The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Encounters with Mailer: Difference between revisions

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{{byline |last=Gordon |first=Andrew M. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04gor |abstract=Norman Mailer spoke to a crowd at the University of California, Berkeley in the fall of 1972, toward the end of the Nixon-McGovern campaign. It was a memorable evening, raucous and rowdy, as his speech was heckled and disrupted frequently. In 1986, Mailer came to the University of Florida in Gainesville in February 1986 to give a talk entitled “The Art of Writing.” In 1972, it was one of the tempestuous Nixon years: the Vietnam War was still raging, the country was facing an election, and Mailer confronted vociferous protesters. In contrast to that wild evening, by 1986 it was the quiescent Reagan era, the tranquilized Eighties. The times were tamer, and Mailer too had aged and mellowed. }}

Suddenly, a man enveloped from head to toe in a furry pink costume bunny-hopped onto the stage. He was a Bay Area grotesque, a walking phallus, a local character who called himself “The People’s Prick.” The author strode up to this pink furry outrage—we expected him to start swinging— but he only removed the sign pinned to the ambulatory shmuck. It read, “Mailer than thou.” Mailer placed it in front of the lectern. “One down, 8,700 to go.”

The times were tamer, and Mailer too had aged and mellowed. He was dapper in a double-breasted blue blazer, white, open-collared shirt, and grey slacks. No more blue jeans for his public performances. At sixty-three, he looked stouter and more wrinkled and his hair thinner and whiter then when I had last seen him–but then, I was fourteen years older too. And this bored Florida student crowd was a far cry from the Berkeley rebels who had alternately cheered, booed, and heckled and disrupted Mailer’s speech in 1972. Some of these UF students had actually been required to attend by a journalism professor. The headline in the Florida student newspaper the next day told the tale: “'''Meet Mailer the lamb: Dry audience dampens author’s''' {{pg|403|404}} '''rhetoric'''” (Hagy, Jim, ''The Independent Florida Alligator'', 26 Feb. 1986, p. 1.)

Afterwards there were the inevitable questions about Mailer’s reputation as a male chauvinist. “I’ve been called a sexist. I’ve been called macho. . . . Women don’t know what they’re talking about....Women have been telling men how to live in New York for the last century.” Some in the audience groaned; others laughed.

At the reception, I asked Mailer about his projected trilogy. When his novel ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983) appeared, it was announced as the first of a fictional trilogy beginning in ancient Egypt and stretching into the far future. Mailer said the trilogy was now “on ice.” He said that he spent eleven years on the Egyptian novel, that it could stand by itself, and that he felt no great impulse to continue. He also admitted he was hesitant about writing about the future because science fiction was not his genre. He didn’t know enough about computers, for one thing. I said I taught science fiction, and he asked, “Is it really close to magic?” I mentioned Arthur C. Clarke’s remark: "any sufficiently advanced technology is close to magic." Although Mailer majored in engineering at Harvard and wrote ''Of a Fire on the Moon'' about the Apollo astronauts, he had always deeply distrusted technology and preferred magic.  

He said that the American government had been lying to us about Russia throughout the Cold War to exaggerate the threat. He found Russia in 1985 not to be a great power but a sad place, a Third World country, like the {{pg|405|406}} United States if it had been devastated by war and then run by the Army. He called it more “an Army state” then a police state: “In the Army, everyone gets drunk as a way of saying, ‘I don’t give a shit about your institution.’” That, he claimed, accounts for the appalling rate of alcoholism in Russia.