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The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/The Big Bite: Difference between revisions
The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/The Big Bite (view source)
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{{ | {{hatnote|For fourteen months, November 1962 to December 1963, Mailer wrote a monthly column for Esquire on a variety of subjects — television, totalitarianism, the astronauts, the Cold War, dread, architecture, the novels of his contemporaries, U.S. Cuba policy, and the deaths of Marilyn Monroe and Hemingway. The most celebrated, his February 1963 column, titled “Ten Thousand Words a Minute,” is an account of the first Floyd Patterson-Sonny Liston heavyweight boxing match. It is considered to be a foundation stone of the New Journalism. He reprinted these columns, save one, in three of his miscellanies: ''[[The Presidential Papers]]'' (1963), ''[[Cannibals and Christians]]'' (1966), and ''[[The Idol and the Octopus]]'' (1968). The final column, which contains his comments on the August 18, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which he observed (although he missed Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech), is reprinted here for the first time. Why Mailer passed over this column is unknown, especially since his analysis of the meanings of the March is acute and his description of it evocative. | ||
His valedictory column ends with the announcement that he is embarking on a serial novel, ''[[An American Dream]]'', in the January 1964 issue of the magazine, and doing so in the spirit of Dickens and Dostoevsky. He says that he plans to write the eight chapters in an existential fashion: the first will be published before he has written the third. He kept to this scheme, staying a month or so ahead of deadline, until the final chapter, which arrived late and was 10,000 words longer than planned. ''Esquire'' literally held the presses for the August issue and then published a portion of the final chapter in seven-point type. This essay originally appeared in ''Esquire'' (December 1963), 22–26. Reprinted with the permission of The Mailer Estate. | His valedictory column ends with the announcement that he is embarking on a serial novel, ''[[An American Dream]]'', in the January 1964 issue of the magazine, and doing so in the spirit of Dickens and Dostoevsky. He says that he plans to write the eight chapters in an existential fashion: the first will be published before he has written the third. He kept to this scheme, staying a month or so ahead of deadline, until the final chapter, which arrived late and was 10,000 words longer than planned. ''Esquire'' literally held the presses for the August issue and then published a portion of the final chapter in seven-point type. This essay originally appeared in ''Esquire'' (December 1963), 22–26. Reprinted with the permission of The Mailer Estate. | ||
A final note: Mailer intended President Kennedy to be an important figure in the novel, but had to change his plans when Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, about two weeks after the December ''Esquire'' hit the newsstands. As readers of the novel will remember, the protagonist and narrator, Stephen Rojack, opens the novel with a description of a 1946 double date with JFK. In the final chapter, the President sends his commiserations to Rojack on the death of his wife. | A final note: Mailer intended President Kennedy to be an important figure in the novel, but had to change his plans when Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, about two weeks after the December ''Esquire'' hit the newsstands. As readers of the novel will remember, the protagonist and narrator, Stephen Rojack, opens the novel with a description of a 1946 double date with JFK. In the final chapter, the President sends his commiserations to Rojack on the death of his wife. —[[J. Michael Lennon]]}} | ||
Now, almost three months after 200,000 negroes and whites made their March on Washington, the reports I remember best were the ones I read in ''The Village Voice'' (September 5, 1963). There was a fine piece of journalism by Marlene Nadle; also a political analysis by Robert Levin with which I disagreed, but thought to the point. In fact it established where the point could be found. Let me quote from it: | Now, almost three months after 200,000 negroes and whites made their March on Washington, the reports I remember best were the ones I read in ''The Village Voice'' (September 5, 1963). There was a fine piece of journalism by Marlene Nadle; also a political analysis by Robert Levin with which I disagreed, but thought to the point. In fact it established where the point could be found. Let me quote from it: | ||
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[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]] | [[Category:Miscellany (MR)]] | ||
[[Category:Columns (MR)]] | [[Category:Columns (MR)]] | ||