18
edits
The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Washed by the Swells of Time: Reading Mailer, 1998–2008: Difference between revisions
The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Washed by the Swells of Time: Reading Mailer, 1998–2008 (view source)
Revision as of 15:04, 27 June 2021
, 27 June 2021no edit summary
No edit summary |
No edit summary |
||
| Line 77: | Line 77: | ||
Mailer corresponded with some of the most important American figures in his time, including Allen Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, Truman Capote, Muhammad Ali, John Lennon, Don DeLillo, Joyce Carol Oates, Diana Trilling, James Jones and William Styron. | Mailer corresponded with some of the most important American figures in his time, including Allen Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, Truman Capote, Muhammad Ali, John Lennon, Don DeLillo, Joyce Carol Oates, Diana Trilling, James Jones and William Styron. | ||
On November 9–11, 2006, the Center hosted its biennale Fleur Cowles Flair Symposium, ''The Sense of Our Time: Norman Mailer and America in Conflict''. The panelists included Norman Mailer himself, J. Michael Lennon, and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David Oshinsky. There was also an exhibition held in conjunction with the Symposium–“Norman Mailer Takes On America”–which was described by Lennon as “by far the most impressive exhibition of the life and work of Norman Mailer ever mounted”. Lennon’s interview with the Centre can be found [http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/ransomedition/2006/fall/norman_mailer.html here]. Also, an interview with Norman Mailer, his son John Buffalo Mailer and sister Barbara Mailer Wasserman was conducted by Ransom Center’s Curator of Academic Affairs, Robert Fulton, when the family came for the Symposium. The audio clips from the interview and its transcript can be found at the [http://eupdates.hrc.utexas.edu/site/PageServer?pagename!Audio_with_%20Mailer_Family Center's website]. Among other questions, Fulton asked the following: | |||
{{quote|'''Robert Fulton:''' You as Norman Mailer have various identities– you are Norman Mailer the writer, then when you speak about yourself as Norman or Mailer in your writings in sort of the third person, and then you’re Norman Mailer the reader. Which one of those is stronger for you? | |||
'''Norman Mailer:''' It almost depends on my mood. If I’m reading aloud, I’ll be the person I’m pretending to be, at that point I’ll be Norman Mailer the reader. I do think we have a certain separation from ourselves. In other words, when I’m talking about myself at the age of 28, and I’m saying “Norman”–he exists in my mind almost like a relative. In other words I don’t feel the individual umbilical cord stretching right out to him so I can yank on him and bring him in. He’s there; he is what he was and so on. And I think that’s true of all of us. We bear an odd relation to our own past that is beyond my powers to explore, but they may get into that sort of thing.}} | |||
The umbilical cord stretching endlessly between imagination and reality– Mailer’s musings, his more polished prose, and the anecdotes we now think of as “his life” flow one into the other, defeating our attempts at anything like narratological precision. | |||
The Harry Ransom Center’s website provides an inventory page for the [http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/research/fa/mailer.hp.html Mailer archive], which includes detailed descriptions of its scope and contents, the six series the collection is divided into, the folder list and indexes of his correspondents and works. A [http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/press/%20releases/2007/mailer/ press release page] also serves as a navigation page to various Mailer resources available on the website–interviews, photos, and information about Mailer-related materials found in other collections at the Center. A searchable “Finding Aid” at [http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/research/fa/ this website] provides more information about the collection under the search term “Norman Mailer,” although many of the search results are repeated and hence difficult to wade through. However some of this information can only be found via the Finding Aid, so until the search engine becomes more intelligent, the dedicated researcher will have to go through every link. These online search aids should prove most valuable to those intending to visit the Harry Ransom Center, as one can locate a thorough picture of what is available before going there. | |||
Another online resource is the home page of The Norman Mailer Society.<sup>7</sup> It is essentially presented as a blog, complete with a news feed one can subscribe to for news and announcements–a boon for those who want to | |||
keep abreast of the latest Mailer-related news, as the site is frequently updated. Information about the Society’s yearly conference is available, and registration payment can be made directly from the site using PayPal. The Society also puts out newsletters that can be downloaded from their site. The section of the website called “Books” provides an Amazon-powered search engine for books and convenient links to first-editions of Mailer books available for purchase at the Amazon website. There is also a recommended list | |||
of key texts for Mailer studies. Another section is dedicated to information about ''The Mailer Review'', including excerpts from the second volume. | |||
As the website is run on a blogging platform, each “post” on the website is open to comments from the public. Alas, hardly any comments can be found–not even a Bronx cheer in response to the announcement that Mailer had been inducted into the Brooklyn Hall of Fame. The posting of comments creates a sense of community with the possibility for back-and-forth conversations, and hopefully more Mailer enthusiasts will participate as the Society matures. Provocations are proposed. That said, the website is the first place to go for Mailer news. Headlines at this moment include the national high school and college-level writing contests (co-sponsored by The Mailer | |||
