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IN A LENGTHY, SINGLE-SPACED, TWO-AND-A-HALF-PAGE TYPEWRITTEN CRITIQUE


THE MAILER REVIEW VOL. 5, NO. 1, FALL 2011. Copyright 2011. The Norman Mailer Society. Published by The Norman Mailer Society.


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ject and the self-revelatory hesitations he expresses creates a correspondence between him and Monroe as they both projected a blatant forward sexuality that overlays an undercurrent of vulnerability.

Another service Marilyn/Marilyn performs for Mailer is facilitating his joys of linguistic excess.[a] Given the spectacular and extravagant nature of his subject and her reputation, he allows himself a surfeit of verbal highwire acts. On occasion the result is fun as when he catalogs the list of Monroe's early Hollywood relationships: "Snively, Schenck, Karger, and Hyde! If she had been a bargirl lookng to sue an ex-lover in a raunchy case, she would have picked her law firm out of the yellow pages with a name like that".[1] But at other times his unmonitored metaphors and imagery are definitely in need of a discerning editor.[b] In one jarring instance he writes of Monroe's final moments when "the wings of death lay wet feathers across her face."[2] "Wet feathers" is a clumsy image whereby to communicate the dark eminence of death. Rather than a sense of awe, what is evoked is annoyance; wet feathers would tickle or make one want to sneeze. Mailer's choice of metaphor to describe Monroe's inability to escape her past is to describe her behavior "as sluggish as a dinosaur's tail".[3] This metaphor is equally inept. The image conveyed is awkward rather than apt. Experience that repeats itself "with the breath of a turnip" is another of his odd images.[4] Wet feathers, dinosaur tails, and the breath of a turnip--surely a wordsmith like Mailer could do better. In his explanation of why the "detritus of the insignificant" films she played in early in her career so damaged any good will she may hav accumulated as young women and led to "retaliations" he descibes as "nihilistic," Mailer pulls out more over-the-top verbal imagery.[5] He calls Monroe "a sly leviathan of survival, and, Faust among the Faustians".[6] In addition to the lingustic abandon, he also allows himself such salaciously voyeuristic flights of the imagination as an nvented dialogue after the discovery by studie executives that their newest sensation had posed in the nude. Mailer excuses himself by pointing out that "a novelist has a right to invent the following dialogue".[7] He then devises such questions as cannot help but inflame the imagination: "Did you spread your legs?""Is your asshole showing?""Any animals in it with you?" Lest he miss the opportunity to use every profanity he knows, Mailer includes the statement, when trying to describe the divided character of Monroe's personality, that while she could be an angel, she was also "on hard and calculating

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computer of a cold and ambitious cunt" and then underlines his linguistic choice by stating parenthetically "(no other English word is near)".[8][c]

The publication of Marilyn was a boon to Mailer both personally and professionally--and then as a bonus benefit unexpectedly, it was to serve him as a tool for seduction. In A Ticket to the Circus, Norris Church Mailer writes of its role in their first encounter and subsequent courtship. In 1975, in anticipation of meeting the famous author, Barbara Norris--her name when they met--brought her copy of the book for him to sign. He did not sign it until February of 1976 when a relationship had already begun. Addressing it to Barbara Mailer he writes, "Because I knew when I wrote this book that someone I had not yet met would read it and be with me".[9] The Mailer chutzpah is in full force here.

Of Women and Their Elegance, Mailer's second appropriation of Marilyn Monroe, came some seven years after the first. Like the first, it is heavily reliant on the visual. Here, however, rather than pictures only of Marilyn, there are pictures of other women and their elegance. The photographs by Milton H. Greene run the gamut from Marlene Dietrich to Grandma Moses. In Marilyn Mailer claimed to be writing a "novel biography" and he routinely referenced the biographical works of Maurice Zolotow, Fred Lawrence Guiles, and Norman Rosten, also often citing what he called "factoids." Here he baldly states in a note before the text that he "does not pretend to offer factual representations."

Obviously foreseeing much of the kind of criticism that this book would engender, Mailer anticipates his detractors in a make-believe trial published in New York magazine. Deftly titled "Before the Literary Bar," besides his own voice he creates the parts of the Prosecutor, the Defense, and The Court. The charge is "criminal literary negligence" and Mailer himself characterizes the work as a "falso autobiography" or "an imaginary memoir".[10] The thrust of his main argument about his fast-and-loose treatment of the facts is that what he portrays in the book, "whether factual or not...[could] reasonably have occurred in Miss Monroe's life" and that they are therefore "aesthetically true" if not literally so.[11] Mailer assumes the variety of voices, both pro and con, in an adroit manner, convincingly developing the arguments of his detractors. In some spots he even demonstartes a delightful sense of self-irony. An example is when, after having been instructed numerous times to reply only to the questions asked of him, he has The Court remark, "Maybe Mr. Mailer thinks he is being paid by the word".[11] In another instance he

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has The Court assure him, after a question of whether or not he would like it if someone made up facts about him when he is dead, that they "do not with to rush that occasion".[12]

