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

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 us.