The Mailer Review/Volume 9, 2015/The Day the Century Ended: Francis Irby Gwaltney’s “Sequel” to The Naked and the Dead: Difference between revisions

The Mailer Review/Volume 9, 2015/The Day the Century Ended: Francis Irby Gwaltney’s “Sequel” to The Naked and the Dead (view source)

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 It would be nice to conclude this essay by saying that Francis Irby Gwaltney, until his death in 1981 at the age of fifty-nine, remained friends with Norman Mailer. Unfortunately, the two old friends quarreled again in 1979, following the publication of Fig’s review of ''The Executioner’s Song'' in the ''Arkansas Gazette''. It was over a slighting remark Gwaltney made in the review about Barbara Norris, Mailer’s sixth wife, whom he had met in 1975 at a party in Russellville, Arkansas, where the Gwaltneys were teaching English at Arkansas Tech. Fig, whose monogamous idea of marriage was diametrically opposed to his friend’s, evidently regretted the fact that he had allowed Barbara to attend his party in order to meet Mailer, with whom she subsequently left Arkansas to live and ultimately marry Mailer. Norris Church, as she came to be known after her marriage, resented Fig’s reference to her as Mailer’s “present live-in wife,” as well as the fact that she was never mentioned by name in the article. When Mailer himself addressed the issue with Fig, he replied with the feistiness he had shown during their first quarrel. In response to Mailer’s letter of November 27, 1979, he wrote a month later: “It has never been my understanding that acting as Barbara Norris’s publicity agent was a condition of our friendship.” He concluded that now that their friendship had been “lastingly breached,” the thing he most deeply regretted was having allowed her to crash his party in 1975. Shortly before her official marriage to Mailer in 1980, Norris Church made an effort to patch up the quarrel, saying “Norman and I are getting married now, and it’s all your doing, et cetera,” but apparently Fig either never received the letter or simply ignored it, not even mentioning it to his wife.{{sfn|Manso|1985|pp=618–619}}
-In one of his last letters (extant in the HRC), however, Fig read ''The Fight'' (1975), a book that led Mailer almost directly to his magnum opus in ''The Executioner’s Song'', and told his wartime buddy and lifelong friend: “You’ll discover, deep in your dotage, that people will be studying [''The Fight''] as a social document.”{{sfn|Gwaltney|1975|}} Francis Irby Gwaltney was Norman Mailer’s best and oldest friend, and the New Yorker who could do a pretty good Southern accent paid tribute to him in 1983, when he gave the keynote lecture at the Annual Creative Writing Workshop at Arkansas Tech that Fig had co-founded. Mailer had come for $3,000, half his usual lecturer’s fee, and at the close of the workshop he returned the check to establish a scholarship fund for creative writing at the college in Fig’s name.{{sfn|Dempsey|1987|pp=42–45}}{{efn|Mailer returned to Arkansas Tech twelve years later, again donating his speaker’s fee to the college (“Scholarship”).}} Today, advertised as the only Bachelor of Fine Arts, or BA level creative writing program in the Southwest, the BFA website still features a photograph of Gwaltney, the writer who hated the South enough to write in the Southern tradition of Mark Twain and William Faulkner. Along the way, he befriended another great writer, a New Yorker and a “Southerner” — that is, a “natural mimic” who could talk “to us in a language that only a sharp ear could differentiate from the good, Southern English.”
+In one of his last letters (extant in the HRC), however, Fig read ''The Fight'' (1975), a book that led Mailer almost directly to his magnum opus in ''The Executioner’s Song'', and told his wartime buddy and lifelong friend: “You’ll discover, deep in your dotage, that people will be studying [''The Fight''] as a social document.”{{sfn|Gwaltney|1975|}} Francis Irby Gwaltney was Norman Mailer’s best and oldest friend, and the New Yorker who could do a pretty good Southern accent paid tribute to him in 1983, when he gave the keynote lecture at the Annual Creative Writing Workshop at Arkansas Tech that Fig had co-founded. Mailer had come for $3,000, half his usual lecturer’s fee, and at the close of the workshop he returned the check to establish a scholarship fund for creative writing at the college in Fig’s name.{{sfn|Dempsey|1987|pp=42–45}}{{efn|Mailer returned to Arkansas Tech twelve years later, again donating his speaker’s fee to the college.{{sfn|Scholarship|1995|p=1}} }} Today, advertised as the only Bachelor of Fine Arts, or BA level creative writing program in the Southwest, the BFA website still features a photograph of Gwaltney, the writer who hated the South enough to write in the Southern tradition of Mark Twain and William Faulkner. Along the way, he befriended another great writer, a New Yorker and a “Southerner” — that is, a “natural mimic” who could talk “to us in a language that only a sharp ear could differentiate from the good, Southern English.”
 ==Notes==
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 * {{cite letter |first=Norman |last=Mailer |recipient=Francis Irby Gwaltney |subject=- |language= |date=October 28, 1959 |url= |accessdate= |author-mask=1 |location=MS. Harry Ransom Center. University of Texas, Austin. |ref=harv }}
 * {{cite book |last=Manso |first=Peter |date=1985 |title=Mailer: His Life and Times |url=https://archive.org/details/isbn_9781416562863 |location=New York |publisher=Washington Square Press |author-link= }}
+* {{cite news |author=<!--staff--> |date=December 6, 1995 |title=Scholarship Gets Boost from Mailer’s Speech |page=1 |work=Atkins Chronicle |ref={{harvid|Scholarship|1995}} }}
 {{refend}}