into a victory. Whew.''</blockquote><br />
<br />
{{dc|dc=I|’m superstitious, I admit it.}} Or I’m at least given to paying attention to signs—when I see them. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when about a week before Norman was supposed to show up in L.A. for a book tour, I was traveling around back of the group house I live in with other, mostly thwarted souls obsessed with filmmaking of an independent sort, to pick a lemon off of our tree, when something orange caught my eye nestled among its roots. Lo and behold, it was a copy of Norman’s ''Ancient Evenings'' that in some bizarre way had found a resting place there. A thousand pages of Egyptian arcana, embalming procedures, and cavorting of various Egyptian gods and demons. I confess, I had read some but not all of it, yet out of some weird sense of loyalty, I couldn’t leave it there and picked it up, brushed away the less crusted dirt and dropped it off at my workbench area where it would receive its own embalming at some later date. So there it was. And exactly the next day I got the call from Judith, Norman’s most loyal assistant whom I had gotten to know over the last decade, and who was now inviting me to attend a talk Norman was giving and afterward join him and his party for dinner.<br />
<br />
At that time, there had been quite a splash in the press about his long and illustrious career as a writer spanning fifty years, and his anthology of his work, ''The Time of Our Time'', had been respectfully received, but almost nowhere was there more than a scant line or two mentioning his writing and ''directing'' in theater and film. This was dismaying to me, both because that was, in fact, how I had come to know and work with him, but also because—through my experiences with him as a performer—I knew firsthand that as a writer and, more particularly as a director for the stage ''and'' screen, he was first-rate. Yet for some reason, he never seemed to receive his just due in these endeavors. His theatrical and film projects, though admired by some, were criticized mercilessly and scoffed at by others. Sometimes I wondered if there weren’t some secret cabal that had decided the gods had dropped enough manna on him already in the form of his talent for prose, and to ask for more was offending to them, so he paid accordingly. If some praised his work for the stage and screen, others slaughtered it. But to me, as an actor who was working cheek by jowl with him as a director and interpreting the lines he would give me—I was always flying. When I would hear someone excoriate something we just had finished performing, for example, at the Studio, I would wonder if they had seen the same piece I had been in. To me, the dialogue was always rich, and the scenes were powerful—outrageous maybe, and certainly male in their impulse, but juicy to perform in, they were a hell of a dance, and never, ever, boring. Norman was always pushing the envelope of conventional behavior. He was always ''interesting''.<br />
<br />
Of him as a ''director''—they knew nothing at all. I suppose, in these days when the worth of a director is gauged by how many commercial hits he’s had, Norman didn’t loom large on the landscape of Godzillas, but I think that this may be a reflection of the times we live in, rather than a reflection of his merit as a director. Because if it’s true that being a good director is related to some psychological zone of leadership, as it happened, Norman had it in spades. In his presence there was an amazing aura of commitment—one had the feeling of participating in something of great import, ground-breaking, historic even, and you gave one hundred and ten percent of your stuff as an actor. I can’t speak for others of course, but I never heard too much of the common griping or bitching during our stage-run of ''Strawhead'' at the Actors Studio, or during the shoot of ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance''. Norman often used the metaphor of a general marshalling his troops to describe the work of the director, but I always thought he was more benevolent and inspirational than any military man I had ever heard of. Rather, he seemed to have something more like the inspirational power of a preacher or rabbi, maybe. <br />
<br />
I think it would be a great disservice to his work to have this sound like just some sort of epistle of adoration, so I’d like to go back to the beginning of our work together, our first encounter, and then chronicle some episodes from the projects we did together that might be illuminating. Apparently I’ve been privy to some moments that not too many others have, and if I can re-create some of them, maybe I can give my opinions some basis. There’s nothing better to stir up the creative juices than a damp, cloud-hooded day in the Apple. The fruity colors of the garbage spilling out of the cans stand out a little stronger against the gray cement in an especially attractive funk, the smells are mostly just wetness—the gods are about to make their move in the arena above—one’s nerve-endings start trilling with expectation, and it makes me, for one, feel alive and especially capable. And I needed an extra dose of spunk, because on a day like that, I would cross paths with Norman Mailer.<br />
<br />
The floors of the Actors Studio were being shellacked, and so the theater was unavailable, but rather than canceling the session it was relocated. Nobody seemed to know exactly where, as if it were a secret place, so the entire entourage of maybe three dozen wandered up Tenth Avenue from Forty Fourth Street, as if guided by an invisible hand. Maybe they were afraid that if people knew, they wouldn’t show. Anyway, on we went, and it was still Hell’s Kitchen then (not “Heaven’s Gate,” which is what I call it now) and the slums and dark alleys we passed were good enough for me—they fed me, “preparing,” as I was, to play a young Scottish gang leader in Dundee, who was trying to get out of the endless rounds of “bovvers” (gang brawls where kicking was the main jab) and go straight. As I stalked up the avenue, I found myself hunching over, like a boxer, protective of my psyche, not very chatty, irritated by everything—from the steady honking and screaming sirens approaching and then fading, to the kid who somehow managed to trip right in front of my feet (I admit I was tempted). But these fumes wafting around my brain gave rise to the unmistakable feeling that a claw was slowly tightening around my skull—and the deeper it gouged, the more I wanted to bust out—perfect for the part I was about to play. In short, Stephan, the actor, was having a good day. We ended up on the eighth floor of what was nothing less than an empty warehouse building. Yes indeed, no lie. A few scoop lights at one end over what was apparently the playing area, and a few dozen folding chairs facing it, made up what would be our theater for this event.<br />
<br />
To say that this dusty industrial space had the surreal quality of a Fellini movie would not be an exaggeration. Not just because of the barrenness amidst the scattered pools of light, but because sitting in those few wooden chairs was a roster which included the likes of: Arthur Penn, Joseph Mankewicz, Ellen Burstyn, Elia Kazan, Joseph Heller, Pete Masterson, A. R. Gurney, Harold Brodkey, Jonathan Reynolds, and Norman Mailer.<br />
<br />
Though I had worked hard on my character, I didn’t expect to find that playing a character with an accent, or this particular accent was, in some mysterious way, terrifically liberating. Perhaps the distance it created from my own personal reality gave me a mask, behind which I could leave my particular self behind, and be free. Though not a Scot by blood, I felt as if some atavistic tribal chord of Scotland was throbbing inside of me—unless it was the terror I felt in front of such an audience of heavyweights—that put an extra zing into my performance. Suffice it to say, if there ''had'' been any scenery to chew I would have had a feast. A spirit of heroic proportions flew into my chest like a madman on wings and lodged there with steel talons. I couldn’t have shaken it even if I had wanted to—it was bigger than I was. And when it was over, with people milling around the way they do after a main-event bout, I knew in my bones, that it was one of those times in my life where it had, indeed, been my night. Now it was fortunate that I felt this because I happened to catch sight of a large flock of white hair next to me. It was Norman inviting another cast member to play Arthur Miller in a play of his about Marilyn. Since that actor, though capable enough, was a soap opera actor, an occupation held in rather low esteem by some young stage actors, I naturally felt that I might also be worthy of such an invitation. The adrenalin pumping through me that night, had given me a little more bravado than I might otherwise have had.<br />
<br />
So I planted myself in Norman’s path and, be damned, sure enough he turned and as if it was all in the plan, said “And you. There’s a role for you. Not the lead, but a role I think ''you'' might find interesting. He’s a stuntman, and one thing he does is take Marilyn for a ride.” You’ve already heard what that scene was like, and that was just the beginning, but what’s really significant here is that he offered me a role in his play only because of the merit he saw in the work—he didn’t know me from Adam. A gesture of that kind of fairness is almost unheard of in the Byzantine casting channels of theater and film. To give a young actor a break, without asking for credentials, or who he knew, or was connected to, with the only consideration being the ''work itself'', seems like it is almost looked upon as heretical by the powers that be. So that was my first sense of Norman, that he was a stand-up guy—a ''fair man''. Rare indeed.<br />
<br />
One of the most satisfying things for an actor is to have a director who receives and fully absorbs what the actor is doing in his performance. The director is the actor’s objective eye and his mirror reflection. At the same time, a gifted director is one who creates a safe space, say, a sandbox of the mind, where the actor can cavort, search, get naked—psychologically or otherwise—and yes, fall on his ass, if it comes to that, without fear of retribution. In short, where he can be free to take risks and, if his instincts are ripe, land on his feet. Norman didn’t miss a trick and, it was understood, if the actor felt the urge to try something that might embellish a scene, he could, and if it worked Norman was likely to keep it in. Not to be misconstrued as license to rewrite the author’s lines, no, this was more in the vein of breathing life into the lines by extending their physical life. The first time this happened for me was a rather small moment, but one that opened up a door that ushered in an abundance of future opportunity. My character, Rod, had picked up Marilyn in a bar where one of her first lines was a challenge. “Gee, Rod, why are all those boys staring at you?” The line called for a simple answer of “I don’t know.” Instead something sparked and, taking my cue from her, I looked off in the direction she had suggested and then sashayed over a few steps to where this imaginary bevy of queenly young men might be, and with a gesture of defiance, a Sicilian “fungoo,” grabbed my crotch at them, so to speak. The gesture spoke volumes, and opened up the scene—the audience guffawed as if they could see this imaginary little group. This happened during a performance and none of it had been planned. Now it should be noted that, in addition to Norman’s openness, this was, after all, The Actors Studio and there, when you were ''on'', you went all the way with what you were doing—if an impulse hit you, you were free to dive after it. I didn’t know from what cesspool of the subconscious this impulse sprang from, but it felt right and Norman loved it. Afterwards he told me to keep it in—it was right for the character. To me this was the real thing, theater on the edge: genuine collaboration between author and actor.<br />
<br />
Recently I read about a young, raging, female playwright that had lit up the London stage with a play that included a character getting anally assaulted with a broomstick, another character shooting junk through his eyeball. She was touted as terrifically brave, and her writing groundbreaking. What’s peculiar to me about this is that when Norman put things up, at least as dark as this, fully a decade before in our production of ''Strawhead: A Portrait of Marilyn'', the audiences almost yawned, barely raising an eyebrow, defiantly unimpressed. And nothing he wrote was ever gratuitous—it never felt as if anything we did was exploitive or pornographic. He simply had a curiosity for those who walked on the wild side, and was committed to pushing out to the edges of what was considered acceptable behavior on stage. Which leads me to a scene that takes place between Marilyn and Rod, right after their motorcycle ride. Norman was not yet through running with the demons of the night. After she and I dismounted, I was supposed to pull her down to her knees by the hair; apparently, how I did this was a little too gentle for Norman’s taste. He wanted something, frankly, more brutal.<br />
<br />
He: “Well, look. This is not Stephan, Boy Scout. This is Rod, Stuntman and stud ''extraordinaire''. Can I show you?” Feeling a little foolish, I nodded. Grabbing a fistful of air he brought his arm down twisting it with a vicious grunt. Did I mention that the actress playing Marilyn was his daughter? Well, so she was, but before we go off speculating about various and delicious Oedipal delights, suffice it to say, after I was given the license I needed— indeed, a father’s permission—WHAM, down she went.<br />
<br />
The scene didn’t stop there. In the next instant, I found myself within a zipper-jerk away from being the first actor in the history of The Actors Studio to be fellated during a performance. At that moment, Marilyn flings off her platinum wig and the ''actress'', Kate, refuses to go on with this “tabloid bullshit.” Of course, the whole thing was a set-up, and this is, in fact, the moment when the play stops mid-stream, with the heckler, previously mentioned, standing up and haranguing the playwright.<br />
<br />
One night, shortly before a performance, Norman approached me in some consternation. “Look, about that cassette with the Doberman sounds. It turned out badly. I don’t want to use it, unless I have to. I want to try and keep it more in the vein of live theater.” He peered at me closely, his sharp blue eyes driving in on me. “I have this idea. What about if you tried it? Could you do something? ”My mouth opened and closed as I caught myself from saying “Like what?” I was blank—it took a long moment for what he was suggesting to sink in. Then, “Sure. Where uhh ... do you want me to do it?” I was trying to be a sport about the thing, but I could only imagine myself out there in the center of the stage, maybe even off a little to one side, writhing and growling, for all I was worth, like some rabid psychotic, less like Rod and more like Renfield’s soul brother. A whole performance going down the toilet in one unfortunate flush. I must have been transparent in my despair. So he said, “Well, I mean for you to do it in the wings upstage. You go offstage and make the sounds from there.”<br />
<br />
Small comfort. This was the story. To wit: Rod, who was determined to get back a diamond necklace from his ex-girlfriend would have to retrieve it from the neck of her Doberman, and thereby kill it in the process. So I was going to be making the sounds of Rod grunting in his efforts, simultaneously with those of the dog snarling with rage, then whining in pain and finally gurgling in his death throes. Never mind that I had never taken a sound effects lesson in my life, as if there were such a thing. Or that I could only vaguely conceive of what a Doberman might sound like in such circumstances, alive or dead. Well, sometimes you can’t plan and you have to just jump and pray. And sometimes, just because of this, when there’s nothing preconceived, instinct takes over—there’s no thought involved—and though there may be very little recollection of what exactly happens, something extraordinary may occur. Maybe Norman didn’t realize how much of the dog I had in me—or maybe he did and knew better than I. But I doubt that he was expecting the ''symphony''; nay, hurricane might be more accurate, of sounds that issued forth from that little corner in the wings. I have only a hazy recollection, like some werewolf, of that first time we did the scene. I am convinced, though, that if there had been any fur it would have been flying. The audience must have thought so because, as I recall, there was a spontaneous ovation for it.<br />
