The Mailer Review/Volume 10, 2016/The Curious Story of Norman Mailer’s Engagement with Short Fiction: Difference between revisions

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Norman Mailer begins his introduction to the 1967 paperback collection of his short fiction by telling us that he agrees with those who find his efforts in this genre “neither splendid, unforgettable, nor distinguished.” He shortly doubles down on himself when he also agrees with the notion that in this realm he is simply a “journeyman.”{{sfn|Mailer|1981|p=9}} Mailer gives us still more grounds to dismiss his short fiction when he tells us “it is painful to push one’s own plain efforts so far forward. Yet we do it. Yes, for the bucks first, paperback reader!” He also confesses he does not have “the gift to write great stories . . . the interest, the respect, or the proper awe. The short story bores him a little . . . he rarely reads them . . . is, in secret, not fond of writers who work at short stories.”{{sfn|Mailer|1981|p=9}} His clinching argument in the form of a “terrible confession” is that “he thinks the short story is relatively easy to write,” because it takes only a few days, whereas the novel may take years.{{sfn|Mailer|1981|pp=10–11}} Since we know this writer as someone who enjoys making advertisements for himself, we may begin to suspect that all of this deprecation of the genre and of himself as its exponent is some kind of ruse—a ruse to induce us to find out for ourselves, what is this short fiction of Norman Mailer all about, and is it really as undistinguished as he is leading us to believe?