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In good Mailer fashion, I will admit that I have in the past harbored a certain, mild antipathy towards most of you. I thought I would fess up right away about my discomfort and my animosity, and hope that my Mailerean honesty might help to forge a kind of friendship between us. | In good Mailer fashion, I will admit that I have in the past harbored a certain, mild antipathy towards most of you. I thought I would fess up right away about my discomfort and my animosity, and hope that my Mailerean honesty might help to forge a kind of friendship between us. | ||
. . . | Thank you for inviting me to be here and part of me feels amazed that | ||
you trust me enough to be the Keynote Speaker. I wasn’t clear on the exact | |||
meaning of Keynote, so I looked it up on Google, a habit Norman would | |||
definitely abhor. Having read Merriam Webster’s list of synonyms, I do not | |||
feel that I qualify as any of the following: bottom line, bull’s-eye, centerpiece, | |||
core, crux, essence, gist, heart, kernel, meat, meat and potatoes, net, nub, | |||
nubbin, pith, pivot, point, root, sum. I was surprised by “meat and potatoes,” | |||
although of all those items, it resonates first, perhaps because Dad loved potroast | |||
and once tried to teach me how to make it. But I’m not going to tell that | |||
story. I’m keeping most of the “Norman As Family Man” stories to myself, | |||
for reasons which will unfold. And the talk may—or may not—feel like meat | |||
and potatoes, may or may not feel like the gist, heart, or essence. But I will | |||
do my best, and can probably manage a nub, nubbin, or pith. | |||
This talk is dedicated to my Siblings. Here is a brief outline, two warnings, | |||
and a confession. | |||
I will deliver the talk in two parts. The first part was difficult to write, | |||
personally revealing, and possibly solipsistic. The second part is all about | |||
me, so I can promise you a modicum of fun. I considered asking you to vote | |||
on which one to present. But working on this project has extracted the egomaniac in me, so I made the decision to give you both talks. Hopefully your attention won’t be commandeered by the promise of fun in part 2, which, by | |||
the way, is also all about me. | |||
'''PART 1. “THIRD PERSON FATHER”''' | |||
It has been said that in families of two or more children, each child experiences | |||
a different version of the same parent. If that is true, in our case, there | |||
were at least nine Normans, in addition to all the experimental versions, and | |||
accents that he tested in public. | |||
I am going to talk today about the different ways in which I have met my | |||
father, and the different stations in my own life, where these meetings took | |||
place: child, teenager, adult. I have met my father in dreams, and of course, | |||
in his writing. I have met Norman Mailer, the character, trying out for the | |||
role of Dad. I met Dad in the days before death, in the hospital, when he lost | |||
the ability to speak or properly hold a pen, but could still flirt heavily with | |||
the nursing staff, and communicate to us through a look. And I met him | |||
just after death, when his presence seemed to permeate everything. I had the | |||
sense that he had finally gained access to the whole cosmos. It couldn’t be an | |||
accident that on the morning after he died I saw his last book in the window | |||
of a nearby bookstore, just released to the public: ''Norman Mailer, On God''. | |||
His fame had always seemed to confer a kind of immortality, but this was the | |||
real thing. The simultaneity of his presence, in those three days after his | |||
death, was palpable. It felt like The Universe’s Bookshelf now contained only | |||
Norman Mailer books—only all the pages had traded places. He was everywhere | |||
in an instant, there was no story, no continuity, only essence. | |||
I also met my father long after his death: some two years ago, in the Jungle | |||
in Peru, while drinking the supernatural concoction Ayahuasca, and | |||
crossing the border between this world and the afterlife. I had heard that | |||
imbibing this purgative tea, known as the “Vine of the Dead,” was a route to | |||
the other side, and I might meet my father there. I was looking for my father, | |||
but I met Norman Mailer. He showed up reluctantly, after several days, six | |||
cups of the tea, and a brief interlude with Norris, who showed up ahead of | |||
him, so that we could hash out a few things. When Dad appeared, he did | |||
not appear: I heard his voice, saying, “Listen Darlin, I know you’ve come a | |||
long way to talk, and you’ll hear my voice, but you won’t be able to see me. | |||
I’m working on a film, and it’s difficult to get away. But we can talk.” I said, | |||
“I came all the way to Peru to track you down in the afterlife, and you better | |||
fucking show up.” Some smoke descended, and there he was: But not my | |||
Dad. It was Mailer in 1969, with his turbulent curls, the man a couple of | |||
years before my birth in ’71. I was looking for Dad, and I got Norman Mailer, | |||
running for Mayor: looking, oddly enough, exactly like the image of him | |||
printed on the front of this year’s Mailer conference program. | |||
He said to me: “you had a choice: you could have been one of my women, | |||
or come in as my daughter.” I said, “why would I want to be one of your | |||
women? It was your Genius I was interested in. I was hoping to inherit some | |||
of that.” He then gave me a talk about Work, with a capital W, the Work that | |||
you meet when taking on a creative life. He said: “Listen, Darlin. You’ve been | |||
approaching Work as if I’m the gate you need to pass through first, on the way | |||
to Work. That’s your problem. Work is its own gate, you need to find your | |||
own way through. You can’t get to Work through me. I am not the Way.” | |||
I do not know if that was a real conversation with his soul, or an animated | |||
character scripted by my subconscious. But I am not sure there’s a difference. | |||
The Novel as History, and History as a Novel, is something I have lived. | |||
I was quite resistant to giving this talk today and my main hesitation is | |||
that it occupies the spooky—yes, spooky—territory of rewriting history. | |||
There is a phenomenon that I have repeatedly encountered when reading | |||
most biographies, essays, or articles about my father, in which I begin to believe | |||
I am wrong about the man I knew. My version of him is tenuous, easily | |||
displaced. History may have known him better. It has been hard for me | |||
to hold both versions at the same time. | |||
While putting this talk together I was repeatedly interrupted, and sometimes | |||
held hostage, by a six-year-old girl who kept showing up and demanding | |||
certain things. She said that she would not allow me to write the | |||
talk until I acknowledged her. She specifically wanted me to tell the story of | |||
my Dad’s leaving, at Christmas time, in 1975. I thought that she was a pain | |||
in the ass, and kept telling her to leave me alone. I did not think that the | |||
Mailer Conference would have much interest in this particular six-year-old. | |||
What did she know about Norman Mailer? She was tedious, not intellectual | |||
in the least, and spoiled. At a certain point, her presence became so insistent | |||
that she began to invade my personality. I started throwing tantrums, refusing | |||
to take care of business, and so on— and this was just last week. Nothing | |||
could stand up to this girl. So I finally caved, and—Here I am— | |||
acknowledging her. | |||
I could say that at age six, I met up with my father’s absence. I have a cinematic | |||
memory of the moment and it is a bit melodramatic. | |||
I remember one night, looking out the window facing the driveway of our | |||
enormous house at the top of Yale Hill in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. I was | |||
talking to the darkness on the other side of the glass, the black darkness that | |||
you get in the Berkshires, in winter, and I was saying, “I miss him.” My mother | |||
Carol and I were still living in the house, which she describes to this day, in | |||
mantra-like fashion, as “the house with 28 rooms.” Dad had left earlier that | |||
week. The house with 28 rooms had never seemed too large to me, and there | |||
had always been a stream of guests that included friends, writers, musicians, | |||
actors, siblings. When he left and took everyone with him, the house felt cavernous. | |||
That night, when I spoke out loud the words, “I miss him,” I did not | |||
understand what I was saying. The words were someone else’s words, and I | |||
had probably heard my mother saying them as well. The sensation of newness | |||
in that sentence offered a confusing, and sharply held experience. Somehow | |||
I viscerally decided that to know my father was to miss him. And, more | |||
to the point, that to Miss him was to Know him. I was staking my claim upon | |||
him, even if all I could get my hands on was his absence. Missing him was an | |||
action that I could take, it was a verb: “I miss him,” but a verb that also revealed | |||
