a novel by Norman Mailer
Friday, December 13, 2013
a belated blurb for a great Norman Mailer novel
a novel by Norman Mailer
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
Norman Mailer at the Movies : The New Yorker
I would suggest that Mailer's goal from the get-go was to be a volatile blend of genius and jerk, as he writes in the first paragraph of his introduction to his 1959 collection Advertisements for Myself:
.“…Whether rightly or wrongly, it is then obvious that would go so far as to think it’s my present and future work which have the deepest influence of any work being done by an American novelist in these years, I could be wrong , and if I am, then I’m the fool who will pay the bill, but I think we can all agree it would cheat this collection of its true Interest to present myself as more modest than I am.”
This is not to suggest that he didn't regret that some of off-strength projects, whether films, plays, poetry or screenwriting, weren't as superb or revolutionary as he desired them to be, but he certainly didn't wallow in his failures. He got up and went back to work on his next project, toward an unknown artistic success or career destroying embarrassment. Except his career didn't end. Even stabbing his wife in a drunk, speed-chased rage couldn't stop his career. Mailer believed in dualities in human personality, and he achieved his , admirable and loathsome at once. We are lucky he elected to remain a brilliant literary figure ,where his problematic nature could be contained, rather than get himself elected to office. God help us if he got his hands on any kind of real political power.
Sunday, June 2, 2013
Mailer: self-made sociopath
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Summer reading 2
by Norman Mailer
Anyone who has had difficulty with Norman Mailer's militant ego-- or just plain irritated with the prospect of a writer declaring himself the best scribe in the land simply because he was the only one with the temerity to reach for the crown vacated by Hemingway--won't find relief here in his award winning book 'The Armies of the Night'. Too bad for them, I say, because even though Mailer's self regard is legendary and obnoxious without redemption in lesser pundits, Mailer shrewdly uses the persona, the third person referenced 'Mailer', to engage the the collision of forces that made up the political sensibility of the 60s ; the counter culture, anti-war activist, avowed Marxist revolutionaries, feminists, black nationalists , yippees, hippees, crazies of all sorts converged on the Pentagon to protest the war in Vietnam and what was seen by many alternative life stylers as the fatally erring trajectory America had taken; all the sins of capitalism, white racism, imperialism and the like were now returning to the soil from which they came, demanding the bill be paid and the interest collected in full.
Mailer, someone who had announced early in his career, in his introduction to 'Advertisements for Myself', that he was obsessed with radically transforming the way his country came to see itself in the strange and terrifying world that was emerging in the post war period, comes off as the smartest guy in the room, someone conducting a running commentary on the tensions and contradictions that were coming from the estranged forces that composed the American Left. Much of the fun, though, certainly has to be the adventures of the swaggering, blustery, drinking and drunk Mailer as he wades through the issues and the worries that accompany movements that want to seize the future. There is an apt awareness of his own absurdity and celebrity, there is a realization that even his imagination cannot single handedly stop an a congery of policy evils already in place and being executed. What he could do, though, was maintain his sublime sense of irony and report, comment, opine and theorize with the quick witted verve that only the best stylists maintain.
This is a worthy read, an important document from a period of American which to this day refuses to be understood in retrospect. The
Saturday, January 23, 2010
The Faith of Graffiti: a brief exchange
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Sunday, December 6, 2009
D.G. WILLS BOOKS LITERARY EVENT VIDEOS NOW ON YOUTUBE
D.G.Wills Books in LaJolla, California is a long time mecca for book lovers who crave a shop with a varied and deep selection literature, poetry and philosophy sections .Owner Dennis Wills, whom I've known (in full disclosure) since he opened his shop in 1979, has besides keeping his doors open , presented San Diego with an impressive roster of world-class literary events over the last few decades. Lucky for the rest of us that some of the most notable personalities were taped for future reference and are now available on D.G. Wills Books' own YouTube Channel, thanks to the curatorial efforts of bookstore associate and media specialist Bill Perrine. More of these remarkable events are being added. Meanwhile, enjoy the plenitude of what Wills hath wrought:Norman Mailer ,Allen Ginsberg,Oliver Stone, Billy Collins, Gore Vidal, Lawerence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder. I recommend checking back with channel from time to see who else has been added to this amazing and important archive of literary figures.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Who needs heroes
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Kicking Mailer When He's Dead
The sour truth is that I am imprisoned with a perception that will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time. Whether rightly or wrongly, it is then obvious that I would go so far as to think it is my present and future work which will have the deepest influence of any work being done by an American novelist in these years. I could be wrong, and if I am, then I’m the fool who will pay the bill, but I think we can all agree it would cheat this collection of its true interest to present myself as more modest than I am.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Moonfire: an insult to Mailer
Taschen Books has published a Moon Landing commemorative "Moonfire", a very over sized and sinfully expensive limited publication that makes use of the writing of Norman Mailer.The Taschen stunt-publication of this edition is an insult to Mailer, really, as it cannibalizes what was likely the one true masterpiece about the moon landing, >"Of a Fire on the Moon", for an expensive gimmick that is inaccessible to most readers who'd otherwise benefit.
