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 {{byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M. |abstract=How will Norman’s Mailer’s work be regarded in the future? From our current vantage point, we have no way of knowing. But we can say this: from WWII to the new millennium—with passion, intelligence, and skill—Mailer has charted the strange and troubled times of the United States.|note=An earlier version of this paper was given at the 2008 Norman Mailer Conference, October 16–18, in Provincetown, MA.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr03vin}}
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 {{dc|dc=N|early seventy years ago}}, T. S. Eliot wrote these words in his poem, “East Coker,” published in 1935 and later a part of his masterpiece, ''Four Quartets''. Hugh Kenner reminds us that East Coker is the name of “the village in Somerset where Eliots or Elyots lived for some two centuries, before the poet’s ancestor Andrew Eliot emigrated in 1667 to found the American branch of the family."{{sfn|Kenner|1965|p=263}} After Eliot died three decades later in 1965, his ashes were interred at St. Michael’s Church—in that same village of East Coker. In the church on a simple wall plaque are other words from that poem, “In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning.”{{sfn|Eliot|1952|p=263}} These enigmatic words seem, as Marysa Demoor has pointed out, “designed to elude death.”{{sfn|Demoor|2005|p=258}}{{efn|And T. S. Eliot’s poetry was the source for the epitaphs on two plaques commemorating his death in 1965. His ashes are interred in the church of St. Michael’s in East Coker, where a commemorative plaque on the church wall bears his chosen epitaph—two lines from ''Four Quartets'': ‘In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning.’ Significant lines of course, considering the topic of this paper. The circularity of the reasoning, as well as the engraving on the stone, seems designed to elude death. The T. S. Eliot memorial stone in Westminster Abbey, featured in the BBC documentary, reads: ‘The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.’ Taken from Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding,’ this even more intriguing passage marks a communication between the dead, the living, and the ‘beyond’—in other words, a communication licensed by God. Communication ‘tongued with fire’ may indeed be poetic language, endowed with special godly powers going ‘beyond the language of the living.’ Here, then, modernist poets see their dead selves as immortal souls whose language has divine qualities capable of reaching the living.”{{sfn|Demoor|2005|p=258}}}} Whether we see life as a manifestation of God’s providence or of a more impersonal Wheel of Life, surely we could see a strange sense of recursion and return in these simple facts of Eliot’s pilgrimage.{{efn|The concepts of recursion, strange loops, and “metaphorical fugues” are dealt with by Douglas Hofstadter in his ''Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid'' (Basic Books, 1979). His book won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, the same year that Norman Mailer won the Pulitzer Fiction Prize for ''[[The Executioner’s Song]]''.}} At times, does not life seem to ''fold back'' on itself? Or, to take up a hint from the title of ''Four Quartets'', is not life like a string quartet or a Bach fugue, weaving a series of complex musical variations upon various themes? As Kenner suggests, Eliot’s ''Four Quartets'' “traverse and exploit a diversity of timbres and intonations, interchange themes, set going a repetitive but developing minuet of motifs.”{{sfn|Kenner|1965|p=261}}{{efn|The music parallel to Eliot’s ''Four Quartets'' is sometimes said to be the “late” quartets of Beethoven, but Kenner (relying on information from Hodgart) maintains that Eliot was “paying attention chiefly to Bartok’s Quartets, Nos. 2–6.”{{sfn|Kenner|1965|p=261}}}}
-Did not Norman Mailer’s untimely death on November 10, 2007 cause some of us to look again at the trajectory of our own lives, seeking to come to terms with his passing but also, implicitly, with our own mortality? This reflection is not to become obsessed or haunted by death—our own or others—but to examine the more positive aspects of aging, to chart the slow development of character, to find deeper meaning in the contingencies of life. This path, surely, is a crucial part of self-knowledge: in discovering character, Heraclitus tells us, we shall discover our fate.{{efn|“The idea we are moving in its place says it is to character that you are most truly yoked. ‘Character,’ said Heraclitus at the beginning of Western thought, ‘is fate.’ No, Napoleon, not geography; and no, Freud, not anatomy, either. Character! Character governs—governing physiology, too. We will be maintaining, with all the heft and perseverance we can still summon, that genetic inheritance is shaped into our own peculiar pattern by character, that specific composition of traits, foibles, delights, and commitments, that identifiable figure bearing our name, our history, and a face that mirrors a ‘me.{{' "}}{{sfn|Hillman|1999|p=xvi}}}} I freely acknowledge that such a stance may well reflect my own advancing years. However, as James Hillman the Jungian psychologist argues, part of the purpose of our “later years” may be that we are able to explore these deeper patterns of life.
