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The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law: Difference between revisions

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{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in ''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law''}}
{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in ''Wild 90'' and ''Beyond the Law''}}
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{{Byline |last=Cohen |first=Sarah Jo |abstract=A discussion of Mailer’s career, interrelating Mailer’s ethnicity with his corpus of work, with special attention to his cinematic work. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr05coh }}
{{Byline |last=Cohen |first=Sarah Jo |abstract=A discussion of Mailer’s career, interrelating Mailer’s ethnicity with his corpus of work, with special attention to his cinematic work. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr05coh }}
{{dc|dc=N|orman Mailer’s sizable FBI file begins with his voice.}} The 165 pages of Mailer’s 171-page file available to the public cover fifteen years of observation and surveillance, and includes materials ranging from endless notes tracking Mailer’s passport applications and international travel, to FBI agents’ reviews of Miami and the Siege of Chicago (with meticulous notes about each mention of the FBI), and even a letter from a high school teacher asking J. Edgar Hoover for permission to teach ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{efn|In a letter dated March 18, 1964, also included in Mailer’s file, Hoover wrote back telling the teacher that this request was beyond his area of jurisdiction because the FBI “neither makes evaluations nor draws conclusions as to the character of integrity of any organization, publication, or individual,” and because Hoover has made it a habit “not to comment on any material not prepared by the FBI.”}} The file begins, however, with a clipping from ''The Washington Post'', a June 6, 1962, George Sokolsky column called “These Days,” that moved J. Edgar Hoover to leave a note for his staff reading, “Let me have memo on Mailer.”{{sfn|FBI|1962–1975}} Sokolsky’s article responds to an ''Esquire'' piece Mailer wrote about then first lady Jackie Kennedy that describes Mrs. Kennedy’s voice as “a quiet parody of the sort of voice one hears on the radio late at night, dropped softly into the ear by girls who sell soft mattresses, depilatories, or creams to brighten the skin.”{{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|loc=A15}} Sokolsky takes offense at Mailer’s mockery of Mrs. Kennedy and scrutiny of her voice, responding, “[A] person’s voice is what it is. I never heard Norman Mailer’s voice but whatever the Lord gave him, baritone or tenor, soprano or bass, it is what it is, and he can thank the good Lord that he does not suffer from cerebral palsy or some such thing.”{{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|loc=A15}} Mailer’s voice, however, much like his persona, is not at all God-given and never “is what it is.” Rather, Mailer’s {{pg|183|184}} voice is a deliberate construction pieced together from bits of others’ voices in order to mask the adenoidal voice of his childhood.
{{dc|dc=N|orman Mailer’s sizable FBI file begins with his voice.}} The 165 pages of Mailer’s 171-page file available to the public cover fifteen years of observation and surveillance, and includes materials ranging from endless notes tracking Mailer’s passport applications and international travel, to FBI agents’ reviews of Miami and the Siege of Chicago (with meticulous notes about each mention of the FBI), and even a letter from a high school teacher asking J. Edgar Hoover for permission to teach ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{efn|In a letter dated March 18, 1964, also included in Mailer’s file, Hoover wrote back telling the teacher that this request was beyond his area of jurisdiction because the FBI “neither makes evaluations nor draws conclusions as to the character of integrity of any organization, publication, or individual,” and because Hoover has made it a habit “not to comment on any material not prepared by the FBI.”}} The file begins, however, with a clipping from ''The Washington Post'', a June 6, 1962, George Sokolsky column called “These Days,” that moved J. Edgar Hoover to leave a note for his staff reading, “Let me have memo on Mailer.”{{sfn|FBI|1962–1975}} Sokolsky’s article responds to an ''Esquire'' piece Mailer wrote about then first lady Jackie Kennedy that describes Mrs. Kennedy’s voice as “a quiet parody of the sort of voice one hears on the radio late at night, dropped softly into the ear by girls who sell soft mattresses, depilatories, or creams to brighten the skin.”{{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|loc=A15}} Sokolsky takes offense at Mailer’s mockery of Mrs. Kennedy and scrutiny of her voice, responding, “[A] person’s voice is what it is. I never heard Norman Mailer’s voice but whatever the Lord gave him, baritone or tenor, soprano or bass, it is what it is, and he can thank the good Lord that he does not suffer from cerebral palsy or some such thing.”{{sfn|Sokolsky|1962|loc=A15}} Mailer’s voice, however, much like his persona, is not at all God-given and never “is what it is.” Rather, Mailer’s {{pg|183|184}} voice is a deliberate construction pieced together from bits of others’ voices in order to mask the adenoidal voice of his childhood.


