The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Reflections of Time Past: Pattern, Time, and Memory in Norman Mailer

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« The Mailer Review • Volume 3 Number 1 • 2009 • Beyond Fiction »
Written by
Raymond M. Vince
Abstract: How will Norman’s Mailer’s work be regarded in the future? From our current vantage point, we have no way of knowing. But we can say this: from WWII to the new millennium—with passion, intelligence, and skill—Mailer has charted the strange and troubled times of the United States.
Note: An earlier version of this paper was given at the 2008 Norman Mailer Conference, October 16–18, in Provincetown, MA.
URL: https://prmlr.us/mr03vin

Nearly seventy years ago, T. S. Eliot wrote these words in his poem, “East Coker,” published in 1935 and later a part of his masterpiece, Four Quartets. Hugh Kenner reminds us that East Coker is the name of “the village in Somerset where Eliots or Elyots lived for some two centuries, before the poet’s ancestor Andrew Eliot emigrated in 1667 to found the American branch of the family."[1] After Eliot died three decades later in 1965, his ashes were interred at St. Michael’s Church—in that same village of East Coker. In the church on a simple wall plaque are other words from that poem, “In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning.”[2] These enigmatic words seem, as Marysa Demoor has pointed out, “designed to elude death.”[3][a] Whether we see life as a manifestation of God’s providence or of a more impersonal Wheel of Life, surely we could see a strange sense of recursion and return in these simple facts of Eliot’s pilgrimage.[b] At times, does not life seem to fold back on itself? Or, to take up a hint from the title of Four Quartets, is not life like a string quartet or a Bach fugue, weaving a series of complex musical variations upon various themes? As Kenner suggests, Eliot’s Four Quartets “traverse and exploit a diversity of timbres and intonations, interchange themes, set going a repetitive but developing minuet of motifs.”[4][c]

Did not Norman Mailer’s untimely death on November 10, 2007 cause some of us to look again at the trajectory of our own lives, seeking to come to terms with his passing but also, implicitly, with our own mortality? This reflection is not to become obsessed or haunted by death—our own or others—but to examine the more positive aspects of aging, to chart the slow development of character, to find deeper meaning in the contingencies of life. This path, surely, is a crucial part of self-knowledge: in discovering character, Heraclitus tells us, we shall discover our fate. I freely acknowledge that such a stance may well reflect my own advancing years. However, as James Hillman the Jungian psychologist argues, part of the purpose of our “later years” may be that we are able to explore these deeper patterns of life.

. . .

Notes

  1. ↑ And T. S. Eliot’s poetry was the source for the epitaphs on two plaques commemorating his death in 1965. His ashes are interred in the church of St. Michael’s in East Coker, where a commemorative plaque on the church wall bears his chosen epitaph—two lines from Four Quartets: ‘In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning.’ Significant lines of course, considering the topic of this paper. The circularity of the reasoning, as well as the engraving on the stone, seems designed to elude death. The T. S. Eliot memorial stone in Westminster Abbey, featured in the BBC documentary, reads: ‘The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.’ Taken from Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding,’ this even more intriguing passage marks a communication between the dead, the living, and the ‘beyond’—in other words, a communication licensed by God. Communication ‘tongued with fire’ may indeed be poetic language, endowed with special godly powers going ‘beyond the language of the living.’ Here, then, modernist poets see their dead selves as immortal souls whose language has divine qualities capable of reaching the living.”[3]
  2. ↑ The concepts of recursion, strange loops, and “metaphorical fugues” are dealt with by Douglas Hofstadter in his Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Basic Books, 1979). His book won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, the same year that Norman Mailer won the Pulitzer Fiction Prize for The Executioner’s Song.
  3. ↑ The music parallel to Eliot’s Four Quartets is sometimes said to be the “late” quartets of Beethoven, but Kenner (relying on information from Hodgart) maintains that Eliot was “paying attention chiefly to Bartok’s Quartets, Nos. 2–6.”[4]

Citations

  1. ↑ Kenner 1965, p. 263.
  2. ↑ Eliot 1952, p. 263.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Demoor 2005, p. 258.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Kenner 1965, p. 261.

