The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/On the State of Mailer Studies: A Conversation with J. Michael Lennon: Difference between revisions
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public intellectual.What is your most powerful and lasting memory of him? | public intellectual.What is your most powerful and lasting memory of him? | ||
. . . | '''J. Michael Lennon''': It’s not an easy question. I have so many memories of | ||
Norman. But one of the things that has always impressed me about him, | |||
right to the very end, is ''work ethic''. Norman was always devoted to the literary arts,which took a toll on other relationships.Yet it was it was something | |||
that drove him. For example,when he entered the hospital for his last round | |||
of operations and treatments, he brought with him a half dozen books on | |||
Adolf Hitler. I was just stunned by that! I thought, oh, my God, when is he | |||
going to give it a break? No, he just didn’t give up. | |||
As a writer, he was devoted to the notion that the novel was the art form | |||
that had the greatest capacity for understanding society and human psychology. He believed the novel made the world more understandable, made | |||
it a better place to live in. | |||
The other issue that comes to mind is his identity as an insider/outsider. | |||
Norman knew a lot of famous people, of course, including Muhammad Ali, | |||
Jack Kennedy, Bill Clinton, John Lennon, and practically every one of his | |||
major contemporaries in the United States: Bellow, Mary McCarthy, Robert | |||
Lowell, Dwight Macdonald, the Beats—Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs— | |||
Bill Styron, Henry Miller, Lillian Hellman, Bill Kennedy, George Plimpton, | |||
Diana Trilling, James Baldwin, Gay Talese, John Irving, Joyce Carol Oates, | |||
Philip Roth, and James Jones (his dearest friend), and Don DeLillo (with | |||
whom he had a special kinship), and Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, with | |||
whom he had off-and-on friendships with—I could name more. | |||
He also | |||
knew many major writers around the world, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, Romain Gary, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, and | |||
Günter Grass. But he never really wanted to be a conspicuous part of the literary establishment.. He wanted to maintain a modicum of distance from it | |||
so that he could criticize it; he was resolute about not losing his independent perspective, and so he backed out of many activities. However, he was | |||
president of PEN for a couple of years, and yes, that is certainly the establishment. But he got out of there after only two years. He called it his “church | |||
work.”With Norman there was always the sense of “I want to be an outsider. I do not want to be trammeled by my affiliations with any literary, political | |||
or what-have-you establishment to the extent that it will dampen my independence, or constrict my perspective.” Norman felt that one must be there | |||
to speak to one’s time on the planet. He was also exceptionally devoted to his | |||
family and his friends; there had to be at least fifty people who thought of | |||
themselves as “Norman Mailer’s best friend.” He had a kind of openness, candor, and generosity of spirit with his friends and his family, a personal | |||
magnetism. | |||
'''PS''': Do you feel that this duality of insider and outsider hurt him at times? | |||
Did it accelerate tensions or create conflicts that perhaps someone with a | |||
more stable identity of either insider or outsider might not encounter? | |||
... | |||
{{Review}} | {{Review}} | ||
{{DEFAULTSORT:On the State of Mailer Studies: A Conversation with J. Michael Lennon}} | {{DEFAULTSORT:On the State of Mailer Studies: A Conversation with J. Michael Lennon}} | ||
===Works Cited=== | |||
{{Refbegin}} | |||
* {{cite book |last=Sipiora|first=Phillip|date= Fall 2019 |title= On the State of Mailer Studies: A Conversation with J. Michael Lennon |url= |location= |publisher=The Norman Mailer Society |pages=47-64 |isbn= |author-link=Phillip Sipiora |ref=harv }} | |||
{{Refend}} |