The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/On Reading Mailer Too Young: Difference between revisions

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 like a white man. And we learned stuff like, to kill a Jap sentry, you should stab him down behind the collarbone, not up into the kidney. A piece of advice that could save your life. I mean, to get that kind of lesson, you had to
 go to Stag Magazine and Men’s Bluebook, and half the time, no one would sell them to us.
-  This kind of special knowledge set off top-of-the-lungs debates over
+  </blockquote>This kind of special knowledge set off top-of-the-lungs debates over Mailer among the Junior High tuna sandwich-and-literary crowd. We broke down along two lines, both of a physical nature. The question? Who could Mailer take if it came down to a rough-and-tumble? The main contender, for some reason, seemed to be Jack London, who had mentioned some kind of Japanese death grip in his book The Assassination Bureau Ltd. Mailer was thought to be the victor in this contest because he knew how to stab Jap sentries and because he’d been trained in dirty fighting and hand-to-hand combat (as we’d read in ''The Naked and the Dead''.) However, in the minus column, among the literary guys walking home from school or in the cafeteria, Mailer had endorsed, on the cover, a volume called Jiu Jitsu Complete,
-Mailer among the Junior High tuna sandwich-and-literary crowd. We broke down along two lines, both of a physical nature. The question? Who could Mailer take if it came down to a rough-and-tumble? The main contender, for some reason, seemed to be Jack London, who had mentioned some kind of Japanese death grip in his book The Assassination Bureau Ltd. Mailer was thought to be the victor in this contest because he knew how to stab Jap sentries and because he’d been trained in dirty fighting and hand-to-hand combat (as we’d read in ''The Naked and the Dead''.) However, in the minus column, among the literary guys walking home from school or in the cafeteria, Mailer had endorsed, on the cover, a volume called Jiu Jitsu Complete,
 an early book on the Japanese combative art. This book detailed moves that we regarded as so unusable, you couldn’t even get them to work on your little brother. And believe me, we tried.
   Even so. We loved the guy.
   He was of our father’s generation (and experience), but Mailer on the page seemed more like some impossible, beloved older brother. He might smack us around a little but if anybody else got wise? Forget about it. He was a guy we envied but could trust to tell us the truth. He let us in on the secrets. He told us, “Don’t listen to Dad; it’s OK to swagger.”He said, “Do like me, trust your own experience.” And unlike almost any other writers we knew about, alive and hitting the typewriter keys, he got himself into trouble. Big trouble. More than us. But it went further than that. From Mailer, and probably unconsciously from our fathers, we absorbed the powerful{{pg|416#|next page 417#}} motor that, I’m convinced, was greatly behind the vast upheavals of the period between to. This was the attitude—often unspoken—of The War’s enlisted man: Don’t trust them, they’re lying to you, they’ll get you killed, shoot first and ask questions later, everyday above ground is a good day, is this trip really necessary, everyone’s scared, everyone dies, just keep moving forward and don’t worry about a thing.
   	Study that attitude carefully, add Mad Magazine, Capt. American and the rest, mix it with Mel Brooks and national travesty along with a pinch of the state of the world and I bet that you’ll find a pretty direct route to long hair, fringed jackets and everything else that was counter to culture.
