The Mailer Review/Volume 10, 2016/Mailer’s Letters: A Colloquy at the Strand Bookstore: Difference between revisions

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'''LARRY SCHILLER''': Thank you, everybody, for coming. It’s almost . . . I think it is a full house. The Mailer Center started in 2008, shortly after Norman’s passing, and the reason for it was to encourage young writers, with the vigor of an athlete, to go out there and “punch,” as Norman did, but through the written word. Also, to take the issues of today and challenge their readers to think about these subjects in a different way. The Mailer Center, you should know, sponsors fellowships — fifteen fellowships — every year to writers by merit that come from all over the world. One of our mentors, Meena Alexander, is here, who’s been working poetry with us for a number of years. We have workshops every summer — very small workshops, six people to a workshop, and usually eight to ten workshops a summer, so we’re entertaining another hundred writers from all around the country. We were originally housed in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and two years ago, the board decided to take the Mailer Center on the road to go to those cities around the country where Mailer himself researched or wrote a book. And we’ve started to do that. Brooklyn Heights was, you know, very close, where he wrote one of his books or several books. And then we went to Salt Lake City last year, where he researched ''[[The Executioner's Song]]''. And this year, we’ll either be in Palm Desert or in Palm Beach, Florida, where ''[[Miami and the Siege of Chicago]]'' was researched.

Morris Dickstein is somebody who I’ve just seen in passing and know because I’ve read some of his reviews and things that he’s written. Norman said of him once that he’s one of the best and most distinguished American critics of literature that we have, and that speaks a lot. And Morris soon will publish a memoir, which I think is titled ''Why Not Say What Happens'' — am I right or wrong? Right, very close. I was told it wasn’t an autobiography; it was a memoir, because it’s not the whole thing. So, Morris has a memoir coming out next month, and I hope that we fill the room again when it’s published and, you know, maybe a little bit more. Morris and Mike, I think, are a great duo to entertain us tonight, educate us tonight, and make us think about Norman’s letters and the period of time that he lived in maybe a different and interesting way. So I turn it over to these two gentlemen, Morris and Mike Lennon, it’s all yours. Thank you very much for coming.

'''MORRIS DICKSTEIN''': Well, I’m going to be the opener for the main act here, but we’ll have a conversation, and it should be fun. I’m a huge admirer of Mike’s biography. I think he did it, not only in record time, but just wonderfully. Literary biography is not an easy thing to do. When you concentrate on the life then the work tends to get rather lost, especially if it’s done by someone not equipped to handle the work very well. When you concentrate on the work, it slows down the story, but you [to Lennon] manage to strike just the right balance. Of course, his subject was a fascinating one, and he knew everything there was to know about it — for the biography, of course, but also for this collection of letters. I was down in Austin for the opening of the archive, but I really had no idea that it was so huge, that the number of letters was immense. He tells us that there are some 45,000 letters, of which he was only able to publish about two percent, some 714 letters, an amazing job of selection. And the writing is good too, exceptionally good. It led me to think about what a collection of letters is, what kind of book it makes up. It’s not something the author himself wrote as a book. On the other hand, it is a book that the author did write, especially someone like Mailer, who kept carbons of his letters and knew what their value would be. We also discover from Mike that Mailer kept tapes of his letters. In other words, after 1958, he dictated them, to be transcribed by his secretary, then amended and signed them, so that not only was Mike able to build the text through the carbons of Norman’s letters, but he was able to actually listen to him making them up as he went along, which must have been an extraordinary resource for an editor and biographer.