Estate and the National Council of Teachers of English), and the launching of the Mailer Writer’s Colony, which has its own [http://www.%20nmwcolony.org/aboutUs/ourVision/ website]: . | |||
In April 2008, Harvard University purchased seven boxes of letters, books and papers from Mailer’s mistress of nine years, actress Carole Mallory. The material includes photos, interview transcripts and notes from the writing lessons he gave her. What researchers would most likely be interested in, and what Leslie Morris, Harvard’s curator of modern books and manuscripts, regards as “important” are Mailer’s hand-written edits and notes on several of Mallory’s manuscripts.<sup>8</sup> | |||
===III. Mailer And His Others: The Personification Of ''Agon?''=== | |||
Taking all the articles written about Mailer in the last ten years in hand, one could select a set of which compare Mailer to another writer, usually in not very surprising ways, but the interesting tendency is for critics to begin to see Mailer less in terms of ''agon'' and more in terms of affiliation. Mailer has been | |||
often understood as a rival of other writers, and this perspective is a large aspect of his own self creation. His 1959 article, “Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room,” was perhaps Mailer’s Rubicon: his appraisals of James Jones, William Styron, Truman Capote, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, and so forth made it clear that Mailer was not destined to become a literary politician. Mailer wrote in ''The Armies of the Night'' that he thought of himself as a counter-puncher, and his literary feuds and rivalries, including spats and major feuds with writers such as James Baldwin and Gore Vidal, as well as his battles with larger movements such as his engagement with feminism that led to ''The Prisoner of Sex'', reveal the essential truth of Richard Poirier’s claim that Mailer never stopped being a war novelist. If Mailer has always had reliable Orwellian intuitions about the ways in which American political forces drift toward war to enhance an internal organization rather than ward off external threat, then perhaps it could be said it | |||
takes one to know one. Mailer writes on the imagination at war and Mailer readers look for the mythical “good war.” Mailer often was not quite on the right side in the Manichean battle between the Devil and the Lord. | |||
Mailer and Coover, for example, help us see homophobia as a function of cold war hegemony in “Crises of Masculinity: Homosexual Desire and Homosexual Panic in the Critical ColdWar Narratives of Mailer and Coover” | |||
by Michael Snyder. For Snyder,Mailer’s ''An American Dream'' and ''Why are We in Vietnam?'', like Coover’s ''The Public Burning'', “critique the way homosexuality functions to consolidate patriarchal power” (250), but Mailer is a little more of the bad cop to Robert Coover’s good cop, since Mailer’s homophobia is compared to Coover’s “use of subversive Bakhtinian carnival laughter,” which “presents a more devastating, comprehensive critique of cold war rhetoric” than do texts by Mailer (250). | |||
Some of the “Mailer vs. X” merely recycle an idea, using the staged fight to expand naught into naught-much-more. Michael Macilwee’s article “Saul Bellow and Normal Mailer” is somewhat reminiscent of earlier articles we have seen on these two writers. There have been two Vidal vs. Mailer articles during this period, one by Michael Mewshaw, appearing in 2002, “Vidal and Mailer,” and Heather Nelson’s “Jack’s Ghost: Reappearances of John F. Kennedy in the Work of Gore Vidal and Normal Mailer” in ''American Studies International''. Neither one mentions Donald Pease’s Mailer/Vidal comparison from 1992, “Citizen Vidal and Mailer’s America,” for example. | |||
Mewshaw informs us, after recycling the Mailer/Vidal feud one more time, that “Vidal gave no sign of being bothered by the noise and the pollution,” that a “servant, Indian or Sri Lankan, brought our drinks” (6), and that “as I would often hear Vidal repeat with glee, no number of dinner parties could possibly dry up a writer’s creative juices as quickly as a steady diet of teaching freshman composition” (8). Heather Neilson alternatively not only recovers but extends more significant literary memory. She reminds us that this comparison has a history, quoting Bernard F. Dick from 1974, who had astutely suggested that “the fact that ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' (1967) appeared in the same year as ''Washington D.C.'' not only crystallizes the difference between these two literary rivals but also explains why Mailer has become the voice of his generation while Vidal has become its mocking persona” (Dick 27). In more recent years, Neilson notes the pattern has not held: The almost simultaneous appearance of ''Palimpsest'' and ''Oswald’s Tale'' can be seen | |||
as a piquant reversal of the expected projectories of their authors’ careers– Vidal at last writing openly about his private life, and Mailer confirming his growing interest in history and historiography. We would like to see Neilson develop these points more fully. | |||
Whether or not “Vidal vs. Mailer” was in any sense the fight of the century, a good literary feud can have a salutary effect on literary history. The Maxine Hong Kingston vs. Frank Chin fight, for example, has helped Asian-American writers and scholars make communally recognized literary constellations out of what would otherwise be random points of light, and we may ask, along these lines: What has the Gore/Norman fight produced? Reviewing the matter from various angles, including for example Fred | |||
Kaplan’s ''Gore Vidal: a Biography'' and Dick Cavett’s recollections of the televised parts of the feud just after Mailer’s death, one does not come away | |||
thinking that great battles have been won either by the Devil or the Lord.<sup>9</sup> | |||