The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Courtly Mailer: The Legacy Derby: Difference between revisions

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American letters, so said the drooling, yet chiding media.

Such deconstruction gets a body English treatment when Morrow refers to a 1994 Valentine’s Day incident at Carl Bernstein’s fiftieth birthday party. Mailer was about to commit a social atrocity and was likened to a madcap Existential killer-driver:

Naturally, I differ with ''Smithsonian'' and Morrow. So, I toured the derby site, did some laps cruising, not speeding, but stopping. I consider my experience with multiple Mailer “stops” or “visits.” Over a span of more than forty years, four visits of them were in-depth and three visits were less so. The following discussion is not a composed memoir, just a series of short takes. I was looking for “Courtly Norman” and I found him.

Our first meeting was a bundle of “hellos” and “smiles.” The English department at the University of Iowa had billed me as a pioneer scholar, writing the first doctoral dissertation on Norman Mailer. That fact was what greeted Mailer, who was on a college tour as an “''Esquire'' Literary Symposium” panelist. I was only four years younger than Mailer and must have given off a whiff of pre-academic street sensibilities. This part of me Mailer must have sensed or at least that’s what his first handshake said: “All’s well that starts well.”

Mailer was hardly “Courtly,” but he was aware, sensitive, amiable, and most promising. Norman Mailer and I had a future, I was sure of it.

Our second substantial meeting occurred in 1965 in Alaska during a Mailer

(echoes of his final novel, ''The Castle'' In The Forest). But he was making the next best “stop” in 1965 America at a three-day wilderness city with ''Castle'' atmospherics. Although I did not know when Mailer landed in Alaska, he immediately sensed that his Lower 48 self and the media-crafted image of the “big bad celebrity” was a lost art up North. Mailer, instead, sensed both an old and new American frontier atmosphere and merged with both of them. If a passerby New Yorker would have spotted this star visitor, he might well have blinked and said, “Where has the real Norman Mailer gone?” I would have answered, “He’s going back to the Lower-48” with loads of Frontier Charm, and that’s why the term—Courtly Norman—stuck.

Culturally speaking, this visit was a drastic shift from a wilderness city to the “sin center” on Cape Cod. In 1967 Provincetown was Mailer’s summer home. Only two years had elapsed since the Alaska trip. How much of that “Arctic Metamorphosis” was still healthy and intact in Mailer?

“his” than “hers.” Beverly called it a “part-time hotel,” but I saw it as “fulltime party pad,” but this weekend a partial exception. On my last Ptown night in a bedroom on that dock over the water, I reviewed a weekend’s appraisal of “Mailer’s “character” that also examined his literary canon. The body of his work, indeed, was wide and deep. What about Mailer as a good family man?

The caption of this trip might well read: the Norman Mailer meltdown that

out. His Tampa visit did not create headlines, only modest coverage. Everybody won, and that included Kathy, Norman, and his Legacy Quotient.

This “visit” was a Miami peepshow, mostly a three-day blur, because I was no longer at stage-center, relegated to become one of those proverbial lost souls in the crowd, even as was Mailer himself lost among fellow celebrities. For once, Mailer and his “character” were too obscure to probe.

was Senator Mike Gravel, a proven scene-stealer. Norman worked the room

the best he could.