The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/On Reading Mailer Too Young

Written by
Ross Klavan

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Abstract: Remediating Article by Ross Klvan

THERE HE IS, GET A GOOD LOOK AT HIM AND PROMISE NOT TO LAUGH—this little guy stooping there Quasimodo-style over a thick book at the lumbering dark wood table in the cathedral library of this suburban New York junior high. With dust on his socks, a morsel of cafeteria lunch stuck on his lip. Girls with bare legs who’ve just started developing, but he won't look up, afraid that his hormones might cause him to explode, but he’s lost in the book; it's just too good. Here, it is already 1964. He’s thirteen. Kennedy has just died, the Beatles have just arrived, and the Stones are releasing their debut album, too. Clay has just become Ali, and the GI’s in Vietnam are still mostly called advisors. The red carpet’s getting ready to unfold. And this little guy is sitting there, reading The Naked and the Dead. Holt, Rinehart, Winston edition. A 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 continues reading 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: “half an 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. It’s not Forster. It’s not literature that’s got this little thirteen-year-old guy reading Mailer too young, turning page-by-page through the longest book he’s ever read. No, the clincher comes earlier — it’s on page 150. It’s when Mailer’s recon platoon suddenly comes under Japanese machine gun fire, and we read: “BEE-YOWWWW!... BEE-YOWWWW!” and on and on and on. Those fantastic machine gun sounds were written out right there on the page. It’s not literature that brought him to Mailer. It’s comic books. Now, the discovery of Mailer is an eureka moment that’s built out of a truckload of mental prep. What’s got this little guy hooked on Mailer (though it’s a few years yet before he’ll use that phrase) is that Mailer is the only great writer around, the only living major public author, who comes busting off of an operatic stage in total exuberance, to fall right into the laps of this thirteen-year-old boy and his reading pals. Because, with their own struggling hands, they’ve hammered together two unlikely mind-bending standards: Mad Magazine and the world of Batman, Superman, Capt. America, and Sgt. Rock of Easy Co. (OK, also the blessed Classics Illustrated, one of the finest series of comics ever in those terrible days before Cliff’s Notes.) So, for the first time, our young man and his reading buddies are convinced they’re being exposed to an adult author who can live up to this incredible mind-melt of Mad, Marvel, National Periodicals... I’m telling you, reading this Mailer guy is like being on a rocket even if half the time, you have no idea what he’s talking about.

In the literary eye of the thirteen-year-old boy, this is the highest compliment. Forget the studied sincerity of, say, To Kill A Mockingbird.. Down with the The Old Man and the Sea, tii, which even at thirteen we thought was enough to put you off Hemingway before you discover the madness, the whole crazy, lurid world was there in Mailer's pages, and even better, this was a guy who was respec ted and could write like a son of bitch. 

And if a “real writer” could put something like “BEE-YOWWWW! . . .

BEE-YOOWWWW!” in his book, if he could huddle so dangerously close to “Sgt. Rock of Easy Company” and “SpyVs. Spy” then by God, a writer could do anything.

I mean, listen. It would be great to proclaim that we were drawn in by the

sex scenes. The only thing is, until An American Dream, Mailer wouldn’t get a shake of the hand from the dedicated literary onanist. Maybe The Time of Her Time.A bit of The Deer Park. But, hey, we’d already read Terry Southern’s Candy. We’d scampered into Lady Chatterley’s Love,r and ’ was the year of the court fight over Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, a book that showed up, literally in brown paper wrappers, in the school hall from time to time. We were veterans of post-war war novels. Battle Cry by Leon Uris with the bedroom wrestling that always ended in “. . .” and at least two of us were collectors of the fantastic and now much-mourned Monarch Books, a long gone and sadly missed paperback company that had dissected the soul of the thirteen-year-old boy. Titles like: Bloody Beaches (Marines die hard!), Baby Face Nelson, Reptilicus, Tarawa, Marine War Heroes, The Indian Wars series, Nikki (One night with Nikki was like a lifetime)—the company put out a forest’s worth of original paperbacks that skipped their way into the welcoming thirteen-year-old mind. And in each book, even the historical The Apache Indian Wars (even in the novelization of the monster movie Reptilicus, f’Christ’s-sake!), there was always a surprise sex scene. You’d be sitting around, reading about the Apaches or the Marines or a primordial monster, and suddenly there’d be a breathless unhooking of bras, there’d be nipples, panting and moaning and then the final ellipsis or white space. You stumbled upon these surprises in your reading when you least expected it, although, after some experience, you knew it would be there like a gift in a Cracker Jack's box. Apropos of nothing. Just apropos of they know their audience. Monarch Books was young adult reading at its best. We practically supported the company with purchases from the swiveling metal rack at Virginia Variety and an occasional secretive mail order. And the only reason to go on about all this is . . . into this reading world we invited Norman Mailer.