Mailer's self-defense in "Before the Literary Bar" is that made-up parts of his fictional autobiography can be justified as having reasonably occurred in Monroe's life. However, his creation of the Bobby de Peralta character pushes the boundaries of a reader's willing suspension of disbelief. Mailer claims to have made him up to try to explain the tragic ambiguities in Monroe's character, attributing them to buried matters in her psyche. He rationalizes that something in her unrecorded years in Hollywood must contain a "psychic cyst" or memories so bad that she could face them.[13]

Mailer's rationalizations are unconvinicing and his sordid and sensational section of Of Women and Their Elegance is a prime example of Mailer's "piling on." To demonstrate the appropriateness of this football metaphor, at the point in her life at which Mailer claims to need a defining episode, like a downed quarterback, Marilyn's background of illegitimacy, foster homes, absent father, family insanity, and a remembered attempted strangling in her crib have effectively already left her "sacked." Any one or any combination of the events of her childhood could more than adequately explain why she would be the unahappy and disturbed person Mailer portrays. Dumping more excrement on her can serve little purpose other than to warrant the author's desire to give license to his lascivious imagination. The pictures he paints are almost cliché in their pornographic purpose. For Marilyn's first Hollywood party Mailer evokes rooms of filthy pictures filled with naked people and the imaginary Bobby "naked except for cowboy boots and a Stetson hat," walking a Doberman named Romulus who tries to get in on the sexual action of the lustful couples.[14]

But the party is only the destination point for the heart of this imaginary episode. Traveling to this party, Mailer indulges his fantasy by having Marilyn engage in a brief fling with a fictional "Rod" (the double entendre is almost funny). They ride to the party on his motorcycle, all the while having sexual intercourse at eighty miles an hour. Making the most of his imaginary license, Mailer has Marilyn explain how she had only "to lean up on the handlebars a little, and he was in the proper place, if from behind, my dear. I could have become an addict".[15] The situation only gets more sordid after that.[d] As if picturing Marilyn as so dissolute that she rides to the party on a motorcycle having sex with the fictional Rod, after which she gives him

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Notes

  1. ↑ I do not mean to imply that Mailer's linguistic virtuosity is sparing in other works, only that this work allows him even more occasion for unmonitored verbal hijinks.
  2. ↑ My colleague Robert Gunn suggests that Mailer's prose flaunts a lack of monitoring, that in its "gleefully exhibitionistic (and highly erotic)" display demonstrates "not an absence of artistic control, but rather a deliberate choice to refuse propriety and proportionality."
  3. ↑ I am reminded of an old graffiti:"Profanity is the crutch of the inarticulate mother-fucker." I can think of a number of words that would work as well. I am sure Mailer could too, but he liked to shock and as I argue throughout, he gives himself full license with this topic.
  4. ↑ Stephan Morrow writes of Shelley Winters getting up and objecting when he played that scene in Strawhead

Citations

  1. ↑ Mailer 1973, p. 89.
  2. ↑ Mailer 1973, p. 86.
  3. ↑ Mailer 1973, p. 126.
  4. ↑ Mailer 1973, p. 143.
  5. ↑ Mailer 1973, pp. 89-90.
  6. ↑ Mailer 1973, p. 90.
  7. ↑ Mailer 1973, p. 92.
  8. ↑ Mailer 1973, p. 97.
  9. ↑ Mailer 2010, p. 89.
  10. ↑ Mailer & 10 Nov 1980, pp. 27-8.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Mailer & 10 Nov 1980, p. 34.
  12. ↑ Mailer & 10 Nov 1980, p. 45-6.
  13. ↑ Mailer & 10 Nov 1980, p. 45.
  14. ↑ Mailer 1980, p. 130.
  15. ↑ Mailer 1980, p. 129.

Works Cited

  • Bailey, Jennifer (1979). Norman Mailer: Quick-Change Artist (Print). London: Macmillan.
  • Dearborn, Marilyn V. (1999). Mailer: A Biography (Print). New York: Houghton Mifflin.
  • Leeds, Barry H. (2002). The Enduring Vision of Norman Mailer (Print). Bainbridge Island, WA: Pleasure Boat Studio: A Literary Press.
  • Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher (16 July 1973). "Aquarius ON Gemini - I". New York Times (Print). 27.
  • Mailer, Norman (10 Nov 1980). "Before the Literary Bar". New York Magazine (Print). pp. 27–46.
  • Mailer, Norman (1980). Of Women and Their Elegance (Print). New York: Simon and Schuster.
  • Mailer, Norman (1973). Marilyn (Print). New York: Galahad Books.
  • Mailer, Norris Church (2010). A Ticket To The Circus (Print). New York: Random House.
  • Manso, Peter (1985). Mailer (Print). New York: Simon & Schuster.
  • Merrill, Robert (1992). Norman Mailer Revisited (Print). New York: Twayne Publishers.
  • Rollyson, Carl (1991). The Lives of Norman Mailer: A Biography (Print). New York: Paragon House.
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