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At the small church college I attended from 1959–1961 in Kentucky—first because I had fallen in love with the Kentucky River and then because I thought I was in love with a girl at that college—Mailer was not present on the list of authors who were talked about openly. His books were not in the college library. By the time I went to New York during the Christmas season of 1960 I had heard that Mailer had stabbed his wife, had spent some time at Bellevue, and had only managed to avoid prison time because his wife would not press charges. Some people that I talked to then held Mailer up as the prime example of a great talent laid waste by drink and drugs. I did not know if this were true. I was in Brooklyn for the Christmas season to sing with the Salvation Army on the streets, and to dress up as Santa Claus and ring the bell for donations. I couldn’t find any other Christmas break employment and the Sallies offered room and board. And I wanted to be in New York City. When my Santa Claus gig ended I moved from Brooklyn to Greenwich Village where I slept wherever I could find folks hospitable to young folksingers and would-be writers. There was so much hospitality that I had to get away from it for a few days, so I stayed at the old run-down Broadway Central Hotel because I’d read that Thomas Wolfe stayed there.It was so cold that winter that there wasn’t any singing outdoors in Washington Square, but I sang in some coffeehouses, the ''Café Wha?'', the ''Gaslight'' and other joints, and I sang at the Monday night hootenanny at ''Gerde’s Folk City''. At those hoots, we all got our fifteen minutes on stage. Even a kid named Robert Zimmerman, who was already calling himself Bob Dylan, although his name meant nothing at the time, only got fifteen minutes on stage in those days. The Village coffeehouses swarmed with winos and leftover Beats and some good kid-singers and older jazzmen and Uptown folks slumming and I suppose I saw many well-known writers that I did not recognize. I did not really care about meeting any writers although it would have been nice{{pg|373|374}}to see Kenneth Patchen who was, in my book then, in a league by himself. But I knew he could not be there in his wheelchair. One night somebody pointed out Allan Ginsberg to me. I liked ''Howl'' when I read it in the tenth grade, the year it came out. People said that they sometimes saw Mailer in the jazz and folk joints in the Village but if I ever saw him there I did not know it. But it was due to my momentary spell of infatuation with folksinging in Greenwich Village that I first saw Norman Mailer.  
At the small church college I attended from 1959–1961 in Kentucky—first because I had fallen in love with the Kentucky River and then because I thought I was in love with a girl at that college—Mailer was not present on the list of authors who were talked about openly. His books were not in the college library. By the time I went to New York during the Christmas season of 1960 I had heard that Mailer had stabbed his wife, had spent some time at Bellevue, and had only managed to avoid prison time because his wife would not press charges. Some people that I talked to then held Mailer up as the prime example of a great talent laid waste by drink and drugs. I did not know if this were true. I was in Brooklyn for the Christmas season to sing with the Salvation Army on the streets, and to dress up as Santa Claus and ring the bell for donations. I couldn’t find any other Christmas break employment and the Sallies offered room and board. And I wanted to be in New York City. When my Santa Claus gig ended I moved from Brooklyn to Greenwich Village where I slept wherever I could find folks hospitable to young folksingers and would-be writers. There was so much hospitality that I had to get away from it for a few days, so I stayed at the old run-down Broadway Central Hotel because I’d read that Thomas Wolfe stayed there.It was so cold that winter that there wasn’t any singing outdoors in Washington Square, but I sang in some coffeehouses, the ''Café Wha?'', the ''Gaslight'' and other joints, and I sang at the Monday night hootenanny at ''Gerde’s Folk City''. At those hoots, we all got our fifteen minutes on stage. Even a kid named Robert Zimmerman, who was already calling himself Bob Dylan, although his name meant nothing at the time, only got fifteen minutes on stage in those days. The Village coffeehouses swarmed with winos and leftover Beats and some good kid-singers and older jazzmen and Uptown folks slumming and I suppose I saw many well-known writers that I did not recognize. I did not really care about meeting any writers although it would have been nice{{pg|373|374}}to see Kenneth Patchen who was, in my book then, in a league by himself. But I knew he could not be there in his wheelchair. One night somebody pointed out Allan Ginsberg to me. I liked ''Howl'' when I read it in the tenth grade, the year it came out. People said that they sometimes saw Mailer in the jazz and folk joints in the Village but if I ever saw him there I did not know it. But it was due to my momentary spell of infatuation with folksinging in Greenwich Village that I first saw Norman Mailer.  


