The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/A Favor for the Ages

Written by
Wayne Worcester

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Abstract: An examination of Norman Mailer as representative of the best of American journalism, one of the boldest, brightest, most tenacious, and passionate of its practitioners, as illustrated by the power of Oswald’s Tale. At one turn, Mailer could be the once-and-future journalist, erudite, hard-working to a fault, dazzling with invention, but restrained by the metes and bounds of reality. The next, he could be the celebrated novelist, startlingly fresh, daring and powerful. He could reach for truth with either hand. Genre mattered little; convention not at all. His bravado and originality made his work magnetic and, inevitably, controversial.

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URL: https://prmlr.us/mr03wor

The heroes of my youth died in the 1960s: my father and President John F. Kennedy in 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Assassins took them all: cancer the first, bullets the rest. Losses of that magnitude, at least for a time, stripped life of its joy, reduced living to a mere alternative. It wasn't just me. The loss of my father was only a private preview of the pain, confusion and anger that was to scar and undermine my generation. Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray and Sirhan B. Sirhan, by themselves or in concert with powers unknown, helped to twist and turn us unproductively inward while in the background arose a damnable Asian war that left us mocking the principles, self-reliance and patriotism of our parents and their parents, and their parents before them.

We have been a naïve, narcissistic and arrogant generation, the Baby Boomers, quick to blame and slow to take responsibility. Despite ourselves, we managed to achieve some good along the way, but in a country turned upside down in the 1960s, spun inside out in the 1970s, and set before a fun-house mirror in the 1980s, we remained consumed by the mysteries of the self. Our unswerving indulgence and self-absorption right through the turn of the century has finally brought us, as we flirt with the end of the new millennium's first decade, to the brink of ruin.

Perhaps this is a glib and unfair judgement, the too fast stroke of a broad and darkening brush. I do believe that more hope abides from coast to coast in the year 2009 than during any year in recent memory. And if we look back over all of the years and even quickly consider the day-to-day of it all, where life was lived, only rarely did tomorrow seem unremittingly bleak. There have been moments of great joy, righteous, tide-turning anger, clarity of purpose and, most importantly, understanding.

We owe much of that—although we have always been loathe to admit it and certainly do not do so now—to the best of American journalism, and in particular to those who have been the boldest, brightest, and most tenacious and passionate of the practitioners. They push, prod and knead the prosaic forms of their craft until what might otherwise be homely articles instead become illuminating stories that strain and tilt inexorably toward something more. Invariably, the goal is a keener, clearer, more circumspect knowledge: truth, in other words, with a capital letter T, or as close to it as anyone can possibly come.

Their work on this last literary frontier has gone by various names, some invented by the journalists themselves, others by critics and academics who, for the sake of predictability or perhaps merely for wont of neatness, always feel compelled to categorize—fly-on-the-wall reporting, window-pane reporting, drop-out journalism, submersion journalism, immersion journalism, nonfiction fiction, fictional nonfiction, reporting from the worm’s-eye view, new journalism, gonzo journalism, creative nonfiction, narrative journalism. Well into the exercise, with labels flying everywhere, some pedant is likely to sniff, “Literary journalism? Isn’t that an oxymoron?” Eventually the effort mires in priggish declarations of what is literary and what is not. It is at roughly this juncture that someone is most apt to reel out Ezra Pound’s dictum that “Literature is news that stays news.” Curses are shouted, oaths taken, punches thrown. The police are called. ’Twas ever thus.

Reporters who dare also to write often become the makers of so many glimmering brass rings, the bearers of higher, different, more challenging standards. When one considers the fundamental importance of good journalism to a democratic society, their work can rightly be called heroic. They become models for others who would seek the truth and tell it with a style and grace of their own. This has been so in virtually every age, but in mine, these men and women have stood in my slain heroes.

There have been so many truly fine writing reporters that no single list could accurately be called complete. Here are but a handful from the twentieth century: Jimmy Breslin, Martha Gellhorn, Ernie Pyle, Richard Harding Davis, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, John Hersey, Gay Talese, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Pete Hamill, Lillian Ross, Rachel Carson, Jessica Mitford, Seymour Hersh, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, Tom Wolfe, Mary Heaton Vorse, Joan Didion, Rick Bragg, Michael Herr, Hunter S. Thompson, and, of course, scrapping, jabbing, self-promoting but, best of all, brilliantly writing his way to the top, Norman Mailer.

With him there belongs Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery. a minority view perhaps, but one that is eminently defensible. Stylistically, the book is something of a Norman Mailer sampler. Some passages soar, some trudge. In very many, the author is invisible; in others he is omnipresent, but necessarily so. The book's unevenness gives it an engaging, if unwoven, vitality; it is easily among the most conscientiousness, candid and compassionate of Mailer's reportage.

Consider his summary estimation of Marina Prusakova Oswald, Lee Harvey Oswald's often-and easily- vilified widow:

She sits in a chair, a tiny woman in her early fifties, her thin shoulders hunched forward in such pain of spirt under such a mass of guilt that one would comfort her as one would hug a child. What is left of what was once her beauty are her extraordinary eyes, blue as diamonds, and they blaze with light as if, in divine compensation for the dead weight of all that will not cease to haunt her, she has been granted a spark from the hour of an apocalypse others have not seen. Perhaps it is the light offered to victims who have suffered like gods. (788)

Who but a fellow traveler could write that last line? Only a novelist in reporter's clothing.

. . .

Works Cited

• Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan (2006). Klinger, Leslie S., ed. The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. pp. 209–382.

• Hersey, John (2006). "The Legend on the License". In Adam, G. Stuart; Clark, Roy Peter. Journalism: The Democratic Craft. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 152–163.

• Hillstrom, Kevin; Collier, Laurie (1998). The Vietnam Experience: A Concise Encyclopedia of American Literature, Songs, and Films. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

• Jones, Malcolm (November 19, 2007). "Sentry of a Century; Norman Mailer: 1923/2007". Newsweek. pp. 64–5.

• Mailer, Norman (1995). Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery. New York: Random House.

• "Oswald's Ghost". The American Experience. PBS. January 14, 2008. Retrieved 2021-06-19.

• Pound, Ezra (1934). ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions.