The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer: Stupidity Brings Out Violence in Me: Difference between revisions

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-{{byline |last=Grobel |first=Lawrence |abstract=A veteran interviewer of several decades explores a range of issues in his interview with Norman Mailer, including morality, personal development, the experience of being a writer, the challenges of success, fiction vs. nonfiction, American writers, and a number of other topics. |note=This interview originally appeared in ''Endangered Species: Writers Talk About Their Craft, Their Visions, Their Lives'' (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2001). |url=https://prmlr.us/mr08grob}}
+{{byline |last=Grobel |first=Lawrence |abstract=A veteran interviewer of several decades explores a range of issues in his interview with Norman Mailer, including morality, personal development, the experience of being a writer, the challenges of success, fiction vs. nonfiction, American writers, and a number of other topics. |note=This interview originally appeared in ''Endangered Species: Writers Talk About Their Craft, Their Visions, Their Lives'' (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2001). |url=https://prmlr.us/mr02gro}}
 {{dc|dc=W|hat can one say about Norman {{NM}}}} that he probably hasn’t already said about himself? I grew up on Mailer. His great journalism in ''Esquire''; his incredible gift of metaphor; his surehandedness when it came to writing about taboos, superstitions, and excrement; his knuckleheaded foray into the brave new world of women’s lib. And his supreme self-confidence, focusing so superbly on himself in a book he audaciously and precisely titled ''[[Advertisements for Myself]]'' and later in ''[[Pieces and Pontifications]]''. And, of course, his fiction, which, until recently (and even still ...) he always believed would earn him a Nobel Prize, those purely Mailer novels beginning with ''[[The Naked and the Dead]]'' when he was just 25, and then ''[[Barbary Shore]]'', ''[[The Deer Park]]'', ''[[An American Dream]]'', ''[[Why Are We in Vietnam?]]'', ''[[The Executioner’s Song]]'' (history as novel), ''[[Ancient Evenings]]'', ''[[Tough Guys Don’t Dance]]'', ''[[Harlot’s Ghost]]'', ''[[The Gospel According to the Son]]''.
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 '''Grobel''': Do you regret saying on TV in the early seventies that women should be kept in cages?
-Mailer: I said it in jest on a show with [[w:Orson Welles|Orson Welles]]. One of the troubles with the media is that they are horrendously humorless. They might as well be human walking computers, because whatever you say, it’s always assumed that you said it in a deadly earnest voice. We were chatting. He said, “Norman, you wrote recently that women are low, sloppy beasts.” This was all pre-[[w:Women's liberation movement|woman’s lib]]. And I said, “The rest of that quote is that they’re goddesses.” What I was trying to get into was the fundamental male viewpoint towards women: on the one hand we see them as goddesses, on the other hand, as low, sloppy beasts. And he said, “Beasts?” I started thinking of a few fights I’d had with the ex-wife and began to laugh. And I said, “Oh come on, Orson, women should be kept in cages.” If I had known what that remark was gonna cost, I’d of really bitten right through my lip before I ever said it. It was a stupid remark in terms of its cost. A moment’s fun which I’m paying for ever since.
+'''Mailer''': I said it in jest on a show with [[w:Orson Welles|Orson Welles]]. One of the troubles with the media is that they are horrendously humorless. They might as well be human walking computers, because whatever you say, it’s always assumed that you said it in a deadly earnest voice. We were chatting. He said, “Norman, you wrote recently that women are low, sloppy beasts.” This was all pre-[[w:Women's liberation movement|woman’s lib]]. And I said, “The rest of that quote is that they’re goddesses.” What I was trying to get into was the fundamental male viewpoint towards women: on the one hand we see them as goddesses, on the other hand, as low, sloppy beasts. And he said, “Beasts?” I started thinking of a few fights I’d had with the ex-wife and began to laugh. And I said, “Oh come on, Orson, women should be kept in cages.” If I had known what that remark was gonna cost, I’d of really bitten right through my lip before I ever said it. It was a stupid remark in terms of its cost. A moment’s fun which I’m paying for ever since.
-There’s a wonderful remark that a fellow once made with respect to ''[[Women and Their Elegance]]''. It was that a woman got married to a man who’s much beneath her, so she went to a family party and the head of the family looked at her and said, “Thirty days of pleasure and thirty years at the wrong end of the table.” That remark is equal to the one that I made.
+There’s a wonderful remark that a fellow once made with respect to ''[[Of Women and Their Elegance]]''. It was that a woman got married to a man who’s much beneath her, so she went to a family party and the head of the family looked at her and said, “Thirty days of pleasure and thirty years at the wrong end of the table.” That remark is equal to the one that I made.
 '''Grobel''': There’s another remark you made: that it’s very dangerous to stick it up a woman’s ass, it tends to make them more promiscuous.