The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law

Written by
Sarah Jo Cohen

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Abstract: A discussion of Mailer’s career, interrelating Mailer’s ethnicity with his corpus of work, with special attention to his cinematic work.

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URL: https://projectmailer.net/pm/Sara_Jo_Cohen

NORMAN MAILER’S SIZABLE FBI FILE BEGINS WITH HIS VOICE. The 165 pages of Mailer’s 171-page file available to the public cover fifteen years of observation and surveillance, and includes materials ranging from endless notes tracking Mailer’s passport applications and international travel, to FBI agents’ reviews of Miami and the Siege of Chicago (with meticulous notes about each mention of the FBI), and even a letter from a high school teacher asking J. Edgar Hoover for permission to teach The Naked and the Dead. 1 The file begins, however, with a clipping from The Washington Post, a June 6,1962, George Sokolsky column called “These Days,” that moved J. Edgar Hoover to leave a note for his staff reading, “Let me have memo on Mailer” . Sokolsky’s article responds to an Esquire piece Mailer wrote about then first lady Jackie Kennedy that describes Mrs. Kennedy’s voice as “a quiet parody of the sort of voice one hears on the radio late at night, dropped softly into the ear by girls who sell soft mattresses, depilatories, or creams to brighten the skin” . Sokolsky takes offense at Mailer’s mockery of Mrs. Kennedy and scrutiny of her voice, responding, “[A] person’s voice is what it is. I never heard Norman Mailer’s voice but whatever the Lord gave him, baritone or tenor, soprano or bass, it is what it is, and he can thank the good Lord that he does not suffer from cerebral palsy or some such thing” . Mailer’s voice, however, much like his persona, is not at all God-given and never “is what it is.” Rather, Mailer’s