The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/On Reading Mailer Too Young: Difference between revisions
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</blockquote> Even so. We loved the guy. </blockquote> | </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. | </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. </blockquote> | ||
</blockquote>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. | </blockquote>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.</blockquote> | 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> | ||