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The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/It Takes a Thief to Know a Thief: Biographies of Norman Mailer: Difference between revisions
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{{Byline|last=Martinson|first=Deborah |abstract=An examination of the four major biographies that have been written about Norman Mailer. The scholarship within the books is invaluable and all four of these books—complete with errors, distortions, and idiosyncrasies—nevertheless give this reader, and thousands of other readers, Norman Mailer, a trace of the man.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr03mar}} | {{Byline|last=Martinson|first=Deborah |abstract=An examination of the four major biographies that have been written about Norman Mailer. The scholarship within the books is invaluable and all four of these books—complete with errors, distortions, and idiosyncrasies—nevertheless give this reader, and thousands of other readers, Norman Mailer, a trace of the man.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr03mar}} | ||
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Rollyson evokes Mailer’s range as a writer as no other biographer did. If his retelling of Mailer’s involvement in The March on the Pentagon pales beside Mills’ and Manso’s lively accounts (and it does), his analysis of ''The Armies of the Night'' itself is first rate. A key assertion about part two of the novel is a telling example: | Rollyson evokes Mailer’s range as a writer as no other biographer did. If his retelling of Mailer’s involvement in The March on the Pentagon pales beside Mills’ and Manso’s lively accounts (and it does), his analysis of ''The Armies of the Night'' itself is first rate. A key assertion about part two of the novel is a telling example: | ||
{{quote|‘The Novel as History’ is indispensable, for Mailer is able to display his authority by assessing other sources, probing both their strengths and limitations, demonstrating an impartiality in his scrutiny of both the leftist and the establishment press. Thus Mailer achieves an objective historical voice that complements his third-person treatment of himself in the first part.{{sfn|Rollyson|1991|p=204}} }} | {{quote|‘The Novel as History’ is indispensable, for Mailer is able to display his authority by assessing other sources, probing both their strengths and limitations, demonstrating an impartiality in his scrutiny of both the leftist and the establishment press. Thus Mailer achieves an objective historical voice that complements his third-person treatment of himself in the first part.{{sfn|Rollyson|1991|p=204}} }} | ||
This isn’t brilliant analysis, but it is sound and analytical. He goes on to suggest that ''Armies'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'' are “maps . . . metaphors . . . of campaigns and of armies moved by great conflicting forces of history.”{{sfn|Rollyson|1991|p=204}} Because he is a biographer as well as a critic, Rollyson is especially interesting in Mailer’s relationship to Marilyn Monroe and his writing of her biography. Rollyson’s Chapter 10: “Marilyn (1972–1973)” not only supplies a strong link in his narrative line, but reflectively looks at Mailer the man, writer, friend—focusing on Mailer’s complicated relationship to his biographical subject, Marilyn, and her husband Arthur Miller. Rollyson seriously looks at Mailer’s method and purpose in ''Marilyn'', a work often dismissed or overlooked by both biographers and critics. Quoting Monroe’s last interview, {{" '}}You’re always running into peoples’ unconscious,{{' "}} Rollyson suggests that “This is, in fact, Mailer’s point. . . . Anyone who has read Monroe’s last interview and carefully studied her movies realizes that Mailer is on very solid ground | This isn’t brilliant analysis, but it is sound and analytical. He goes on to suggest that ''Armies'' and ''The Naked and the Dead'' are “maps . . . metaphors . . . of campaigns and of armies moved by great conflicting forces of history.”{{sfn|Rollyson|1991|p=204}} Because he is a biographer as well as a critic, Rollyson is especially interesting in Mailer’s relationship to Marilyn Monroe and his writing of her biography. Rollyson’s Chapter 10: “Marilyn (1972–1973)” not only supplies a strong link in his narrative line, but reflectively looks at Mailer the man, writer, friend—focusing on Mailer’s complicated relationship to his biographical subject, Marilyn, and her husband Arthur Miller. Rollyson seriously looks at Mailer’s method and purpose in ''Marilyn'', a work often dismissed or overlooked by both biographers and critics. Quoting Monroe’s last interview, {{" '}}You’re always running into peoples’ unconscious,{{' "}} Rollyson suggests that “This is, in fact, Mailer’s point. . . . Anyone who has read Monroe’s last interview and carefully studied her movies realizes that Mailer is on very solid ground indeed.”{{sfn|Rollyson|1991|p=256}} To further emphasize Mailer’s insight, Rollyson next regales the reader with the events and textual explorations of ''The Fight'' (1975) bringing Mailer the man to Mailer the writer in an exemplary way. As Rollyson says, ''The Fight'' “contains all of the virtues and none of the vices of his best work. As in ''Miami and the Siege of Chicago'', there is his superb traveler’s evocation of environment.”{{sfn|Rollyson|1991|p=264}} In retelling Mailer’s journey in ''The Executioner’s Song'' (1979), he notes that Mailer “found he could not explain Gilmore and that it was ‘more interesting not to.’ Guided by the words of the witnesses, he used ‘very little invention.{{' "}}{{sfn|Rollyson|1991|p=286}} Rollyson’s subsequent analysis shows insight into the book and the writer. Rollyson delivers sharp critique through the entire Mailer canon (up to 1990), although he does give shorter shrift to Mailer’s later work. | ||
While I am unable to give Rollyson’s ''The Lives of Norman Mailer'' a rave review, it is the biography I would recommend to the person wanting an overview of Mailer and his work; it is sound, fair, and readable. If I cannot give high marks for original material or startling insight, I can honor him for taking Mailer seriously on his own merits, and for endeavoring to give life to the man through his writing. Rollyson respected Mailer and his work and it shows. He writes, “Mailer, of all writers, has made his personality an issue, and his impact upon me has been profound—often dictating my choice of subjects and my approach to biography.”{{sfn|Rollyson|1991|p=370}} The approach of Mary V. Dearborn in ''Mailer: A Biography'' (1999) that followed Rollyson’s, had a different edge, often more brilliant, but not as evenhanded. She wrote a biography where Mailer “struts like a Balzacian demigod, a harlot of high and low.”{{Sfn|Birkerts|1999|p=80}} | While I am unable to give Rollyson’s ''The Lives of Norman Mailer'' a rave review, it is the biography I would recommend to the person wanting an overview of Mailer and his work; it is sound, fair, and readable. If I cannot give high marks for original material or startling insight, I can honor him for taking Mailer seriously on his own merits, and for endeavoring to give life to the man through his writing. Rollyson respected Mailer and his work and it shows. He writes, “Mailer, of all writers, has made his personality an issue, and his impact upon me has been profound—often dictating my choice of subjects and my approach to biography.”{{sfn|Rollyson|1991|p=370}} The approach of Mary V. Dearborn in ''Mailer: A Biography'' (1999) that followed Rollyson’s, had a different edge, often more brilliant, but not as evenhanded. She wrote a biography where Mailer “struts like a Balzacian demigod, a harlot of high and low.”{{Sfn|Birkerts|1999|p=80}} | ||
. . . | Dearborn serves up the richest brew in her ''Mailer''—a kind of witch’s concoction of enchanting, theoretical analyses of Mailer’s work coupled with a woman’s sensual consideration of the man. Ultimately, Dearborn took me, the reader, on an erotic adventure. I put myself in the place of the wife or the mistress and I rode Mailer’s excesses, hated his stupid infidelities with women who couldn’t possibly have worked in partnership with him, despaired of his blinders, half-admired, half-despised his straight talk about nearly everything. Dearborn, however rough she rides over the Man Mailer, endeavors—for most of the book—to find Mailer in his work and his actions. And like a wife, she is disgusted, attracted, amazed—until she isn’t—and then she just wants to finish it, and him. Dearborn, at book’s end, does not seem to understand Mailer’s on-going life as a writer. She cannot reconcile, nor does she try, Mailer’s maturity, aging, shifting character, and personality, And if I, too, wanted to finish Dearborn—after all, this was the fourth biography I had read in as many months—I didn’t quite want to finish with Norman. She did. | ||
Dearborn definitely privileges the sexual interplay at the center of Mailer’s psyche, and thus she foregrounds Mailer of middle-years, skating through the first part of his life with narrative that seems plainly derivative. Her writing and information about family seems predictable—as if she herself would rather die than have Fan’s dinner of pot roast nearly every Friday night. She barely mentions wife one, Bea, and hurriedly gets rid of Jeanne Campbell, so she misses Mailer’s early hopes of making a family of his own. Both Bea and Jeanne women were tough and super-smart—so Mailer does have an attraction to brains. Both of them—and sister Barbara—were important people to Mailer and the how and the why of his relationship to Fan, Barbara, Bea and Jeanne are truncated. Adele holds sway for her raw sexuality played out in Mailer’s life. Strangely, with all Dearborn’s rapt interest in his ex-wives Adele and Beverly, his mistress-wife Carol Stevens, and later mistress Carole Mallory, Dearborn also doesn’t quite come to grips about why such talented, fabulous women were drawn to Norman Mailer. Why would they, and Norris Church, too, put up with Mailer on his worst days? This is a question Dearborn doesn’t ask, but it is important. Dearborn tarries long about Mailer’s numerous and outlandish hot man days: telling Styron to “shut up about my wife . . . I will invite you to a fight in which I expect to stomp out of you a fat amount of your yellow and treacherous shit”;{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=134}} taunting the audience at the “infamous” poetry reading at the 92nd Street Y; biting Rip Torn’s ear in ''Maidstone'';{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=252}} berating volunteers working on his Mayoral election: “You’re just nothing but a bunch of spoiled pigs . . . sitting around jerkin’ off, havin’ your jokes”;{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=267}} and on it goes, until “only ego remained.”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=253}} | |||
Acknowledging his complexity, Dearborn doesn’t carry a cohesive view of him throughout. She dishes the dirt in some parts, then moves to literary analysis, with just bits of reflection on the man himself. To Dearborn, Mailer is a performer, a political provocateur, mystical Egyptian priest, sexually raucous bad-lover, bully, fighter for the underdog, law-skirting dangerous edgy near-criminal, slick elitist, head-butting ass. The reader is forced to agree that he is all of these things, but still wonders, who IS Mailer? Casting Mailer into these roles, surrounding him with beautiful women and sexual intrigue, Dearborn invites the reader into this erotic place of sizzling tension and taut curiosity. As a reader of Dearborn’s biography, I am attracted to Mailer, even if I am also often fed up, ready to throw the bum out, rolling my eyes at his excesses. I want to come back and see—what’s next? Dearborn gives us a great deal, but never the whole man. | |||
Maybe it isn’t the reader who appropriates the persona of the wife-lover of Mailer in getting through the biography, but Dearborn herself. She exhibits Mailer the professional writer by attending to literary analysis and his relationship to other writers. The “New Journalist” chapter, for example, illuminates Mailer’s work in the early 1960s with rare insight. She begins with Mailer’s “ladies” of the era, revealing his narcissism, yet his intricacy and energy, too. Then she moves quickly to his connection to Hemingway and his death, his relationship to ''Esquire'', to ''Playboy'', to the great writers of his time: Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Garry Wills, and more importantly, Henry Miller. Dearborn’s reflections move from Mailer’s relationships, to his virile physicality, to his work: ''Advertisements for Myself'', ''Death to the Ladies'', “Ten Thousand Words a Minute,” the report of the Liston-Patterson fight. Dearborn calls the whole fight scene “one giant testosterone feast.”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=184}} Despite this dismissive description, nowhere in the other books is this time of Mailer’s life and writing better integrated. If Dearborn has an unfortunate penchant for burying her insights in the middle of chapters and paragraphs—at least she has them. In the midst of “The Fight” analysis she notes that Mailer had reflected: “[W]henever I was overtired, sensitivity to the magical would come over me.”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=185}} At such times Dearborn’s research leads her to a nuanced, complex discussion of Mailer. While Dearborn revels in Mailer’s writing during this period, she also points out Mailer’s more excessive assertions—that Patterson was beaten by the Evil Eye, a combination of Mob involvement and poor advisors. Dearborn writes: “This seemingly absurd theory had some basis in reality, and in fact demonstrated Mailer’s instinctive understanding of the boxing world.”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=186}} | |||
From this world of male sweat, Dearborn moves to “Changing Partners” and “A Gamble and a New Direction.” These shifts the reader’s attention to Beverly, wife number four, and the heady challenges and competitions of the erotic that ensued—from Mailer’s rivalry with Miles Davis to his crazy insistence on “no birth control,” then back to the entirely male sensibility of ''An American Dream''. The literary analysis in each section is informed by the dichotomous male and female sensibilities, as when Mailer tells Gore Vidal: “The novel is like the Great Bitch in one’s life. We think we’re rid of her, we go on to other women, we take our pulse and decide that finally we’re enjoying ourselves, we’re free of her power...and there’s the Bitch smiling at us, and we’re trapped.”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=198}} In language, story and metaphor, Dearborn definitely engages in Mailer’s evocative world. This sometimes results in disappointing literary analysis, as Dearborn’s work on ''An American Dream'' which she uncharacteristically analyzes as autobiography, resulting in some now clichéd assessments, as well as some that seem just superficial: “In killing his wife, Rojack feels himself cured of cancer—a feeling Norman had shared after stabbing Adele,” then comparing the rest of Rojack’s odyssey to times with Beverly, Carol Stevens, literary tropes, and Mailer’s obsessions of sex, the Devil and God. Dearborn ends this section: “That Mailer manages to create a hero with many of his own bizarre beliefs and views without making him ridiculous is an extraordinary feat indeed.”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=208}} The complexity of ''An American Dream'' escapes her—and this reader, too—but Dearborn is at her best in the throes of another kind of eroticism, one played out in public debate. | |||
Dearborn’s understanding of Mailer’s clash with Feminism in the 1970s is extraordinarily insightful. Dearborn seems to abjure the hype and standard view of Mailer the Macho to give the reader a new understanding of Mailer, the thinker—a man caught in a revolution he doesn’t understand and instinctively rejects, but endeavors to engage: “the more widely accepted principles of mainstream women’s liberation completely eluded him.”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=283}} Dearborn despaired at some of Mailer’s most outrageous comments: “At their worst, women are low, sloppy beasts”; “they should be kept in cages.”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=286}} She moves, however, to an insightful and careful recording of events which shows a real effort to come to terms with Mailer and “women,”—of the movement, of the times. Mailer had a yen for women, although he categorized them in one part of his brain as a sexual and subordinated species. In a more inclusive way, he shared their humanity. While Dearborn records his wholesale dismissal of women’s talents, she took his generation under consideration. He had been raised in a male culture which embraced biological essentialism. Dearborn writes carefully and thoughtfully to show Mailer’s giving women and the movement a chance to prove themselves. Reading Dearborn’s Mailer, the reader knows that even if Mailer still could not seem to get beyond the breasts (looking from the feet up), he intellectually knows the head, with a brain, is there—thinking, judging. Dearborn’s great feat is showing that although ''The Prisoner of Sex'' belittles women (an assessment I have come to disagree with), “it is to Mailer’s credit that he tried to open a dialogue with the feminists” and “he takes individual women on their own terms. . . . Mailer aims to upset and agitate his readers, reminding them of the need to challenge authority and break rules. He is at once a progressive—he favors sexual liberation and places sex at the center of our lives. . . . ”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=291}} Dearborn’s analysis of the man and the literature and performance of the period is incisive, excellent. When he appeared in the famed “Debate” at Town Hall on West 46th Street in Manhattan, Dearborn notes: “Few feminists would thank him for it, but by commenting on the subject—however outrageously—he served notice that it was perhaps the single most important issue of the day.”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=296}} | |||
