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

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 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.
+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.
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 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.
+“Well, now you know how near-sighted I am.” Mailer is a past master at the art of self-deprecation as a saving gesture.
+The blunder was resolved with tact; each had saved face for the other. And that was how the evening ended, Uncle Norman proving himself human after all, neither genius nor fool nor boor, just a mild-mannered gentleman who had the small vanity not to wear his glasses. Had some bullies in a long-distant Brooklyn schoolyard taunted him once too often with the humiliating cry “Four-eyes”? A sensitive, friendly, slightly vain middle-aged man who had committed a ''faux pas'' at a party and, courteous to a fault, made his amends and returned to grace.
 == II. 1986: UNCLE NORMAN AT THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA ==
+Norman Mailer came to the University of Florida in Gainesville on February 25, 1986, sponsored by a student organization called Accent. He was paid $14,000 to give a talk entitled “The Art of Writing.” I was asked to introduce him. As he took the stage in the O’Connell Center, a huge, multi-purpose hall built for major speeches and sporting events, both Mailer and the mostly student crowd of several hundred seemed dwarfed by this cavernous arena built to seat thousands.
+I reflected on how much had changed in the fourteen years since I had last seen him. It had been 1972; I was a bearded graduate student in ragged jeans at the University of California, Berkeley when Mailer spoke there. Now I was a bearded Associate Professor of English in a jacket and tie, courtesy of Mailer; I had turned my dissertation about his fiction into a book. I never sent Mailer the book, afraid he would punch me in the nose. After all, would you want your works psychoanalyzed in public?
+In 1972, it was the tempestuous Nixon years: the Vietnam War was still raging, the country was facing an election, and Mailer faced vociferous protest at Berkeley from both women’s liberation and gay liberation. In 1986, it was the quiescent Reagan era. It was as if the Gipper had force-fed America a massive dose of valium, and everybody was living in Fantasyland, trying to pretend the 1960s never happened. Robert Lowell once wrote, “These are the tranquilized ''Fifties'', and I am forty” (“Memories of West Street and Lepke”). Well, these were the tranquilized Eighties, and I was forty.
+The times were tamer, and Mailer too had aged and mellowed. He was dapper in a double-breasted blue blazer, white, open-collared shirt, and grey slacks. No more blue jeans for his public performances. At sixty-three, he looked stouter and more wrinkled and his hair thinner and whiter then when I had last seen him–but then, I was fourteen years older too. And this bored Florida student crowd was a far cry from the Berkeley rebels who had alternately cheered, booed, and heckled and disrupted Mailer’s speech in 1972. Some of these UF students had actually been required to attend by a journalism professor. The headline in the Florida student newspaper the next day told the tale: “'''Meet Mailer the lamb: Dry audience dampens author’s rhetoric'''” (Jim Hagy, ''The Independent Florida Alligator'', February 26, 1986, p. 1).
+Mailer began apologetically, saying his reputation had been exaggerated. They seemed to expect a wild man like Hunter S. Thompson: “I couldn’t carry Hunter Thompson’s water pail,” he said modestly. He referred to the last lecture he had given at the University of Florida, in 1975, when the audience heckled him; he felt he had laid an egg that night and seemed to want to make up for it. But his opening anecdote about the boxer Sonny Liston, intended to warm them up, received no response. “That’s the first time I’ve told that story without getting a laugh,” he said. “I can see we’re going to have a lot of fun tonight.” With that, the audience finally laughed, and Mailer smiled for the first time that evening.
+He read a passage about Muhammad Ali from ''The Fight'', speaking with a Southern twang, holding the book in his right hand while making short jabs with his clenched left fist. He also read from “The Art of Writing,” which had recently been published in ''Michigan Quarterly Review''.
+Afterwards there were the inevitable questions about Mailer’s reputation as a male chauvinist. “I’ve been called a sexist. I’ve been called macho. . . . Women don’t know what they’re talking about....Women have been telling men how to live in New York for the last century.” Some in the audience groaned; others laughed.
+The evening had been neither triumph nor disaster for Mailer, but there was no way it could compare with the absurdist warfare that had taken place during his speech at Berkeley in 1972.
+At the reception, I asked Mailer about his projected trilogy. When his novel ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983) appeared, it was announced as the first of a fictional trilogy beginning in ancient Egypt and stretching into the far future. Mailer said the trilogy was now “on ice.” He said that he spent eleven years on the Egyptian novel, that it could stand by itself, and that he felt no great impulse to continue. He also admitted he was hesitant about writing about the future because science fiction was not his genre. He didn’t know enough about computers, for one thing. I said I taught science fiction, and he asked, “Is it really close to magic?” I mentioned Arthur C. Clarke’s remark: "any sufficiently advanced technology is close to magic." Although Mailer majored in engineering at Harvard and wrote ''Of a Fire on the Moon'' about the Apollo astronauts, he had always deeply distrusted technology and preferred magic.
+He said he was working on another novel but didn’t want to talk about it.