The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Encounters with Mailer
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| « | The Mailer Review • Volume 4 Number 1 • 2010 • Literary Warriors | » |
1972: UNCLE NORMAN AT BERKELEY
“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.
So, when I heard that the great man was coming to town, Uncle Norman giving a lecture at Berkeley, all the mixed feelings leaped to the surface, like Dexedrine warring with Seconal in the head. After grappling so long with his shadow, to confront the legend in the flesh—I felt as much apprehension as anticipation.
“There’s gonna be trouble,” I heard some prophesy gleefully. “Woman’s Lib ain’t gonna let him get away with it.”
The scene as I approached Zellerbach Auditorium seemed to bear out their warnings. In front of the ticket line, a handful of demonstrators were holding up their placards: “A little bit of rape is good for a man’s soul, says Norman Mailer.” Surprisingly, the militants were primarily gays, not women. Super macho meets the army of gays. It seemed to promise a classic contest: Classic Comics, perhaps.
I was surprised to find my instinct was to defend the champ. Couldn’t they picket grosser offenders than Mailer? Or was it only that he had the boldness to announce unpopular views and the foolishness to take on all comers?