<br />
They say that the hardest thing in art is to know when to stop. Sure enough, small moment of triumph that I had snatched, perhaps from the dark jaws of disaster. Still, the way the Doberman scene opened, left me unsatisfied. Why would any dog, especially a trained attack animal, just wait to be slaughtered? Didn’t make sense. Clearly something was missing for the scene to have some street credibility. Then I got ''the idea''. And yet, because it was a fragile one, or perhaps because I didn’t have the strength of my convictions, I found myself eagerly waiting for the night I had found out there was a good chance Norman would arrive very late or not at all. I would try it. It would either work or it wouldn’t, and if it didn’t nobody would be the wiser except me, and maybe the more astute souls in the audience. I had a strong feeling that this idea was valid, yet I wouldn’t know for sure until it was up in front of an audience. And if I brought it up casually to Norman, and I happened to chance it at the wrong moment, say, in the dressing room when he might be having an irritating moment with another actor or, worse yet, with his lovely though provocative wife, Norris (who was also in the cast). Or if I just presented it clumsily, it might easily get shot down, and we would never know if it could have worked or not, which, in my heart of hearts, I believed would have been very unfortunate. So that night, as I slithered across the stage, giving a low whistle for the dog, Bowie knife slipping quietly up out of my engineer boot—I slowly drew out the large, soft, bloody steak Rod had especially brought for the occasion. The mushy, red flesh swaying back and forth from my black-gloved hand, spread something nauseating into the air as if bloody vapors were slowly drifting out into the house. It wasn’t so much that you could hear a pin drop—you couldn’t, because there was a storm of little gasps rolling around out there. Maybe because it was not imaginary, but a small dose of something real, palpable, in this minimalist production—it stood out and it resonated, that pulpy piece of meat, so that I knew in my bones I had made a small but stunning contribution to the piece. I was thrilled, to say the least, and then I did a double take. There was a flock of familiar-looking white hair in the last row. Impossible. Norman was presiding at the PEN meeting at the UN and not here tonight, or at least not until much later. After the show, sure enough, there was Norman in a formal three-piece, pin-striped blue suit looking for all the world like a banker. He caught my eye and, solemn-faced, stormed straight up to me. As he approached I heard a strange hymn-like phrase thunder past me. “Here comes the Judge. Halleluhah.” Ho. Ho. Joke’s on me. When he reached my elbow he immediately broached the subject of the steak. “What kind of meat was that?” (I was a vegetarian at the time, and wouldn’t have known a sirloin from a shoe sole.) I shrugged. “Steak?” Then he moved in on me. “Do you know what Dobermans love to eat?” he demanded. I saw a large black hole opening at my feet into which my cherished spirit of collaboration was diving headfirst. Busted. I hadn’t even done my homework. Who knew what Doberman’s ate? Meat. Red. What other mysterious substance could they possibly crave? Who knew? Maybe someone, but not me. Suddenly his face lit up with a look as if he had suddenly remembered something. A smile creased his mouth and, as his eyes started to twinkle ferociously, he was whisked away by an old crony, arm around his shoulder, who more direly needed his attention. So he had been yanking my chain. I had paid the price for my boldness. Later he gave his formal approval and for the rest of the run he even paid for the steak.<br />
<br />
The run was not without some moments of tension and ruffled feathers. We had a few interns helping us out backstage and one of them got into a dispute with the young stalwart running the lights. It seems that the lighting kid had a pretty full plate up in the booth and had asked the intern to help him out and sweep the stage. The intern, not too diplomatically, had answered the request with “I’m not here to be a friggin’ janitor.” Things had escalated and gotten out of hand with the two young bucks squaring off and in the end the intern had stalked off. The Actors Studio tends to be somewhat on the egalitarian side, so if anyone had been just pulling rank, that would have been given short shrift, but it was not hard to see that there was a lot to be done up in the booth. Moreover, as it happened, the lighting booth techie had been somewhat generous in his praise about what I was managing to pull off in the play and, since it’s true that generosity is not especially abundant in the theater, he was in a position to see every night’s efforts and his comments were especially valued. But more than the flattery, I really appreciated the warmth of spirit he brought to the production. He was one of those buoyant personalities that can bring some levity to an otherwise grim moment. To further complicate things, it turns out I had also developed an acquaintance with the intern and, prideful though he might be, he was a good sort in the end. And since there are never enough volunteers for a show, even at the Actors Studio, I thought it would be worthwhile to approach him and said so to Norman. “Lemme talk to him, I think I can get him back.” Norman answered “No. We don’t want him if he’s not interested.” I persisted. “Look, we had a small crew before, now we have almost no one backstage. I’m telling you. I know him a little. I think I can bring him back.” Norman repeated himself even more sharply the second time. “It’s only good if he’s interested.”<br />
<br />
Well, his drift was clear. He wasn’t about to beg anyone for help and no cajoling would be acceptable. If a person didn’t have his own inner drive and desire to participate in something, than in Norman’s opinion it was better not having them around. For no particular reason, that dictum branded itself on my brain. I guess I liked its brass. ''Only if he’s interested'' became one of those mantras that surfaced in my mind whenever similar situations cropped up later in my life. A little addendum: The intern did walk, and I didn’t say much to him about his decision, even though I thought it was a foolish one. Although most of the time I can see no rhyme or reason why one person gets a career and another does not, years later I bumped into the intern in L.A. He was trying to pull down commercials and exercising his comedic talents as a driver for the Star-Graveyard Tours. It might also be noted that up in the booth had been the young Ben Stiller.<br />
<br />
If ''Strawhead'' is beginning to sound like the story of Marilyn and Rod, I have misrepresented it. Since most of my experience of the play was through my character, it may only be natural that my point of view is rather one-sided, and that may be one of the shortcomings of an actor writing about a production he is in. In fact, a major portion of the play focused on her relationship with Milton Greene the photographer, and his wife, and the haven they created for her. For a brief spate, Rip Torn, one of the brighter, if wilder lights of the American Stage stepped in to play him. I must admit that as a young actor I felt some awe at playing in the same production with this legend of the theater who was trailed by a long line of apocrypha about his work, inspired as it was, perhaps to the point of craziness. He carried a mantle of reputation for doing anything to be real. ''Being'' the character was brought to new heights. Brawls with actors in the middle of a performance on stage if he thought they were inauthentic. Brawls with directors off stage right after. Even he and Norman had a famous story between them, when at the end of ''Maidstone'', the experimental film Norman had made, things got carried away, or did they?<br />
<br />
That was the point, what was real and what was manufactured? You could never be sure and that was the preferred state. So in the last scene, perhaps out of a frustration that had been building between the two erstwhile friends, or out of some truth of the moment, Rip had whacked Norman with a hammer and Norman, in turn, had bitten him on the ear. All this by way of introduction to describing an amazing scene I had the uneasy privilege of witnessing that occurred between them one day in rehearsal. I had arrived early and was watching the end of a scene that Rip had been working in. He was wandering around far upstage in a dark corner, doing what you would have to call private work, in the sense that he was mostly repeating the lines to himself and occasionally including the other actor in his investigations. Well, it was clear that he wasn’t obligating himself to the text and was free of it, presumably until he was ready and understood it in a felt way. It’s a way of working—what the hell. It is certainly true that because you had no idea what he might do at any given moment, he drew your eye to his haunted being, like a magnet. How this served the playwright might not be altogether clear and, since the session had been going on for some time, there might have been a worm of tension beginning to turn between the two old chums, actor and writer. When the end of the scene was finally reached, Rip ended up about fifteen feet upstage facing Norman, who was standing by the first row of seats. Rip asked, “Can I split for the next half hour? I want to get some lunch.” Legit enough, nobody is served by a hungry actor. I’m sure that if Norman had heard him he would have agreed. Unfortunately, all he did hear was, “Do you need me?” Proud man that we know he is, he answered gruffly, “Need you? No, I don’t need you.” And what Rip heard was “No,” which ''he'' couldn’t figure and lightning-quick also got huffy. “Well, I need some food. I’m leaving,” he flipped over his shoulder and, adding from the doorway, that he’d be back in thirty minutes. Norman missed that last bit altogether. I need to reveal something here: Norman had a cauliflower ear on his right side (maybe from his boxing efforts) that was permanently useless. And Rip’s right ear also happened to be bad, and the way they were facing each other, on a rough diagonal, both malfunctioning organs were the ones doing the receiving or lack thereof. I actually saw this—the two of them mis-hearing half and inventing what was left, until they ended up with completely opposite versions of the same conversation. The hilarity of it must have cowed me, because I wasn’t able to reach out and stop it from happening. Frozen, like in a dream, I could only watch it unravel in front of me. And in this dream two brontosauri were engaging in a rather intimate family squabble and were farting at each other. That’s how surreal it was. Anyway, Rip stormed out wondering what stick Norman had been impaled on and Norman, in some shock, turned to a cohort and said, “That son of a bitch. I’ve known him thirty years and he walked out on me.” Rip never came back.<br />
<br />
So we had our comic moments and sometimes they were actually part of the play. After all, Norman had nothing if not an incisive sense of irony and the humor that sprang from that. There was a memory scene when I came on as Joe DiMaggio swinging an imaginary bat. Marilyn was going through a phase of “joy through embracing nature” and said something like “I want to run through the flowers, feel the wind on my face, and be free.” To which I replied in Joe’s inimitable Bronx Bomber fashion: “Fine. We got a backyard. Invite some friends over. We’ll have a barbecue.”<br />
<br />
''Strawhead'', though rumored to be headed for full production, Off Broadway, never made it, and faded into that large black hole of oblivion that so much Off Off Broadway sadly descends into. About a year later, out of the blue, I got a call from Judith, Norman’s journeyman assistant, asking me to hold while he came on the line. “I’m directing the film of my book ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance''.” I congratulated him. He continued, “There’s the thinnest crack of a possibility” (another one of those lines that would never leave me) “that one of the roles is available. A star we had may be dropping out. Do you have time to come in and audition?” I heard myself say in my best British, “Not bloody likely—unless I fail to win the lottery, thereupon which I probably will have some time.” Thank God it got a chuckle. Who knows where my impulse to amuse came from, unless it was from my desire to rebel against the obvious. Fact was, it was a plum of a project and every actor in New York had heard about it and was campaigning to get a berth on board. When I mentioned this to one of my more arrogant friends he thought “he should just give you the goddam role if you’re right for it.” Hadn’t the two incarnations of his play run, all together, over a period of several months and, if he didn’t know my work by then, when would he? But nobody gives an Olympic medal away and to an unknown theater actor and this was just that. So I had to work hard at it.<br />
<br />
The third and final audition was to be an improvised, videotaped session, opposite another actor who was probably competing for the same role, though we were never absolutely sure of this. Up to now things had been going pretty well for me in the two meetings we had had and, as they say, it was so close I could taste it. In any case, that last day had a few surprises that I could have done without. The appointment was late in the afternoon, and I had to plan everything very carefully: I would get out of the survival job I had recently latched onto early enough to saunter across midtown and get my head together and end up at the Actors Studio, where, lo and behold, the audition was to be held. The character I would be playing was not too distant from the one in ''Strawhead'', except this time a line had been crossed—murder was involved. I had packed my version of leathers to change into. I felt cool, tough, and scary—ready for anything. That’s when things flipped. My buddy, George Tsaganis, who ran the coffee shop next door to the topless bar where I had the afternoon shift, got held up. Every morning at 10 a.m. when I got there, George cheerfully greeted me with some filthy Greek about my night before with the unfortunate wench he was sure I had misused, and handed me a generously buttered roll and two coffees. Anyway, they had taken him into the back of the store and made him lie on his stomach, face down. Not an envious position. But ''zoi’'' (the Greek for ‘life’) was with him. There was no blood, just some very large pistols and a lot of trauma for George. So I sat with him while he wept into my shoulder and shook and when he had calmed down and cleaned himself and his pants up a little bit, I was about fifteen minutes into my appointment. I would had to have been a cold fish, indeed, to have left him earlier. But by then no bus, train, even cab, would get me through midtown early rush hour traffic, quick enough to salvage my audition.<br />
<br />
My Brazilian barback assistant came through with a solution: his bicycle. Off I roared, literally, at anything in my way. There is nothing like a good dose of street rage to create the sociopathic state of mind. The entire universe despises you, is conspiring against you. For no discernible reason. And so retaliation is called for. Growling, spitting, yelling like a demon bike-messenger while sporting black, greasy motorcycle leathers, slicing through traffic of trucks, blessed jay-walking office workers, and obviously satanic pushcart-workers. By the time I slammed through the sacred portals of the Actors Studio, I was spitting nails. I was ready to do anything, criminal or otherwise and with great exuberance. I didn’t know it, but this was a prescient moment for my future association with Lawrence Tierney, toughest of the tough guys. We would meet, through this very film, and I would understand him and the rage he held toward the world, at war with it as he was. No problem. As I plowed through the final scene, the events of the day had caused me to settle into myself and drop down a couple of notches, into a state of, say, grim determination.<br />
