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| SOME PRELIMINARY SPECULATION ON NORMAN MAILER'S LEGACY reminds
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| me of a media-fixed auto derby that has already predetermined a Mailer finish as a questionable non-winner at the starting-gate.
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| Such derby flux began with the news of Mailer’s recent demise and
| | These developments fed the early LQ verdict in the January 2008 ''Smithsonian'', a print-medium legacy bible. The presumptive judge, Lance Morrow,dissects Mailer’s “huge ego” and finds it “unpleasant” and “poisonous.”Thus, Mailer “[I]n his own ways he embodied America’s worst faults: selfindulgence, bullying, sense of entitlement, irrelevant belligerence, the obnoxious American self-importance that is a corrupted Emersonianism—Emerson without the sweetness, the calm, the brains, the transcendence”(97).Such deconstruction gets a body English treatment when Morrow refers to a 1994 Valentine’s Day incident at Carl Bernstein’s fiftieth birthday party.Mailer was about to commit a social atrocity and was likened to a madcap Existential killer-driver: |
| became fast-tracked into obvious truth that Mailer’s Legacy Quotient (LQ) is
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| unique in that his “character” supersedes and eclipses his canon of work A
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| writer’s behavior, in short, is all that matters to some critics. The LQ axiom,
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| in Mailer’s case, remains commonplace: character overshadows canon.
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| Imagine such absurdity, historically speaking. To hell with ''The Ring'',Wagner was such a rotter. And up the LQ of Will Shakespeare with his blank bio,
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| but down the LQ of the thuggish Ben Jonson. And give a zero read to Ezra
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| Pound, that Fascist. And don’t forget that old goat, Theodore Dreiser, and his
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| whorehouse antics. And, yes, Papa Hemingway, that macho bundle of character flaws. Heraclitus said that “Character is Destiny.” Enter Norman Mailer,
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| a literary bundle of flux, perhaps destined to have his ego read more than his
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| books. Also enter the ubiquitous media that increasingly preside over a
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| nation of gawkers rather than readers.
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| In 1948, a curtain rose and out trots an unknown with a big war book, an
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| overnight best seller and a corresponding big-eyed media. What a readymade twosome, Mailer and the media, mutual enablers, and Norman Mailer
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| becomes America’s leading literary celebrity. Unlike his two nearest competitors, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal, Mailer was typecast as ruffian
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| extraordinaire—a 24/7 bully-brawler in salons and saloons, the epitome of
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| egghead violence. Overnight, Mailer became the undisputed bad boy of
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| American letters, so said the drooling, yet chiding media.
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