a vacuum and vulnerability that did not go with my six-year-old’s idea | |||
of action. I did not know what a stative verb was. How confusing. To know | |||
you is to miss you, and to miss you is to know you. I had not been exposed | |||
to country music much—my mother Carol was a Jazz vocalist—but I seemed | |||
to know that I could milk this feeling like a line from a country song. And, | |||
small irony, Dad was leaving my mother for Norris, who was from Arkansas | |||
and loved country music. Maybe he had been playing country music for us | |||
all prior to his departure. I do know that he had been passing around photos | |||
of Norris to show the kids their new Stepmother, and according to my mother | |||
he was excited, like a little kid. But back to this other little kid. She was beginning | |||
to understand that any bond with her father would now be bracketed— | |||
would have to compete—with a distant network that included other | |||
people, strangers, the whole world it seemed, but did not necessarily include | |||
his children. He once said to me, “I am a writer first, and your father second, | |||
and I don’t have a choice about this.” | |||
In his early years of fame, my father told me that he regarded the character | |||
Norman Mailer as the outer shell of a Sarcophagus, which he occupied during | |||
the day and at night he would venture out and scribble notes and revisions on | |||
the outside. And even though I read this description in one of his books years | |||
after its telling, hearing it directly from him gave me a great deal of emotional | |||
ballast. He was telling me because he could relate to my shyness, which was the | |||
sarcophagus that I lived inside, and the telling felt full of love and attention. | |||
Later on, when I found that he had already written the idea and released it to | |||
the world, I could have felt duped, but I did not. The intensity of his attention | |||
was worth as much as what he said. But the place where I often did feel duped | |||
was in reading about him. Most anything written about my father had the effect | |||
of reducing him to the man described on the Sarcophagus, and left me | |||
with the sense that the other guy did not exist. In the same way that he constantly | |||
rewrote and adjusted his public image, texts about him seemed to | |||
rewrite my memory, and my sense of him would change with each reading. | |||
For a long time, I did not want to come to the Mailer conferences. The | |||
ballast I was always seeking in our relationship could be further displaced by | |||
any version of Norman I might establish hearing— or especially speaking— | |||
about him. In the effort to connect with an audience who knew externally | |||
more about him than I did, I could lose track of my dad completely. | |||
But now I am in it: I have agreed to take on the role of the one telling, adjusting, | |||
and revising the image. And perhaps I can say nothing. While | |||
preparing this talk, I had the fantasy of standing here on stage without uttering | |||
a single word, as if you, the audience, would be able to read me. After | |||
all, I am his flesh and blood. A living text. I could stand here as the Speechless | |||
Aftermath, to quote a friend, and accept your readerly attention so that, | |||
given the collective knowledge about Norman Mailer in this room, we might | |||
construct together a new idea of him without my ever speaking. This is the | |||
part of me that feels like the truth, and throughout this talk there is present | |||
a version of this self. | |||
If I am not honest, this podium becomes an impossible insertion point, | |||
like an Escher drawing, where I transform in real time into a character in | |||
Dad’s continuing novel, a character who will surprise the writer in the act of | |||
writing, who has things to say the writer cannot know until it is written. If | |||
my writing is off, I will not believe in the character, or in this moment of | |||
self invention. This impossible insertion point is half-first person, half-third | |||
person. Anything else would be a lie. Perhaps that is how Norman understood | |||
himself as a father—that his children were partly his creations, but | |||
that he had limited say in the matter. I once got angry at him for remarking | |||
that when you have kids, you have no idea who you’re going to get—as if we | |||
were volumes from the Book-of-the-Month-Club. I wanted him to write | |||
that text himself. And I wanted it to be the Great American Novel. I still believed | |||
he could transmit his brilliance to me, with his attention, as he was | |||