<br />
Apparently I was convincing, because I got the job. After the formal session had ended, Norman and I stood around and swapped corpse stories. I had gone up into Cambodia from Bangkok, as part of a two year global pilgrimage I made after school, and had come across some grisly stuff during one of Pol Pot’s offensives—dead people stacked like cordwood. Norman matched me. During WWII he had seen a Filipino man carrying three Japanese heads on a pole, like they were lanterns, who was trying to sell them to the G.I.s as souvenirs. ''Look what I brought you, ma.'' Later, it turned out that Stoodie, the character I was to play, had some truck with decapitated bodies, so it wasn’t just idle chatter. So far as the other actor I had been up against in the “improv,” I was like a buzz saw—he was his own lackadaisical self. In Actors Studio parlance, he was not forcing anything that wasn’t there—he was just ''existing'' on stage. But apparently what Norman wanted was something a little more heightened. There was nothing ordinary about the denizens that peopled Norman’s world. They were hot and ready to pop.<br />
<br />
On the film shoot you were pretty much on your own. None of the ensemble feeling I was used to in the Off Off Broadway arena where most people were driven by a passion for the material. The first night I arrived in Provincetown I was brought to a dinner where an actress that I had known in New York, and who had also been hired for the film, actually said “Welcome aboard,” as if I had just gained membership to an exclusive club. A celebration was going on as if the project had just ended and everybody was euphoric with the contribution they had made. Except that this was the first night. What was understood was that this was a step on the ladder to a large career, thus a cause for celebration. So be it. This was the big leagues, maverick production or not. A bridge had been crossed and Art was on one side of it and careerism was on the other. As my cohort in the film added at dinner, “Well, at least we’ll all work for the rest of our lives.” That was the thing. So much for art when lucre was dangled in front of someone. That it didn’t quite work out that way in the end was something everyone who worked on that film would have been surprised by. But more of that later.<br />
<br />
There is a moment that has it’s own niche in the pantheon of rich moments that I hold from that time. It happened over a scene, that on the face of it was an unexceptional scene of exposition. Ryan O’Neal corners me and demands to know if I had put a tattoo on his arm the night before. It’s all a black void to him. I answered by imitating Ryan in his shitfaced state, crying that he wanted to put “Madeleine,” his wife’s name on his arm. As I did this I got an impulse to point to my cheek, instead of my arm. Plausible enough, he was that drunk and confused. Norman stopped me and said “That’s good. Wait a minute.” He looked down at his feet, pondering. Then. “But do this. Point to your forehead and say ‘Madeleine. I wronged you. I’m gonna put your name on my forehead.’ I could have fucked you good. I put it on your arm.’ ” Think of it. A tattoo emblazoned forever across the forehead. Incredible. Norman was nothing if not good on his feet. And it happened not seconds before we were supposed to shoot it. And the script girl was madly scribbling this new dialogue down, so that I would have to not only instantly make it my own, but do it verbatim. Let it be said that there is tremendous pressure on the actor on a film set to not blow his lines. No matter that they were just handed to him, golden though they may be. No. That was the actor’s burden. Moreover, those of us who were not celebrities had been touted as ''real'' New York actors, as opposed to those West Coast denizens who were more cosmetically inclined and traded on the impact of their appearance. Norman’s conceit in the casting process was to use stage-trained actors who would presumably breathe a vital force into his lines and create the full, rich, offbeat characters his material demanded. So I suddenly found myself in the middle of a pressure-cooker of a moment. Fifteen people stuffed into every nook and cranny of a room the size of a large bathroom, electric cables running over my feet, microphones inching up my thighs, reflectors bouncing galaxies of light, and all of this hanging on the words that would tumble from my lips, hopefully with some stuff. The Provincetown witches cracked a wicked grin and then let everything spill out smoothly. It’s a honey of a scene. And I suppose the greatest flattery is that Norman’s young son, John Buffalo, was apparently so buzzed by that scene that he would do an impression of Stoodie saying those lines at the drop of a hat.<br />
<br />
Maybe it was the witches’ blessing that did it, but I shouldn’t have been surprised when ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' became a cult favorite rather than a mainstream hit. I couldn’t have agreed more. For those hardy souls who could handle its blood-darkness, Norman had written some of the best drug-rap, gutter-lingo dialogue, and created a fabric of delirious white-trash, Bohemian, Provincetown culture of supreme richness and exuberance. The axe I have to grind I hold up high, dripping with praise for his work and with no embarrassment.<br />
<br />
At the premiere Norman stood up in front of the movie house and held a long sheet in front of him. It had the positive reviews on one side and the negative ones on the other. They had been divvied up like a balance sheet and he read them off that way. For every euphoric statement of wild praise there was its blood sister shrieking the most excoriating venom and scorn one could imagine. This is no exaggeration. It seemed like something in Norman’s makeup, by that time in history at any rate, really provoked adoration and loathing in equal parts. It was almost like the mad preacher Robert Mitchum played in ''The Night of the Hunter'', with tattooed hands of love and hate. Each time Norman held up one hand in victory, the other was ready to counter it with defeat. But I will say this much: Recently at a twenty year reunion of the cast and crew of the film, one of the production people said something that really stuck out in my mind: “It’s been a long time since we did this film, and in that time I’ve worked on a lot of productions, but for none of them would it have ever even ''occurred'' to anyone to have a reunion.” So I keep thinking about why it seemed like such a historic mission that we were participating in, that this particular project had some special kind of significance. It didn’t try to answer all the questions in the universe. No, it was a genre film after all—although one where all the big issues were always lurking around the edges: mortality; murder and mayhem and retribution for it; greed; obsessive love; the corruption of social climbing; even demon spirits. So why does it haunt me and other kindred spirits, in spite of its flaws? I can only think that part of it is if you knew Norman’s writing on the page and the power he has, it would have been as is if Abe Lincoln had asked you to aid him on The Gettysburg Address. That may be a little far flung, but the fact is that there are very few writers walking the earth who have the power he has on the page and who take on the issues that he does. And I’ve noticed that all too often many of his detractors eventually admit that they have never actually ''read'' much of his writing. Well, ''I had'' read a few of his books, certainly ''The Naked and the Dead'', ''The Armies of the Night'', ''Barbary Shore'', ''Prisoner of Sex''. Even, oddly enough, ''Of a Fire on the Moon''—when it surfaced on a beach in a fishing village in Malaysia where I was recovering from a near fatal bout of the Hong Kong flu. (I can even remember being propagandized enough in my socialist-inspired youth to reject the moon endeavor as taking away funds from poverty programs—until I read his thoughts on the subject and changed my mind about the whole thing, mostly because the writing was so gorgeous.) And so knowing what his writing was like, I have to ask myself: would I have felt the same, for example, if Philip Roth, or Joseph Heller, or even William Styron, would have invited me to work with one of them on something? Probably not. No, ''emphatically'', not. Terrific writers though they are, I don’t think so, not on the level of anticipation and excitement that I and the others experienced working on Norman’s project.<br />
<br />
The question that begs to be asked then is why was half of the list of reviews he held up so excoriating? Why the absolute scorn from some quarters? Norman has said that political correctness is akin to telling people how to think and, whether it’s in the guise of progressive politics or not, it’s the great enemy. All we can do is persuade. Anything more is ushering in the dictates of the Thought Police. He is someone who has always clearly been on the side of those who plumb the depths for the truth—wherever it may lie. Apparently he’s paid the price—and what a cruel irony. To me he is like those heroic figures who are embraced during the revolution but, once the revolution is won, are eliminated as liabilities to the new regime. Certainly in the role of Media Gadfly that he has always embraced, he fits the bill perfectly to draw heat. But I think that Norman as a ''writer'' must be given his just due as having hit the nail on the head, inside the head, and around every angle of the head on all the large issues more than any writer alive. If there was a fire on the moon, he’s got fire on the page and attention must be paid.<br />
<br />
Again, it’s not that ''Tough Guys'' isn’t flawed. For one thing, I’ve seen it recently three times at the retrospective of his film work and keep discovering more parts of the puzzle that fit together each time. But there’s a famous story about Harry Cohn, head of Columbia, screening Orson Welles’s ''The Lady from Shanghai'' and, turning to the room when it was over, laid a thousand dollars on the barrel to anyone who could explain the film to him. No one took him up on the bet. So, if ''Tough Guys'' is dense, Norman’s in good company. And Welles didn’t have the dialogue that Norman could pump out. That’s where I think its strength lies and upon which its longevity will depend. Norman has created the kind of artifact that lasts for two hundred years and glows (darkly) with a vitality that lasts forever. And to even ''try'' to do that in these days of car crashes and slasherfests is why we felt so privileged to participate in it.<br />
<br />
I’m also often amazed at how much of the wit of ''Tough Guys'' is missed. It may give new meaning to gallows humor, but it’s there nevertheless in spades. The audiences I recently saw it with were overwhelmingly attentive but definitely somber. I tended to cackle constantly at the humor of irony that’s constantly pumping through it. Sometimes I was even joined by some of the hardier souls in the house. But that didn’t happen too often and I think that’s because there are no easy laugh lines or cues and it takes a certain bravery to let go and laugh at the absurdity of something —they’re not quite sure about it as if a guffaw at an irony might take something away from its truth. It challenges the baseline of your perceptions of things—your heft of what’s true in life and what’s not. Are you an a-hole or do you really know what’s what? But there are some hysterically funny lines in it. And more than the one that states that you should never call an Italian small potatoes—it could be bad for your health. That’s just the best one, the capper. But there are many, even in the middle of the horror. Another gem that I can’t quote exactly but whose gist goes something like this: The police chief, Regency, has appropriated (stolen) two million dollars and in jubilation says. “If someone gives you one potato—you eat, one hundred you can sell, but ten million you can run a country ... I think I’ll run for president.” Now since it’s a known fact that Joseph Kennedy, father of JFK, was a well-known bootlegger and this line is as profoundly truthful as it is cynical and finally funny. A deranged police chief/narcotics dealer in the White House. Could be prophetic who knows? You might also add, for example, the one about getting your girl’s name tattooed on your forehead. And on and on. Who’s writing things pound for pound, that good? Not too many, folks.<br />
<br />
Having said that, I had been living in L.A. for a couple of months thinking that I would ply my trade there, perhaps snare some lucre, and then hightail it to Japan. This was my secret ambition. I had seen some Kabuki theater in my travels and had an interest in learning more about its history and tradition. One day I received a letter in the mail from Norman, who knew of my move, but I hadn’t been in touch with him for a while. It was the most extraordinary document:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>To whom it may concern: <br />
<br />
This recommendation for Stephan Morrow’s work is unsolicited by him. I have worked with Stephan as his director on two projects: ''Strawhead'' which we performed at Actors Studio in workshop for eleven performances, where he played the parts of Joe DiMaggio and a biker; and again in my movie ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'', where he did a superlative job in the role of Stoodie. In both projects he did an exceptionally fine job. He’s not only a strong actor with fine talents, but he’s stand-up and always gives 100% of himself to the project and the people he works with. He’s responsive and active in relation to a director, and I intend to use Stephan Morrow whenever I see a role for him in anything I’m directing in the future. <br />
<br />
Sincerely,<br />Norman Mailer</blockquote><br />
<br />
To say that I was impressed by his thoughtfulness is insufficient for a gesture of such generosity, not to mention the mood of hope it put me in. Not every actor can brandish a letter of recommendation from perhaps our greatest living writer. Witness the following scene: I’m in a meeting with a casting person for some project or other, or maybe it was a super-agent, my memory fades. Upon reading the letter, this young woman whose instinct makes her eager to please, says something like: “Oh, Ryan O’Neal—I ''love'' him ...” (Pause. Noncommittal. It was not a blockbuster.) “I heard about that show,” she continued. “And Norman ''Mailer''. Oh yeah, we read him in high school.” (Her inflection might describe the oldest pair of shoes in her closet.) Then, with much enthusiasm. “I loved that famous play of his: ''Death of a Streetcar''. It made me cry.” Me too. So much for letters of recommendation from literary giants in the film capital.<br />
<br />
