The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer in “God’s Attic”: Difference between revisions

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 nightclub?
-I vaguely recall dim lights and faces, and piping-hot Soul music and a full
+I vaguely recall dim lights and faces, and piping-hot Soul music and a full rocking dance floor and I think I sat at a big table, full of converging “I-know-Norman-faces.” All was a murky mood. Then I saw the rarest of sights. I nudged Ed Skellings and said, “Look, Norman Mailer is dancing.”
-rocking dance floor and I think I sat at a big table, full of converging
-“I-know-Norman-faces.” All was a murky mood. Then I saw the rarest of
+His partner was a woman much taller and more rubbery. As for her partner, was he boxing or dancing? Mailer, the music notwithstanding, was doing a crouch; his feet doing gymnasium shuffles; his arms extended at eye-level, and his ungloved fists jabbing (rat-a-tat-tat) the air. I said to myself: “Norman Mailer, the worst dancer in this room, if he stayed on that dance floor long enough would invent a New American Dance.” The rest of the night was a blur.
-sights. I nudged Ed Skellings and said, “Look, Norman Mailer is dancing.”
+Early in the morning after the Anchorage reception, four passengers
+(Mailer, Bischel, a hitchhiker, Skellings, and Kaufmann) were picked up for a private and direct flight into the heart of interior Alaska and what remained of the American Frontier. Barney Gottstein, another Anchorage tycoon and Gravel friend, provided his private Beechcraft Baron and a pilot.
+Mailer’s fact-finding quest turned more existential and mystical in Fairbanks. Gone was picturesque and politicized Juneau and would-be urbanized Anchorage. Fairbanks was an oxymoronic microcosm, a “Wilderness City.”
+Imagine brand-new real estate next to log cabins, swank motels (two) next to Eskimo strip-joints, a musk ox farm next to a state university, and, the civic eyesore—a mammoth suburban junkyard. And those downtown streets, frequented in summer by overfed tourists and, in winter, by underfed dog packs. A Fairbanks illustrated “city directory” could have been a best seller. Mailer, in three mere days, could not experience all this aberrant
+Americana. However, he sensed it.
+On the April 4 arrival, Mother Nature had her own welcome mat. Mailer got off Barney Gottstein’s plane and stepped onto snow, compact winter permanent, snow. Spring in Fairbanks happens when the ice-locked Chena and Tanana rivers break and the skies above Creamer Field darken with southern birds. Mailer also experienced more culture shock. That’s what usually
+happens when a newcomer first breathes in Fairbanks’s super-clean air. Mailer remarked about enhanced visibility. He was ecstatic. “I can’t even breathe in Brooklyn,” he said.
+With renewed lungs, eyes, and an aired-out brain, Mailer introduced himself to this wilderness city. He was a quick study and I surmised that he was initially on the prowl for more data and lore concerning minorities, priming himself for the main event—the Ellison Debate.
+Mailer’s Alaskan fascination also included Fairbanks’s more mundane aspects. It was Alaska’s second-largest city (population about 35,000), called the “Chicago of Alaska,” being the goods-and-services supply hub for the vast upper two-thirds of the entire state. Fairbanks was also the Interior’s media and military capital. Of all fifty states, during our Vietnam controversy, Alaska sported the highest “hawkish” mind-set because the Vietnam War was viewed as a pursuit of common sense. Win or leave. Fairbanks also served as the entertainment center for soldiers and civilians alike. From outlying Interior bases, military personnel would converge on Alaska’s “Sin City,” joining up with local hedonists, losing themselves in the too-good-to-be-true Wild West.
+Clearly, this city was ripe for a Norman Mailer visit. Mailer led the way with a flexible agenda: (1) literary work and play plus good booze and conviviality; (2) Big speech and debate; (3) A farewell bash.
+Activities were carefully planned and time was devoted to the Alaskan Writer’s Workshop. Mailer visited the campus and spent hours counseling and critiquing student writers with wisdom and wit.
+Mailer’s prime focus was minorities, yet Fairbanks had no black unrest, no black precincts, nary a black presence, except at Wainwright and Eielson. The city’s only sizeable black presence was military, not residential.