+Did not Norman Mailer’s untimely death on November 10, 2007 cause some of us to look again at the trajectory of our own lives, seeking to come to terms with his passing but also, implicitly, with our own mortality? This reflection is not to become obsessed or haunted by death-our own or others—but to examine the more positive aspects of aging, to chart the slow development of character, to find deeper meaning in the contingencies of life. This path, surely, is a crucial part of self-knowledge: in discovering character, Heraclitus tells us, we shall discover our fate.{{efn|“The idea we are moving in its place says it is to character that you are most truly yoked. ‘Character,’ said Heraclitus at the beginning of Western thought, ‘is fate.’ No, Napoleon, not geography; and no, Freud, not anatomy, either. Character! Character governs—governing physiology, too. We will be maintaining, with all the heft and perseverance we can still summon, that genetic inheritance is shaped into our own peculiar pattern by character, that specific composition of traits, foibles, delights, and commitments, that identifiable figure bearing our name, our history, and a face that mirrors a ‘me.{{' "}}{{sfn|Hillman|1999|p=xvi}} }} I freely acknowledge that such a stance may well reflect my own advancing years. However, as James Hillman the Jungian psychologist argues, part of the purpose of our “later years” may be that we are able to explore these deeper patterns of life.
 {{quote|Then we will be able to look at the decay of body and mind as more than affliction. We will connect it with an underlying truth we already feel: Something forms a human life into an overall image, including life’s haphazard contingencies and wasted irrelevancies. Later years are often devoted to exploring these irrelevances, adventuring into past mistakes so as to discover understandable patterns.{{sfn|Hillman|1999|p=xvi}} }}
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 While story-tellers are embedded within a particular time, their ''stories''–if truly great—can speak to the ages, rising above context to communicate some meaningful pattern, some exemplar of art, some human truth that may seem almost timeless. Certainly, Hemingway’s ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' is rooted in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s—but it may be saying something about heroism, the good earth, and human connection that could last for a thousand years. On a more modest scale, as the Cold War was coming to an end in 1988, the narrative, patterns, and metaphors of John Donne and Ernest Hemingway were found very relevant by Mikhail Gorbachev.{{efn|In December 1988, less than a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mikhail Gorbachev addressed the United Nations in New York. He began his speech by “invoking the great English poet, John Donne, cited in his novel by Ernest Hemingway, ‘No man is an island ...{{' "}}{{sfn|Josephs|1994|p=9}} Allen Josephs comments, “Were not these ever-widening gyres precisely what Professor Baker had meant by the partisanship of humanity? It is one thing to cite John Donne’s ‘Meditation,’ but an altogether larger issue to invoke Donne as invoked by Hemingway, invoked in turn by Mr. Gorbachev in his historic, bridge-building address.”{{sfn|Josephs|1994|p=9}} Donne’s conceit and Hemingway’s bridge are indeed potent metaphors—especially across the Wall, behind the Iron Curtain, as quoted by Gorbachev.}} How will Mailer’s work be regarded in the future? From this vantage point, we have no way of knowing. But we can say this: from WWII to the new millennium—with passion, intelligence, and skill—Mailer has charted the strange and troubled times of the United States.
-. . .
