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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/“Oohh Normie—You’re Sooo Hemingway”: Mailer Memories and Encounters: Difference between revisions

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There were other “Hemingway-Mailer moments” at that Michigan ranch in the summer of 1961 but I will limit my account here to just this one, which does seem to me to be a token, a sign, a charged moment in the oral history of literary reputation. So, too, was the fact that when I finished my duties at the ranch, I left with no less than five books given to me by girls and women, inscribed with love and great hopes for my future writing. All of the books were by Hemingway.  
There were other “Hemingway-Mailer moments” at that Michigan ranch in the summer of 1961 but I will limit my account here to just this one, which does seem to me to be a token, a sign, a charged moment in the oral history of literary reputation. So, too, was the fact that when I finished my duties at the ranch, I left with no less than five books given to me by girls and women, inscribed with love and great hopes for my future writing. All of the books were by Hemingway.  


             * * *  
             {{* * *}}
   
   
That September, after some more hitchhiking-singing-on-the-road escapades, I went off to Parris Island to become a Marine. I offer this sidelight on the literary history of the Marine Corps: Marine privates, who were said{{pg|378|379}}in those days to be joining up either because they were running from the law or from a girl, did in fact ''read''. My platoon at Parris Island and Camp Lejeune was in fact a remarkably literate group, many of us college dropouts, and most of us dropouts were English ''majors''. We devoured war books and all of us preferred ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'' over Jones and ''From Here to Eternity'', over Styron’s ''The Long March'', over Remarque’s ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' and all the other World War One books by Aldington, Cummings, Dos Passos and the rest. The fact that Hemingway and Mailer received the Good Marine Seal of Approval—in my platoon—must mean at least as much as a good or bad review in the ''New York Times''.
That September, after some more hitchhiking-singing-on-the-road escapades, I went off to Parris Island to become a Marine. I offer this sidelight on the literary history of the Marine Corps: Marine privates, who were said{{pg|378|379}}in those days to be joining up either because they were running from the law or from a girl, did in fact ''read''. My platoon at Parris Island and Camp Lejeune was in fact a remarkably literate group, many of us college dropouts, and most of us dropouts were English ''majors''. We devoured war books and all of us preferred ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'' over Jones and ''From Here to Eternity'', over Styron’s ''The Long March'', over Remarque’s ''All Quiet on the Western Front'' and all the other World War One books by Aldington, Cummings, Dos Passos and the rest. The fact that Hemingway and Mailer received the Good Marine Seal of Approval—in my platoon—must mean at least as much as a good or bad review in the ''New York Times''.
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By the 1980s nobody at my university, nobody that I knew around the country, was teaching Mailer. When I did a senior Fulbright year in China— now hired to teach both Faulkner ''and'' Hemingway—at Peking University, I was much involved in translation projects initiated by Chinese scholars and translators who wanted to get all of the best twentieth-century American fiction rendered into Chinese. On several occasions, I was formally consulted on this matter, and once I was asked to comment on a very long list of writers and works that were under consideration. Mailer’s name was not on the{{pg|384|385}}list. I suggested that they should add his name. I do not know if they did or if he was ever translated into Chinese. One translator, roughly my age, who knew the names of many lesser American writers, said he had never heard of Mailer. But then he had never heard of Elvis Presley either.  
By the 1980s nobody at my university, nobody that I knew around the country, was teaching Mailer. When I did a senior Fulbright year in China— now hired to teach both Faulkner ''and'' Hemingway—at Peking University, I was much involved in translation projects initiated by Chinese scholars and translators who wanted to get all of the best twentieth-century American fiction rendered into Chinese. On several occasions, I was formally consulted on this matter, and once I was asked to comment on a very long list of writers and works that were under consideration. Mailer’s name was not on the{{pg|384|385}}list. I suggested that they should add his name. I do not know if they did or if he was ever translated into Chinese. One translator, roughly my age, who knew the names of many lesser American writers, said he had never heard of Mailer. But then he had never heard of Elvis Presley either.  


