The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Washed by the Swells of Time: Reading Mailer, 1998–2008: Difference between revisions

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→‎III. Mailer And His Others: The Personification Of Agon?

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 thinking that great battles have been won either by the Devil or the Lord.<sup>9</sup>
+Fred Kaplan’s ''Gore Vidal: a Biography'' gives the chemical formulas for the various high-intensity exchanges between the two; Kaplan’s account gives much more than recycled spleen. There are also detailed portraits of intermediaries such as the influential editor Jason Epstein, contrasting responses to various phases of the relationship between Mailer and Vidal, and a tactful rendition of the highly cautious manner in which the two aging writers sidled up to one another in order to end the feud.10 The story of Mailer as a
+friend rather than as an ineluctable adversary emerges in Rachel Cohen’s ''A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854–1967''. This book is in some ways quite Mailerian, folding in the radical intuitionism of Mailer’s speculative biography Marilyn into the subjective force of ''The Armies of the Night'', in which the centering self stands up to history. The book braids together the pacts and patterns of hundreds of biographical books and articles, and if it is a little too general at times, it always proceeds form a genuine appreciation of the affiliations that explain the intensity of all literary quests. Mailer figures quite strongly in the last third of the book, with chapters on Mailer with Baldwin, with Marianne Moore, and with Robert Lowell.
+There have been a few articles in which Mailer is not the Satanic adversary. John M. Kinder’s “The Good War’s “Raw Chunks”: Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead'' and James Gould Cozzens’s ''Guard of Honor''”
+returns to WWII via two 1948 novels to correct our misimpression that the “good war” was always good: “At best, what we now call the ‘Good War’ is a well-maintained fiction, a constellation of images, narratives, memories, and sound bites invoked to lend authority to everything from the War on Drugs to the current American-lead occupation of Iraq” (187). In this article, not only does Mailer become friends with another writer, he also gets to be the political good guy. Gary Rosenshield aligns Mailer with three other writers
+in his article “Crime and Redemption, Russian and American style: Dostoevsky, Buckley, Mailer, Styron and Their Wards.” Many people have commented critically on Mailer’s involvement in the Abbot case, noting his
+valorization in contemporary American society, “his romanticization of the criminal, and his faith in the redemptive power of literary talent” (684). The main virtue of Rosenshield’s essay is that he does not look at the activity of a single writer in isolation, instead choosing to compare Mailer, Styron and Dostoevsky to show the complex interrelations between judgment, risk and seduction in all of these cases. Rosenshield does what a scholar should do–he connects the impulsive judgments that energize daily journalism to the
+deeper responsibilities of historical memory. How does Mailer come off
+compared to others?:
 ===Notes===