-  But even better—we could double back on that attitude and throw Mailer against our fathers, knock the old man off the Oedipal perch. The War, as we called it, hung over everything back then. In the neighborhood, everybody’s father had been in The War, uncles thrilled us with the bullet wounds they’d caught at Pearl Harbor, the father of the kid around the corner downed beer after beer watching Guadalcanal Diary on Saturday afternoon TV and slurred to us how he’d killed Japs, too, just like that, just like in the movies. The guy next door showed us a dented Nazi helmet in his basement, the blood still caked and visible inside. The War was almost a form of cosmic, religious authority. To have been in The War was to “know,” although to “know” what exactly nobody could quite say.It took some thought and some years in the land of the living to learn that this guy you met, say, who’d gone in on the first wave at Iwo Jima? Well, he turned out to be fat, stupid, afraid of his boss, more terrified of his wife, and if you were foolish enough to ask him, he’d give you the dumbest advice possible. He knew nothing. It could happen.And to absorb that shock, there was little else besides The Naked and the Dead. Because Mailer, by putting The War out there as a detailed, finite human action, had almost pulled The War down off its celestial perch. You couldn’t imagine your father walking through The War, say, as in Battle Cry, but the old man’s failures, foibles, and shortcomings were apparent in Mailer’s characters. Through our eyes, trained by comics, Mailer did just fine. We got the feeling from The Naked and the Dead that regular guys fought The War and came out of it regular guys, most of them deeply fugged up, but still regular. To qualify as one of Mailer’s existential heroes, though, you had to do a lot more than that.
+  But even better—we could double back on that attitude and throw Mailer against our fathers, knock the old man off the Oedipal perch. The War, as we called it, hung over everything back then. In the neighborhood, everybody’s father had been in The War, uncles thrilled us with the bullet wounds they’d caught at Pearl Harbor, the father of the kid around the corner downed beer after beer watching Guadalcanal Diary on Saturday afternoon TV and slurred to us how he’d killed Japs, too, just like that, just like in the movies. The guy next door showed us a dented Nazi helmet in his basement, the blood still caked and visible inside. The War was almost a form of cosmic, religious authority. To have been in The War was to “know,” although to “know” what exactly nobody could quite say.It took some thought and some years in the land of the living to learn that this guy you met, say, who’d gone in on the first wave at Iwo Jima? Well, he turned out to be fat, stupid, afraid of his boss, more terrified of his wife, and if you were foolish enough to ask him, he’d give you the dumbest advice possible. He knew nothing. It could happen. And to absorb that shock, there was little else besides The Naked and the Dead. Because Mailer, by putting The War out there as a detailed, finite human action, had almost pulled The War down off its celestial perch. You couldn’t imagine your father walking through The War, say, as in Battle Cry, but the old man’s failures, foibles, and shortcomings were apparent in Mailer’s characters. Through our eyes, trained by comics, Mailer did just fine. We got the feeling from The Naked and the Dead that regular guys fought The War and came out of it regular guys, most of them deeply fugged up, but still regular. To qualify as one of Mailer’s existential heroes, though, you had to do a lot more than that.
 And another thing about Mailer. He was a cocky, stay-the-hell-awayfrom-synagogue Jew. Sure, I know all about the God business—but nobody {{pg|417#|418#}} at our lunch table believed that part of his outlook, and I have to admit that when Mailer’s “On God” came out, I still suffered a slight rumbling that he took this stuff seriously. To us, see, at thirteen, this was a twofisted, blooded GI veteran Jew who wrote incredible stuff and cowboyed around like a champ. There wasn’t a one of us, not that I knew, who hadn’t quit Hebrew School the New York minute after saying some prayers and getting some pens. I’d even go as far as to say that the Hebrew Schools of that era turned out as many non-believers (proportionally) as the World War Two infantry turned out pacifists. And Mailer fit right in there, he’d faced and overcome the murderous demand to be “nice” especially in America and especially in our neighborhood where many of the fathers were not only Depression kids and veterans of The War, but also soon to be indicted on various counts of fraud, embezzlement, money laundering, ponzi schemes, you name it. Mailer knew our hearts, and he’d be there alongside us when we needed him. I mean, hey. We’d read The Sun Also Rises, and we knew what the literary lion of masculinity thought of Robert Cohn. And here was Mailer (in Advertisements For Myself) writing that Hemingway had the “shrewd mind of a small-town boy” because Mailer came across to us, even as boys, as shrewd, sure, but every inch the urban Jew—exactly the guy we needed. Harvard or not, like it or not.
   So that was Mailer to the thirteen-year-old mind of the year that (as Andy Warhol said in Popism) “everything went young” (and at thirteen we didn’t have a choice.)