* * *  
{{* * *}}
 
And that brings me to my most important encounter with Mailer—at the legendary 1986 PEN meeting in New York. My original intent here was simply to record that encounter. I had hoped to locate the careful notes I took at all the meetings and sessions where Mailer presided, but they seem hopelessly lost among the trunks and closets full of pre-computer writing in my vast wreck of a house. Still, it is a story worth telling, and to tell it properly I have felt it necessary here to record my long involvement at the periphery of Mailer’s life and work. So I offer this anecdote, this record of my newfound admiration for Mailer, as a kind of atonement for my own long neglect.  
And that brings me to my most important encounter with Mailer—at the legendary 1986 PEN meeting in New York. My original intent here was simply to record that encounter. I had hoped to locate the careful notes I took at all the meetings and sessions where Mailer presided, but they seem hopelessly lost among the trunks and closets full of pre-computer writing in my vast wreck of a house. Still, it is a story worth telling, and to tell it properly I have felt it necessary here to record my long involvement at the periphery of Mailer’s life and work. So I offer this anecdote, this record of my newfound admiration for Mailer, as a kind of atonement for my own long neglect.  


The 48th Congress of International PEN in January 1986, when the nation’s and the world’s leading writers came to New York at the invitation of Norman Mailer, president of PEN’s American Center, to discuss the theme of the gathering—“The Writer’s Imagination and the Imagination of the State”—was the most extraordinary literary event I have witnessed in a lifetime of participation in remarkable literary conferences and parliaments worldwide. Only Mailer could have created and presided over such a happening. I was not an invited participant, just a bystander, an observer who was present at most of the events as I stayed at the St. Moritz Hotel on Central Park South for the duration of the Congress. For a week I sat next to and rode the hotel elevator with and exchanged passing remarks with the likes of Brodsky, Coetzee, Gordimer, Grass, Milosz, Oz, Rushdie, Soyinka, Vargas Llosa, and of course the Americans such as Bellow, Carver, Doctorow, Morrison, Sontag, Styron, Updike, Vonnegut and many others I had seen or met or talked with at previous literary occasions. It is hard to believe that a detailed account of the event does not exist in print, but if it does I am not aware of it. I have heard, in conversation, the event referred to as “Mailer’s Disgrace.” But I prefer to think of it as “Mailer’s Triumph.” Since I have been unable to locate my detailed contemporaneous notes taken at the meetings, I can only sketch here a few of the most memorable moments.{{pg|385|386}}
The 48th Congress of International PEN in January 1986, when the nation’s and the world’s leading writers came to New York at the invitation of Norman Mailer, president of PEN’s American Center, to discuss the theme of the gathering—“The Writer’s Imagination and the Imagination of the State”—was the most extraordinary literary event I have witnessed in a lifetime of participation in remarkable literary conferences and parliaments worldwide. Only Mailer could have created and presided over such a happening. I was not an invited participant, just a bystander, an observer who was present at most of the events as I stayed at the St. Moritz Hotel on Central Park South for the duration of the Congress. For a week I sat next to and rode the hotel elevator with and exchanged passing remarks with the likes of Brodsky, Coetzee, Gordimer, Grass, Milosz, Oz, Rushdie, Soyinka, Vargas Llosa, and of course the Americans such as Bellow, Carver, Doctorow, Morrison, Sontag, Styron, Updike, Vonnegut and many others I had seen or met or talked with at previous literary occasions. It is hard to believe that a detailed account of the event does not exist in print, but if it does I am not aware of it. I have heard, in conversation, the event referred to as “Mailer’s Disgrace.” But I prefer to think of it as “Mailer’s Triumph.” Since I have been unable to locate my detailed contemporaneous notes taken at the meetings, I can only sketch here a few of the most memorable moments.{{pg|385|386}}
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