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Forging a criminal enterprise, and/or performing criminal masculinity, is a traditional means of assimilation for immigrant populations in America, which for the second wave of European immigrants begins with the Irish in the 1850s and is then passed on to Italian and Jewish immigrants two generations later.{{efn|A classic example appears in Sergio Leone’s Jewish gangster film, ''Once Upon a Time in America''—which stars the perpetually ethnicity-crossing Robert De Niro and for which Mailer flew to Rome 1976 in to work on the screenplay ({{harvnb|Mewshaw|2002|p=14}}). For a recent example, see Stern’s ''The Frozen Rabbi'', a comic whirlwind tour through the history of American Jewry that follows one family from the Russian Pale to Memphis, Tennessee, with a stop in New York, where one family member, Ruby “Kid” Karp, becomes a notorious gangster.}} While criminality provided immigrant gangsters with increased notoriety and power, immigrant groups who became police officers saw a similar rise in status—and much like criminals, in part because it was hoped that they could infiltrate the criminal scenes of their brethren, it was the Irish who were cops first, followed by Italians and Jews.{{sfn|Fried|1993|p=xv}} While this history suggests discrete ethnic groups who cross paths but not cultures, cinematic representations of the outlaw capitalism of mobsters often star Jewish immigrants in the role of Italian immigrants and thus demonstrate ethnic crossings similar to those in Mailer’s films. The results register in the voice; in ''Little Caesar''{{sfn|Caesar|1931}} Edward G. Robinson, né Emanuel Goldenberg, stars as the adenoidal Cesar Enrico Bandello, and in ''Scarface'',{{sfn|Hawks|1932}} Paul Muni, né Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, stars as Antonio Camonte whose Italian accent has a near Yiddish lilt.
Forging a criminal enterprise, and/or performing criminal masculinity, is a traditional means of assimilation for immigrant populations in America, which for the second wave of European immigrants begins with the Irish in the 1850s and is then passed on to Italian and Jewish immigrants two generations later.{{efn|A classic example appears in Sergio Leone’s Jewish gangster film, ''Once Upon a Time in America''—which stars the perpetually ethnicity-crossing Robert De Niro and for which Mailer flew to Rome 1976 in to work on the screenplay ({{harvnb|Mewshaw|2002|p=14}}). For a recent example, see Stern’s ''The Frozen Rabbi'', a comic whirlwind tour through the history of American Jewry that follows one family from the Russian Pale to Memphis, Tennessee, with a stop in New York, where one family member, Ruby “Kid” Karp, becomes a notorious gangster.}} While criminality provided immigrant gangsters with increased notoriety and power, immigrant groups who became police officers saw a similar rise in status—and much like criminals, in part because it was hoped that they could infiltrate the criminal scenes of their brethren, it was the Irish who were cops first, followed by Italians and Jews.{{sfn|Fried|1993|p=xv}} While this history suggests discrete ethnic groups who cross paths but not cultures, cinematic representations of the outlaw capitalism of mobsters often star Jewish immigrants in the role of Italian immigrants and thus demonstrate ethnic crossings similar to those in Mailer’s films. The results register in the voice; in ''Little Caesar''{{sfn|Caesar|1931}} Edward G. Robinson, né Emanuel Goldenberg, stars as the adenoidal Cesar Enrico Bandello, and in ''Scarface'',{{sfn|Hawks|1932}} Paul Muni, né Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, stars as Antonio Camonte whose Italian accent has a near Yiddish lilt.


In a 1965 letter to William F. Buckley, a man whose mid-century faux British accent made his voice almost as strange and remarkable as Mailer’s{{efn|Buckley is also both WASPy and a former CIA agent. See {{harvtxt|Buckley|2005}}.}} Mailer hands the crown of “most hated man in American life” over to Buckley. The letter responds to Buckley’s recent speech before the Holy Name Society, an annual gathering of Catholic police officers, in which Buckley criticized the news media for overemphasizing police brutality during the recent civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama.{{sfn|Tanenhaus|2005|}} When the ''Herald Tribune'' and civil rights activists caught wind of these remarks, and the rumors that the assembled police officers laughed and applauded upon hearing them, a media frenzy ensued which elicited a letter from Mailer, weighing in on Buckley’s speech by clarifying his own relationship to the boys in blue:
In a 1965 letter to William F. Buckley, a man whose mid-century faux British accent made his voice almost as strange and remarkable as Mailer’s{{efn|{{harvtxt|Buckley|2005}} is also both WASPy and a former CIA agent.}} Mailer hands the crown of “most hated man in American life” over to Buckley. The letter responds to Buckley’s recent speech before the Holy Name Society, an annual gathering of Catholic police officers, in which Buckley criticized the news media for overemphasizing police brutality during the recent civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama.{{sfn|Tanenhaus|2005|}} When the ''Herald Tribune'' and civil rights activists caught wind of these remarks, and the rumors that the assembled police officers laughed and applauded upon hearing them, a media frenzy ensued which elicited a letter from Mailer, weighing in on Buckley’s speech by clarifying his own relationship to the boys in blue:


<blockquote>I’m not the cop-hater I’m reputed to be, and in fact police fascinate me. But this is because I think their natures are very complex, not simple at all, and what I would object to ...is that you made a one-for-one correspondence between the need to maintain law and order and the nature of the men who would main- {{pg|191|192}} tain it. The policeman has I think an extraordinarily tortured psyche. He is perhaps more tortured than the criminal.{{sfn|Mailer|2008|p=8}}</blockquote>
<blockquote>I’m not the cop-hater I’m reputed to be, and in fact police fascinate me. But this is because I think their natures are very complex, not simple at all, and what I would object to ...is that you made a one-for-one correspondence between the need to maintain law and order and the nature of the men who would main- {{pg|191|192}} tain it. The policeman has I think an extraordinarily tortured psyche. He is perhaps more tortured than the criminal.{{sfn|Mailer|2008|p=8}}</blockquote>
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