+In his 1998 work, ''The Time of Our Time'', Mailer tried to place his life work as a writer on a larger canvas, which he described as “the web of history, the style of our lives, and the river of becoming.”{{sfn|Mailer|1998|p=xii}} A ''web''—that which is woven, whether it be textile or tale—is a wonderful choice of word to describe the patterning of our lives. The words ''web'' and ''weave'' are ancient Teutonic terms, dating in English from before 1000 AD, and referring to a craft known from Neolithic times. But in their contemporary use, as a pattern of linked hypertext documents accessed through the Internet, web and weave also describe the patterning of meaning captured in the World Wide Web. Mailer also writes of “the river of becoming,”{{sfn|Mailer|1998|p=xii}} a powerful synecdoche of our lives and times seen as a river, a synecdoche used also by Twain and Hemingway, and drawing, perhaps, on ancient memories of the earliest River Cultures of the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus, and the Yellow River. Mailer describes ''time'' itself as “the most intimate and indefinable of words, the most mysterious word of them all.”{{sfn|Mailer|1998|p=xii}}{{efn|“So I can have the hope that this book may stimulate your sense of our time. . . . In effect, this is a book that nearly all of us have created in our own minds; each book vastly different yet still related by the web of history, the style of our lives, and the river of becoming that we refer to by the most intimate and indefinable of words, the most mys- terious word of them all—time. Time!”{{sfn|Mailer|1998|p=xii}} }} All human life-all art and culture, all human artifacts, all meaningful patterns—are ultimately transformations in time. Time, then, is the inescapable matrix for everything else of significance: Mailer’s words seem appropriate.
+What of ''memory''? Memory is the human facility that enables us to reflect who we are and from whence we have come, to understand our identity as beings in time, and to create and tell our stories. Our reflection of ''time past''—and our understanding of ''time present'' and our hopes and fears concerning ''time future''—are all created and shaped by our memories. Memory cannot physically change the events of the past but memory shapes how the past is perceived. Memory may help to determine, for instance, whether the past will be for us oppressor or liberator. At times, memory may provide the chance, almost, of a ''do-over''.{{efn|“I am inclined to believe that God’s chief purpose in giving us memory is to enable us to go back in time so that if we didn’t play those roles right the first time round, we can still have another go at it now.”{{sfn|Buechner|1991|p=32}} }} Again, I quote from Buechner:
+{{quote|We cannot undo our old mistakes or their consequences any more that we can erase old wounds that we have both suffered and inflicted, but through the power that memory gives us of thinking, feeling, imagining our way back through time we can at long last finally finish with the past in the sense of removing its power to hurt us and other people and to stunt our growth as human beings.{{sfn|Buechner|1991|pp=32–33}}
+Apart from the obvious fact that memory is at the core of both narrative and our human identity, what is the particular place of memory in Mailer’s work? He once called ''form''—something surely vital to any narrative—{{" '}}the physical equivalent of memory.{{' "}}{{sfn|Busa|2008|p=90}} As we continue to study the form of his narratives and stories, in effect we are recalling Mailer’s memory, his perception of the “the web of history,”{{sfn|Mailer|1998|p=12}} so that we may better weave our own pattern. Through memory, each of us composes—and continually revises—our personal story, creating our own narrative, part fictional part factual. Throughout our lives, we are telling our stories, shaping a history of our times, drafting our own map of reality, weaving our own web of meaning. At the heart of that patterning process, we find human memory. Again, here is how Mailer expresses it in ''The Time of Our Time'':
+{{quote|Over the course of our lives, most of us compose in the privacy of our minds a social and cultural history of the years through which we have passed. We often think of it as a collective remembrance that others will share with us. We even speak of it as our time. . . . we are forever working to obtain some understanding of our lives and our time.{{sfn|Mailer|1998|p=10}} }}
+Memories may be lost, of course. We may simply forget, move on with other concerns, and/or get older. Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia may destroy memory. Sometimes, as Toni Morrison suggests in ''Beloved'', severe trauma can erase, as it were, our cultural history circuits.{{efn|“Only this woman Sethe could have left him his manhood like that. He wants to put his story next to hers. ‘Sethe,’ he says, ‘me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.{{' "}}{{sfn|Morrison|2006|p=314}} }} Under the impact of war and other traumas, what was once called “shell shock” and now PTSD continue to do so. Human memory seems to be both conscious and unconscious—both voluntary and involuntary.{{efn|Zora Neal Hurston suggests this blend of the conscious and unconscious in human memory when she says “Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”{{sfn|Hurston|2006|p=1}} }} Memory needs sustaining, reshaping, reimagining. The Norman Mailer Society, its annual conferences, ''The Mailer Review'', and their counterparts in other bailiwicks of the literary world, are reminders of the power and necessity of cultural and literary memory for all of us. In November 2007, we lost Norman Mailer. Each day we lose more of the “Greatest Generation.” We must not forget the memories, that “social and cultural history” and “collective remembrance” that is threaded through Mailer’s work—and the voices of his generation.