One other point that is salient, and one that I learned the hard way, is the sheer number of hurdles that have to be cleared for an actor to make an impact in a film. And how this is different from theater. The first hurdle that I’ve gone into is, of course, pulling down the gig. And it’s a lot more than just walking through the front door and “being the character.” At the time, and I’ve not much reason to think that it’s much different today, there was such a dearth of good roles in film for an unknown actor in New York that you’d have better odds betting on a Tibetan monk winning the Olympic pole vault championship on his first try than pulling down a choice role in a movie project. And that’s pretty much what it felt like for the first week, walking around about a foot off the ground in my best lama style. But this is only the first hurdle. Once getting the job is over the next is doing it as well as you can, without getting fired in the pursuit of that excellence. To wit: In Provincetown, one early evening after the day’s shooting was over, I’m telephoned by an assistant director. Norman would like to chat with me later that evening about 11 p.m. Nothing unusual in that and I’m not too nervous waiting around in my oak-paneled Cape Cod bungalow residence. First thing Norman says that night is, “I think I fixed it all. I don’t want you to worry. You won’t be fired.” To say that I was stunned is not enough. I saw stars without being slugged. My solar system was collapsing, simple as that. And then the rattlesnakes of my paranoia struck. Jeez, could I have done that badly that I was on such thin ice? Maybe I did blow that scene about the tattoo on Ryan O’Neal’s forehead. Norman continues: “I explained that in the theater everyone does everything from acting to costuming to set design. So that you’re used to having input into things like Stoodie’s shack.” The sickening feeling that comes from a dread truth slowly rising like a Nazi periscope in British shipping lanes rises in me. I had met someone outfitting the shack where my character, Stoodie, lived. Indeed, as I was brandishing my knowledge of the insides of my character I had reeled off the groups whose music he relished. Classic rock mostly, and this carpenter (I imagined) and I traded licks as it were, from the classic rock Stoodie listened to and the posters he would put up on the walls of his shack. As far as I can recall, that was it. Harmless enough. An artist’s opinion about an element of his work. Well, apparently it traveled up the pipeline and, little did I know, I was stepping on a designer’s substance-altered toes. Because the posters that he, in his omniscience, had chosen were pretty different. The Partridge Family—yes, that lame—not the Led Zep or Sticky Fingers, Stones, or Janis I had yodeled about and with which he had jocularly agreed. He had allowed how he was himself an old-time rock and roller and knew where I was coming from. Ho Ho. Jokes on me. Anyway, Norman finished the conversation by asking me to pledge not to make any more comments about, or any more requests for, changes in my character’s abode. Well, I certainly agreed. What the hell else could I do? Partridge Family be damned—I would have accepted Lawrence Welk as my spiritual guide by that time. But I did wonder, “Jeez, who was the General here?” That was my first step into the minefield without a map that is the film world and how I learned that in that world there was a social ladder in which the actor was at the bottom rung—unless he was the star—and that just meant that he got his own Winnebago (trailer). Even though I had been handpicked by Norman himself, I was very expendable. This is not to mention the fact that probably what saved me from being shitcanned was that Norman was both writer and director. As the saying goes in the film capital, only the Polish actress slept with the writer to get a job in a movie. Luckily, as it turned out, Norman liked what I did well enough so that all the scenes I was in stayed in the final cut. Truncated to be sure—and he apologized for that— but nevertheless up there on the screen and not on the cutting room floor. Another hurdle cleared, though many actors will tell you how often that is not the case. The supporting characters are the first to go and the rough cut was over three hours long, so no doubt about it: I was lucky.<br />
<br />
The final hurdle of course, involves the fate of the film itself. If it generates revenue you’re golden and doors open. If not, it’s a novelty piece by a controversial and provocative author, or one notch higher—a cult film that has a hard core of devoted fans. Every now and then I encounter someone who indeed is passionately euphoric about Norman’s film.<br />
<br />
For the actors, it hardly gives you another chip to bring to the table for a play at a career. Far from “working for the rest of our lives,” as my cohort in crime had prophesied up in Provincetown, the actors drifted their separate ways pretty much into oblivion. It didn’t destroy anybody, it just didn’t help. At all. Again, it’s all guilt by association, so if you say two lines in a film that’s a hit, you’re in. If not, fugghedabouddit. No buzz.<br />
<br />
This brings me back to distinguishing between acting in front of a camera and on stage. For a performer, when the play begins, everything is in his hands and the theater gods. There’s no medium between him and the audience, just a raw experience where people are either moved or they’re not. An entirely different trip from what happens on a film set. That’s why I call what goes on in front of a camera re-enacting, rather than acting. It takes a certain number of psychological skills to get primed, that’s for sure: there’s no audience, if that’s your fuel, and that’s a magic that’s not particularly easy to find. But sometimes I liken it to a vast costume pageant where people parade around and go through the motions of the civilization they’re representing. Put a rifle in your hand, a soldier’s uniform on you, tell you where to charge and you’re on. “Yes sir, we’ll get it.” Cut. A costume pageant. It is different on stage where the actor has developed a character by making a myriad of choices on his own, let it mulch around in the hopper, and then let fly with no safety net under the frisson of the performance. There’s no second take. Either you channel something extraordinary or you don’t—so either the energy that flows back and forth between audience and actor launches the entire congregation—with its roots in religion, I can call it that—into experiencing the mysteries of the cosmos in a visceral way—or it doesn’t. In any case, it’s either a sublime experience or as deadly as watching paint dry. (There’s nothing worse than a play where nothing is really snap, crackling, and popping on stage. And nothing better when there is.) Norman has a different take on theater versus film, though, from the point of view of the audience. It’s stuck in my mind and goes something like this: “You might find yourself going to a play with a couple of martinis under your belt, but you wouldn’t do that at a film. A couple of joints maybe. That’s because film is closer to dreams and death—and theater is closer to a feast and a fuck.” <br />
<br />
A group of us are sitting having dinner after his talk in L.A. and out of curiosity I had asked if he had ever met Hemingway, so Norman is telling of the time he was set up to meet him. Shortly after ''The Naked and the Dead'' came out, he had written something rather harsh about Hemingway. George Plimpton, who was editing the ''Paris Review'' at the time, had mentioned it to Hem and he had dragged Plimpton to a bookstore where he stood there devouring what Norman had written. When he finished, he looked up and said “I want to meet him.” Next morning Norman got the call. The old man had read the piece and wanted to “meet.” Plimpton said, “Stay by the phone. I’ll call you back when I find out where.” As the hours piled up, Norman started worrying. What if he wanted not so much to meet him as beat him, in retribution? Plimpton called back a little later, “I’ll know where it’s going to be, pretty soon. Don’t leave the phone.” This was sounding less like literary fellowship and more like a showdown with every call. He started to sweat now. In desperation, he called up his buddy Mickey Knox, who could handle himself, and back him up if things got rough. (Mickey was sitting at the table at Norman’s right.) They had a drink to calm down. And waited on into the afternoon. Had a few drinks more. Sunset came and went. They were doing some serious drinking now. Just around the time they were really getting into their cups, they stopped worrying—what the hell. With their high-octane courage, they were absolutely ready to take on Rocky Marciano if it came to that. Maybe they were even hoping. Well, Hemingway never gave them the chance. He stood them up. He never called and Norman never heard from him again. <br />
<br />
As I sat there taking this all in, I thought: Christ, this is even better than the Roundtable at the Algonquin. And not just pretentious litterateurs. In addition to Mickey, there was Ronnie, a black raconteur, who regaled us with a story about hustling in an airport to get out of Rome, and from there it led to the high point of the evening. All in all, it was a great night. I felt as if I had been to the Garden on a night Ali was fighting.<br />
<br />
Norman had described himself as feeling like a member of “The Ancient Regime,” meaning that he was once in the vanguard of the intellectual shock troops of the age that would change the world for the better, and later he found himself out of touch, dated, and defending the old guard, most particularly for its stance on feminism. There was a scene that took place early on in the process of developing ''Strawhead'' that has never left me. Shelley Winters’s complaints about his depiction of Marilyn have already been quoted, but at this session it was Ellen Burstyn, who at that time was Acting Artistic Director of the Actors Studio, who led the attack. I remember her as being very subdued in her tone, but her remarks carried the weight of a velvet sledgehammer. “[N]othing new is revealed here ... why write a play if you have nothing new to say about her... ? We’ve seen so much of this before ... the writing is good but it’s so chauvinistic.” Well, Norman who was usually pretty cool during these discussions, got fierce—his silver hair seemed to have an electric current running around it as he bristled. He slowly stood up, collected himself, and with great poise, said: “If you think that ''this'' is chauvinistic, my God, then this place [the Actors Studio] is going to end up being run by a bunch of Stalinoid dykes.” There was a long, thoughtful, perhaps uneasy pause, as some, if not all of us, were launched into a reverie of what brave new world we might be approaching. Then, incredibly, Shelley Winters again. With a deadpan delivery, she asked: “Norman, what’s the difference between Stalinist and Stalinoid?” It brought the house down. And Norman, with no condescension, answered her almost humbly: “Well, one is of style, and the other is of a period.” The studio audience roared again. End of discussion. Maybe it was the simplicity and honesty of the exchange, I don’t know for sure, but I had always heard about something called a ''perfect moment''—when things fell effortlessly and perfectly into place. For me, that was one of them.<br />
<br />
So finally, if Norman is a dinosaur, then I for one can only hope that as the wheel of life turns, their age may come around again soon. Spirits of such enormity are rare as diamonds.<br />
<br />
If I describe Norman as a brontosaurus, there was another dinosaur that I would come to know who could only be described as the toughest of the tough guys, and who must have had tyrannosaurus in his genes—the legendary Lawrence Tierney. I can’t recall exactly how we hooked up in L.A. a couple of years after the film, but we became, dare I say, best friends for a while, if such a term could be applied to Larry—at war with the world as he was, even at eighty-three. But I was always flattered that he sanctioned what I did in ''Tough Guys'' and so never felt the whip of contempt with which he could so easily lash out at someone. That would include even someone who had given him a chance to act: like against the young Quentin Tarantino, who had just made ''Reservoir Dogs'' with him. It made sense really. Larry had rubbed shoulders with the criminal element like it was breathing. A self-described video geek, as clever as he might be, wouldn’t hold much water with the original Dillinger. Norman, I might add, he thought OK—and that was saying a lot in his book. So there I was, meeting Larry’s fellow denizens in the middle of the kind of brouhaha you would expect from ex-addicts and parolees in a halfway house, which was where he was residing when I first knew him out there. As near as I could get from him, the story went like this: when he was filming ''Reservoir Dogs'', and playing the godfather of a crew of professional bank robbers, somehow a real gun had ended up in his room and it had gone off with the round going through the wall and almost decapitating someone sitting in the next room—it just missed. Did I mention that the gun was in Larry’s hand? So he ended up in the valley in a group house. The occasion for my being there was that I was taking him out to a gathering of some fellow actors at the famous Jerry’s Deli on Ventura Boulevard. When we arrived, one of the bunch who fancied himself a cut above the rest because he was an aficionado of old films was struck dumb when I introduced Larry. “You mean, ''the'' Lawrence Tierney,” as if he’d seen someone from the dead. And God knows he could’ve been back from Hades, because as Larry once put it, “Ahh. I lost five careers to the bottle.” And meant it. But I confirmed the young actor’s suspicion. Yes, no impostor, this was the man himself. So for a few minutes Larry basked in the adulation that an icon is given recognition in the film capital. Then the conversation went on to other things, as is the wont among young folks in Hollywood, to mostly career considerations. So Larry faded off, flirting with a young redheaded actress. Suddenly, someone was tugging at my sleeve. She had returned and was very nervous, whispering that I might want to check on my ward—I don’t know if that’s how she put it or I did, but that’s certainly what it felt like shepherding Larry around. So I went into an adjoining banquet room that was empty and there he was: stuffing mustards from the tables into the large pockets of his garment of choice—a dark raincoat. I got us out of there ASAP. There are more memories of Larry I have and not all of them quite so pungent, but which would occasion a longer piece on him alone. Some people break ground by writing, others just break the ground. Let’s just say, it was one of God’s little jokes that he would pass peacefully from this plane in his sleep.<br />
<br />
I mentioned that I was superstitious. Well, that night at the Writers Guild Norman actually ended his talk by reading a passage from none other than ''Ancient Evenings''. So a fitting finale for this piece might be a quote from the section he read from:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>I had dreams of cities drifting down the Nile like floating islands. Yet when the work was done, I felt larger, as if my senses now lived in a larger space. Was it that my heart and lungs had been placed in one jar, and my stomach and small intestines in another? Leave it that my organs were spread out in different places, floating in different fluids and spices, yet still existing about me, a village. Eventually, their allegiance would be lost. Wrapped and placed in the Canopic jars, what they knew of my life would then be offered to their own God.{{sfn|Mailer|1983|pp=25–26}}</blockquote><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">FINIS</div><br />
<br />
===Citation===<br />
{{Reflist}}<br />
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===Work Cited===<br />
{{Refbegin|indent=yes}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1983 |title=Ancient Evenings |location=Boston|publisher=Little Brown |ref=harv }}<br />
{{Refend}}<br />
{{Review}}<br />
{{DEFAULTSORT:Unknown and the General, The}}<br />
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]</div>ChristinaPinkstonhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=User:ChristinaPinkston&diff=11708User:ChristinaPinkston2020-09-24T01:01:29Z<p>ChristinaPinkston: added bio</p>
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<div>==Introduction==<br />
<br />
Hello! My name is Christina Pinkston. I am currently a junior at Middle Georgia State University, majoring in Media and Communication. I look forward to remediating and helping Project Mailer be the best it can be!</div>ChristinaPinkstonhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/Norman_Mailer_in_%E2%80%9CGod%E2%80%99s_Attic%E2%80%9D&diff=11362The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer in “God’s Attic”2020-09-14T18:55:00Z<p>ChristinaPinkston: added postscripts and ellipses between block quotes</p>
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<div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}<br />
{{MR02}}<br />
{{byline|last=Kaufmann|first=Donald L.|abstract=An eyewitness to Norman Mailer’s five-day visit to Alaska in 1965 chronicles<br />
the details of the only visit Mailer made to Alaska.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08kauf}}<br />
<br />
{{dc|dc=T|he post-climax of Norman Mailer’s ''An American Dream''}} (1965) features<br />
Stephen Rojack (some might say the author’s virtual alter ego) in the desert,<br />
outside Vegas, in a surreal phone booth, ideal for a celestial call to his dead<br />