able to do on the page. | |||
Like most of my siblings, I did not see a lot of my dad growing up, so I | |||
tended to feel that the way I knew him was always warring with the third person | |||
version he wrote about. If Mailer’s third person self was to become an habitual | |||
feature in his writing—Mailer’s Mailer—it was also an habitual feature | |||
in his parenting. My father, when at home, was often still playing the character | |||
Norman Mailer with us. It seemed that he maintained an eye on himself | |||
as NM while attempting to inhabit the other character, called Dad. Perhaps the | |||
sarcophagus was a permanent fixture. It allowed him to speak to us, his children, | |||
with a forthrightness that was good for Norman the writer, but perhaps | |||
not so good for the kids. I thought that he regarded us with a cooler eye than | |||
most parents, and was comfortable dispensing comments about our appearance | |||
and aptitudes that could easily be taken for insults, but given as they were | |||
with a writerly eye, could also be tossed off as attempts at sentences that did | |||
not quite work. He might announce to me and my sisters, something like: | |||
“Maggie always had a purchase on Beauty, but now she really owns it.” Such | |||
insults/compliments were a matter of course for him. He did not believe in | |||
compliments. He wanted us to be on our toes and he was always looking for | |||
a sparring partner. I was probably the world’s worst sparring partner. I would | |||
meet his glancing barbs, his attempts to wake me out of a dreamy inwardness, | |||
with greater shyness. I was almost mute around him. I loved my father fiercely, | |||
perhaps in the way that only a daughter can love her father, but around him I | |||
was so terrified of getting hurt that I could not think. | |||
He once told me that most of what he said to me should not be taken seriously. | |||
I heard this around college-age and I felt shocked at the revelation that | |||
every word he uttered TO ME, was not meant for consumption, unlike his | |||
writing. I was confused, as was he, between the writer and the Father. It is a | |||
confusion that I have continually grappled with in a kind of reflexive inner | |||
merry-go-round, wherein I seek the private father and hope to find him in | |||
the public one. I want the first-person, and I want to chase the third-person. | |||
I see myself planted upon a carousel creature, spinning round a central axis | |||
with vertical mirrored sections that catch your reflection as you pass by. The | |||
outer rings of the carousel are also adorned with small mirrors, as well as the | |||
ceiling, each placed at a different angle and offering multiple views of one’s | |||
position astride an absurdly painted animal. The central axis may or may not be | |||
my father, and the outer spokes my siblings, but the mirrored fragments feel | |||
like a third person version of me, the only one possible in a family of nine children | |||
and six stepmothers. At times it was difficult if not impossible to hold | |||
onto a sense of self amidst the family, but I became an expert at surveying the | |||
arena and observing my role in it, even if the only reflective surfaces appeared | |||
willy nilly, at oddly punctuating moments, in my field of vision. | |||
From our teenage years until adulthood, Dad used to take each of his kids | |||
out individually for dinner, with the idea that because he knew we were not | |||
getting enough of him during the year, he would at least try to deliver an intense | |||
injection of one-on-one time with him. During these dinners, he | |||
would often lay down incisive commentary on my being, and I would listen | |||
like a sponge to everything that he had to say, and then spend the next several | |||
months trying to digest it. “Oh, I’m like this. Maggie calls a spade a | |||
spade. Maggie’s silence projects her intelligence. Maggie has the ambition of | |||
a Napoleon, but the worldliness of a house-wife.” These dinners, which happened | |||
one or two times a year, were like those oddly placed carousel mirrors, | |||
flashing back a quick reflection. In his absence I would outgrow the image | |||
that he had offered, but try to hold on to it anyway, because it was delineated | |||
with such power—and it was all that I had of him. Or, let me switch | |||
metaphors: our dinners felt like short stories, in which the character Maggie | |||
came into being for a brief time. For me there was a quasi-religious quality | |||
to them, as if I were being invented anew. In Dad’s absence his ideas about | |||