+===The Place of Home===
+Eliot wrote, “Home is where one starts from. As we get older / The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated.”{{sfn|Eliot|1952|p=V}} What is the place of ''home'' in Norman Mailer’s work and significance? We could answer that on several levels: his rootedness both in Brooklyn, New York City and in Provincetown, Massachusetts; his secular Jewish identity; and his citizenship and sense of home here in the United States. Much can be said about Mailer’s roots in New York City and in Provincetown; in ''The Mailer Review'' (2008), Chris Busa wrote about his Provincetown roots. Mailer’s Jewish identity may be seen throughout his work, in his love of language and debate, his passion for the life of the mind, and his abiding sense of history and ''kairos'' time.{{efn|Why, some might ask, would ''kairos'' be an aspect of Jewishness? After all, ''kairos'' is a Greek word for time, dating back to Hesiod’s ''Works'', and signifying ''opportunity, significant time, right time, critical time'', as opposed to the word ''chronos'', the more general term for ''time as a period''. ''Kairos'' is both common and important in New Testament usage and Christian theology. But significantly—it seems to me—in the ''Septuagint'', the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, ''kairos'' occurs about three times as often as ''chronos'' to translate the usual Hebrew word for time, ''ét''.{{sfn|Hahn|1978|p=835}} To that extent, it seems that the perspective on time that is represented by the Greek word ''kairos'' is as much Jewish as Christian in origin. As Hans-Christoph Hahn has said, “The creator, Yahweh, has created the whole of time and fills it in accordance with his will, and also fixes the individual ''kairoi'' (cf. Gen. 1:14).”{{sfn|Hahn|1978|p=835}} }} We can see that Jewish identity, I think, in ''The Gospel According to the Son'', ''On God'', and—more implicitly but passionately—in ''The Castle in the Forest''. Again, in ''The Mailer Review'' (2008), Mashey Bernstein and Ezra Cappell both write of this Jewish dimension. Cappell reports that in 2006, speaking at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas, Mailer said that the Talmud “has influenced everything I have written.”{{sfn|Cappell|2008|p=98}}
+Home is where “one starts from.” Mailer’s citizenship and character as an American are evident throughout his life and work. From time to time, the Right-wing tries to suggest that dissent is somehow un-American and unpatriotic: during his life Mailer certainly was tarred with that brush. In reality, however, dissent is at the core of the American experience. As both a British citizen and a U.S. resident alien, I believe I can testify to this fact. If I remember correctly, was not the 1776 Revolution concerned with dissent against a certain British king? Instinctively, Mailer—always the warrior and the rebel—knew that dissenting reality. This country was always his home and his reference point in the space-time continuum. This nation, with its long, painful, but ultimately noble quest for genuine freedom, was both his passion and his theme. If his work is a complex form of patterning—like any work of narrative or art—the pattern he was searching for was always a patterning of times and spaces specifically American. For this reason, I am convinced that Norman Mailer was and is a great ''American'' writer. Despite increasing and welcome interest in his work from other countries, that will remain his abiding significance.
+===Pattern and Calendar===
+This essay was completed on February 25th, which in the Christian calendar for 2009 was Ash Wednesday. Is not a calendar, religious or secular, a way of patterning time, of bringing meaning to the chaos and losses that ''chronos'' may signify? In effect, a calendar interposes occasions of ''kairos''–significant, critical, meaningful events—upon the rather forbidding expanses of ''chronos''. In the Christian calendar, one of those significant ''kairos'' times is Ash Wednesday. In many churches, at the special liturgy for Ash Wednesday, these words accompany the marking of the forehead with ashes, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”{{sfn|BCP|1979|p=265}} Some may see this as excessively morbid or an outdated superstition, but for others this ritual is a healthy reminder of the frailties and fragilities of human nature. To that extent, Ash Wednesday is a simple patterning of life: Judaism and Christianity are more complex and comprehensive patterns, larger narratives that to some offer meaning and significance.