Mailer had always “come to terms” with the flesh and blood women because he liked women as well as lusted after them. Dearborn’s reliance on the interviews of ex-wives Beverly and mistress Carole Mallory seep through the whole of the book, revealing more of the sexual Mailer than the other biographies. Mallory makes her entrance in the chapter “A Mistress, A Patron, and A Thriller” which begins with tales of Mailer’s “familial stability.” Dearborn documents Mailer’s marriage to Carol Stevens in November, 1980 to make daughter Maggie legitimate, then his marriage to Norris days later on November 11. Dearborn set up Mailer’s proud patriarchal position with his nine children and quotes him in ''Puritan'' magazine: “There’s a spiritual demand in love ... more a demand than an obligation. Love asks that we be a little flexible. It means living on the edge more than we care to.”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=355}} At that point Dearborn outs Mailer’s serious affair with the stunningly beautiful actress Mallory which began in 1983, undercutting Mailer’s status as reformed masher and nearly causing the death of his marriage to Norris. Dearborn explores the affair in some detail: “she had become a legendary bed companion . . . he loved role-playing, playing doctor, masseur, or Hollywood director . . . Carole tried to surprise him every time with new lingerie or new scenarios for them to act out.”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=379}} Salacious and exciting, Mailer and Mallory stories entice. | |||
When Mailer discovered Dearborn was going to tell-all about the illicit sexual experiments he and Carole had shared, he was furious—and much chagrined. As he told friend Chris Busa: “I’ve been a bad, bad, bad boy.”{{sfn|Busa|2008}} For her part, at least according to Dearborn, Mallory thought Norris knew about his bicoastal enchantment with Mallory, a relationship more than occasional, less than seriously threatening to Norris. She had not. Mailer was forced to confess to Norris who began packing to go back to Arkansas. Somehow, Mailer talked Norris into staying, and his remorse and her common sense and loyalty prevailed; they stayed married until Mailer died. Unfortunately, the really explicit detailing of Mailer’s affair with Mallory did not inform Dearborn’s analysis of ''Ancient Evenings'', which came out the same year Mailer started his affair. She emphasizes that the book is “marked by an erotic indulgence of the senses . . . linguistic extravagances,” while noting the “sheer number of graphic sexual scenes and their originality.”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=366}} Dearborn quotes many reviewers who seem disgusted by the book’s flagrancy, but she doesn’t make the attempt to tie the book to Mailer’s internal eroticism. Both book and mistress point to a time of Mailer’s life, a place of his consciousness; the text and the affair warrant exploration in understanding the man. Dearborn lets Mailer’s actions suffice. | |||
For a biographer who has such insight, it surprises that sometimes her perceptions about Mailer are just plain silly. In narrating his “drug smuggling days” with Buzz Farber and Richard Stratton, Dearborn writes: “Had Norman learned nothing from the Abbott case, or from covering Gary Gilmore’s trial? He still glorified the criminal, and caused reviewer Caleb Crain to accuse Mailer with a failure to ‘sympathize when a drug-related prison sentence pushed a long-time friend to suicide{{' "}};{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=377}} Mailer refuted both Dearborn and Crain, remarking “I spoke at his funeral. To this day, I am haunted by his suicide.”{{efn|In reference to Caleb Crain’s review.}}{{sfn|Mailer|2000}} In another instance, Dearborn clearly didn’t understand Mailer and his avid reading and thinking regime. She writes flippantly: “Just as he believed himself an existentialist without reading Sartre so he believed himself a Marxist sympathizer without reading Marx.”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=60}} Even novice readers of Mailer would find that assessment off, and it drove Mailer to write: “Oh God! I spent nine months in the winter, spring, and summer of 1948–49 reading and brooking over ''Das Kapital'' and can also plead guilty to reading and arguing in my mind for many weeks with ''Being and Nothingness''.”{{sfn|Mailer|2000}} Such lapses in Dearborn’s judgment are not the norm, but they tarnish the book. | |||
