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

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 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?
+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.”
+Applause.
+People’s Prick was unceremoniously dragged off stage by a bouncer, reverting to the state the media calls “going limp,” but in his case could only be called “going stiff.” This was turning into a bad farce.
+Mailer was talking about the women at the Democratic convention and the curse they had put on McGovern, when a curse seemed to descend upon Mailer. A second freak, this one sporting a gigantic blue dildo strapped to the front of his pants—like a demon in a medieval pageant—hurled a burning jockstrap onstage. It sat there and smoldered for a minute, seeming to mirror Mailer’s nervous condition.
+But the protestors had exhausted their best ammunition early in the spectacle. The evening went on and subsequent interruptions were shouted down by the audience. When they pleaded for aid for the two phallic impersonators who had been busted, nobody cared. For all the justice of their cause, the gays had ambushed themselves with juvenile inanity.
+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.”
+Mailer was warming up now, growing more eloquent and impassioned as he arrived at the core of his ideas, orating in his characteristically rapid, staccato fashion. The extemporaneous words flowed the way his elaborate phrases do in print, in long, elegant sentences that bend and turn and gather momentum. He claimed that the country may be “already afloat on a sea of totalitarianism which is different from any which has ever been visited before on the earth. For this is a species of benign totalitarianism. . . .”
+Then he denounced the arrogance and self-righteousness of the New Left 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.”
+Now the jester had taken on the guise of the revolutionary theorist. And we believed him; perhaps he had the handle on where the truth was hidden. His strategy had been to establish a communality with all of us—he was full of shit, but then, so were we all. He was one leap ahead because he already knew how full of it he was, and we, perhaps, did not.
+The speech was over, and he fielded questions from the audience, handling them with the aplomb of a politician. He could rattle off a quick reply to every questioner and a snappy rejoinder to every heckler. The only difference between Mailer and a candidate was that Mailer’s responses were not memorized. He could take the most prosaic question and weave you an epic poem of an answer.
+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.
+Finally, I could see the difference between the audience and Mailer: they were amateurs, and he was a professional. He’d had his entire life to develop the role of Norman Mailer, and he’d really got his act together. If, at times, the performance verged on the slick, it was always surprising. He gave you more than your money’s worth. I thought of Mark Twain playing the lecture circuit (although Twain never had to cope with “The People’s Prick”).
+Mailer moved slowly offstage, passing through the crowd like a politician working a receiving line, pumping hands, giving autographs (the signature was a little shaky), making pleasant small talk.
+He clasped the hand of one attractive woman a little longer than usual. I caught the tag end of the conversation. “We must get together when I come back to San Francisco. Where will you be?”
+She, smiling enigmatically, said: “Well, I move around a lot.”
+Mailer: “Don’t worry, I’ll find you.”
+As he walked past me, I got an overdose of the potent Scotch fumes wafting off him. An old admirer jumped in and they mixed it up for a minute, cheerfully mauling each other like two bear cubs at play, while the campus patrol freaked out on the sidelines. Then Jerry Rubin appeared, and the two held an instant reunion, embracing in a hearty bear hug. Mailer was beaming.
+We followed the entourage to Solomon Grundy’s on the Berkeley Marina (“Magnificent Morsels and Great Grog”), where Mailer sat and worked his way through a series of Tom Collinses, surrounded by a circle of twenty or thirty rapt young listeners. He spoke more casually now, and I began to sense a private Mailer, quiet, polite, and gracious, who was different from the brash, argumentative, and pugnacious image he put forward in public. Perhaps this lion saved his roar for the limelight.
+Some of the questions were simple-minded, but his replies were courteous and attentive, and he looked the questioner right in the eye as he answered.
+Still, one woman standing near me was less than satisfied. “He talks a lot,” she said, “but he doesn’t give much of his real self. And he doesn’t really care about these people as individuals. Think of the situation Paul Krassner would have made of this round-table discussion!”
+Granted, Mailer was not Krassner, but as I listened to his spiel, I could not help being fascinated. Here was Mailer tossing out idea after idea, rapidly and effortlessly. Here was an expert, a professional, a man who had molded his talent and his personality into that species of human magic we call genius. But was he too much the intellectual machine, feeding off his own substance? His ego seemed hidden inside an intricate fortress of metaphor.