me became relics and, to keep them alive, I traded my developing idea of | |||
myself for his, thereby casting myself into the third person. I thought on | |||
some level I could meet him, if not in daily life, then on the page, his page, | |||
in some nether region where we were both enigmas. I wanted this maneuver | |||
to be liberating for me, as I knew that it was for Mailer the writer. Handing | |||
over my first-personhood was, of course, a form of captivity. It was not | |||
a creative act. If I really wanted to meet him, I would have to join in the creative | |||
process, or else live in a kind of perpetual denial, a prison without walls. | |||
“You can’t cheat life,” he would say. | |||
So I am meeting him right now, at the Norman Mailer Conference. | |||
Maybe now he is equally present—and absent—for all of us. Maybe we all | |||
Miss him, and try to Know him, or bring him to life, with our missing. He | |||
would find this notion sentimental. But we need him. We need to know what | |||
he would say about Trump. He might write an imaginary conversation, in | |||
which the character Mailer says to the character DT, “Pal, we have this in | |||
common: I could spit in the mythological eye of the Media, and they would | |||
still love me.” DT would respond, “That’s terrific, you understand me. I could | |||
stand in the middle of 5th avenue and shoot someone and I wouldn’t lose | |||
any voters.” Perhaps right now Mailer’s words and energy would restore | |||
some balance in the great match between God and The Devil. Perhaps he | |||
could rev up the artist in the collective us. | |||
I think that something about being an artist is to admit that liberation is | |||
found within the prison. For me, liberation has come in part from trying to | |||
answer the question: What did he mean when he said he was a writer first, | |||
and a parent second? For much of my life I have entertained obvious, boring | |||
answers: He knew he was not able to give us the right kind of attention. | |||
Children were not his priority. He did once say he was not really interested | |||
in his kids until he could have a decent conversation with them. But his form | |||
of apology was to tell the truth. And one of the most helpful and corrective | |||
comments he ever passed on was the notion that ''Feeling Sorry for Oneself is | |||
a Great Sin''. So entertaining those answers has never been interesting enough, | |||
on top of being Sinful! | |||
I have come to understand, or perhaps decide, on another meaning: | |||
Namely, a writer first, and a parent second, means that the writer begat the | |||
father. If he were a writer first, that idea of himself permeated every part of | |||
his existence. In some ways, I did not have a Father. I had a Writer. I was | |||
raised by the same mind that investigates the nature of existence, raised by | |||
a magician. No pun intended—just a different set of rules. The sense of possibility, | |||
the magical possibilities this engenders, partly sustain the loss of | |||
missing the other man. There is a transmission of freedom in the understanding. | |||
As the daughter of a writer first, my sense of self, when I meet it— | |||
becomes fluid, a creative action. If growing up, I had clung to that carousel | |||
horse and waited for the flash of deliverance offered by his attention, as an | |||
artist I learn everyday how to enliven that plastic horse, take it where I want | |||
to go. If I felt that I lived as a character who shared ranks with his other protagonists, | |||
I am now part author. The question of authorship now becomes | |||
a philosophical stance, a living, existential question: who is doing the writing? | |||
Who is creating the life? While this may be the underlying question for | |||
all of us, not everyone is encouraged to attempt an answer. In telling me that | |||
he was a writer first, and a father second- in admitting a truth exquisitely | |||
painful for a child to hear, he was also handing me the mantle of the artist’s | |||
life. Did this mean I would become an artist first and a mother second? No. | |||
But the idea of being an artist was built in. And as an artist, I would need to | |||
use all those reflections and versions of myself-first, second, third person, | |||
reflected in the crazy prism of our family. | |||
'''PART 2: THE PRISM, OR, THE DREAM LIFE OF MY SIBLINGS''' | |||
I would like to show you some diagrams featuring the nine children, six | |||
wives, and Norman in various formations and relationships that seem to | |||
resonate with some hefty cosmic references. They also help me locate myself | |||