Thus, Dearborn assesses Mailer’s work unevenly. Sometimes she is brilliant, sometimes obtuse. She muddles her comparison of ''An American Dream'' with ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' (1984). ''Harlot’s Ghost'' she nearly writes off as a “ghost” of Mailer, and ''Oswald’s Tale'' gets a paragraph or so. More disappointing was her less than critical look at ''The Executioner’s Song''—for which Mailer won the Pulitzer Prize. By the end of her book, Dearborn seems not to want to understand Norman Mailer’s conflict with culture, his changes politically, his madness with media, his experimental fiction and auto/biography. The mid-1980s hold her attention for a bit. She rallies in her analysis of Mailer’s relationship with Abbott and seems to understand, tying his interest in writers to his role in the debacle, enjoying the “Mailerian provocation,” and the outlandish statements Mailer made to the press, calling the ''New York Post''’s work “scumbag journalism.”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=361}} She revives, too, in detailing the Mailer-Manso wars. But her report on PEN in the mid 1980s is absolutely dismissive of the role he played in that critical, contentious conference. Sadly, her efforts to understand the complexity of his family life just don’t solidify into more than summary. When she closes with an analysis of a 1998 party celebrating ''The Time of Our Time'' and his fifty-year career, she lets Mailer speak: “It’s either my living memorial or else it’s a chance to take a large part of my life and look at it before getting on with all I have to do ... For certain I’ll take the second option. . . . ”{{sfn|Dearborn|1999|p=427}} Dearborn uses Mailer’s own words to illustrate the strength of his intellect—and yes, his genius—and it grips the reader. But like a woman married to Norman Mailer all these long years, at book’s end Dearborn seems tired. She’s frustrated by Mailer’s “changes,” seeing them as hypocritical rather than growth or reconsiderations. She seems irritated by his body’s frailty, his continued machismo self, his celebrity, his problematic relations with women. While Dearborn delivers a fascinating, lusty biography, she, like the rest of Mailer’s biographers to date, presents us with an absorbing life, but she fails to give us a coherent sense of the man. | |||
Mailer never stood in the way of his biographers, but he did keep himself aloof; they each ultimately disappointed him. Mailer’s chief complaint has merit: “They present me as if I have no inner life . . . there’s a tendency to be seen too much from the outside . . . no matter how odd the things were that I did, I had my internal logic.”{{sfn|Lennon|2008}} Early on Mailer was “cautiously respectful” of Mills’ biography, saying that she, for the most part, was accurate, fair, “honest,”{{sfn|Lennon|2008}} but he became less sanguine as he came to know more about this tough game of biography. As Mailer testily writes Mills: “you were upset that Peter Manso was getting favored nation treatment over you, and I can only repeat what I said . . . I wouldn’t help you and wouldn’t hurt you . . . it doesn’t take intimacy to write a good biography, but the right kind of imagination—a rare ingredient.”{{sfn|Mailer|1982}} Mailer reveled in the pushing and shoving competition of Mills and Manso, writing to Abbott: “Peter hates her, and for good cause;” what caused this biographers’ tiff Mailer did not say.{{sfn|Mailer|1983}} Later, Mailer turned on Manso, remarking “what a truly unpleasant piece of work the man” was. He despaired that Manso was turning the “damn thing into a cockfight.”{{sfn|Mailer|1986}} Mailer might have joined the fray had he known that after his death thirty years later Manso would release a new 2008 edition of ''Mailer: His Life and Times'' which villainously trades on Mailer’s reputation while airing the less than credible and dirty story of their break. As late as 2002 Mailer wrote to the editor of the ''Provincetown Banner'', complaining about Manso’s 1985 biography. In this letter, he labeled Manso “poison-drip.”{{sfn|Mailer|2002}} The Manso-Mailer biography war continues. In January, 2009 Manso wrote the editor of the ''Wicked Local Cape Cod'' complaining about a recent reviewer’s “pus-filled agenda” in panning his Mailer biography. | |||
What originally stoked the fires of Mailer’s indignation were the errors and “shifted nuances” biographers inevitably make.{{sfn|Mailer|1983a}} He noted scores of errors in the biographies of Mills, Manso and Dearborn, even complaining that Dearborn’s errors may be more numerous than her facts.{{Sfn|Mailer|2000}} But Mailer’s fury over Dearborn had more to do with her mischaracterizing his relationship with Harry Cohn and getting “spot on” his relationship with mistress Carole Mallory. Only Rollyson escaped Mailer’s heated critique because by and large Rollyson wrote his book without Mailer knowing much about it; Mailer and his assistant Judith McNally had misplaced a series of letters and questions Rollyson had posed. Mailer finally granted Rollyson permission to quote from his works, but both he and the Scott Meredith Agency were miffed that Rollyson never specifically designated what parts of his works he would quote. Rollyson disputes that complaint but says “Quite a correspondence ensued about the First Amendment and unauthorized biographies.” Rollyson got permission, with Mailer requesting “I be charged the smallest possible fee.”{{sfn|Rollyson|1991|p=372}} | |||