Works Cited

  • Auden, W. H. (2007) [1979]. Mendelson, Edward, ed. Selected Poems. New York: Vintage.
  • — (1991). Mendelson, Edward, ed. Collected Poems (Revised ed.). New York: Vintage.
  • Bernstein, Mashy (2008). "The Heart of the Nation: Jewish Values in the Fiction of Norman Mailer". The Mailer Review. 2 (1): 376–384. Retrieved 2021-06-20.
  • The Book of Common Prayer...according to the Episcopal Church (BCP). New York: Oxford UP. 1979.
  • Bronowski, J. (1973). The Ascent of Man. New York: Little, Brown.
  • Brooks, Peter (1996). "Reading for the Plot". Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. pp. 326–347.
  • Buechner, Frederick (1982). The Sacred Journey: A Memoir of Early Days. San Francisco: HarperCollins.
  • — (1991). Telling Stories. San Francisco: HarperCollins.
  • Busa, Chris (2008). "This is a Town Worth Digging in and Fighting For". The Mailer Review. 2 (1): 87–96. Retrieved 2021-06-20.
  • Cappell, Ezra (2008). "Norman Mailer: A Man of Letters Inspired by the People of the Book". The Mailer Review. 2 (1): 97–99. Retrieved 2021-06-20.
  • Demoor, Marysa (Spring 2005). "From Epitaph to Obituary: the Death Politics of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound". Biography. 28 (2): 255–275.
  • Devlin, Keith (1997). Mathematics, the Science of Patterns: the Search for Order in Life, Mind, and the Universe. New York: Scientific American.
  • Eliot, T. S. (1952). The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950. New York: Harcourt Brace.
  • George, William Herbert (1936). The Scientist in Action. London: Williams and Norgate.
  • Hahn, Hans-Christoh (1978). "Time, kairos". The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology. 3.
  • Hart, Matthew (Spring 2007). "Visible Poet: T. S. Eliot and Modernist Studies". American Literary History. 19 (1): 174–189.
  • Hillman, James (1999). The Force of Character and the Lasting Life. New York: Random House.
  • Hurston, Zora Neale (2006) [1937]. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: HarperCollins.
  • Josephs, Allen (1994). For Whom the Bell Tolls: Ernest Hemingway’s Undiscovered Country. New York: Twayne.
  • Kenner, Hugh (1965). The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot. London: Methuen.
  • Kuhn, Thomas (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
  • Lee, Michael (Summer 2007). "The Devil in Norman Mailer". Literary Review. 50 (4): 202–216.
  • Leeds, Barry (2008). "He was a Fighter: Boxing in Norman Mailer's Life and Work". The Mailer Review. 2 (1): 385–395. Retrieved 2021-06-20.
  • Mailer, Norman (2003). The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing. New York: Random House.
  • — (1998). The Time of Our Time. New York: Random House.
  • Mailer, Susan (2008). "Tapestry". The Mailer Review. 2 (1): 28–29. Retrieved 2021-06-20.
  • Morrison, Toni (2006). Beloved. New York: Everyman’s Library.
  • O’Gorman, Lawrence (October 2008). "Six Years of Pattern Recognition". IAPR Newsletter. 30 (4): 3–4.
  • Rodwan, John G. (2008). "Fighters and Writers". The Mailer Review. 2 (1): 396–406. Retrieved 2021-06-20.
  • Scott, Robert Ian (1991). "Entropy vs. Ecology in The Great Gatsby". In Bloom, Harold. Gatsby. Major Literary Characters. New York: Chelsea House. pp. 81–92.
  • Shulevitz, Judith (September 27, 2001). "Chasing after Conrad's Secret Agent". Slate. Retrieved 2021-06-20.
  • Spender, Stephen (1975). Eliot. Fontana Modern Masters. Fontana.
  • Steinfels, Peter (December 1, 2001). "Beliefs; After Sept. 11, a 62-year-old poem by Auden drew new attention. Not all of it was favorable". The New York Times (late ed.). sec. A. p. 13. Retrieved 2021-06-20.
  • Whitehead, Alfred North (2001). The Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead. New York: David R. Godine.
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