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

At the small church college I attended from 1959–1961 in Kentucky—first because I had fallen in love with the Kentucky River and then because I thought I was in love with a girl at that college—Mailer was not present on the list of authors who were talked about openly. His books were not in the college library. By the time I went to New York during the Christmas season of 1960 I had heard that Mailer had stabbed his wife, had spent some time at Bellevue, and had only managed to avoid prison time because his wife would not press charges. Some people that I talked to then held Mailer up as the prime example of a great talent laid waste by drink and drugs. I did not know if this were true. I was in Brooklyn for the Christmas season to sing with the Salvation Army on the streets, and to dress up as Santa Claus and ring the bell for donations. I couldn’t find any other Christmas break employment and the Sallies offered room and board. And I wanted to be in New York City. When my Santa Claus gig ended I moved from Brooklyn to Greenwich Village where I slept wherever I could find folks hospitable to young folksingers and would-be writers. There was so much hospitality that I had to get away from it for a few days, so I stayed at the old run-down Broadway Central Hotel because I’d read that Thomas Wolfe stayed there.It was so cold that winter that there wasn’t any singing outdoors in Washington Square, but I sang in some coffeehouses, the ''Café Wha?'', the ''Gaslight'' and other joints, and I sang at the Monday night hootenanny at ''Gerde’s Folk City''. At those hoots, we all got our fifteen minutes on stage. Even a kid named Robert Zimmerman, who was already calling himself Bob Dylan, although his name meant nothing at the time, only got fifteen minutes on stage in those days. The Village coffeehouses swarmed with winos and leftover Beats and some good kid-singers and older jazzmen and Uptown folks slumming and I suppose I saw many well-known writers that I did not recognize. I did not really care about meeting any writers although it would have been nice{{pg|373|374}}to see Kenneth Patchen who was, in my book then, in a league by himself. But I knew he could not be there in his wheelchair. One night somebody pointed out Allan Ginsberg to me. I liked ''Howl'' when I read it in the tenth grade, the year it came out. People said that they sometimes saw Mailer in the jazz and folk joints in the Village but if I ever saw him there I did not know it. But it was due to my momentary spell of infatuation with folksinging in Greenwich Village that I first saw Norman Mailer.  

At that event, more party than protest, there were many Village luminaries present, standing around talking in little circles with drinks in their hands, doing what I then regarded disdainfully as their dismal Prufrockian dance. A few of us proudly ''authentic'' kid-folksingers were singing in a far corner of that large warehouse-like room. During a break between songs, a tweedy, pipe-smoking professorial-looking older man that I talked to about being a writer said: “That’s Norman Mailer over there.” He gestured with his pipe toward the far side of the crowded room. “Mailer thinks he’s Hemingway but he doesn’t really know who Hemingway is, and he doesn’t write anything like him. And besides, Hemingway’s very sick now.” I remember staring at his lizard-lidded eyes behind thick black rectangular glasses and thinking ''what do you really know about Mailer and Hemingway'' but I said nothing. I put down my guitar to head over and introduce myself to Norman Mailer. I knew it was Mailer from all the pictures I’d seen. On my way across the large room I stopped at the outer fringe of one circle of talkers, the circle where Moe Asch—head of Folkways Records—held forth. He was the{{pg|374|375}}real reason I had come to that gathering, having heard he’d be there. More than anything, I wanted Moe Asch to offer me a recording contract with Folkways. Just like every other kid-folksinger in the room, in the Village, in the entire country—that’s what I wanted then. (Years later, I had a chance to make a Folkways album with Asch but I was too busy writing about Faulkner and Hemingway to take time off from my promotion-and-tenure quest.) That night in 1961 I listened to Asch talk about the record business for a few minutes, and when I turned to make my way through the crowd toward Mailer I saw his shoulders and the back of his head going through the door, leaving the gathering. I was a little disappointed I didn’t get to talk to him but I wasn’t going to chase him down the steps and into the street. So that was when I first ''saw'' Mailer. I went back to the singing corner and played guitar and sang some more. That night some girl gave me a copy of ''The Old Man and the Sea'', inscribed to me and my “future great writings.”