Mailer merely skirmished with those writers who had the utter audacity to write his life—with the exception of Manso where it got personal: “He and I are now so much at odds that I’m afraid to be in the same room with him, for fear I would kill him with my hands, and he, I think, would come to such a room carrying a gun.”{{sfn|Mailer|1986}} Mailer—never opposed to drawing blood with either his pen or his fist—gave these writers a wide girth initially, letting them do what they would, and later decided “it may be healthier to read no biography about yourself until you are turning in the grave.”{{sfn|Mailer|2000}} As a reader, I am grateful that Mailer did not stand in their way—no matter the later sparring. The scholarship within the books is invaluable. All four of these books—complete with errors, distortions, and idiosyncrasies—nevertheless gave this reader, and thousands of other readers, Norman Mailer, a trace of the man I have come to know. | |||
Of course, these early biographers were seriously hampered by lack of access to the 50,000 letters Mailer wrote, and, with the exception of Manso, access to Mailer’s force of personality. Michael Lennon’s newly contracted Mailer biography should remedy that lack of perspective and deepen the reader’s understanding of Mailer. Lennon has for years been Mailer’s bibliographer and has had an intimate relationship with the Mailer family. Until a biographer such as Lennon wraps his mind around all that is Mailer and furnishes us a long-awaited sharply focused but nuanced Norman Mailer, we have not read the quintessential Mailer biography. We await the portrait of Mailer who has an inner, private life as important to our understanding of the man and his ''oeuvre'' as his public life. This soul-catcher will confer an immortality of a sort, a lasting depiction of a whole human being named Norman Mailer who made his mark on our world. | |||
===Notes=== | ===Notes=== | ||
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* {{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |recipient=the Editor |work=Provincetown Banner |subject=To the Editor |location=Norman Mailer Archive |publisher=Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. |date=May 13, 2002 |url= |access-date= |ref=harv }} | * {{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |recipient=the Editor |work=Provincetown Banner |subject=To the Editor |location=Norman Mailer Archive |publisher=Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. |date=May 13, 2002 |url= |access-date= |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |recipient=Hilary Mills |subject=PC |location=Norman Mailer Archive |publisher=Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin |date=March 31, 1982 |url= |access-date= |ref=harv }} | * {{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |recipient=Hilary Mills |subject=PC |location=Norman Mailer Archive |publisher=Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin |date=March 31, 1982 |url= |access-date= |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |recipient=Hilary Mills |subject=PC |location=Norman Mailer Archive |publisher=Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin |date=January 21, | * {{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |recipient=Hilary Mills |subject=PC |location=Norman Mailer Archive |publisher=Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin |date=January 21, 1983a |url= |access-date= |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |recipient=Jack Abbott |subject=PC |location=Norman Mailer Archive |publisher=Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin |date=January 17, 1983 |url= |access-date= |ref=harv }} | * {{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |recipient=Jack Abbott |subject=PC |location=Norman Mailer Archive |publisher=Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin |date=January 17, 1983 |url= |access-date= |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |recipient=Jean Malaquais |subject=PC |location=Norman Mailer Archive |publisher=Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin |date=April 23, 1986 |url= |access-date= |ref=harv }} | * {{cite letter |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |recipient=Jean Malaquais |subject=PC |location=Norman Mailer Archive |publisher=Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin |date=April 23, 1986 |url= |access-date= |ref=harv }} | ||