Because of the girl back in Kentucky that everybody but me thought of as my intended, I went back belatedly to attend the college winter quarter. Then, either during spring break or on one of my week-long hitchhiking trips AWOL from college, I was in the Village again in early April. The cops were harassing folksingers in the streets and tension was building over the singing in Washington Square. We sang “We Shall Not Be Moved” and made up words about Mayor Wagner and other city officials. I was lucky not to be in the Square the day the cops cracked down on the folksingers and hauled wagonloads away to jail. I was in the Library up on 42nd Street trying to read all the way through Hemingway’s ''Across the River and into the Trees''. Word of the crackdown and assault spread like wildfire and I was still in town a few days later when the protests and right-to-sing meetings started. I went to a few of these gatherings including one that was a kind of protest party in somebody’s place near the Judson Memorial Church.  
Because of the girl back in Kentucky that everybody but me thought of as my intended, I went back belatedly to attend the college winter quarter. Then, either during spring break or on one of my week-long hitchhiking trips AWOL from college, I was in the Village again in early April. The cops were harassing folksingers in the streets and tension was building over the singing in Washington Square. We sang “We Shall Not Be Moved” and made up words about Mayor Wagner and other city officials. I was lucky not to be in the Square the day the cops cracked down on the folksingers and hauled wagonloads away to jail. I was in the Library up on 42<sup>nd</sup> Street trying to read all the way through Hemingway’s ''Across the River and into the Trees''. Word of the crackdown and assault spread like wildfire and I was still in town a few days later when the protests and right-to-sing meetings started. I went to a few of these gatherings including one that was a kind of protest party in somebody’s place near the Judson Memorial Church.  


At that event, more party than protest, there were many Village luminaries present, standing around talking in little circles with drinks in their hands, doing what I then regarded disdainfully as their dismal Prufrockian dance. A few of us proudly ''authentic'' kid-folksingers were singing in a far corner of that large warehouse-like room. During a break between songs, a tweedy, pipe-smoking professorial-looking older man that I talked to about being a writer said: “That’s Norman Mailer over there.” He gestured with his pipe toward the far side of the crowded room. “Mailer thinks he’s Hemingway but he doesn’t really know who Hemingway is, and he doesn’t write anything like him. And besides, Hemingway’s very sick now.” I remember staring at his lizard-lidded eyes behind thick black rectangular glasses and thinking ''what do you really know about Mailer and Hemingway'' but I said nothing. I put down my guitar to head over and introduce myself to Norman Mailer. I knew it was Mailer from all the pictures I’d seen. On my way across the large room I stopped at the outer fringe of one circle of talkers, the circle where Moe Asch—head of Folkways Records—held forth. He was the{{pg|374|375}}real reason I had come to that gathering, having heard he’d be there. More than anything, I wanted Moe Asch to offer me a recording contract with Folkways. Just like every other kid-folksinger in the room, in the Village, in the entire country—that’s what I wanted then. (Years later, I had a chance to make a Folkways album with Asch but I was too busy writing about Faulkner and Hemingway to take time off from my promotion-and-tenure quest.) That night in 1961 I listened to Asch talk about the record business for a few minutes, and when I turned to make my way through the crowd toward Mailer I saw his shoulders and the back of his head going through the door, leaving the gathering. I was a little disappointed I didn’t get to talk to him but I wasn’t going to chase him down the steps and into the street. So that was when I first ''saw'' Mailer. I went back to the singing corner and played guitar and sang some more. That night some girl gave me a copy of ''The Old Man and the Sea'', inscribed to me and my “future great writings.”  
