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 13:36, 20 June 2021

7,003 bytes added , 20 June 2021

no edit summary

ARiley

18

edits

@@ Line 23: / Line 23: @@
 All Mailer readers know that Mailer was a professional author who made sure he got paid twice for his writings as often as possible, just as Jack London and other highly productive authors did, but this is hardly an adequate response either to Mailer’s retrospective collections or his works on Picasso or Oswald. One could just as well, if one were given to agree with Kakutani, say that ''The Executioner’s Song'' was a “cut-and-paste” job, as if Mailer’s assemblage of a bewildering array of voices and texts does not form a lush and witty hand-woven carpet–a narrative that effectively transforms fragments of Gilmore’s life into a redemptive and beautiful narrative.
-. . .
+''Norman Mailer’s Letters on An American Dream'' is a wonderful resource, detailing Mailer’s aesthetic considerations, his social world from the inside as most of us have never seen it before, and his responses to the weird reception much of his work has received as well. Mailer asks Diana Trilling to please invite Iris Murdoch to dinner as he has always wanted to meet her (71); he tells several correspondents that he thinks the responses to ''Dream'' were not only schizophrenic but were symptomatic, also, of the nation’s own tectonic fault lines (apologizing to Aldridge for the overloaded metaphor as he uses it: 74); and we see Mailer writing long, friendly, detailed letters to fans such as Mrs. Virginia M. Mangram: “Between us, I’m just a little tickled with the book, because no matter its larger merits or lack of them, I worked the
+surface of this book harder than anything I’ve ever written and so feel at last there’s a certain craftsmanship to something I’ve done. To me it purrs a little now. It’s a bitch of a book, at least I think so. If you don’t like it, or are a good bit disappointed, my god, I’ll respect you for saying so after reading all these fine words about me by me” (63). Evidence is accumulating to show that Mailer was actually one of the most gracious of the Truly Famous; in a few years or so, Lennon’s edited collection of Mailer letters will come out, and then the world will know.
+Compared with Mailer’s best nonfiction, ''Why Are We at War?'' and ''The Big Empty'' are less intense efforts. In the former case, Mailer blasts the Bush administration appropriately, although it does seem a bit out of time for Mailer to claim that Bush and Company invaded Iraq to bolster whiteness and maleness. ''On God'' offers some interesting refinements on Mailer’s psycho-theology. ''On God'', though it strikes me more as a series of lectures than a conversation, has a great deal of essential information for readers of
+''The Gospel Acccording to the Son'' and ''The Castle in the Forest''.
+===II. Book-Length Studies and Developing Resources===
+In the last ten years, there have been four book-length scholarly studies of Mailer’s work, none of them from major presses,3 and an annotated bibliography. There have also been three collections of essays about his work, if we count the special issue of ''Journal of Modern Literature'' (2006) that the ''JML'' editors downgraded to a “cluster of essays” and the first two issues of ''The Mailer Review'' (2007 and 2008), published by The Norman Mailer Society and co-sponsored with the University of South Florida.<sup>4</sup> Other new resources include the Mailer papers at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin, which in 2005 acquired a mind-bogglingly comprehensive archive of Mailer’s work. There is also the website of The Norman Mailer Society. Harvard University also acquired some papers of limited value when Carole Mallory sold her papers to America’s most prestigious university.
+First book-length study: Mailer continues to receive more attention as a symptom rather than as a shaper of culture, and Mary V. Dearborn’s ''Mailer: a Biography'' is an excellent window into literary politics in postwar America. In presenting Mailer as an artist who has lost as much as he has gained by bargaining with fame, Dearborn raises important issues about the effects of celebrity culture on literature. Her account begins with Mailer’s fiftieth birthday party in 1973, in which he was to announce his plan for a “Fifth
+Estate,” a citizen watchdog group to monitor the activities of the FBI and the CIA. Mailer was intoxicated as he stepped up to the microphone and bungled the event. Dearborn examines Mailer’s every failure in excruciating detail and hypothesizes a Freudian repetition-compulsion at one point, but psychological explanation of Mailer’s behavior is in no way a priority in this text. Rather, Dearborn marshals the author’s crimes and misdemeanors to argue that Mailer has been cut off from the world in important ways by the celebrity that has been such an important part of his literary arsenal: “[H]e became famous seemingly overnight, and his stature ensured that he was shielded from reality by a tight band of supporters and family. When he tragically stumbled, stabbing Adele in 1960, his inner circle made sure that he would pay no price for the deed” (424). Previous biographers have covered what has been euphemistically called “the Trouble,” but none have been as astute as Dearborn in assessing the more painful consequences of America’s love affair with literary rebellion.
+What, then, is Mailer’s achievement? Dearborn mercilessly assesses Mailer’s failures but finally concludes that he has “turned his celebrity to good account” (425). For Dearborn “Mailer... discovered that celebrity could open up doors to a new kind of cultural expression in which the artist’s personal and creative lives inform each other in beneficial ways” (425). While insisting that his experiments with celebrity have often been disastrous failures, Dearborn finally lauds Mailer for having opened up a cultural space that was not available previously, one which has been as important to ideological opponents as it was to himself: “[C]ould Germaine Greer not have known that without Norman Mailer she would perhaps not have been able to cut the figure she did, flamboyant in feathers, and as the author of ''The Female Eunuch'', a feminist text that brilliantly mixed the personal and the political?” (425). This argument is often put forward by Mailer defenders, but it is more credible when it appears in Dearborn’s frequently severe assessment.
+Though Dearborn claims that the life and the work are equally important in Mailer’s case, her non-hagiographic view of the life is worth much more than her approach to the writing. ''The Armies of the Night'' (1968) is for Dearborn Mailer’s best work, and it is an unsurprising opinion. She declares ''Of a Fire on the Moon'' (1971) “one of the most disastrous projects of his writing life,” which is a strange assessment when one considers the thoughtful responses to that work in studies by Kernan, Landow, and Tabbi. Dearborn’s discussions of the work occasionally strike one as breezy, and they seem to rely a little too much on the scuttlebutt of reviewers. For example, she claims that ''Oswald’s Tale'' (1995) received almost uniformly bad reviews, but actually this book received positive reviews in a number of publications. More
+ambitious works such as ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983) receive a competent overview, but the study offers no real surprises. Each generation, at any rate, must write its own biography of a phenomenon such as Mailer, and Dearborn’s is the most complete portrait from this period, 1998–2008. Since Robert Lucid’s death, J. Michael Lennon has taken over the job of writing an authorized biography.
+...
 ===Notes===