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John W. Aldridge, April 23, 1965: Difference between revisions
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Dear Jack,<ref>[[w:John W. Aldridge|John W. Aldridge]] became friends with Mailer in 1951 shortly after Aldridge’s ''After the Lost Generation: A Study of Writers of Two Wars'' appeared earlier that year. It contains the first major appreciation of Mailer’s work; Mailer wrote an [[Introduction to After the Lost Generation|introduction to the 1985 reprint]]. Aldridge went on to write extensively about Mailer, including reviews of most of his books.</ref> | Dear Jack,<ref>[[w:John W. Aldridge|John W. Aldridge]] became friends with Mailer in 1951 shortly after Aldridge’s ''After the Lost Generation: A Study of Writers of Two Wars'' appeared earlier that year. It contains the first major appreciation of Mailer’s work; Mailer wrote an [[Introduction to After the Lost Generation|introduction to the 1985 reprint]]. Aldridge went on to write extensively about Mailer, including reviews of most of his books.</ref> | ||
I’ve held off sending you a batch of reviews, because there seemed no order to most of it. Just New York, dependably, whenever a review was done by someone who lived in New York, the review was bad. There is of course no vast mystery to this. The book was around in serial form for eight months and every literary mind in New York had an opportunity to test his message on every other literary mind, so the intellectual establishment was all bad. [[w:Phillip Rahv|Philip Rahv]] bad, Elizabeth Hardwick in Partisan Review,<ref>[[w:Elizabeth Hardwick (writer)|Elizabeth Hardwick]] wrote a scolding review that appeared in ''Partisan Review'' in the spring 1965.</ref> [[w:Stanley Edgar Hyman|Stanley Edgar Hyman]] in ''The New Leader'', so it will go. Only Richard Poirier in ''Commentary'' will be good, and that’s not out until June.<ref>[[w:Richard Poirier|Richard Poirier]] wrote a very warm review of the novel in ''Commentary'', June 1965. In 1972 he published ''Norman Mailer'', perhaps the most perceptive study of the first half of Mailer’s career.</ref> Also, grand surprise, ''National Review'' had a rave done by [[w:Joan Didion|Joan Didion]], who writes very nicely. At any rate, I’m getting together a batch of duplicates, and I’ll send them off with this letter to you. But could you send them back after you’ve glanced through them, for I think then I’ll be mailing the same set on to my daughter in Mexico. Finally, I decided to take out an ad in ''Partisan Review''. Elizabeth Hardwick’s review was so bad that I decided to oppose it with yours. Originally I planned to use your entire review on two pages, but William Phillips<ref>[[w:William Phillips (editor)|William Phillips]] was the longtime editor of ''Partisan Review''.</ref> decided that was impossible because of the smallness of the print. And so he cut a couple of hundred words out. I just hope he did the job well. I wasn’t here at the time, I was in Alaska, giving—what else—a lecture. And so was unable to see the copy before the deadline. He’s conscientious, however, and so it should be all right. Although I must say cutting that piece of yours is not so easy. | I’ve held off sending you a batch of reviews, because there seemed no order to most of it. Just New York, dependably, whenever a review was done by someone who lived in New York, the review was bad. There is of course no vast mystery to this. The book was around in serial form for eight months and every literary mind in New York had an opportunity to test his message on every other literary mind, so the intellectual establishment was all bad. [[w:Phillip Rahv|Philip Rahv]] bad, Elizabeth Hardwick in ''Partisan Review'',<ref>[[w:Elizabeth Hardwick (writer)|Elizabeth Hardwick]] wrote a scolding review that appeared in ''Partisan Review'' in the spring 1965.</ref> [[w:Stanley Edgar Hyman|Stanley Edgar Hyman]] in ''The New Leader'', so it will go. Only Richard Poirier in ''Commentary'' will be good, and that’s not out until June.<ref>[[w:Richard Poirier|Richard Poirier]] wrote a very warm review of the novel in ''Commentary'', June 1965. In 1972 he published ''Norman Mailer'', perhaps the most perceptive study of the first half of Mailer’s career.</ref> Also, grand surprise, ''National Review'' had a rave done by [[w:Joan Didion|Joan Didion]], who writes very nicely. At any rate, I’m getting together a batch of duplicates, and I’ll send them off with this letter to you. But could you send them back after you’ve glanced through them, for I think then I’ll be mailing the same set on to my daughter in Mexico. Finally, I decided to take out an ad in ''Partisan Review''. Elizabeth Hardwick’s review was so bad that I decided to oppose it with yours. Originally I planned to use your entire review on two pages, but William Phillips<ref>[[w:William Phillips (editor)|William Phillips]] was the longtime editor of ''Partisan Review''.</ref> decided that was impossible because of the smallness of the print. And so he cut a couple of hundred words out. I just hope he did the job well. I wasn’t here at the time, I was in Alaska, giving—what else—a lecture. And so was unable to see the copy before the deadline. He’s conscientious, however, and so it should be all right. Although I must say cutting that piece of yours is not so easy. | ||
The book received such violently opposed reviews that—forgive this weighted metaphor—it was as if the intellectual crust of the nation were suffering a seismographic fault. It was not just the virulence of the bad reviews, except they weren’t good on their own terms, and usually they are. The put-down was declarative rather than analytical; the weight of the indictment seemed to be placed by most New York intellectuals on the improbability of the plot, which is of course the given. That the narrative clichés were chosen precisely because I felt they had been despised so long that a novelistic magic had returned to them seems not to have occurred to Rahv and Co. And so the tone of their reviews is puzzled, irritable, full of loud statement and bad faith. Like an uncle displeased with a nephew and profoundly worried. But I go on too long. You’ve probably seen most of these reviews yourself, and the ones I send from the smaller papers will prove amusing I hope. | The book received such violently opposed reviews that—forgive this weighted metaphor—it was as if the intellectual crust of the nation were suffering a seismographic fault. It was not just the virulence of the bad reviews, except they weren’t good on their own terms, and usually they are. The put-down was declarative rather than analytical; the weight of the indictment seemed to be placed by most New York intellectuals on the improbability of the plot, which is of course the given. That the narrative clichés were chosen precisely because I felt they had been despised so long that a novelistic magic had returned to them seems not to have occurred to Rahv and Co. And so the tone of their reviews is puzzled, irritable, full of loud statement and bad faith. Like an uncle displeased with a nephew and profoundly worried. But I go on too long. You’ve probably seen most of these reviews yourself, and the ones I send from the smaller papers will prove amusing I hope. | ||