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

  </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,

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.

  </blockquote> Even so. We loved the guy. </blockquote>

  </blockquote> 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.