663
edits
The Mailer Review/Volume 1, 2007/Norman Mailer as Occasional Commentator in a Self-Interview and Memoir: Difference between revisions
The Mailer Review/Volume 1, 2007/Norman Mailer as Occasional Commentator in a Self-Interview and Memoir (view source)
Revision as of 07:29, 8 July 2021
, 8 July 2021Updated URL; added dc.
m (Move tweaks.) |
Jules Carry (talk | contribs) m (Updated URL; added dc.) |
||
| Line 1: | Line 1: | ||
{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>{{SUBPAGENAME}}}} | {{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>{{SUBPAGENAME}}}} | ||
{{MR01}} | {{MR01}} | ||
{{byline|last=Kennedy|first=William|url=https://prmlr.us/ | {{byline|last=Kennedy|first=William|url=https://prmlr.us/mr01ken}} | ||
I started writing fiction in college and when I was drafted during the Korean War I had a post-graduate education through my army buddies who were a literate gang. We were all running a weekly army newspaper in Germany and after the workday at the Enlisted Men’s club in Frankfurt we guzzled heilbock and dunkelbock and talked about writers — Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Algren, Katherine Ann Porter, Flannery O’Connor, James Jones, Irwin Shaw, Thomas Wolfe. And Norman Mailer. Once in a while somebody mentioned Chekhov. I read everything I could find by all of them, and realized that the writing I’d done since college was all blithering drivel and that I was into something truly new by matching myself against these maestros. When I left the army I got a job as a newspaperman. I wrote short stories on my days off and found I could turn out dialogue that sounded very like Hemingway, I could keep a sentence running around the block like Faulkner, I could describe the contents of a kitchen refrigerator just like Thomas Wolfe, I could use intelligent and not-so-intelligent obscenity with the panache of Norman Mailer. None of this had much to do with Kennedy. | {{dc|dc=I| started writing fiction in college and when I was drafted}} during the Korean War I had a post-graduate education through my army buddies who were a literate gang. We were all running a weekly army newspaper in Germany and after the workday at the Enlisted Men’s club in Frankfurt we guzzled heilbock and dunkelbock and talked about writers — Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Algren, Katherine Ann Porter, Flannery O’Connor, James Jones, Irwin Shaw, Thomas Wolfe. And Norman Mailer. Once in a while somebody mentioned Chekhov. I read everything I could find by all of them, and realized that the writing I’d done since college was all blithering drivel and that I was into something truly new by matching myself against these maestros. When I left the army I got a job as a newspaperman. I wrote short stories on my days off and found I could turn out dialogue that sounded very like Hemingway, I could keep a sentence running around the block like Faulkner, I could describe the contents of a kitchen refrigerator just like Thomas Wolfe, I could use intelligent and not-so-intelligent obscenity with the panache of Norman Mailer. None of this had much to do with Kennedy. | ||
Kennedy did emerge, but only after shucking off all those maestros, who were smothering him. Of course you don’t really shuck them. They form your voice, your syntax, your wit or solemnity, your political inclinations, your defiance, your creative mysteries. Where does that insight come from? What a great style — how do I get a style? I remember deciding Graham Greene didn’t have a style; he was merely intelligent. I decided Mailer didn’t have a style either. He had a huge brain, which I couldn’t imitate. In those early days I didn’t have a brain, only a hunger. I was reading Mailer and Dos Passos as if they were contemporaries of each other until I discovered Mailer owed a debt to Dos Passos, as did I, and that it was visible in ''The Naked and the Dead'' through his use of the Time Machine, and the Chorus, which seemed inspired by the Camera Eye and the Profiles in ''U.S.A.'' | Kennedy did emerge, but only after shucking off all those maestros, who were smothering him. Of course you don’t really shuck them. They form your voice, your syntax, your wit or solemnity, your political inclinations, your defiance, your creative mysteries. Where does that insight come from? What a great style — how do I get a style? I remember deciding Graham Greene didn’t have a style; he was merely intelligent. I decided Mailer didn’t have a style either. He had a huge brain, which I couldn’t imitate. In those early days I didn’t have a brain, only a hunger. I was reading Mailer and Dos Passos as if they were contemporaries of each other until I discovered Mailer owed a debt to Dos Passos, as did I, and that it was visible in ''The Naked and the Dead'' through his use of the Time Machine, and the Chorus, which seemed inspired by the Camera Eye and the Profiles in ''U.S.A.'' | ||