The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer: Difference between revisions

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 I’ll give you this much: you have come by it honestly. Not by bribery and not by marriage, not by family ties and not by wealth, not by good luck alone or by the breaks of the game. You have plenty, Slugger, that I’ll admit. But I do not come at you like a barbarian. The latest technology is in my corner. The Schick 1000-watt blow-dryer, trunks by Haspel, robe by Mr. Mann, Jovan cologne. Adidas kidskin shoes travel three quarters of my shin with laces of mandarin silk. From my flesh, coated with Vaseline and Desenex, {{pg|505|506}} the sweat breaks forth like pearls. My desperation grows muscular in the bright lights. I am the fatted calf.
+You stand in your corner like Walt Whitman. No electric outlets, cheap
+cotton YMCA trunks, even your gloves look used. Your red robe just says “Norm.” You wear sneakers and no socks. I should take you the Oriental way by working your feet up to blisters and then stepping on your toes, but I lack the Chinaman’s patience. No, it will have to be head to head, although everyone has cautioned me about trading punches with you.
+Last week a crowd of critics came out to my camp in a chartered bus.
+They carried canes and magnifying glasses. They told me to evaluate each
+punch from the shoulder. “Let your elbow be the judge,” Robert Penn Warren said; “Sting like an irony,” from Booth of Chicago. They told me that if I win I’ll get an honorary degree from Kenyon and a job at one of the best gyms in the Midwest. Like a Greek chorus they stood beside my training ring and sang in unison, “Don’t slug it out, move and think. Speed and reflexes beat out power. To the victor goes the victory.”
+“Scram.” I yelled, spitting my between-the-rounds mouthwash. “Get lost you crummy bastards. You shit on my poems and laughed off my stories,
+now you want some of my body language. Go study the ambiguities of
+Harold Robbins.” I was mad as hell but they stood firm taking notes on my weight and reach. Finally a group of kids carrying “Free Rubin Carter” signs ran them back to the bus.
+The press is no help either. They are so tired of promoting Ali against a bunch of nobodies that to them I’m just another Joe Bugner. They rarely call me by name. “Mailer’s latest victim to be” is their tag. The ''Times'' calls me a “man with little to recommend him. Slight. almost feline, with the gestures of a minor poet, this latest in a long series of Mailer baiters seems to have no more business in the ring with the master than Stan Ketchel had with Jack Johnson.No one is interested in this fight. The Astrodome will be bare, UHF refuses to televise, and Mailer has scheduled a reading for later that night at the University of Houston. Norman, why do you keep accepting every challenge from the peanut gallery? Let’s stop this Christians versus Lions until there is a real contender. Now, if the Pynchon backers could come up with a site and a solid guarantee, that might be a real match.”
+You know what I say, I say, “Fuck the ''Times''.” They gave Clay no chance
+against Big Bad Sonny Liston, and four years later the “meanest, toughest” {{pg|506|507}} champ the ''Times'' ever saw dropped dead while tying his shoes and Muhammad built a Temple for Elijah M. So much for the sports writers.
+But there are a few people who understand. Teddy White will be in my corner and Senator Proxmire at ringside. ''The Realist'' and the L.A. ''Free Press'' have picked me. The DAR sent a fruit basket. Outside the literary crowd I’m actually well liked. Cesar Chavez and the migrants from South Texas are coming up to cheer for me and my friend Ira from Minneapolis and the whole English department of my school. All the Democratic Presidential candidates sent telegrams; so did Bill Buckley, Mayor Beame, Gore Vidal, Irving Wallace, John Ehrlichman, and Herman Kahn. . . . All I can say is, when the time comes boys, I’ll be ready, just watch.
+==II==
 {{Review}}
 {{DEFAULTSORT:Inside Norman Mailer}}
 [[Category:Short Stories (MR)]]