lover, Cherry, now with Marilyn Monroe. But Rojack, uncharacteristically,<br />
remains speechless, hangs up the phone, and makes no phone call the next<br />
morning because this Mailer protagonist was “something like sane again.”<br />
Moreover, he is headed due south to the jungles of Guatemala and Yucatan.<br />
The starting point for such a seminal exit from America is the Vegas desert,<br />
just a casino chip’s throw from America’s real nadir point, Death Valley.<br />
<br />
There was nothing Arctic about Mailer’s 1965 novel, or was there?<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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<br />
in his lifetime that affect him as an existential experience. Alaska was one of<br />
those places for me.”<br />
<br />
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<br />
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,<br />
teaching while turning a Mailer dissertation into a Mailer book. I was there,<br />
live. I was also one of the few who were “hip” to the Alaskan academic magic<br />
that prompted (virtually tricked) a reluctant Mailer to visit Alaska.<br />
<br />
Edmund Skellings (later to become a Messiah of high tech art, a.k.a. the<br />
“Electric Poet”) was my best friend and fellow PhD candidate at the State<br />
University of Iowa. There, Ed and I first met the Norman Mailer.<br />
<br />
''Esquire'' (the home magazine of Mailer’s eight-part serialization [Jan–Aug<br />
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<br />
presentation, Ed and I pressed the flesh with Mailer—who responded with<br />
warm wit and a promise to keep this mellow threesome mood going that<br />
night at the party at Donald Justice’s home.<br />
<br />
I arrived a bit late at the poet’s house. Don Justice told me that Mailer and<br />
Mark Harris had shouted and wrestled and that Mailer, in a huff, had exited<br />
the party with Ed Skellings—seemingly gone for good.<br />
<br />
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<br />
friendship. Skellings added that Mailer was not his but “our” friend.<br />
<br />
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<br />
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<br />
high professorial adventures.” Ed really tempted me when he flew to New<br />
York and fell flush into one of those famous Norman Mailer Brooklyn<br />
Heights parties. At one of them, this conversation took place:<br />
<br />
“Norman,” Skellings said, “you’re going to Alaska.”<br />
<br />
Mailer replied, “The hell I am.”<br />
<br />
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<br />
a best friend be? Upon graduation, I joined Ed in Fairbanks, September 1964.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Our University English Department was well funded. We were told:<br />
“Bring up that Norman Mailer and Ralph Ellison to celebrate our next early<br />
snowy spring.”<br />
<br />
How could Mailer snub such a bountiful invitation? He almost did.<br />
He responded with three “existential stipulations.”<br />
<br />
(Late 1964 was the onset of Mailer’s more distinct political phase. There<br />
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.)<br />
<br />
When the Alaskan offer arrived, Mailer was probably in a high-risk political existential mood. Hence, three stipulations. His counteroffer: “Do the<br />
undoable, or else!” Mailer would visit Alaska only if:<br />
<br />
# He must be greeted at the Juneau Airport by the governor;<br />
# He must be escorted to the state capitol building and be permitted to address both Houses in session (a real political challenge);<br />
# He must be allowed to attend a Democratic Party caucus meeting.<br />
<br />
All these “musts” sounded to Ed and me like a Maileresque “Catch-22.” These<br />
details were sent to us by Mailer saying, in essence, that he had vetoed the<br />
visit and was having ''realpolitik'' fun.<br />
<br />
How was Mailer expected to fully comprehend our Mike Gravel “connection”?<br />
<br />
Try to imagine Mailer’s surprise when, on February 6, 1965, Governor<br />
William Egan wrote to him:<br />
<br />
<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><br />
<br />
In ''The Presidential Papers'', Mailer defined politics as “the art of the possible.” Mike Gravel, indeed, was Alaska’s supreme artist.<br />
<br />
Skellings immediately wrote to Mailer that Mike Gravel, Speaker of the<br />
Alaska House, would take care of all his arrangements in Juneau and<br />
Anchorage before Mailer came to Fairbanks. Skellings wrote: “I imagine you<br />
should arrive Juneau on April 1 for the day with the Governor and Demo<br />
party caucusing on the second. Anchorage on the third. Then here for lecture with Ellison.”<br />
<br />
I did not witness, firsthand, Mailer’s initial ground-time in Alaska, but<br />
Mike Gravel did. On the next day in Anchorage, where Ed and I were still<br />
preparing for Day Two’s festivities, Mike told me that he and Bill Egan had<br />
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<br />
the Alaskan State Legislature: There was thunderous applause before and<br />
after Mailer’s undoubtedly tasty and serendipitous remarks. The finale<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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<br />
not have to say that Mailer’s Juneau stopover was both political and peaceful.<br />
<br />
Anchorage, the next stop, was no Juneau (the latter, tiny, inaccessible by<br />
road, a political microcosm and little else). Anchorage was Alaska’s largest<br />
city and cosmopolitan center. There, in a flight from Juneau, Gravel and<br />
Mailer landed at what was also the Speaker’s home city, which Mailer, after<br />
one fulsome day, would later in Fairbanks label Anchorage as “Little Las<br />
Vegas.”<br />
<br />
Mailer was not a one-night tourist. On the contrary, he was an in-depth<br />
observer and, in retrospect, I sensed what Mailer would soon perceive: just<br />
ignore those majestic seas and mountains and you could imagine yourself<br />
being in any small city in Nevada or Montana. Fairbanks, a real wilderness<br />
city, awaited Mailer, reputedly the leading urban American exponent of the<br />
German psychologist and existentialist philosopher, Karl Jaspers (1883–1969).<br />
High risk behavior with a dash of violence was Mailer’s literary reputation.<br />
Anchorage and Fairbanks awaited.<br />
<br />
Anchorage offered little time for unscripted events. Norman, Ed, and I<br />
took a few catnaps and slept over at the spacious home of Tom Bischel, a<br />
Gravel friend, influential businessman, and maestro of the Mailer visit.<br />
Gravel, however, was the official Anchorage host. He and Bischel asked<br />
Mailer about his urban wants and places he wanted to visit. Mailer was<br />
mindful of his notoriety, spawned by his violence-prone essay, “The White<br />
Negro,” and the live Black Power racial violence swirling in the Lower 48.<br />
Ralph Ellison, author of ''Invisible Man'', was going to debate this upstart<br />
“White Negro” in Fairbanks. Mailer’s one-day preoccupation was with<br />
minorities. We did some brief sightseeing, but mostly short stops in black<br />
neighborhoods where Mailer met with local residents and politicians. In<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Anchorage’s Western Hotel was the site for a well-advertised, open door<br />
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.<br />
<br />
“Where’s that tough guy?”<br />
<br />
“Where’s that wife-knifer?”<br />
<br />
Just then, the vast reception room became surreal. I made the rounds for<br />
a few hours, keeping my eyes on the crowd. Each time Mailer was accosted,<br />
he remained gentlemanly and conciliatory. Then, suddenly, Mailer was out<br />
of the circle and into a ring, involved in a crazy sort of fisticuffs, mostly<br />
lunges and misses, but uniformed security made instant peace, and Mailer<br />
swaggered back into his inner circle, with an Irish smile and a fresh drink.<br />
<br />
By the end, I was a mixture of alcohol and fatigue, but I could decipher<br />
Gravel’s and Bischel’s smiles. Tonight had been an unforgettable success. A<br />
nightcap celebration was in order. Why not duplicate our daytime travels, the<br />
canvas of black precincts, with a midnight session at Anchorage’s prize black<br />
nightclub?<br />
<br />
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.”<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Early in the morning after the Anchorage reception, four passengers<br />
(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.<br />
<br />
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.”<br />
<br />
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<br />
Americana. However, he sensed it.<br />
<br />
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<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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<br />
academic author. Mailer, full of Alaskan magic, was quite mellow. The audience of eighteen hundred enthusiasts was in a good mood.<br />
<br />
I was there and I introduced Mailer.<br />
<br />
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:<br />
<br />
<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.<br />
{{* * *}}<br />
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.<br />
{{* * *}}<br />
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><br />
<br />
Mailer then shifted to “Existential Minorities,” an original offshoot of his “The White Negro,” and racial strife in that “other” America:<br />
<br />
<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.<br />
{{* * *}}<br />
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.<br />
{{* * *}}<br />
We’re forced to go through life with a psychology profoundly different from most people—a very divided existential psychology.<br />
{{* * *}}<br />
To balance the conflict, we consider ourselves in two different ways, as superior or inferior, and this can be a conflict within itself.<br />
{{* * *}}<br />
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.<br />
{{* * *}}<br />
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.<br />
{{* * *}}<br />
And so, as a minority group, you spend your life constantly redefining your role within the dominating group.</blockquote><br />
<br />
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.”<br />
<br />
Yes, with Norman Mailer surprises never end. The farewell bash provided the setting for the second Maileresque self-defined moment. The bash itself was anticlimatic. 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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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 seriocomedy at the very least. Two mockpugilists 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.<br />
<br />
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!”<br />
<br />
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.”<br />
<br />
Mailer didn’t even blink. The attorney drifted off and I spirited Mailer inside.<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.”<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Mailer, in the Ellison debate, was remarkably prophetic when he warned<br />
the Fairbanks audience: “You could become the very worst; a big Las Vegas<br />
at sixty below. There’s already a priggishness alive in this state, people greedy<br />
to get all the plastic buildings up here just as fast as they can.” If, at the<br />
moment, I could have foreseen Fairbanks’s near future, I would have jotted<br />
and underlined: ''Prudhoe Greed Invasion''.<br />
<br />
As for Mailer’s ultimate 1965 Alaskan Mystery—either the “best” or the<br />
“worst” state, I can only add a few more words. No doubt there are still small<br />
pockets of individualized common sense, perhaps, some evolutionary mode<br />
of Mailer’s “existential minority.” Otherwise, 1965 Fairbanks is dead and<br />
gone.<br />
<br />
What remains of the ultimate Mailer American Mystery? I cannot imagine Alaska ever becoming the “worst” state without Mother Nature’s full<br />
cooperation. As for Alaska being the “best,” I can only echo the lament:<br />
“Such hope is ‘all over’ up here.” But I’m glad that Norman Mailer experienced five of its last glory days.<br />
<br />
What remains to be told of “Mailer in Alaska” is my own memory high<br />
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<br />
North America. On the Mailer itinerary, this epiphany was the first of two,<br />
the latter being the mock fisticuffs during the farewell bash, in the snowy<br />
outdoors, where Mailer neutralized a violently drunk attorney, perhaps with<br />
an Arctic display of Papa Hemingway’s “grace under pressure.” I mention<br />
this because I sensed that “Papa’s spirit” joined Mailer’s “big eyes” over<br />
Mount Denali, the Alaskan Native name for Mount McKinley. This epiphany was purely literary.<br />
<br />
It was Mailer’s idea, in mid-flight from Anchorage to Fairbanks, not to<br />
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<br />
this be done, Barney Gottstein’s pilot immediately turned and nodded yes to<br />
Alaska’s guest of honor.<br />
<br />
Up to that moment, the pilot’s four passengers were in various degrees of<br />
wakefulness. The seating arrangement was: pilot up front, behind him on the<br />
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<br />
vantage point was perfect. I had Mailer in full view all the time. Skellings and<br />
I were dead tired from day and night Anchorage revelry. But Mailer, alone,<br />
seemed primed. The pilot announced that buzzing that high required “sucking oxygen” (mouth-inhalers in small containers). Anyone familiar with the<br />
1960s drug culture knew that this meant “getting high.”<br />
<br />
Then, another significant Mailer observation. He put on eyeglasses. A<br />
Provincetown legend held that Mailer was vain about his imperfect vision<br />
and that eyeglasses equaled unmanly or, as a takeoff on the (“don’t dance”)<br />
title of Mailer’s later (1984) novel, ''Tough Guys Don’t Wear Glasses''. And, so the<br />
legend went, when Norman Mailer puts on his spectacles, he is expecting<br />
nothing less than an epiphany.<br />
<br />
For twenty long minutes, Barney’s pilot made low passes around the peak<br />
or higher, and with each pass, buzz, or mind-skimming of Denali’s top, I<br />
looked down and wondered what Mailer was imagining or seeing, as he<br />
sucked oxygen with an extra pair of eyes.<br />
<br />
During that twenty-minute hello to Denali, I could not foresee Mailer’s<br />
next novel, ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' (1967), oddly entitled because the word<br />
“Vietnam” appears but once—in the book’s final phrase, “Vietnam, hot<br />
dam.” Most of the novel’s “hot dams” took place in Alaska and mostly in<br />
remote, stark wilderness—the Brooks Range.<br />
<br />
There, reincarnations of “Big Oil” and “Big Greed” in the guise of yahoo<br />
Texan hunters (with a zero hunter’s code) visited the Arctic for hi-tech<br />
slaughter of the wildlife. With such “messy” tactics, someone like Papa Hemingway would have “offed” those Texans. Mailer, instead, used literary<br />
ammunition—a novel, a pop culture acerbic comedy of Arctic wilderness<br />
being despoiled by the mechanistic arts of a so-called American Civilization gone berserk.<br />
<br />
Above Denali, with Mailer just an arm’s length away, I lost myself in<br />
simultaneous images of Papa Hemingway peering down on Kilimanjaro, seeing a frozen leopard, and Mailer (on Alaskan oxygen plus magic) peering<br />
down on Denali, seeing (and believing) what? “Would there have been a<br />
Mailer Vietnam novel without us being here?”<br />
<br />
Such literary fancy has an afterlife. My belief that twenty minutes over<br />
Denali was the genesis of Mailer’s Vietnam novel causes me to wonder how<br />
Stephen Rojack, the protagonist-narrator of ''An American Dream'' (1965)<br />
would have behaved had Mailer created him after—and not before—his<br />
five-day Alaskan visit.<br />
<br />
There are ample literary cues. The somewhat tight time line between<br />
the writing and publishing of two key novels (''An American Dream'' and<br />
''Why are We in Vietnam?'') and, at approximate mid-point, the Alaskan<br />
