The Mailer Review/Volume 1, 2007/How Mailer Became “Mailer”: The Writer as Private and Public Character: Difference between revisions

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-{{Byline|last=Dickstein|first=Morris|url=https://prmlr.us/mr07dick|abstract=Mailer has been our most protean writer, remarkably consistent in his themes yet always surprising in the ways he finds to pursue them, beginning with his own inimitable style. In choosing his subjects he was like a riverboat gambler restless for risk; each new venture depended on bold strokes that could as soon fail as succeed. Strategies that worked well would never be exactly repeated. Invariably he was engaging the moment, never writing for the uniform edition.|note=This paper served as the keynote address at a conference, “The Sense of Our Time: Norman Mailer and America in Conflict,” held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin, November 9–11, 2006. I am grateful to the director, Thomas Staley, and his colleagues for inviting me to participate.}}
+{{Byline|last=Dickstein|first=Morris|url=https://prmlr.us/mr01dic |abstract=Mailer has been our most protean writer, remarkably consistent in his themes yet always surprising in the ways he finds to pursue them, beginning with his own inimitable style. In choosing his subjects he was like a riverboat gambler restless for risk; each new venture depended on bold strokes that could as soon fail as succeed. Strategies that worked well would never be exactly repeated. Invariably he was engaging the moment, never writing for the uniform edition.|note=This paper served as the keynote address at a conference, “The Sense of Our Time: Norman Mailer and America in Conflict,” held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin, November 9–11, 2006. I am grateful to the director, Thomas Staley, and his colleagues for inviting me to participate.}}
-It’s a privilege, though daunting, for me to take part in a conference that celebrates the opening of what is sure to become one of the indispensable archives in modern American letters, especially with the subject himself in attendance. At the same time this event leaves me uneasy. [[Norman Mailer]] has always prided himself on being unpredictable, unsettling. This is after all a living, unruly body of work, virtually unclassifiable in its range and variety. For close to sixty years, Mailer has been our most protean writer, remarkably consistent in his themes yet always surprising in the ways he finds to pursue them, beginning with his own inimitable style. As his early novels were quick to demonstrate, no two of Mailer’s books would ever be quite alike. In choosing his subjects he was like a riverboat gambler restless for risk; each new venture depended on bold strokes that could as soon fail as succeed. Strategies that worked well would never be exactly repeated. Invariably he was engaging the moment, never writing for the uniform edition.
+{{dc|dc=I|t’s a privilege, though daunting, for me to take part}} in a conference that celebrates the opening of what is sure to become one of the indispensable archives in modern American letters, especially with the subject himself in attendance. At the same time this event leaves me uneasy. [[Norman Mailer]] has always prided himself on being unpredictable, unsettling. This is after all a living, unruly body of work, virtually unclassifiable in its range and variety. For close to sixty years, Mailer has been our most protean writer, remarkably consistent in his themes yet always surprising in the ways he finds to pursue them, beginning with his own inimitable style. As his early novels were quick to demonstrate, no two of Mailer’s books would ever be quite alike. In choosing his subjects he was like a riverboat gambler restless for risk; each new venture depended on bold strokes that could as soon fail as succeed. Strategies that worked well would never be exactly repeated. Invariably he was engaging the moment, never writing for the uniform edition.
 It was wise to focus this symposium and the accompanying exhibition not so much on Mailer himself as on his ever-shifting dialogue with his tumultuous times, especially during the first decades after World War II. With the rich mother lode of this archive and his many published works, one could no doubt write the history of the age through Mailer’s idiosyncratic involvement in it. We are now distant enough from the fifties and sixties to begin to understand them. For that we need firsthand informants who were also actors on the cultural stage. More than any other writer of his generation, Mailer not only reacted strongly to the public world of his times, often in obscure private ways, but also tried to influence it by descending — sometimes physically, more often textually — into the thick of battle. In doing so he blurred the lines between journalism and literature, fiction and autobiography, writing and acting.