The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Norman’s Crystals

Written by
Christopher Busa

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Abstract: A long-time Provincetown resident, writer, and magazine editor describes the recently founded Norman Mailer Writers Colony and recounts the importance of Norman Mailer’s life and work to the mission of the Colony.

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URL: https://prmlr.us/mr03bus

NORMAN’S CRYSTALS

CHRISTOPHER BUSA

Larry Schiller, the executive director and co-founder with Norris Mailer of the fledgling Norman Mailer Writers Colony in Provincetown, told me that a year ago he knew little about how to run a writer’s colony. He is still trying to figure out how much he knows, now that the workshops have begun in the large house that Norman lived in up to the time of his death. The idea of gathering writers in this brick mini-mansion-by-the-sea is to perpetuate the kind of life and activity that fueled Norman’s own writing. Schiller, the photographer, filmmaker, longtime collaborator with Norman, and a founding member of The Norman Mailer Society, envisions the Colony as something of a performance piece, an enactment that takes place in the very house where Norman wrote the bulk of his books. Indeed, Schiller is actively filming long segments of interactions and conversations. His concept of creating the Colony must have its model in documentary filmmaking, and may embody Boswellian lessons in Schiller’s unstoppable commitment to this project. Johnson once said to Boswell, “Why do you write down my sayings?”

There is history in every crevice of the East End neighborhood; the fellows live nearby in a large house divided into condominiums with glimpses of the sun-spanked bay. In the backyard of their house, a used car, bought for summer use, died before a Labor Day in the late sixties, and people gathered around a hole dug in the ground by a bulldozer. The lapsed automobile was interred vertically with its windshield skyward. Norman was writing Of a Fire on the Moon, and wandered out from his studio on this sunny afternoon to witness the strange religious ceremony that he wrote about in the chapter titled “Burial by the Sea.”

The Colony was born on the occasion of Norman’s death. Four months earlier Schiller was visiting and sitting in Mailer’s dining room. Norman looked up at him and noted, “I’m prepared to die, Larry. I won’t be alive by the end of this year.” Schiller found élan in the example of Mailer’s wild ride through life, meeting ambitious challenges or failing so completely as to succeed artistically. Mailer’s failures were akin to those Joyce spoke about: “A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”

People always asked Norman why he didn’t write an autobiography. He answered me in an interview that was published in Provincetown Arts in 1999: “The main reason is that I don’t want to use up my crystals. What I mean is that certain experiences have an inner purity to them. They remind me of a crystal. I use the word advisedly. Your imagination can project through this experience in one direction, and you can have one piece of fiction. You can project through the same crystal in another direction and have another piece of fiction. What I call a crystal experience is not a simple one, rather a most complex one, but it has this other quality that it can be studied from many different angles to produce many results. So, whenever you write about a crystal experience, you are dynamiting one of your richest narrative sources. I don’t want to write an autobiography, because that would mean I’m done as a writer. I’ve never written about any of my wives, for just that reason.”

Norman seems to be saying that the light of his imagination is cast in a cone through a crystal experience, becoming prism-like in its power to divide the light into the revelation of the full spectrum of its colors.

The inaugural events of the first weeks of the Colony included Robert Begiebing’s workshop focused on “self-editing for writers.” J. Michael Lennon gave a workshop on novelistic techniques of the new journalism. A week later Kaylie Jones would be teaching memoir. An award sponsored by the Colony and Provincetown Arts Press selected Salvatore Scibona as the winner of the 2009 Norman Mailer Award for Exception Writing on Cape Cod. Scibona’s novel, The End, was nominated last year for the National Book Award. He wrote most of the book in Provincetown as a fellow and future writing coordinator of the Fine Arts Work Center.