At that event, more party than protest, there were many Village luminaries present, standing around talking in little circles with drinks in their hands, doing what I then regarded disdainfully as their dismal Prufrockian dance. A few of us proudly ''authentic'' kid-folksingers were singing in a far corner of that large warehouse-like room. During a break between songs, a tweedy, pipe-smoking professorial-looking older man that I talked to about being a writer said: “That’s Norman Mailer over there.” He gestured with his pipe toward the far side of the crowded room. “Mailer thinks he’s Hemingway but he doesn’t really know who Hemingway is, and he doesn’t write anything like him. And besides, Hemingway’s very sick now.” I remember staring at his lizard-lidded eyes behind thick black rectangular glasses and thinking ''what do you really know about Mailer and Hemingway'' but I said nothing. I put down my guitar to head over and introduce myself to Norman Mailer. I knew it was Mailer from all the pictures I’d seen. On my way across the large room I stopped at the outer fringe of one circle of talkers, the circle where Moe Asch—head of Folkways Records—held forth. He was the{{pg|374|375}}real reason I had come to that gathering, having heard he’d be there. More than anything, I wanted Moe Asch to offer me a recording contract with Folkways. Just like every other kid-folksinger in the room, in the Village, in the entire country—that’s what I wanted then. (Years later, I had a chance to make a Folkways album with Asch but I was too busy writing about Faulkner and Hemingway to take time off from my promotion-and-tenure quest.) That night in 1961 I listened to Asch talk about the record business for a few minutes, and when I turned to make my way through the crowd toward Mailer I saw his shoulders and the back of his head going through the door, leaving the gathering. I was a little disappointed I didn’t get to talk to him but I wasn’t going to chase him down the steps and into the street. So that was when I first ''saw'' Mailer. I went back to the singing corner and played guitar and sang some more. That night some girl gave me a copy of ''The Old Man and the Sea'', inscribed to me and my “future great writings.”  
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Sometime in April 1991 I drove up to Albany for the “Telling the Truth Symposium” put on by the New York State Writers Institute. I particularly wanted to see Gay Talese again and to hear the “Is Fiction Truer than Truth?” panel with Mailer, Mary Gordon, and William Kennedy. I knew all three of them and it seemed like a fine mix for some fireworks or at least lively discussion, with Gordon and Mailer, and Kennedy’s ''politesse'' between them. It wasn’t exactly fireworks, but after Gordon held forth at length on the Catholic novel, it was Mailer’s turn to say something about the Jewish novel. When Mary kept interrupting Norman, even on the subject of Jewishness, he said what he said. Suffice it to say that Mailer won the debate, scoring top points in the categories of literary acuity and wit. When I talked to Mailer{{pg|388|389}}after the program, he again made a reference to the phantom PEN-punch at the St. Moritz.
Sometime in April 1991 I drove up to Albany for the “Telling the Truth Symposium” put on by the New York State Writers Institute. I particularly wanted to see Gay Talese again and to hear the “Is Fiction Truer than Truth?” panel with Mailer, Mary Gordon, and William Kennedy. I knew all three of them and it seemed like a fine mix for some fireworks or at least lively discussion, with Gordon and Mailer, and Kennedy’s ''politesse'' between them. It wasn’t exactly fireworks, but after Gordon held forth at length on the Catholic novel, it was Mailer’s turn to say something about the Jewish novel. When Mary kept interrupting Norman, even on the subject of Jewishness, he said what he said. Suffice it to say that Mailer won the debate, scoring top points in the categories of literary acuity and wit. When I talked to Mailer{{pg|388|389}}after the program, he again made a reference to the phantom PEN-punch at the St. Moritz.