visit. There was also an autobiographical linkage. Rojack, of all the protagonists, remains the most “authorial self,” in J. Michael Lennon’s<br />
phrase. Lennon also refers to Rojack as “Mailer’s fictional cousin”. {{sfn|Lennon|1986|p=9}}<br />
Rojack, pointedly, is Lower 48–rooted, a professor of existential psychology, with a fondness for magic, not Alaska styled. However, with a<br />
five-day booster shot of Alaskan magic inside Mailer the Creator, how<br />
would Rojack have acted and ended? I leave the “acts” for future Mailer<br />
scholars.<br />
<br />
As for an Alaska-inspired ending of Mailer’s ''An American Dream'', a “new”<br />
Rojack must have a new “post-climax”—or call it epilogue. Let him redo the<br />
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<br />
Brooks Range.<br />
<br />
Rojack’s departure time is now, not tomorrow, but his destination is not<br />
foreign jungles but deep inside America, and this time he’s not speechless<br />
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<br />
and press the flesh with God.<br />
<br />
'''Three Postscripts'''<br />
# 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.<br />
# ''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.<br />
# 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.<br />
<br />
=== Citations ===<br />
{{Reflist}}<br />
<br />
=== Work Cited ===<br />
{{Refbegin|indent=yes}}<br />
* {{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 }}<br />
{{Refend}}<br />
{{Review}}<br />
{{DEFAULTSORT:Norman Mailer in "God's Attic"}}<br />
[[Category:V.2 2008]]<br />
[[Category:Articles]]</div>ChristinaPinkstonhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/Norman_Mailer_in_%E2%80%9CGod%E2%80%99s_Attic%E2%80%9D&diff=11306The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer in “God’s Attic”2020-09-12T22:52:30Z<p>ChristinaPinkston: finished up to pg 312 postscripts</p>
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<div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}<br />
{{MR02}}<br />
{{byline|last=Kaufmann|first=Donald L.|abstract=An eyewitness to Norman Mailer’s five-day visit to Alaska in 1965 chronicles<br />
the details of the only visit Mailer made to Alaska.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08kauf}}<br />
<br />
{{dc|dc=T|he post-climax of Norman Mailer’s ''An American Dream''}} (1965) features<br />
Stephen Rojack (some might say the author’s virtual alter ego) in the desert,<br />
outside Vegas, in a surreal phone booth, ideal for a celestial call to his dead<br />
lover, Cherry, now with Marilyn Monroe. But Rojack, uncharacteristically,<br />
remains speechless, hangs up the phone, and makes no phone call the next<br />
morning because this Mailer protagonist was “something like sane again.”<br />
Moreover, he is headed due south to the jungles of Guatemala and Yucatan.<br />
The starting point for such a seminal exit from America is the Vegas desert,<br />
just a casino chip’s throw from America’s real nadir point, Death Valley.<br />
<br />
There was nothing Arctic about Mailer’s 1965 novel, or was there?<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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<br />
in his lifetime that affect him as an existential experience. Alaska was one of<br />
those places for me.”<br />
<br />
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<br />
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,<br />
teaching while turning a Mailer dissertation into a Mailer book. I was there,<br />
live. I was also one of the few who were “hip” to the Alaskan academic magic<br />
that prompted (virtually tricked) a reluctant Mailer to visit Alaska.<br />
<br />
Edmund Skellings (later to become a Messiah of high tech art, a.k.a. the<br />
“Electric Poet”) was my best friend and fellow PhD candidate at the State<br />
University of Iowa. There, Ed and I first met the Norman Mailer.<br />
<br />
''Esquire'' (the home magazine of Mailer’s eight-part serialization [Jan–Aug<br />
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<br />
presentation, Ed and I pressed the flesh with Mailer—who responded with<br />
warm wit and a promise to keep this mellow threesome mood going that<br />
night at the party at Donald Justice’s home.<br />
<br />
I arrived a bit late at the poet’s house. Don Justice told me that Mailer and<br />
Mark Harris had shouted and wrestled and that Mailer, in a huff, had exited<br />
the party with Ed Skellings—seemingly gone for good.<br />
<br />
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<br />
friendship. Skellings added that Mailer was not his but “our” friend.<br />
<br />
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<br />
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<br />
high professorial adventures.” Ed really tempted me when he flew to New<br />
York and fell flush into one of those famous Norman Mailer Brooklyn<br />
Heights parties. At one of them, this conversation took place:<br />
<br />
“Norman,” Skellings said, “you’re going to Alaska.”<br />
<br />
Mailer replied, “The hell I am.”<br />
<br />
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<br />
a best friend be? Upon graduation, I joined Ed in Fairbanks, September 1964.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Our University English Department was well funded. We were told:<br />
“Bring up that Norman Mailer and Ralph Ellison to celebrate our next early<br />
snowy spring.”<br />
<br />
How could Mailer snub such a bountiful invitation? He almost did.<br />
He responded with three “existential stipulations.”<br />
<br />
(Late 1964 was the onset of Mailer’s more distinct political phase. There<br />
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.)<br />
<br />
When the Alaskan offer arrived, Mailer was probably in a high-risk political existential mood. Hence, three stipulations. His counteroffer: “Do the<br />
undoable, or else!” Mailer would visit Alaska only if:<br />
<br />
# He must be greeted at the Juneau Airport by the governor;<br />
# He must be escorted to the state capitol building and be permitted to address both Houses in session (a real political challenge);<br />
# He must be allowed to attend a Democratic Party caucus meeting.<br />
<br />
All these “musts” sounded to Ed and me like a Maileresque “Catch-22.” These<br />
details were sent to us by Mailer saying, in essence, that he had vetoed the<br />
visit and was having ''realpolitik'' fun.<br />
<br />
How was Mailer expected to fully comprehend our Mike Gravel “connection”?<br />
<br />
Try to imagine Mailer’s surprise when, on February 6, 1965, Governor<br />
William Egan wrote to him:<br />
<br />
<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><br />
<br />
In ''The Presidential Papers'', Mailer defined politics as “the art of the possible.” Mike Gravel, indeed, was Alaska’s supreme artist.<br />
<br />
Skellings immediately wrote to Mailer that Mike Gravel, Speaker of the<br />
Alaska House, would take care of all his arrangements in Juneau and<br />
Anchorage before Mailer came to Fairbanks. Skellings wrote: “I imagine you<br />
should arrive Juneau on April 1 for the day with the Governor and Demo<br />
party caucusing on the second. Anchorage on the third. Then here for lecture with Ellison.”<br />
<br />
I did not witness, firsthand, Mailer’s initial ground-time in Alaska, but<br />
Mike Gravel did. On the next day in Anchorage, where Ed and I were still<br />
preparing for Day Two’s festivities, Mike told me that he and Bill Egan had<br />
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<br />
the Alaskan State Legislature: There was thunderous applause before and<br />
after Mailer’s undoubtedly tasty and serendipitous remarks. The finale<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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<br />
not have to say that Mailer’s Juneau stopover was both political and peaceful.<br />
<br />
Anchorage, the next stop, was no Juneau (the latter, tiny, inaccessible by<br />
road, a political microcosm and little else). Anchorage was Alaska’s largest<br />
city and cosmopolitan center. There, in a flight from Juneau, Gravel and<br />
Mailer landed at what was also the Speaker’s home city, which Mailer, after<br />
one fulsome day, would later in Fairbanks label Anchorage as “Little Las<br />
Vegas.”<br />
<br />
Mailer was not a one-night tourist. On the contrary, he was an in-depth<br />
observer and, in retrospect, I sensed what Mailer would soon perceive: just<br />
ignore those majestic seas and mountains and you could imagine yourself<br />
being in any small city in Nevada or Montana. Fairbanks, a real wilderness<br />
city, awaited Mailer, reputedly the leading urban American exponent of the<br />
German psychologist and existentialist philosopher, Karl Jaspers (1883–1969).<br />
High risk behavior with a dash of violence was Mailer’s literary reputation.<br />
Anchorage and Fairbanks awaited.<br />
<br />
Anchorage offered little time for unscripted events. Norman, Ed, and I<br />
took a few catnaps and slept over at the spacious home of Tom Bischel, a<br />
Gravel friend, influential businessman, and maestro of the Mailer visit.<br />
Gravel, however, was the official Anchorage host. He and Bischel asked<br />
Mailer about his urban wants and places he wanted to visit. Mailer was<br />
mindful of his notoriety, spawned by his violence-prone essay, “The White<br />
Negro,” and the live Black Power racial violence swirling in the Lower 48.<br />
Ralph Ellison, author of ''Invisible Man'', was going to debate this upstart<br />
“White Negro” in Fairbanks. Mailer’s one-day preoccupation was with<br />
minorities. We did some brief sightseeing, but mostly short stops in black<br />
neighborhoods where Mailer met with local residents and politicians. In<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Anchorage’s Western Hotel was the site for a well-advertised, open door<br />
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.<br />
<br />
“Where’s that tough guy?”<br />
<br />
“Where’s that wife-knifer?”<br />
<br />
Just then, the vast reception room became surreal. I made the rounds for<br />
a few hours, keeping my eyes on the crowd. Each time Mailer was accosted,<br />
he remained gentlemanly and conciliatory. Then, suddenly, Mailer was out<br />
of the circle and into a ring, involved in a crazy sort of fisticuffs, mostly<br />
lunges and misses, but uniformed security made instant peace, and Mailer<br />
swaggered back into his inner circle, with an Irish smile and a fresh drink.<br />
<br />
By the end, I was a mixture of alcohol and fatigue, but I could decipher<br />
Gravel’s and Bischel’s smiles. Tonight had been an unforgettable success. A<br />
nightcap celebration was in order. Why not duplicate our daytime travels, the<br />
canvas of black precincts, with a midnight session at Anchorage’s prize black<br />
nightclub?<br />
<br />
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.”<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Early in the morning after the Anchorage reception, four passengers<br />
(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.<br />
<br />
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.”<br />
<br />
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<br />
Americana. However, he sensed it.<br />
<br />
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<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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<br />
academic author. Mailer, full of Alaskan magic, was quite mellow. The audience of eighteen hundred enthusiasts was in a good mood.<br />
<br />
I was there and I introduced Mailer.<br />
<br />
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:<br />
<br />
<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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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><br />
<br />
Mailer then shifted to “Existential Minorities,” an original offshoot of his “The White Negro,” and racial strife in that “other” America:<br />
<br />
<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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
We’re forced to go through life with a psychology profoundly different from most people—a very divided existential psychology.<br />
<br />
To balance the conflict, we consider ourselves in two different ways, as superior or inferior, and this can be a conflict within itself.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
And so, as a minority group, you spend your life constantly redefining your role within the dominating group.</blockquote><br />
<br />
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.”<br />
<br />
Yes, with Norman Mailer surprises never end. The farewell bash provided the setting for the second Maileresque self-defined moment. The bash itself was anticlimatic. 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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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 seriocomedy at the very least. Two mockpugilists 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.<br />
<br />
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!”<br />
<br />
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.”<br />
<br />
Mailer didn’t even blink. The attorney drifted off and I spirited Mailer inside.<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.”<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Mailer, in the Ellison debate, was remarkably prophetic when he warned<br />
the Fairbanks audience: “You could become the very worst; a big Las Vegas<br />
at sixty below. There’s already a priggishness alive in this state, people greedy<br />
to get all the plastic buildings up here just as fast as they can.” If, at the<br />
moment, I could have foreseen Fairbanks’s near future, I would have jotted<br />
and underlined: ''Prudhoe Greed Invasion''.<br />
<br />
As for Mailer’s ultimate 1965 Alaskan Mystery—either the “best” or the<br />
“worst” state, I can only add a few more words. No doubt there are still small<br />
pockets of individualized common sense, perhaps, some evolutionary mode<br />
of Mailer’s “existential minority.” Otherwise, 1965 Fairbanks is dead and<br />
gone.<br />
<br />
What remains of the ultimate Mailer American Mystery? I cannot imagine Alaska ever becoming the “worst” state without Mother Nature’s full<br />
cooperation. As for Alaska being the “best,” I can only echo the lament:<br />
“Such hope is ‘all over’ up here.” But I’m glad that Norman Mailer experienced five of its last glory days.<br />
<br />
What remains to be told of “Mailer in Alaska” is my own memory high<br />
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<br />
North America. On the Mailer itinerary, this epiphany was the first of two,<br />
the latter being the mock fisticuffs during the farewell bash, in the snowy<br />
outdoors, where Mailer neutralized a violently drunk attorney, perhaps with<br />
an Arctic display of Papa Hemingway’s “grace under pressure.” I mention<br />
this because I sensed that “Papa’s spirit” joined Mailer’s “big eyes” over<br />
Mount Denali, the Alaskan Native name for Mount McKinley. This epiphany was purely literary.<br />
<br />
It was Mailer’s idea, in mid-flight from Anchorage to Fairbanks, not to<br />
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<br />
this be done, Barney Gottstein’s pilot immediately turned and nodded yes to<br />
Alaska’s guest of honor.<br />
<br />
Up to that moment, the pilot’s four passengers were in various degrees of<br />
wakefulness. The seating arrangement was: pilot up front, behind him on the<br />
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<br />
vantage point was perfect. I had Mailer in full view all the time. Skellings and<br />
I were dead tired from day and night Anchorage revelry. But Mailer, alone,<br />
seemed primed. The pilot announced that buzzing that high required “sucking oxygen” (mouth-inhalers in small containers). Anyone familiar with the<br />
1960s drug culture knew that this meant “getting high.”<br />
<br />
Then, another significant Mailer observation. He put on eyeglasses. A<br />
Provincetown legend held that Mailer was vain about his imperfect vision<br />
and that eyeglasses equaled unmanly or, as a takeoff on the (“don’t dance”)<br />
title of Mailer’s later (1984) novel, ''Tough Guys Don’t Wear Glasses''. And, so the<br />
