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

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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.
-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.