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

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Stephen Rojack (some might say the author’s virtual alter ego) in the desert,

outside Vegas, in a surreal phone booth, ideal for a celestial call to his dead

(Late 1964 was the onset of Mailer’s more distinct political phase. There

When the Alaskan offer arrived, Mailer was probably in a high-risk political existential mood. Hence, three stipulations. His counteroffer: “Do the

undoable, or else!” Mailer would visit Alaska only if:

   

details were sent to us by Mailer saying, in essence, that he had vetoed the

visit and was having ''realpolitik'' fun.

included Mailer attending a meeting of the Democrat Party Caucus (a non-member was usually considered unimportant) which, undoubtedly, made Mailer feel like a real politician.

Anchorage, the next stop, was no Juneau (the latter, tiny, inaccessible by

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.”

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.

<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.

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.

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>

<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.

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.

We’re forced to go through life with a psychology profoundly different from most people—a very divided existential psychology.

To balance the conflict, we consider ourselves in two different ways, as superior or inferior, and this can be a conflict within itself.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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!”

“Such hope is ‘all over’ up here.” But I’m glad that Norman Mailer experienced five of its last glory days.

North America. On the Mailer itinerary, this epiphany was the first of two,

the latter being the mock fisticuffs during the farewell bash, in the snowy

Up to that moment, the pilot’s four passengers were in various degrees of

wakefulness. The seating arrangement was: pilot up front, behind him on the

I were dead tired from day and night Anchorage revelry. But Mailer, alone,

seemed primed. The pilot announced that buzzing that high required “sucking oxygen” (mouth-inhalers in small containers). Anyone familiar with the

During that twenty-minute hello to Denali, I could not foresee Mailer’s

“Vietnam” appears but once—in the book’s final phrase, “Vietnam, hot

dam.” Most of the novel’s “hot dams” took place in Alaska and mostly in

when he phones some “wilderness city,” somewhere, to say Hi to Cherry and Marilyn, before exiting due north, direct, to the Brooks Range to say hello

and press the flesh with God.

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