The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Meeting Mailer: Difference between revisions

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 {{byline|last=Stratton|first=Richard|abstract=A writer recounts his relationship with Norman Mailer, beginning in the 1970s.
 |url=https://prmlr.us/mr08stra}}
+{{dc|dc=“It| was the early 1970's.”}} I was living in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on a
+writing fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center. Across Commercial Street,
+the narrow lane meandering through town, cater-cornered to the garret
+apartment where I lived, was a big red brick house on Cape Cod Bay. A
+young woman, Bobbi, worked in that house as a cook and housekeeper for
+Norman Mailer. Bobbi lived in the ground floor apartment of the building
+I lived in and over the fall and winter months we became friends.
+“You should meet Norman,” Bobbi said to me one evening as we sat
+drinking wine and talking. “You guys would hit it off.”
+By then I was already a Mailer aficionado. I had come to his writing
+through his movies. On a whim one night I went to a screening at Brandeis
+of Beyond the Law—it was the title that attracted me. Ninety minutes later
+I walked out of the auditorium determined to read Mailer, for anyone who
+could make a film that bold and outrageous about cops and criminals, I
+knew, had to have much to teach me about writing.
+I read Mailer over the next several months, and, during the summer while
+I attended a writing course at Harvard, his alma mater, I got up the nerve to
+write him a letter. First I read the early novels, ''The Naked and the Dead, Barbary Shore, The Deer Park, then, The Armies of the Night'', and I was hooked.
+This was, after all, a time when the death of the novel had already been
+announced and readers and writers of fiction were in mourning. Given what
+we were living through at the time—the Kennedy and Martin Luther King
+assassinations, the war in Vietnam and rioting in the streets of American cities, as seen on the evening news—reading fiction was a bit like reading obituaries. The potential for fiction to ignite the public consciousness had been
+usurped by reporting current events and what was to become known as the
+new journalism.. With The Armies of the Night, Mailer became its stellar
+performer, there in the event, balls to the wall, and back at his desk, writing
+with a hard-on.