The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Encounters with Mailer: Difference between revisions
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“Norman Mailer! How can you waste your time on him? He’s just a Male Chauvinist Pig, an asshole.” So said some of my friends, consigning him to the trash heap of the totally irrelevant. But Mailer was not your run-of-the-mill MCP; he had elaborated a private metaphysics and arrived at his conclusions by reasoning as tortured and complex as that of a Talmudic scholar. | “Norman Mailer! How can you waste your time on him? He’s just a Male Chauvinist Pig, an asshole.” So said some of my friends, consigning him to the trash heap of the totally irrelevant. But Mailer was not your run-of-the-mill MCP; he had elaborated a private metaphysics and arrived at his conclusions by reasoning as tortured and complex as that of a Talmudic scholar. | ||
It was the fall of 1972, toward the end of the Nixon-McGovern campaign. I was a graduate student at the University of California, finishing a doctoral dissertation about Mailer’s fiction, a project that had engaged me in a close scrutiny of his work and his volatile public personality. Writing a long study of someone is marriage of a sort; you do not commit yourself to it lightly. At times during those years, Mailer looked to me like an existential hero. At other times, he was an arrogant boor, a first-rate genius or a second-rate clown, a modest gentleman or an egomaniacal tyrant, a weird mixture of incompatible extremes, as various and schizoid as Mailer’s own portrait of his beloved America. So, my feelings toward him alternated between attraction and repulsion, hero worship and total disillusionment. I had never met the man, and I couldn’t make up my mind. | It was the fall of 1972, toward the end of the Nixon-McGovern campaign. I was a graduate student at the University of California, finishing a doctoral dissertation about Mailer’s fiction, a project that had engaged me in a close scrutiny of his work and his volatile public personality. Writing a long study of someone is marriage of a sort; you do not commit yourself to it lightly. At times during those years, Mailer looked to me like an existential hero. At other times, he was an arrogant boor, a first-rate genius or a second-rate clown, a modest gentleman or an egomaniacal tyrant, a weird mixture of incompatible extremes, as various and schizoid as Mailer’s own portrait of his beloved America. So, my feelings toward him alternated between attraction and repulsion, hero worship and total disillusionment. I had never met the man, and I couldn’t make up my mind. | ||
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rhetoric'''” (Jim Hagy, ''The Independent Florida Alligator'', February 26, 1986, p. 1). | 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. | 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. | ||