+Fairbanks may strike some visitors as alien or weird, but not newcomer Mailer, who seemed instantly homegrown. Tommy’s Elbow Room, a stellar downtown pleasure center, famed for its giant live fireplace and its livelier cocktails and music, where artsy revelers congregated, was ideal turf for an inquisitive and philosophical writer. Mailer was at his best. It was the same for his encore at the International Hotel & Bar, which offered a galaxy of foreign brews, a lure for the connoisseur suds-tippler.
+Alcohol use in Fairbanks was a way of life, like eating and breathing—a daily ritual. Mailer, drink in hand, heard “timber” instead of “cheers.” A local legend, Big Bill King, lavish spender, had spoken to the patrons of the bar. Everyone within earshot received, gratis, a refill. Yelling “timber” meant buying the house. Mailer, along with a newly arrived drink, pressed the flesh with the Mysterious Spender. (No one knew “Big Bill’s” money source or motivation.) Mailer was then introduced to barroom poker-dice, a throwback to pre-statehood gambling. Almost every place that sold liquor over the bar offered the buyer a choice of payment: cash or poker-dice with the barkeep— essentially double-or-nothing. Mailer must have concluded that drinking in Alaska was an art and, like politics, the art of the possible. Mailer remained, drink after drink, the existential visitor, welcoming the unpredictable.
+The main event of Mailer’s visit to Alaska was the debate with Ellison. Ironically, no real or formal debate ensued. The term “debate” was mere advertisement for the University of Alaska’s Spring Festival of Arts. Instead of a boxing ring, two celebrity authors shared the same podium. The joint topic for these prominent writers was billed as “Conflicts in Culture.” Yet there was minimal conflict. Ellison, as expected, remained the gentlemanly
+academic author. Mailer, full of Alaskan magic, was quite mellow. The audience of eighteen hundred enthusiasts was in a good mood.
+I was there and I introduced Mailer.
+Mailer and Ellison each spoke for about thirty minutes, followed by moderate rebuttals, subsequently followed by a question and answer session. Mailer became author-prophet. In his Arctic odyssey, he had discovered a medicine for a cancerous “other” America. He had arrived with existential minorities on his mind and in search of a possible cultural template. Tonight, Mailer had come to predict and to warn: “In the future, Alaska could become the very best or the very worst of states.” After my introduction, I heard Mailer say: “God’s attic holds the message.” And then he made the following statements:
+<blockquote>All the messages of North America go up to the Brooks Range. That land above the circle, man, is the land of icy wilderness and the lost peaks and the unseen deeps and spires, the crystal receiver of the continent.</blockquote>
+<blockquote>The extraordinary aspect of the Alaskan psyche is that the future of this state is totally unknown. But it is an unknown in extremes, for the end result will be one of two opposites, the best or the worst.</blockquote>
+<blockquote>You could become the psychic leader of America, revitalizing all the dead circuits and dead fuses. It is a responsibility Alaskans should face up to.</blockquote>
+Mailer then shifted to “Existential Minorities,” an original offshoot of his
+“The White Negro,” and racial strife in that “other” America:
+<blockquote>A minority group is caught between two basic conflicts of culture. This conflict has meaning and takes substance only within the minority group, of course, and perhaps you could say that one culture exists within the other culture, creating the conflict.</blockquote>
+<blockquote>I am a one-man minority group. I have to contend with two opposing forces, two cultures. In a minority group we have a life psychology built upon two rocks sometimes dangerously far apart.</blockquote>
+<blockquote>We’re forced to go through life with a psychology profoundly different from most people—a very divided existential psychology.</blockquote>
+<blockquote>To balance the conflict, we consider ourselves in two different ways, as superior or inferior, and this can be a conflict within itself.</blockquote>
+<blockquote>When you’re within a minority group, your ego is always on edge—always on an elevator going up or down. When you walk along the street the people you meet and see, depending on who they are, cause your ego to rise or fall and splinter in different ways. It’s up and down all the time, and never stable.</blockquote>
+<blockquote>According to this notion, everyone in Alaska can be said to be a member of a minority group. This state has more of a divided sense of itself than any state I’ve ever been in. Alaskans have sort of a vast, group inferiority complex, feeling themselves backward and behind the cultural development of other states. Yet, at the same time Alaskans are intensely proud. There are people willing to die for this state.</blockquote>
+<blockquote>And so, as a minority group, you spend your life constantly redefining your role within the dominating group.</blockquote>
+Mailer deftly linked the Two Americas and Alaska’s “divided sense” to similar split- personality situations in rural Lower 48 towns: “In one sense, you feel inferior, and think of yourselves as hicks. You feel a lack of security as inferiors to the big-city sophisticates. Yet, in the other sense, you feel yourself as the “best goddam-people-in-America.” Such was the crux or soul of the Mailer message. I could well imagine the Alaskan psyches a-buzz with becoming either the “very best” or the “very worst.” As for Mailer, there was but one “final adventure.”
