The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/The Time of His Time: Difference between revisions

{{Byline|last=Dickstein|first=Morris |abstract=This succinct memoir recalls the introductory remarks to Norman Mailer’s reading at Queens College in 1998, the occasion of the publication of Mailer’s abstracts ''[[The Time of Our Time]]''. That book shows that despite all his extra-literary adventures—his political campaigns, his much-publicized feuds with other writers, his occasional tabloid notoriety, his titanic battles with feminists—Mailer’s arena of adventure has always been the sentence. |note=The following remarks served to introduce Norman Mailer’s reading at Queens College in 1998. The occasion was the publication of ''[[The Time of Our Time]]'', a fifty-year anthology of his work, assembled not by the year of publication but according to how the times themselves had unfolded, how deeply the public world and its issues had always engaged him. It was a fine rebuff to those who saw him as a self-absorbed, wholly performative writer. He thanked me for the introduction but added that he couldn’t hear a word: “Deaf as a doorknob.” But he was anything but deaf at the small dinner that followed. In fact I was struck by how responsive he was to the conversation of each of my colleagues, as if to drive home the thrust of his book. Others in his position might simply have offered up a slice of their celebrity persona and held forth. “Is he always like that?” I asked Joe Cuomo, who had organized the reading series. “Well,” Joe said, “he really believes in being ‘in the moment,’ and this happened to be the moment he was in.” In the years that followed, I saw him show the same keen faculty of attention on four or five other occasions. It was impressive in itself, but it also explained a good part of what made his work remarkable.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr03dic}}