legend went, when Norman Mailer puts on his spectacles, he is expecting<br />
nothing less than an epiphany.<br />
<br />
For twenty long minutes, Barney’s pilot made low passes around the peak<br />
or higher, and with each pass, buzz, or mind-skimming of Denali’s top, I<br />
looked down and wondered what Mailer was imagining or seeing, as he<br />
sucked oxygen with an extra pair of eyes.<br />
<br />
During that twenty-minute hello to Denali, I could not foresee Mailer’s<br />
next novel, ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' (1967), oddly entitled because the word<br />
“Vietnam” appears but once—in the book’s final phrase, “Vietnam, hot<br />
dam.” Most of the novel’s “hot dams” took place in Alaska and mostly in<br />
remote, stark wilderness—the Brooks Range.<br />
<br />
There, reincarnations of “Big Oil” and “Big Greed” in the guise of yahoo<br />
Texan hunters (with a zero hunter’s code) visited the Arctic for hi-tech<br />
slaughter of the wildlife. With such “messy” tactics, someone like Papa Hemingway would have “offed” those Texans. Mailer, instead, used literary<br />
ammunition—a novel, a pop culture acerbic comedy of Arctic wilderness<br />
being despoiled by the mechanistic arts of a so-called American Civilization gone berserk.<br />
<br />
Above Denali, with Mailer just an arm’s length away, I lost myself in<br />
simultaneous images of Papa Hemingway peering down on Kilimanjaro, seeing a frozen leopard, and Mailer (on Alaskan oxygen plus magic) peering<br />
down on Denali, seeing (and believing) what? “Would there have been a<br />
Mailer Vietnam novel without us being here?”<br />
<br />
Such literary fancy has an afterlife. My belief that twenty minutes over<br />
Denali was the genesis of Mailer’s Vietnam novel causes me to wonder how<br />
Stephen Rojack, the protagonist-narrator of ''An American Dream'' (1965)<br />
would have behaved had Mailer created him after—and not before—his<br />
five-day Alaskan visit.<br />
<br />
There are ample literary cues. The somewhat tight time line between<br />
the writing and publishing of two key novels (''An American Dream'' and<br />
''Why are We in Vietnam?'') and, at approximate mid-point, the Alaskan<br />
visit. There was also an autobiographical linkage. Rojack, of all the protagonists, remains the most “authorial self,” in J. Michael Lennon’s<br />
phrase. Lennon also refers to Rojack as “Mailer’s fictional cousin”. {{sfn|Lennon|1986|p=9}}<br />
Rojack, pointedly, is Lower 48–rooted, a professor of existential psychology, with a fondness for magic, not Alaska styled. However, with a<br />
five-day booster shot of Alaskan magic inside Mailer the Creator, how<br />
would Rojack have acted and ended? I leave the “acts” for future Mailer<br />
scholars.<br />
<br />
As for an Alaska-inspired ending of Mailer’s ''An American Dream'', a “new”<br />
Rojack must have a new “post-climax”—or call it epilogue. Let him redo the<br />
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<br />
Brooks Range.<br />
<br />
Rojack’s departure time is now, not tomorrow, but his destination is not<br />
foreign jungles but deep inside America, and this time he’s not speechless<br />
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<br />
and press the flesh with God.<br />
<br />
== Notes ==<br />
{{notelist}}<br />
<br />
== Citations ==<br />
{{Reflist}}<br />
<br />
== Work Cited ==<br />
{{Refbegin|indent=yes}}<br />
* {{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 }}<br />
{{Refend}}<br />
{{Review}}<br />
{{DEFAULTSORT:Norman Mailer in "God's Attic"}}<br />
[[Category:V.2 2008]]<br />
[[Category:Articles]]</div>ChristinaPinkstonhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/Norman_Mailer_in_%E2%80%9CGod%E2%80%99s_Attic%E2%80%9D&diff=11282The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer in “God’s Attic”2020-09-12T00:32:32Z<p>ChristinaPinkston: added body up to top of pg 309</p>
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<div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}<br />
{{MR02}}<br />
{{byline|last=Kaufmann|first=Donald L.|abstract=An eyewitness to Norman Mailer’s five-day visit to Alaska in 1965 chronicles<br />
the details of the only visit Mailer made to Alaska.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08kauf}}<br />
<br />
{{start|The post-climax of Norman Mailer’s ''An American Dream''}} (1965) features<br />
Stephen Rojack (some might say the author’s virtual alter ego) in the desert,<br />
outside Vegas, in a surreal phone booth, ideal for a celestial call to his dead<br />
lover, Cherry, now with Marilyn Monroe. But Rojack, uncharacteristically,<br />
remains speechless, hangs up the phone, and makes no phone call the next<br />
morning because this Mailer protagonist was “something like sane again.”<br />
Moreover, he is headed due south to the jungles of Guatemala and Yucatan.<br />
The starting point for such a seminal exit from America is the Vegas desert,<br />
just a casino chip’s throw from America’s real nadir point, Death Valley.<br />
<br />
There was nothing Arctic about Mailer’s 1965 novel, or was there?<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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<br />
in his lifetime that affect him as an existential experience. Alaska was one of<br />
those places for me.”<br />
<br />
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<br />
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,<br />
teaching while turning a Mailer dissertation into a Mailer book. I was there,<br />
live. I was also one of the few who were “hip” to the Alaskan academic magic<br />
that prompted (virtually tricked) a reluctant Mailer to visit Alaska.<br />
<br />
Edmund Skellings (later to become a Messiah of high tech art, a.k.a. the<br />
“Electric Poet”) was my best friend and fellow PhD candidate at the State<br />
University of Iowa. There, Ed and I first met the Norman Mailer.<br />
<br />
''Esquire'' (the home magazine of Mailer’s eight-part serialization [Jan–Aug<br />
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<br />
presentation, Ed and I pressed the flesh with Mailer—who responded with<br />
warm wit and a promise to keep this mellow threesome mood going that<br />
night at the party at Donald Justice’s home.<br />
<br />
I arrived a bit late at the poet’s house. Don Justice told me that Mailer and<br />
Mark Harris had shouted and wrestled and that Mailer, in a huff, had exited<br />
the party with Ed Skellings—seemingly gone for good.<br />
<br />
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<br />
friendship. Skellings added that Mailer was not his but “our” friend.<br />
<br />
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<br />
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<br />
high professorial adventures.” Ed really tempted me when he flew to New<br />
York and fell flush into one of those famous Norman Mailer Brooklyn<br />
Heights parties. At one of them, this conversation took place:<br />
<br />
“Norman,” Skellings said, “you’re going to Alaska.”<br />
<br />
Mailer replied, “The hell I am.”<br />
<br />
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<br />
a best friend be? Upon graduation, I joined Ed in Fairbanks, September 1964.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Our University English Department was well funded. We were told:<br />
“Bring up that Norman Mailer and Ralph Ellison to celebrate our next early<br />
snowy spring.”<br />
<br />
How could Mailer snub such a bountiful invitation? He almost did.<br />
He responded with three “existential stipulations.”<br />
<br />
(Late 1964 was the onset of Mailer’s more distinct political phase. There<br />
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.)<br />
<br />
When the Alaskan offer arrived, Mailer was probably in a high-risk political existential mood. Hence, three stipulations. His counteroffer: “Do the<br />
undoable, or else!” Mailer would visit Alaska only if:<br />
<br />
<blockquote> <br />
# He must be greeted at the Juneau Airport by the governor;<br />
# He must be escorted to the state capitol building and be permitted to address both Houses in session (a real political challenge);<br />
# He must be allowed to attend a Democratic Party caucus meeting.</blockquote><br />
<br />
All these “musts” sounded to Ed and me like a Maileresque “Catch-22.” These<br />
details were sent to us by Mailer saying, in essence, that he had vetoed the<br />
visit and was having ''realpolitik'' fun.<br />
<br />
How was Mailer expected to fully comprehend our Mike Gravel<br />
“connection”?<br />
<br />
Try to imagine Mailer’s surprise when, on February 6, 1965, Governor<br />
William Egan wrote to him:<br />
<br />
<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><br />
<br />
In ''The Presidential Papers'', Mailer defined politics as “the art of the possible.” Mike Gravel, indeed, was Alaska’s supreme artist.<br />
<br />
Skellings immediately wrote to Mailer that Mike Gravel, Speaker of the<br />
Alaska House, would take care of all his arrangements in Juneau and<br />
Anchorage before Mailer came to Fairbanks. Skellings wrote: “I imagine you<br />
should arrive Juneau on April 1 for the day with the Governor and Demo<br />
party caucusing on the second. Anchorage on the third. Then here for lecture with Ellison.”<br />
<br />
I did not witness, firsthand, Mailer’s initial ground-time in Alaska, but<br />
Mike Gravel did. On the next day in Anchorage, where Ed and I were still<br />
preparing for Day Two’s festivities, Mike told me that he and Bill Egan had<br />
greeted Mailer at the Juneau Airport and that Mailer was escorted on a comprehensive tour of the capital, climaxed with more than polite applause<br />
when the state’s guest of honor appeared at a joint session of both Houses of<br />
the Alaskan State Legislature: There was thunderous applause before and<br />
after Mailer’s undoubtedly tasty and serendipitous remarks. The finale<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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<br />
not have to say that Mailer’s Juneau stopover was both political and peaceful.<br />
<br />
Anchorage, the next stop, was no Juneau (the latter, tiny, inaccessible by<br />
road, a political microcosm and little else). Anchorage was Alaska’s largest<br />
city and cosmopolitan center. There, in a flight from Juneau, Gravel and<br />
Mailer landed at what was also the Speaker’s home city, which Mailer, after<br />
one fulsome day, would later in Fairbanks label Anchorage as “Little Las<br />
Vegas.”<br />
<br />
Mailer was not a one-night tourist. On the contrary, he was an in-depth<br />
observer and, in retrospect, I sensed what Mailer would soon perceive: just<br />
ignore those majestic seas and mountains and you could imagine yourself<br />
being in any small city in Nevada or Montana. Fairbanks, a real wilderness<br />
city, awaited Mailer, reputedly the leading urban American exponent of the<br />
German psychologist and existentialist philosopher, Karl Jaspers (1883–1969).<br />
High risk behavior with a dash of violence was Mailer’s literary reputation.<br />
Anchorage and Fairbanks awaited.<br />
<br />
Anchorage offered little time for unscripted events. Norman, Ed, and I<br />
took a few catnaps and slept over at the spacious home of Tom Bischel, a<br />
Gravel friend, influential businessman, and maestro of the Mailer visit.<br />
Gravel, however, was the official Anchorage host. He and Bischel asked<br />
Mailer about his urban wants and places he wanted to visit. Mailer was<br />
mindful of his notoriety, spawned by his violence-prone essay, “The White<br />
Negro,” and the live Black Power racial violence swirling in the Lower 48.<br />
Ralph Ellison, author of ''Invisible Man'', was going to debate this upstart<br />
“White Negro” in Fairbanks. Mailer’s one-day preoccupation was with<br />
minorities. We did some brief sightseeing, but mostly short stops in black<br />
neighborhoods where Mailer met with local residents and politicians. In<br />
mid-afternoon, we rushed to an Anchorage TV station for a scheduled videotaping of a Mailer-Gravel-Skellings-Kaufmann panel discussion for a<br />
statewide audience. The next stop was a media-inspired Mailer farewell.<br />
<br />
Anchorage’s Western Hotel was the site for a well-advertised, open door<br />
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.<br />
<br />
“Where’s that tough guy?”<br />
<br />
“Where’s that wife-knifer?”<br />
<br />
Just then, the vast reception room became surreal. I made the rounds for<br />
a few hours, keeping my eyes on the crowd. Each time Mailer was accosted,<br />
he remained gentlemanly and conciliatory. Then, suddenly, Mailer was out<br />
of the circle and into a ring, involved in a crazy sort of fisticuffs, mostly<br />
lunges and misses, but uniformed security made instant peace, and Mailer<br />
swaggered back into his inner circle, with an Irish smile and a fresh drink.<br />
<br />
By the end, I was a mixture of alcohol and fatigue, but I could decipher<br />
Gravel’s and Bischel’s smiles. Tonight had been an unforgettable success. A<br />
nightcap celebration was in order. Why not duplicate our daytime travels, the<br />
canvas of black precincts, with a midnight session at Anchorage’s prize black<br />
nightclub?<br />
<br />
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.”<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Early in the morning after the Anchorage reception, four passengers<br />
(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.<br />
<br />
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.”<br />
<br />
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<br />
Americana. However, he sensed it.<br />
<br />
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<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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<br />
academic author. Mailer, full of Alaskan magic, was quite mellow. The audience of eighteen hundred enthusiasts was in a good mood.<br />
<br />
I was there and I introduced Mailer.<br />
<br />
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:<br />
<br />
<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.</blockquote><br />
<br />
<blockquote>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.</blockquote><br />
<br />
<blockquote>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><br />
<br />
Mailer then shifted to “Existential Minorities,” an original offshoot of his<br />
“The White Negro,” and racial strife in that “other” America:<br />
<br />
<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.</blockquote><br />
<br />
<blockquote>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.</blockquote><br />
<br />
<blockquote>We’re forced to go through life with a psychology profoundly different from most people—a very divided existential psychology.</blockquote><br />
<br />
<blockquote>To balance the conflict, we consider ourselves in two different ways, as superior or inferior, and this can be a conflict within itself.</blockquote><br />
<br />
<blockquote>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.</blockquote><br />
<br />
<blockquote>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.</blockquote><br />
<br />
<blockquote>And so, as a minority group, you spend your life constantly redefining your role within the dominating group.</blockquote><br />
<br />
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.”<br />
<br />
Yes, with Norman Mailer surprises never end. The farewell bash provided the setting for the second Maileresque self-defined moment. The bash itself was anticlimatic. 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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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 seriocomedy at the very least. Two mockpugilists 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.<br />
<br />
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!”<br />
<br />
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.”<br />
<br />
Mailer didn’t even blink. The attorney drifted off and I spirited Mailer<br />
inside.<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
===Citations===<br />
{{Reflist}}<br />
<br />
===Work Cited===<br />