within the family. | |||
Here is Dad and the children as the Sun and nine planets. John Buffalo, | |||
the youngest, saw the most of Dad, and Sue, the oldest, probably saw him | |||
the least, so it made sense to go in this order. My nine-year-old son, | |||
Nicholas, pointed out that I made myself the Earth, and questioned my | |||
integrity in making such a self-serving map, but I assured him it was a | |||
lucky accident, and also, that if this were so I would be taking on a lot of | |||
responsibility! | |||
placeholder for Figure 1 - Planetary Siblings | |||
I make up for it in the next one: Here we have Dad and the nine children | |||
as the ten layers of the earth, from core to exosphere. | |||
placeholder for Figure 2 - Earth Layers | |||
The children as nine cosmic phases of CREATION, PRESERVATION, | |||
AND DISSOLUTION in Yantra, or sacred mandala construction. | |||
placeholder for Figure 3 - Creation Stage Yantra | |||
Here is the family arrayed like a Benzene Ring; which has the chemical | |||
formula C6H6. If Dad had only had six children, we would have a perfect | |||
match. Thankfully, it is not a perfect match. Benzene is notable for its sweet | |||
smell. It is also terribly toxic. Benzene is used to make plastics, that most totalitarian | |||
of materials! How would Dad feel to know that he almost constructed | |||
such a metaphorical compound around himself? A Benzene ring is | |||
formed of six carbons, which are usually bonded four ways. The one unbonded | |||
electron from each carbon forms something called a conjugated | |||
ring, meaning the electrons have free movement among all six carbons. A bit | |||
like Mailer and his women. This also bears quite a resemblance to the Merry | |||
Go Round described earlier. | |||
placeholder for Figure 4 - Benzene Ring | |||
placeholder for Figure 5 - Dad & Siblings Benzene Ring | |||
Next we have Norman as Pianist: the wives are the black keys and the | |||
children, the white, and fit within an Octave until his marriage to Norris, | |||
which starts a new Octave. | |||
placeholder for Figure 6 - Piano Keys | |||
Here we have the Family as a cell membrane and here, Mother (my | |||
Mother), as catalytic converter. She was extremely protective, and one could | |||
say she reduced any toxic emissions coming my way with the force of her | |||
love, both for me, and for Norman, even after they split. So we have the | |||
father-centric model, the child-centric model, and the wife-centric model. | |||
placeholder for Figure 7 - Notebook Diagrams of Sibling Models | |||
placeholder for Figure 8 - Cell Structure Siblings | |||
placeholder for Figure 9 - Mother as Cataclytic Converter | |||
As a painter, I have spent some time investigating this family structure, | |||
and mining it for clues about my creative habits. But, for a long time, I unwittingly | |||
carried these structures, and projected them onto my paintings. | |||
The numbers eight and nine come up a lot in my work. Without knowing | |||
why, I once spent a year researching eight random topics to fuel a body of | |||
work, in the hopes that my subconscious might forge some interesting paintings | |||
from the overload. My references were far ranging: comic books, rebuses, | |||
yantras, the genres of floating world and cliffhangers, and the palettes of Gauguin, | |||
Goya, and Hiroshige. The title of the show was Floating World and, at | |||
the time, the structure of the project made perfect sense to me, without once | |||
consciously attaching it to my family. I just assumed that the conceptual overload | |||
would induce the sensation of floating in the viewer. I was trying to locate | |||
myself as a painter, and I thought that the number eight resonated with | |||
the eight cardinal directions. It never occurred to me that I was making portraits | |||
of my eight siblings. I see now that I was trying to accommodate eight | |||
or nine possible viewpoints, and anything less felt wrong. | |||
Here is a subsequent series of nine landscapes that I later understood as | |||
portraits of the nine of us in our varied terrain and palettes. I like connecting | |||
things that are not sure that they want to be connected: Arranged marriages | |||
of colors, materials, and ideas. The conversations are wide ranging | |||
and at times chaotic: palettes argue with one another; ideas overlap and interlope. | |||
The revolving personalities in my family template have become standard | |||
bearers for all my decisions about color, composition, and number. In | |||
this way, landscapes become psychological terrain, siblings and stepmothers | |||
