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The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Meeting Mailer: Difference between revisions
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I read Mailer over the next several months, and, during the summer while I attended a writing course at Harvard, his alma mater, I got up the nerve to write him a letter. First I read the early novels, ''[[The Naked and the Dead]]'', ''[[Barbary Shore]]'', ''[[The Deer Park]]'', then, ''[[The Armies of the Night]]'', and I was hooked. | I read Mailer over the next several months, and, during the summer while I attended a writing course at Harvard, his alma mater, I got up the nerve to write him a letter. First I read the early novels, ''[[The Naked and the Dead]]'', ''[[Barbary Shore]]'', ''[[The Deer Park]]'', then, ''[[The Armies of the Night]]'', and I was hooked. | ||
This was, after all, a time when the death of the novel had already been announced and readers and writers of fiction were in mourning. Given what we were living through at the time—the [[w:Assassination of John F. Kennedy|Kennedy]] and [[w:Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.|Martin Luther King]] assassinations, the [[w:Vietnam War|war in Vietnam]] and rioting in the streets of American cities, as seen on the evening news—reading fiction was a bit like reading obituaries. The potential for fiction to ignite the public consciousness had been usurped by reporting current events and what was to become known as [[w:New Journalism|the new journalism]]. With ''The Armies of the Night'', Mailer became its stellar performer, there in the event, balls to the wall, and back at his desk, writing with a hard-on. | This was, after all, a time when the death of the novel had already been announced and readers and writers of fiction were in mourning. Given what we were living through at the time—the [[w:Assassination of John F. Kennedy|Kennedy]] and [[w:Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.|Martin Luther King]] assassinations, the [[w:Vietnam War|war in Vietnam]] and rioting in the streets of American cities, as seen on the evening news—reading fiction was a bit like reading obituaries. The potential for fiction to ignite the public consciousness had been usurped by reporting current events and what was to become known as [[w:New Journalism|the new journalism]]. With ''The Armies of the Night'', Mailer became its stellar performer, there in the event, balls to the wall, and back at his desk, writing with a hard-on. | ||
Reading Mailer changed my life. This was the kind of writer I wanted to be, the kind of man I hoped to be: ''engagé''. He lived what he wrote about and then wrote about what he lived as though the quality of his life depended on the truth he discovered in the experience, reflected by the prose. I said to myself, after reading ''[[Advertisements for Myself]]'', I’ve got to meet this guy. First I communed with him psychically, then on paper. I wrote him a short letter inspired by his essay “Ten Thousand Words a Minute,” which was first published in ''Esquire'', on the death of [[w:Benny Paret|Benny “Kid” Paret]] at the gloved hands of [[w:Emile Griffith|Emile Griffith]]. Mailer answered me with an equally concise note, dated 19 August, 1970: ''Dear Mr. Stratton: I’ve been up in Maine and now I’m in New York and won’t get to P-town till the fall. Will you still be in Hyannis? If so, I might take you up on your offer. Sincerely, Norman Mailer''. | |||
I’m not sure what exactly I had offered, and in the meantime I had left Hyannis; but the fact that Mailer wrote back was enough to inspire me to decamp and move to Provincetown. The Fine Arts Work Center provided a modest stipend, which I augmented working as a carpenter. It was by chance that I moved into the apartment across the street from the home Mailer rented that off-season, and later bought; and another lucky coincidence, if you believe in such things, that Bobbi lived in the same building I moved into and we became friends. I like to think I was so turned on by Mailer’s work, I wanted so much to know him, I created an energy field that drew me to him and vice versa. | |||
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