One last encounter germane to my Hemingway-Mailer motif here was a night at the Lotos Club in the early 1990s that stands sharply at attention in memory. The Lotos Club, in NewYork off Fifth Avenue in the East 60s, is one of America’s oldest and most elegant private literary clubs. Mark Twain was a member, as were many other literary and arts luminaries—a long list. And I have been a member for over thirty years; in the period when Bill Kennedy chaired the Club Literary Committee I went to nearly all the literary evenings he organized at the club—for example, the occasion that Kennedy writes about in his piece, “Norman Mailer: An Eavesdropper at the Lotos Club” (in ''Riding the Yellow Trolley Car''). But the night I am remembering here was a different occasion (if I remember rightly) in the early 1990s when William Styron was being honored, not long after the publication of ''Darkness Visible''. After the program I went downstairs to the famous Grill Room with Kennedy, Mailer, and Styron, where a fascinating literary conversation ensued, crystallizing certain key points regarding the state of twentieth-century American literature.  
One last encounter germane to my Hemingway-Mailer motif here was a night at the Lotos Club in the early 1990s that stands sharply at attention in memory. The Lotos Club, in New York off Fifth Avenue in the East 60s, is one of America’s oldest and most elegant private literary clubs. Mark Twain was a member, as were many other literary and arts luminaries—a long list. And I have been a member for over thirty years; in the period when Bill Kennedy chaired the Club Literary Committee I went to nearly all the literary evenings he organized at the club—for example, the occasion that Kennedy writes about in his piece, “Norman Mailer: An Eavesdropper at the Lotos Club” (in ''Riding the Yellow Trolley Car''). But the night I am remembering here was a different occasion (if I remember rightly) in the early 1990s when William Styron was being honored, not long after the publication of ''Darkness Visible''. After the program I went downstairs to the famous Grill Room with Kennedy, Mailer, and Styron, where a fascinating literary conversation ensued, crystallizing certain key points regarding the state of twentieth-century American literature.  


It started out genially enough in the almost deserted Lotos Grill Room, in the company of the famous nudes hanging on the walls around us. Kennedy and Mailer discussed other writers, and I talked with Styron about Robert Penn Warren. He had died a few years before, and we both said how much we loved and missed Red. I mentioned that Warren had been my sponsor for Lotos membership in 1978. We then talked about how Eleanor and the children were doing. At some point, I mentioned that my other sponsor for Lotos membership was Mary Hemingway. Mary and I had been friends for several years and I was pleased that the first woman member in the long history of the Lotos had been my co-sponsor with Warren. At this point, Styron made some crack about Hemingway—I don’t remember precisely everything he said but it had to do with how vastly over-rated Hemingway was and how his work “was inimical”—this I recall exactly because I always remember when somebody uses words like ''inimical'' or ''eschew''—“to good writing by all the writers who followed after him.” I remember thinking ''uh-oh I hope Norman didn’t hear that'' but he did and immediately abandoned his other conversation and entered what instantly became the fray. It did seem rather graceless for Styron to say such a thing in the presence of Mailer. But{{pg|389|390}}Styron looked very frail that night, his visage showing signs of fragility from his recent illness, so I gave him a pass. At first.
It started out genially enough in the almost deserted Lotos Grill Room, in the company of the famous nudes hanging on the walls around us. Kennedy and Mailer discussed other writers, and I talked with Styron about Robert Penn Warren. He had died a few years before, and we both said how much we loved and missed Red. I mentioned that Warren had been my sponsor for Lotos membership in 1978. We then talked about how Eleanor and the children were doing. At some point, I mentioned that my other sponsor for Lotos membership was Mary Hemingway. Mary and I had been friends for several years and I was pleased that the first woman member in the long history of the Lotos had been my co-sponsor with Warren. At this point, Styron made some crack about Hemingway—I don’t remember precisely everything he said but it had to do with how vastly over-rated Hemingway was and how his work “was inimical”—this I recall exactly because I always remember when somebody uses words like ''inimical'' or ''eschew''—“to good writing by all the writers who followed after him.” I remember thinking ''uh-oh I hope Norman didn’t hear that'' but he did and immediately abandoned his other conversation and entered what instantly became the fray. It did seem rather graceless for Styron to say such a thing in the presence of Mailer. But{{pg|389|390}}Styron looked very frail that night, his visage showing signs of fragility from his recent illness, so I gave him a pass. At first.
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