become open fields and barren hillsides, and our family tree emerges as a | |||
guiding spirit in my creative processes. | |||
placeholder for Figure 10 - Scissors Language 2 | |||
placeholder for Figure 11 - The Dream Life of My Siblings | |||
I will close with the piece I read at Carnegie Hall at Dad’s memorial. | |||
(show of hands: who heard it there?) I think it offers what the rest of the | |||
speech may have missed: My Father. We could say, this was one time I met | |||
him. It is called, ''Fellow Geniuses:'' | |||
I am going to share with you a seminal work of non-fiction by my father: | |||
until now a hidden literary gem, and one that helped me get started as an | |||
artist. I was fifteen and was spending the summer in Provincetown with Dad, | |||
Norris, and my eight siblings. Privacy was scarce but, somehow, a two-week | |||
stretch emerged in which I had my own room. | |||
As an only child living with my mother the rest of the year, I was well | |||
equipped psychologically to spread out. I decided that I would tackle a sculpture | |||
that I had been thinking about for some time. As any serious contemplative | |||
will do, I began by collecting large pieces of driftwood. Buckets of | |||
sand and seaweed piled up on the floor, which also happened to be covered | |||
in wall to wall carpeting that my stepmother had chosen. I think, at one | |||
point in a moment of annoyance with her, and imagining the deepening | |||
bond with my father over our shared aversion to carpeted floors, I may have | |||
dumped some of the sand onto the wall to wall and formed a Carl Andrelike | |||
floor piece. | |||
From the Army Navy store in town I collected buckets full of brass buttons, | |||
and rusted machine gun bullets, which I thought were strangely beautiful, | |||
and they looked to me like beads for a necklace. I think, subconsciously, | |||
I was recreating scenes from ''The Naked and the Dead'', even though I had not | |||
read it. | |||
Meanwhile, deep in artistic fervor, clothes and wet bathing suits and towels | |||
were landing in various locations around the room. I will say, and my | |||
husband can attest, that our house today does perhaps bear a resemblance | |||
at times to events described here. | |||
At fifteen, I was still too shy to speak easily with my father. Days might | |||
pass without conversing, but we would always exchange meaningful looks. | |||
We were both absorbed in our work and I felt that we shared the unspoken | |||
understanding of artists. I was sure, too, that he recognized in me a fellow genius. | |||
So I was not surprised on the day when, returning to my room, I found | |||
a note from Dad, placed at the entrance, so as not to disturb me. “He must | |||
be really impressed to put it in writing” I thought, and eagerly read his assessment | |||
of my work. (See Figure 12) | |||
When I read this note at the Carnegie Hall tribute, I wasn’t sure about | |||
saying “Asshole” out loud, and perhaps I did not want to make him look bad | |||
during his Memorial, so I substituted the word, “Twit.” But here it is in its | |||
original wording. | |||
My father was always superstitious about giving anyone compliments. | |||
And I knew this—but after reading his note I was devastated. Only partially | |||
devastated, though. After all, Norman did teach the art of parsing emotional | |||
states into percentages. Perhaps I was 80% devastated. The other 20% was | |||
hopeful. The other 20% realized, with something like happiness, that my | |||
habits mattered to my father. And on some level, he had stopped being Norman | |||
Mailer and become, simply, my father. I cleaned up my room. | |||
Dad had a great generosity whereby, if he felt that you were serious or excited | |||
about something, he would forget his anger, and give you his full at- | |||
placeholder for Figure 12 - Young Maggie's Note from Dad | |||
tention. He found me a little later and said, “Listen, I didn’t realize you were | |||
up to something in there. I took another look, and I’m pleased. I think you | |||
may be an artist. Finish the sculpture, I’d like to live with it a while. Maybe | |||
we’ll put it in the Living Room.” | |||
To which I now say: Thanks, Dad. | |||
I miss you. | |||
===Work Cited=== | |||
{{Refbegin}} | |||
*{{cite journal |last=Mailer |first=Maggie |title=Prism Break |journal=The Mailer Review | |||
|volume=13 |issue=No. 1|date=2019 |pages=65-84 |access-date=2021 |ref=harv }} | |||
{{Refend}} | |||
{{Review}} | {{Review}} | ||
{{DEFAULTSORT:Prism Break }} | {{DEFAULTSORT:Prism Break }} |
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