+Whether described in older essentialist categories or in more contemporary dynamic ones, human nature is regarded by Jews and Christians as ''mortal''—sharing the atoms, DNA, and fate of the rest of the physical world—and also ''spiritual'', animated by the Spirit of the Creator. Ash Wednesday powerfully brings together—at a specific moment in time and place—''pattern'', ''time'', and ''memory''. It can be seen as a significant ''kairos'' time between birth and death.{{efn|“This is the time of tension between dying and birth / The place of solitude where three dreams cross . . .”{{sfn|Eliot|1952|p=66}} }} The day reminds one of larger issues of life—and death—and of the pattern that may outlast each person’s mortality. Ash Wednesday also reminds us of the power and necessity of memory itself. “''Remember'' that you are dust, and to dust you shall return”{{sfn|BCP|1979|p=265}} (emphasis added). Religion shares with art and literature the belief that it is only through ''memory'' that human identity may be understood and some kind of order brought to the ravages of time.
+In the American literary realm, over which he ruled so magnificently, Mailer was seeking a pattern that could outlast each one of us. His task, simply put, was to tell stories that could “bring order to the absurdity” of life:
+{{quote|We tell ourselves stories in order to make sense of life. Narrative is reassuring. There are days when life is so absurd, it’s crippling—nothing makes sense, but stories bring order to the absurdity. Relief is provided by the narrative’s beginning, middle, and end.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|pp=156-157}} }}
+The stories of Mailer remain to reassure us: his patterns abide to help us make sense of this life. The words of Eliot’s ''Four Quartets'' may perhaps offer us some guidance, as we too face a “stranger” world and a “more complicated” pattern. “In my beginning is my end.” As we reflect upon Norman Mailer and his significance, so we shall continue to examine the rhetorical and metaphorical patterns of his writing, the times about which he so eloquently wrote, and the cultural memory of America that is preserved in this distinguished body of work.
 ===Notes===
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 * {{cite book |last=Auden |first=W. H. |author-mask=1 |date=1991 |title=Collected Poems |editor-last=Mendelson |editor-first=Edward |edition=Revised |url= |location=New York |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv }}
 * {{cite journal |last=Bernstein |first=Mashy |title=The Heart of the Nation: Jewish Values in the Fiction of Norman Mailer |url=https://prmlr.us/mr09bern |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2 |issue=1 |date=2008 |pages=376–384 |access-date=2021-06-20 |ref=harv }}
-* {{Cite book |author=<!--none stated--> |date=1979 |title=The Book of Common Prayer...according to the Episcopal Church (BCP) |location=New York |publisher=Oxford UP |ref={{SfnRef|Prayer|1979}} }}
+* {{Cite book |author=<!--none stated--> |date=1979 |title=The Book of Common Prayer...according to the Episcopal Church (BCP) |location=New York |publisher=Oxford UP |ref={{SfnRef|BCP|1979}} }}
 * {{cite book |last=Bronowski |first=J. |date=1973 |title=The Ascent of Man |location=New York |publisher=Little, Brown |ref=harv }}
 * {{cite book |first=Peter |last=Brooks |date=1996 |chapter=Reading for the Plot |title=Essentials of the Theory of Fiction |pages=326-347| ref=harv }}
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 * {{cite book |last=Spender |first=Stephen |date=1975 |title=Eliot |url= |series=Fontana Modern Masters |publisher=Fontana |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
 * {{cite news |last=Steinfels |first=Peter |date=December 1, 2001 |title=Beliefs; After Sept. 11, a 62-year-old poem by Auden drew new attention. Not all of it was favorable |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/01/us/beliefs-after-sept-11-62-year-old-poem-auden-drew-new-attention-not-all-it-was.html |work=The New York Times |edition=late |location=sec. A |page=13 |access-date=2021-06-20 |ref=harv }}
-* {{cite book |last=Whitehead |first=Alfred North |date=2001 |title=The Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead |url= |location=New York |publisher=David R. Godine |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite book |last=Whitehead |first=Alfred North |date=2001 |title=The Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead |url= |location=New York |publisher=David R. Godine  |ref=harv }}
 {{Refend}}