{{Refbegin|indent=yes}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=1986 |title=Critical Essays on Norman Mailer |location=Boston |publisher=G. K. Hall |ref=harv }}<br />
{{Refend}}<br />
{{Review}}<br />
{{DEFAULTSORT:Norman Mailer in "God's Attic"}}<br />
[[Category:V.2 2008]]<br />
[[Category:Articles]]</div>ChristinaPinkstonhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/Norman_Mailer_in_%E2%80%9CGod%E2%80%99s_Attic%E2%80%9D&diff=11257The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer in “God’s Attic”2020-09-11T00:19:21Z<p>ChristinaPinkston: added body up to pg 303</p>
<hr />
<div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}<br />
{{MR02}}<br />
{{byline|last=Kaufmann|first=Donald L.|abstract=An eyewitness to Norman Mailer’s five-day visit to Alaska in 1965 chronicles<br />
the details of the only visit Mailer made to Alaska.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08kauf}}<br />
<br />
The post-climax of Norman Mailer’s ''An American Dream'' (1965) features<br />
Stephen Rojack (some might say the author’s virtual alter ego) in the desert,<br />
outside Vegas, in a surreal phone booth, ideal for a celestial call to his dead<br />
lover, Cherry, now with Marilyn Monroe. But Rojack, uncharacteristically,<br />
remains speechless, hangs up the phone, and makes no phone call the next<br />
morning because this Mailer protagonist was “something like sane again.”<br />
Moreover, he is headed due south to the jungles of Guatemala and Yucatan.<br />
The starting point for such a seminal exit from America is the Vegas desert,<br />
just a casino chip’s throw from America’s real nadir point, Death Valley.<br />
<br />
There was nothing Arctic about Mailer’s 1965 novel, or was there?<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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<br />
in his lifetime that affect him as an existential experience. Alaska was one of<br />
those places for me.”<br />
<br />
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<br />
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,<br />
teaching while turning a Mailer dissertation into a Mailer book. I was there,<br />
live. I was also one of the few who were “hip” to the Alaskan academic magic<br />
that prompted (virtually tricked) a reluctant Mailer to visit Alaska.<br />
<br />
Edmund Skellings (later to become a Messiah of high tech art, a.k.a. the<br />
“Electric Poet”) was my best friend and fellow PhD candidate at the State<br />
University of Iowa. There, Ed and I first met the Norman Mailer.<br />
<br />
''Esquire'' (the home magazine of Mailer’s eight-part serialization [Jan–Aug<br />
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<br />
presentation, Ed and I pressed the flesh with Mailer—who responded with<br />
warm wit and a promise to keep this mellow threesome mood going that<br />
night at the party at Donald Justice’s home.<br />
<br />
I arrived a bit late at the poet’s house. Don Justice told me that Mailer and<br />
Mark Harris had shouted and wrestled and that Mailer, in a huff, had exited<br />
the party with Ed Skellings—seemingly gone for good.<br />
<br />
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<br />
friendship. Skellings added that Mailer was not his but “our” friend.<br />
<br />
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<br />
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<br />
high professorial adventures.” Ed really tempted me when he flew to New<br />
York and fell flush into one of those famous Norman Mailer Brooklyn<br />
Heights parties. At one of them, this conversation took place:<br />
<br />
“Norman,” Skellings said, “you’re going to Alaska.”<br />
<br />
Mailer replied, “The hell I am.”<br />
<br />
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<br />
a best friend be? Upon graduation, I joined Ed in Fairbanks, September 1964.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Our University English Department was well funded. We were told:<br />
“Bring up that Norman Mailer and Ralph Ellison to celebrate our next early<br />
snowy spring.”<br />
<br />
How could Mailer snub such a bountiful invitation? He almost did.<br />
He responded with three “existential stipulations.”<br />
<br />
(Late 1964 was the onset of Mailer’s more distinct political phase. There<br />
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.)<br />
<br />
When the Alaskan offer arrived, Mailer was probably in a high-risk political existential mood. Hence, three stipulations. His counteroffer: “Do the<br />
undoable, or else!” Mailer would visit Alaska only if:<br />
<br />
<blockquote> <br />
# He must be greeted at the Juneau Airport by the governor;<br />
# He must be escorted to the state capitol building and be permitted to address both Houses in session (a real political challenge);<br />
# He must be allowed to attend a Democratic Party caucus meeting.</blockquote><br />
<br />
All these “musts” sounded to Ed and me like a Maileresque “Catch-22.” These<br />
details were sent to us by Mailer saying, in essence, that he had vetoed the<br />
visit and was having ''realpolitik'' fun.<br />
<br />
How was Mailer expected to fully comprehend our Mike Gravel<br />
“connection”?<br />
<br />
Try to imagine Mailer’s surprise when, on February 6, 1965, Governor<br />
William Egan wrote to him:<br />
<br />
<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><br />
<br />
In ''The Presidential Papers'', Mailer defined politics as “the art of the possible.” Mike Gravel, indeed, was Alaska’s supreme artist.<br />
<br />
Skellings immediately wrote to Mailer that Mike Gravel, Speaker of the<br />
Alaska House, would take care of all his arrangements in Juneau and<br />
Anchorage before Mailer came to Fairbanks. Skellings wrote: “I imagine you<br />
should arrive Juneau on April 1 for the day with the Governor and Demo<br />
party caucusing on the second. Anchorage on the third. Then here for lecture with Ellison.”<br />
<br />
I did not witness, firsthand, Mailer’s initial ground-time in Alaska, but<br />
Mike Gravel did. On the next day in Anchorage, where Ed and I were still<br />
preparing for Day Two’s festivities, Mike told me that he and Bill Egan had<br />
greeted Mailer at the Juneau Airport and that Mailer was escorted on a comprehensive tour of the capital, climaxed with more than polite applause<br />
when the state’s guest of honor appeared at a joint session of both Houses of<br />
the Alaskan State Legislature: There was thunderous applause before and<br />
after Mailer’s undoubtedly tasty and serendipitous remarks. The finale<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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<br />
not have to say that Mailer’s Juneau stopover was both political and peaceful.<br />
<br />
Anchorage, the next stop, was no Juneau (the latter, tiny, inaccessible by<br />
road, a political microcosm and little else). Anchorage was Alaska’s largest<br />
city and cosmopolitan center. There, in a flight from Juneau, Gravel and<br />
Mailer landed at what was also the Speaker’s home city, which Mailer, after<br />
one fulsome day, would later in Fairbanks label Anchorage as “Little Las<br />
Vegas.”<br />
<br />
Mailer was not a one-night tourist. On the contrary, he was an in-depth<br />
observer and, in retrospect, I sensed what Mailer would soon perceive: just<br />
ignore those majestic seas and mountains and you could imagine yourself<br />
being in any small city in Nevada or Montana. Fairbanks, a real wilderness<br />
city, awaited Mailer, reputedly the leading urban American exponent of the<br />
German psychologist and existentialist philosopher, Karl Jaspers (1883–1969).<br />
High risk behavior with a dash of violence was Mailer’s literary reputation.<br />
Anchorage and Fairbanks awaited.<br />
<br />
Anchorage offered little time for unscripted events. Norman, Ed, and I<br />
took a few catnaps and slept over at the spacious home of Tom Bischel, a<br />
Gravel friend, influential businessman, and maestro of the Mailer visit.<br />
Gravel, however, was the official Anchorage host. He and Bischel asked<br />
Mailer about his urban wants and places he wanted to visit. Mailer was<br />
mindful of his notoriety, spawned by his violence-prone essay, “The White<br />
Negro,” and the live Black Power racial violence swirling in the Lower 48.<br />
Ralph Ellison, author of ''Invisible Man'', was going to debate this upstart<br />
“White Negro” in Fairbanks. Mailer’s one-day preoccupation was with<br />
minorities. We did some brief sightseeing, but mostly short stops in black<br />
neighborhoods where Mailer met with local residents and politicians. In<br />
mid-afternoon, we rushed to an Anchorage TV station for a scheduled videotaping of a Mailer-Gravel-Skellings-Kaufmann panel discussion for a<br />
statewide audience. The next stop was a media-inspired Mailer farewell.<br />
<br />
Anchorage’s Western Hotel was the site for a well-advertised, open door<br />
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.<br />
<br />
“Where’s that tough guy?”<br />
<br />
“Where’s that wife-knifer?”<br />
<br />
Just then, the vast reception room became surreal. I made the rounds for<br />
a few hours, keeping my eyes on the crowd. Each time Mailer was accosted,<br />
he remained gentlemanly and conciliatory. Then, suddenly, Mailer was out<br />
of the circle and into a ring, involved in a crazy sort of fisticuffs, mostly<br />
lunges and misses, but uniformed security made instant peace, and Mailer<br />
swaggered back into his inner circle, with an Irish smile and a fresh drink.<br />
<br />
By the end, I was a mixture of alcohol and fatigue, but I could decipher<br />
Gravel’s and Bischel’s smiles. Tonight had been an unforgettable success. A<br />
nightcap celebration was in order. Why not duplicate our daytime travels, the<br />
canvas of black precincts, with a midnight session at Anchorage’s prize black<br />
nightclub?<br />
<br />
I vaguely recall dim lights and faces, and piping-hot Soul music and a full<br />
rocking dance floor and I think I sat at a big table, full of converging<br />
“I-know-Norman-faces.” All was a murky mood. Then I saw the rarest of<br />
sights. I nudged Ed Skellings and said, “Look, Norman Mailer is dancing.”<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
===Citations===<br />
{{Reflist}}<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
===Works Cited===<br />
{{Refbegin|indent=yes}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=1986 |title=Critical Essays on Norman Mailer |location=Boston |publisher=G. K. Hall |ref=harv }}<br />
{{Refend}}<br />
{{Review}}<br />
{{DEFAULTSORT:Norman Mailer in "God's Attic"}}<br />
[[Category:V.2 2008]]<br />
[[Category:Articles]]</div>ChristinaPinkstonhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/Norman_Mailer_in_%E2%80%9CGod%E2%80%99s_Attic%E2%80%9D&diff=11256The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer in “God’s Attic”2020-09-10T22:48:17Z<p>ChristinaPinkston: added body up to pg 300</p>
<hr />
<div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}<br />
{{MR02}}<br />
{{byline|last=Kaufmann|first=Donald L.|abstract=An eyewitness to Norman Mailer’s five-day visit to Alaska in 1965 chronicles<br />
the details of the only visit Mailer made to Alaska.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08kauf}}<br />
<br />
The post-climax of Norman Mailer’s ''An American Dream'' (1965) features<br />
Stephen Rojack (some might say the author’s virtual alter ego) in the desert,<br />
outside Vegas, in a surreal phone booth, ideal for a celestial call to his dead<br />
lover, Cherry, now with Marilyn Monroe. But Rojack, uncharacteristically,<br />
remains speechless, hangs up the phone, and makes no phone call the next<br />
morning because this Mailer protagonist was “something like sane again.”<br />
Moreover, he is headed due south to the jungles of Guatemala and Yucatan.<br />
The starting point for such a seminal exit from America is the Vegas desert,<br />
just a casino chip’s throw from America’s real nadir point, Death Valley.<br />
<br />
There was nothing Arctic about Mailer’s 1965 novel, or was there?<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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<br />
in his lifetime that affect him as an existential experience. Alaska was one of<br />
those places for me.”<br />
<br />
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<br />
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,<br />
teaching while turning a Mailer dissertation into a Mailer book. I was there,<br />
live. I was also one of the few who were “hip” to the Alaskan academic magic<br />
that prompted (virtually tricked) a reluctant Mailer to visit Alaska.<br />
<br />
Edmund Skellings (later to become a Messiah of high tech art, a.k.a. the<br />
“Electric Poet”) was my best friend and fellow PhD candidate at the State<br />
University of Iowa. There, Ed and I first met the Norman Mailer.<br />
<br />
''Esquire'' (the home magazine of Mailer’s eight-part serialization [Jan–Aug<br />
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<br />
presentation, Ed and I pressed the flesh with Mailer—who responded with<br />
warm wit and a promise to keep this mellow threesome mood going that<br />
night at the party at Donald Justice’s home.<br />
<br />
I arrived a bit late at the poet’s house. Don Justice told me that Mailer and<br />
Mark Harris had shouted and wrestled and that Mailer, in a huff, had exited<br />
the party with Ed Skellings—seemingly gone for good.<br />
<br />
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<br />
friendship. Skellings added that Mailer was not his but “our” friend.<br />
<br />
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<br />
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<br />
high professorial adventures.” Ed really tempted me when he flew to New<br />
York and fell flush into one of those famous Norman Mailer Brooklyn<br />
Heights parties. At one of them, this conversation took place:<br />
:“Norman,” Skellings said, “you’re going to Alaska.”<br />
:Mailer replied, “The hell I am.”<br />
<br />
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<br />
a best friend be? Upon graduation, I joined Ed in Fairbanks, September 1964.<br />
<br />
What an operatic happening it was when two former Massachusetts high<br />
school friends reunited in Alaska, Ed Skellings and Mike Gravel. How fortuitous. Gravel, a liberal Democrat, was the Speaker of the Alaskan Lower<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
===Citations===<br />
{{Reflist}}<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
===Works Cited===<br />
{{Refbegin|indent=yes}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=1986 |title=Critical Essays on Norman Mailer |location=Boston |publisher=G. K. Hall |ref=harv }}<br />
{{Refend}}<br />
{{Review}}<br />
{{DEFAULTSORT:Norman Mailer in "God's Attic"}}<br />
[[Category:V.2 2008]]<br />
[[Category:Articles]]</div>ChristinaPinkstonhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/Norman_Mailer_in_%E2%80%9CGod%E2%80%99s_Attic%E2%80%9D&diff=11150The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer in “God’s Attic”2020-09-03T21:31:51Z<p>ChristinaPinkston: added works cited and categories</p>
<hr />
<div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}<br />
{{MR02}}<br />
{{byline|last=Kaufmann|first=Donald L.|abstract=An eyewitness to Norman Mailer’s five-day visit to Alaska in 1965 chronicles<br />
the details of the only visit Mailer made to Alaska.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08kauf}}<br />
==Citations==<br />
{{Reflist}}<br />
==Works Cited==<br />
{{Refbegin}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=1986 |title=Critical Essays on Norman Mailer |location=Boston |publisher=G.K. Hall |ref=harv }}<br />
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{{Review}}<br />
{{DEFAULTSORT:Norman Mailer in "God's Attic"}}<br />
[[Category:V.2 2008]]<br />
[[Category:Articles]]</div>ChristinaPinkstonhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/Norman_Mailer_in_%E2%80%9CGod%E2%80%99s_Attic%E2%80%9D&diff=11070The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer in “God’s Attic”2020-09-01T17:30:23Z<p>ChristinaPinkston: added header and byline</p>
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{{byline|last=Kaufmann|first=Donald L.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr02kauf}}</div>ChristinaPinkston