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

{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>Encounters with Mailer}}

{{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.}}

So, when I heard that the great man was coming to town, Uncle Norman giving a lecture at Berkeley, all the mixed feelings leaped to the surface, like Dexedrine warring with seconal in the head. After grappling so long with his shadow, to confront the legend in the flesh—I felt as much apprehension as anticipation.

“There’s gonna be trouble,” I heard some prophesy gleefully. “Woman’s Lib ain’t gonna let him get away with it.” {{pg|396|397}}

The scene as I approached Zellerbach Auditorium seemed to bear out their warnings. In front of the ticket line, a handful of demonstrators were holding up their placards: “A little bit of rape is good for a man’s soul, says Norman Mailer.” Surprisingly, the militants were primarily gays, not women. Super macho meets the army of gays. It seemed to promise a classic contest: ''Classic Comics'', perhaps.

“Sweet heckler, all I heard was ''schmuck''. I’m sure you don’t know the {{pg|397|398}} meaning of the word. The meaning of ''shmuck'' is ''cunt''. And if I’m a Male Chauvinist Pig, I could not possibly be a cunt. God would not so honor me. So ‘''shmuck you''.{{' "}}

The crowd was vastly amused by these sideshows even as I was finding them more and more tiresome. I resented the protestors for their interruptions, and I resented Mailer for encouraging them. Was he only going to play the clown this evening?{{pg|398|399}}

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 crowd was Mailer’s for the rest of the evening and he began to get good. He read from his new book about the 1972 presidential campaign, ''St. George and the Godfather'', he talked about the “totalitarianism” of the woman’s movement and of Richard Nixon, he considered the “monstrous disproportions” of the Vietnam war, with its “moral atrocities that bugger the mind,” and he spoke of the blight that rests upon the twentieth century, which he called “lividity of the will.”

Then he denounced the arrogance and self-righteousness of the New Left {{pg|399|400}} and said that in the years before us we must begin to question all our motives. “Because finally, all evident before us, is the knowledge that ''we are all full of shit''—from top to bottom.”

The protestors went down to defeat a second time. Whereas Mailer was familiar with every argument they could muster, they had never read his books and knew his ideas only as clumsy slogans. {{" '}}It is better to rape than to masterbate’ —Norman Mailer” one of their placards read. They couldn’t even spell “masturbate” right. So, it was no contest. Compared to Mailer, the crowd seemed weak and unfocused. He was a master of words; everything in him had been concentrated toward the shaping of himself, the honing of his razor-sharp wit. It is the kind of weapon you must develop to survive in the jungle of New York higher culture, but Mailer also used this wit as the sharpest instrument in his literary arsenal.

She, smiling enigmatically, said: “Well, I move around a lot.”{{pg|400|401}}

I talked with his traveling secretary, a lovely, soft-spoken young woman named Suzanne, who said she was a writer herself. “I read ''The Prisoner of Sex'' and thought that he must be a terrible man, an awful person. But when I got to know him, I found that he wasn’t like that at all. He’s really very nice. Sometimes, I feel like I ought to protect him.”

I decided to go up and question the great man myself. But my question {{pg|401|402}} was literary, a piece of Ph.D. trivia. Mailer pondered a moment and said, “I can’t answer that for you. You’ll have to do your own homework.” Then he paused and looked me straight in the eye. “There’s an old Mafia saying: ‘''Follow your nose''.{{' "}}

The blunder was resolved with tact; each had saved face for the other. And that was how the evening ended, Uncle Norman proving himself human after all, neither genius nor fool nor boor, just a mild-mannered gentleman who had the small vanity not to wear his glasses. Had some bullies in a long-distant Brooklyn schoolyard taunted him once too often with the humiliating cry “Four-eyes”? A sensitive, friendly, slightly vain middle-aged {{pg|402|403}} man who had committed a ''faux pas'' at a party and, courteous to a fault, made his amends and returned to grace.

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).

He read a passage about Muhammad Ali from ''The Fight'', speaking with a Southern twang, holding the book in his right hand while making short jabs with his clenched left fist. He also read from ''The Art of Writing'', which had recently been published in ''Michigan Quarterly Review''.

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.

I asked him about the scene of climbing the monument in Provincetown in his novel ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1984). He said it was based on his experience of rock climbing and on the experience of a guy who actually climbed the monument. We began to mentally cast the film ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'', which Mailer was about to direct. For Timothy Madden, I suggested William Hurt; Mailer said his name had been mentioned (the part was finally played by Ryan O’Neal). The part of Regency was tougher to cast. Mailer said there weren’t many big, tough guys who could act. I mentioned Brian Dennehy (Wings Hauser ended up playing Regency). Then I described in detail to Mailer the plot of the Coen brothers’ film ''Blood Simple'' (1985), a murder thriller I had recently seen. Mailer was momentarily taken aback, saying, “Jesus! That plot is better than mine.” He was dissatisfied with the ending of ''Tough Guys Don't Dance'' but didn’t yet know how to change it. (''Tough Guys Don't Dance'' {{pg|406|407}} [1987] had its moments, but it failed at the box office and became Mailer’s first and last try at directing a Hollywood film. He was right: ''Blood Simple'' was a better thriller.)

{{Review}}