The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/On Reading Mailer Too Young
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| « | The Mailer Review • Volume 4 Number 1 • 2010 • Literary Warriors | » |
THERE HE IS, GET A GOOD LOOK AT HIM AND PROMISE NOT TO LAUGH—this little guy stooped there Quasimodo-style over a thick book at the lumbering, dark wood table in the cathedral library of this suburban New York junior high. Dust on his socks. A morsel of cafeteria lunch pasted on his lip. Girls in bare legs who’ve just learned to have breasts walk by but he won’t look up because he’s afraid his hormones will make him detonate and, well, it’s a good book. Here it is, already . He’s thirteen. Kennedy’s just dead, the Beatles are just arrived, the Stones are releasing their debut album, too, Clay has just become Ali and the GI’s in Vietnam are still called advisors, mostly. The red carpet’s getting ready to unfold. And this little guy is sitting there reading The Naked and the Dead. The Holt, Rinehart, Winston edition. Black dust jacket that sports a red line drawing—all dots and jagged lines—the face of (maybe) a soldier in some tight-lipped, abstract rendering of the thousand-mile stare. This kid reads on, about Croft and Wilson and the climb up Mount Anaka. And we could say that he hits page ,runs into the fabled white space, and then the shock of the pick-up: “A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine gun bullet which passed through his chest.” And we could go through the usual amazement, the heartbreak of losing Hearn after six hundred-odd pages and the later dismissals from Mailer himself who sort of scoffed at this device as one he pulled from E. M. Forster. We could do that but . . . . OK. But it’s not Hearn and it’s not Forester; in fact it’s not literature that’s got this little thirteen-year-old guy pouring through Mailer too young, going page-by-page through the longest book he’s ever read. No, the clincher is earlier. It’s page . It’s when Mailer’s recon platoon suddenly comes under