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

  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.</blockquote>

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.

But there was something that we didn’t get out of Mailer at that age, something that I now see as central to his writing and his outlook—the overbearing presence of the threat of personal failure. The demand that one turn up the heat and try not to fail oneself. That seems to power the drive towards Ego and the thoughts always of “the big novel” and all those other adventures. At thirteen, the consciousness of personal failure may be intense in the adolescent hormones, but the spread is pretty thin. At thirteen, a person will secretly fear and struggle with himself and pick up unconsciously on the mood of the elders of the house, failures not articulated that make their way in through the pores. Still, in the understanding, there’s only the dimmest whiff of how deeply one can fail personally. And I don’t think we picked up on, for example, what happened to Croft when he failed to climb Mt. Anaka and the platoon was chased downhill by bees. We didn’t fathom {{pg|418#|419#}} what Croft had failed when he looked back at the mountain as he and the others left the island.  

I only met Mailer once, about fifteen years later. I was overseas, living in London at the time, working on a book and making a living working for the one commercial talk radio station in town, LBC. This was at the end of the s, early s, and Mailer came over to do some PR for Ancient Evenings. It had just been published in paperback. He was interviewed on the air, and then afterwards, as he was rushed out of the studio and escorted to the exit through the newsroom and production area, our crowd of young men timidly, cautiously gathered around him. One by one we approached him— reporters, writers, announcers, producers—and he slowed down and he began to talk. We were all in our late twenties up through about thirty-five, I think, and we started to cluster around Mailer and shyly ask him questions, ask to shake his hand, we traded nice-to-meet ya’s and wound up talking to him about everything. And damned if he wasn’t vastly enjoying himself. Mailer couldn’t have been more generous with his time or attention. I remember thinking even when it was happening, that ol’ Norman was being surrounded by “his boys,” the guys who’d grown up with him in the old neighborhood, the neighborhood of his books. And when we’d finished talking about those books, we talked about London, good pubs, beer, and then we ended up talking about boxing, and Mailer demonstrated a couple of combinations for us, throwing a left and right hook, an uppercut, gracefully moving with the blows. I remember him as somehow both completely relaxed and intensely in-the-moment (as actors tell it), having a hell of a good time and seeming to be genuinely interested in what any of us guys had to say. He was there a long time. And he didn’t leave until the PR woman came over, told him he was late, told him he had to go, and pulled him away from