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The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Courtly Mailer: The Legacy Derby: Difference between revisions
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Naturally, I differ with ''Smithsonian'' and Morrow. So, I toured the derby site, did some laps cruising, not speeding, but stopping. I consider my experience with multiple Mailer “stops” or “visits.” Over a span of more than forty years, four visits of them were in-depth and three visits were less so. The following discussion is not a composed memoir, just a series of short takes. I was looking for “Courtly Norman” and I found him. | Naturally, I differ with ''Smithsonian'' and Morrow. So, I toured the derby site, did some laps cruising, not speeding, but stopping. I consider my experience with multiple Mailer “stops” or “visits.” Over a span of more than forty years, four visits of them were in-depth and three visits were less so. The following discussion is not a composed memoir, just a series of short takes. I was looking for “Courtly Norman” and I found him. | ||
===Iowa city (1963)=== | ===I. Iowa city (1963)=== | ||
Our first meeting was a bundle of “hellos” and “smiles.” The English department at the University of Iowa had billed me as a pioneer scholar, writing the first doctoral dissertation on Norman Mailer. That fact was what greeted Mailer, who was on a college tour as an “''Esquire'' Literary Symposium” panelist. I was only four years younger than Mailer and must have given off a whiff of pre-academic street sensibilities. This part of me Mailer must have sensed or at least that’s what his first handshake said: “All’s well that starts well.” | Our first meeting was a bundle of “hellos” and “smiles.” The English department at the University of Iowa had billed me as a pioneer scholar, writing the first doctoral dissertation on Norman Mailer. That fact was what greeted Mailer, who was on a college tour as an “''Esquire'' Literary Symposium” panelist. I was only four years younger than Mailer and must have given off a whiff of pre-academic street sensibilities. This part of me Mailer must have sensed or at least that’s what his first handshake said: “All’s well that starts well.” | ||
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The “''Esquire'' Literary Symposium” was not Camelot or Versailles and | The “''Esquire'' Literary Symposium” was not Camelot or Versailles and | ||
Mailer was hardly “Courtly,” but he was aware, sensitive, amiable, and most | Mailer was hardly “Courtly,” but he was aware, sensitive, amiable, and most promising. Norman Mailer and I had a future, I was sure of it. | ||
promising. Norman Mailer and I had a future, I was sure of it. | |||
===II. Alaska (spring 1965)=== | |||
Our second substantial meeting occurred in 1965 in Alaska during a Mailer | |||
“culture shock” visit. He was jolted from a Lower-48 America to a magical | |||
Arctic America. In the Lower 48, the media are wired. Up north, there is only skeletal static. Norman had landed, already a product of the early Morrows and the incessant media. He was in transition, as was his “character” and canon. The transformation would last, but five days and for the final four days I was an eyewitness. | |||
I was in my first of four years in Aaska, an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, about one hundred and fifty miles below the Arctic Circle. It was called the “Wilderness City,” an oxymoron and instant Mailer favorite name. Since Iowa, I had done my Mailer homework. And Mailer was ready for Alaska, later calling it “God’s Attic.” From his first breath and step, Norman had formed a natural connection to Alaska. | |||
Mailer was instantly at home with frontier moods and manners. For | |||
example, Mailer arrived as a reputed barroom drinker. Alaska, especially | |||
Fairbanks, had the highest per capita alcohol consumption rate of all fifty States. Drinking was an art form. Norman, after one or two drinks, began to consume his beverages like a veteran Klondike sourdough. Yet he was a positive chameleon. The supposed “violent” Norman Mailer spent three days in Fairbanks, a wilderness City and, overnight, Norman turned absolutely mellow with a barrage of Prospero twinkles. Alaska and Mailer were made for each other in that early Spring of 1965. | |||
There is still mystery surrounding Norman. How compatible, in a Mailer | |||
context, is the term, courtly? Assuredly, I did not conjure up courtliness in my Mailer expectations after three years of absorbing Lower 48 media noise. But why courtly as it pertains to his character? | |||
Mailer certainly was not visiting an American Metropolis in the tundra | |||
(echoes of his final novel, ''The Castle'' In The Forest). But he was making the next best “stop” in 1965 America at a three-day wilderness city with ''Castle'' atmospherics. Although I did not know when Mailer landed in Alaska, he immediately sensed that his Lower 48 self and the media-crafted image of the “big bad celebrity” was a lost art up North. Mailer, instead, sensed both an old and new American frontier atmosphere and merged with both of them. If a passerby New Yorker would have spotted this star visitor, he might well have blinked and said, “Where has the real Norman Mailer gone?” I would have answered, “He’s going back to the Lower-48” with loads of Frontier Charm, and that’s why the term—Courtly Norman—stuck. | |||