+Yes, with Norman Mailer surprises never end. The farewell bash provided the setting for the second Maileresque self-defined moment. The bash itself was anticlimatic. All the “right sorts” appeared: Our mayor (a one-time barber), other community notables, and university people, president included. Even the radical faculty from outlying Dogpatch dropped in.
+Expectations were in the air. Ellison, as ever low-keyed and dapper, kept spellbinding his fans. The other guest of honor—as usual, stage center, Irish glint, American drink, pleasantly besieged by well-wishers, and sounding Brooklyn Heights and Provincetown gone native. The bash seemed destined for a peaceable, perhaps merry conclusion.
+Earlier, before the bash, there was a commotion outside, an iota of Anchorage violence Mother Nature flashed on cue. Aurora borealis swirled above snow—not too slippery, just right—for fisticuffs. The scene was set for a bout of city wilderness-violence.
+Mailer, upon arrival was accosted by an uninvited, downtown attorney, a reputed drunk (once drunk, he became belligerent to everybody). I was left outdoors to defuse this altercation and get Mailer inside, safely into the welcoming arena. What ensued was seriocomedy at the very least. Two mockpugilists were doing a crouch-and-shuffle (shades of an Anchorage dance floor). The inebriated attorney was the aggressor, mouthing words worthy of a roughhouse saloon. Mailer, barely tipsy, responded with alternate growls and purrs, uncharacteristically tentative, hit-or-stop.
+What was I to do? I was an impromptu referee for a phantom fight but, each time I tried to be a third party, Mailer shot me a “get lost” look. For one long twenty minutes these two Arctic sluggers kept it peaceful with their shadow-boxing, body-talking. Mailer then said “Some other time.” The attorney said, “No, now, now!”
+A drunk is a drunk but Mailer is barely tipsy. Was this encounter just another chapter of the Mailer/Hemingway code—grace under pressure? Drunkenness, however, proved decisive. The attorney slipped and fell, Mailer helped him to his feet, and the attorney said: “O.K. Some other time. Tomorrow, 10 a.m. sharp. At downtown’s Stan’s Cafe.”
+Mailer didn’t even blink. The attorney drifted off and I spirited Mailer
+inside.
+In the midst of a busy farewell morning, Mailer took time out to show up at Stan’s Cafe at 10 a.m. sharp, and waited a full twenty minutes. The attorney was a no-show, probably asleep and finally sober. At 10:20 a.m. sharp, no one could read Norman Mailer’s mind. I did not witness this. Norman told me this later on. I can only add—who else but Norman Mailer, under the same circumstances, would have showed up at Stan’s Cafe?
+I now turn to afterthoughts about our 49th State and its 1965 essence. Any mere five-day visit can be but only a glimpse of Alaska in its challenges and expectations. In Mailer’s sensibility, Alaska meant unpredictable plus extraordinary, equaling ''existential''. But even a worldly wise Mailer, in five days, could only sample and speculate. Mailer, concluded, for example, that Alaska had the “best air” in America, and this was true most of the time.
+Mailer had never experienced Alaska’s ice fog. Such dread winters are unknown in the Lower 48 because ice fog can only form if the temperature remains, for about a week, at or lower than -40°. Such a fog affects Fairbanks about two or three weeks each winter. The longer the -40°, the more massive the fog. Soon, above Alaska’s second-largest city, a cloud would form, filled with carbon monoxide. This, in turn, was caused by an overabundance of autos on Fairbanks’s streets, coughing out warm sooty exhaust fumes quickly freezing into ice crystals. Thus, at ground zero, walking or driving, whether emergency or derring-do, amid all this pea soup toxic fog reminded one of being on an urbanized Moon or Mars.
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