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

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 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.
+I talked with his traveling secretary, a lovely, soft-spoken young woman named Suzanne, who said she was a writer herself. “I read The Prisoner of Sex and thought that he must be a terrible man, an awful person. But when I got to know him, I found that he wasn’t like that at all. He’s really very nice. Sometimes, I feel like I ought to protect him.”
+Not surprising that Mailer aroused the maternal instinct. By 1972, he had already been married four times (he was to marry twice more). He admitted he could never live without a woman.
+I decided to go up and question the great man myself. But my question was literary, a piece of Ph.D. trivia. Mailer pondered a moment and said, “I can’t answer that for you. You’ll have to do your own homework.” Then he paused and looked me straight in the eye. “There’s an old Mafia saying: ‘Follow your nose.’”
+There in the perpetual twilight of the bar, I had a momentary flash, an epiphany: Mailer’s features suddenly melted into the face of the most voluble Jewish uncle who has ever lived, the kind who would take you aside at a party and say, “So, nu, when are you going to wise up, putz?”, the Spinoza of a drunken Bar Mitzvah. The type of uncle who would regale you at a family gathering, drink in hand, with the story of his life. A nice little guy, better educated than the other relatives, the family philosopher, gregarious, a quick opinion on every topic of the day, always tossing out a joke or a sharp notion, but he spent his days as a traveling salesman.
+The occasion was coming to a close. It was two in the morning. As Mailer rose from the last Tom Collins like Moby Dick surfacing from the deep, he swam over to a bearded chap in the stygian gloom of the bar and wrapped a comradely arm around his shoulder. “Ah, Jerry!” Mailer intoned. He had located a familiar face in this sea of strangers.
+But the fellow replied with a smile, like an actor graciously refusing a supporting role, “Thanks very much, Norman, but I’m not Jerry.”
+Mailer pulled back, startled, removing his arm as if he had just received a small electric shock. “O, pardon me, you’re not Jerry Rubin.”
+“That’s OK, Norman,” said the man who was not Jerry Rubin. “I’ve been mistaken for him before. It’s really dark in here.”
+Mailer grinned, super-polite and chagrined, the apologetic, chastened grimace of a man who has a little too much booze under his belt and has committed a strategic blunder. If the light had been better, I could have said if he was blushing.
+== II. 1986: UNCLE NORMAN AT THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA ==