User:JSheppard/sandbox: Difference between revisions

I believe it’s best to confront the central issue here at the outset. Mailer has, indeed, perceived gladiatorial confrontation and violence as a central metaphor for his own artistic and personal struggles for growth, fulfillment, salvation.As he muses retrospectively upon a turning point in his career during his crises of the early 1960s,{{quote|The review in Time of Deaths for the Ladies put iron into my heart again, and rage, and the feeling that the  enemy was more alive than ever, and dirtier in the alley, and so one had to mend,and put on the armor, and go to war, go out to war again, and try to hew huge strokes with the only broadsword God ever gave you, a glimpse of something like almighty prose.{{sfn|''Existential''''Errands''|1960|p=204}}}}

Another regular at the Gramercy Gym in the 1980s was Sal Cetrano, who is mentioned ~though not by name! in “The Best Move.” In a hitherto

unpublished interview with J. Michael Lennon (dated May 24, 2007), Cetrano disarmingly recounts a series of anecdotes regarding his experiences

{{in5|n}}Cetrano first met Mailer by accident on Broadway in 1980, and the first thing they talked about was the Paret/Griffith fight. Subsequently, Cetrano wrote Mailer a letter which was reciprocated by a postcard that simply said, “Be at the Gramercy Gym at 10:30 AM Saturday.” Sal had been in the Golden Gloves as a kid, but he“weighed about 145 pounds and everyone seemed bigger.”

His solution to this problem, since “I had been a distance runner as a kid,” was to keep opponents at arm’s length. Of the relationship between

Mailer and Torres, he describes it as one of “power to power: Norman was a king of literature; Jose a king of boxing.” When asked by Michael Lennon of the parallels between Mailer as a boxer

Since Mailer’s death on November 10, 2007, there has (not surprisingly) been an outpouring of retrospective summaries and evaluations of his life and career in magazines, newspapers, radio, and television, virtually all mass media. Equally unsurprising is the fact that Mailer has been almost universally portrayed as a fighter for everything he believed in, and more precisely,

in many cases as a boxer. For example, in an article in ''The New York Observer''(Nov. 19, 2007, 8) Leon Neyfakh tells the story of how Mailer acquired the original David Levine illustration of Mailer “as a boxer, his ... body in a crouch and his gloves at his face.”Mailer had just published “Some Children of the Goddess” in ''Esquire'' (July 1963, rpt. ''Cannibals and Christians'', 1966) in which he took on his major novelistic contemporaries and rivals and was photographed posed in the corner of a boxing ring. Neyfakh goes on to

recount how Mailer took the cardboard-mounted illustration to show Jose Torres, who teased Mailer’s vanity by idly bending it almost to the breaking point. Apparently, by remaining silent (if not unperturbed) Mailer passed the Torres modesty requirement.

It is, in fact, almost impossible to enumerate the many retrospectives appearing immediately after Mailer’s death which either pictured him in a boxing contest: with gloves on or actually in a ring. Many others referred pointedly to his predilection for fisticuffs both in and out of the ring. Thus, it is clear that boxing has always been and will always be associated with the Mailer legend. ''Sports Illustrated'' titled Kostya Kennedy’s tribute, “The Pugilist at Rest.”

What I further consider significant here is Mailer’s fictive vision of fighting. Violence in personal confrontations outside the ring, both in heterosexual relationships and between male adversaries, is central to Mailer’s fiction. Christian Messenger, in a related article, makes some interesting points, but I think it’s a critical commonplace to trot out Mailer’s 1959 story, “The Time of Her Time,” as the beginning of all this. As early as ''A Transit to Narcissus'' (1978),Mailer was already concerned with the smoldering violence between

sexual partners, alluding to “the most terrible themes of my own life:  

 

the nearness of violence to creation, and the whiff of murder just beyond every embrace of love” (Introduction x).

 

And the darkest side of this vision is disturbingly revealed in ''The Armies of the Night'' (1968), when Mailer writes with horror of federal Marshall and American soldiers brutally beating young women during the night after the 1967 march on the Pentagon: Such men, he suggests, “may never have another opportunity like this—to beat a woman without having to make

 

It’s true that in “The Time of Her Time,” Sergius O’Shaugnessy, just back from Mexico after the end of ''The Deer Park'' (1955), does throw Denise Gondelman “a fuck the equivalent of a fifteen round fight” (“Time” in ''Advertisements ''501). Sergius has been a boxer in the Air Force, and in bed he and Denise are “like two club fighters” ~490!. But it is shewho gets in the last literal punch: “I might have known she would have a natural punch. My jaw felt it for half an hour after she was gone...” (494–495).And in the story’s last line, he muses that “Like a real killer, she did not look back, and was out the door before I could rise to tell her that she was a hero fit for me” (503). This is, therefore, a battle of equals, which prefigures embryonically the growth toward the graceful, loving equality of the central Rojack/Cherry passage in ''An American Dream.''