Besides being the result of prodigious research and reporting, the book was an insightful essay as to the role and the fate of the artist in the face of new technology that has usurped the Romantic notion that truth can be revealed through intuition and imagination. The sin is compounded by keeping "Of a Fire on the Moon" out of print, which irritates me endlessly; a major American author's best nonfiction book unavailable to the public Mailer, arch romantic himself , wrote about this through out a number of his essays and journalism, that what we consider as qualities that make humans unique are fated to be regarded as passe and dangerous, as the massive accomplishments of technology demystify the universe entirely and leave the artist , the poet, the novelist irrelevant artifacts. Irony has no limits, we find, with the Taschen volume, who have used the available machinery of contemporary publishing to produce bulky, expensive volumes that are less books and more engineering feats.
Mailer's fine work about the moon shot and the social consequences upon the artist for decades to come , intended for the idealized general reader, are made into mere elements of a pricey elitist vanity. It's an obscenity
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
"An American Dream" by Norman Mailer
Troubling, agitated, problematic for great numbers of readers, a brilliant novel despite its flaws. It may be even because of the flaws--the unreal dialogue, the haphazard cramming of a week's worth of events into a single 24 hour period--that bring the long runs of sentences to shriek and burn so splendidly, as there is the sense that he is in a dream within which he must confront and conquer every blatant and disguised dread. The crash and slam of the plot dynamics--bear in mind that there is very little slack space here where one is allowed to rest and gather their wits in the midst of this ludicrous plot--get an intensity of feeling just right, that the world and the things in it are crashing down upon you. Your only option in the delirium is to obey the first fleeting voice that commands to respond, attack, destroy that which is killing you by the psychic inch. Mailer had written in his infamous essay "The White Negro" that it was one's moral responsibility to "encourage the psychopath within oneself" so to be able to experience greater and more expansive perceptions, to generate new knowledge violently dislodged from murderous conformism. In An American Dream, he conducts a fictional field study of his theory by setting it loose in the plot of a novel. The results are exhilarating as they are nearly unspeakable.
Tom Wolfe, I remember, was not a fan of the novel, suggesting in a review that Mailer “lards up” his prose with too many allusions, metaphors, and similes when he ought to have taken a hint from James M. Cain and fashioned a terser, blunter style. He used Mailer’s running metaphor of boxing and compared him to a fighter who needed to get out of his corner faster. I differ with Wolfe’s conclusions and tend to agree with the late critic Richard Poirier’s reading of the novel, which considered “An American Dream” a compelling delirium of language styles fused, the elegant, the surreal, the jazzy and slang-infested, the terse and the verbose, in a spectacular, intoxicating sweep. The novel's point was to reveal Stephen Rojack’s festering self-doubt despite his nominal accomplishments as both war hero and media figure, and his deranged attempts to save what he considers his soul. Mailer’s novel is an interior view of a breakdown, an interiorized version of Lear’s final speech.
A reader who might be intrigued by Mailer's fictional realization of his existential anti-hero/hipster/White Negro wouldn't be wrong to think that the author himself is disturbed by the furthest reach of his imaginative takes on the purgative value of sudden and decisive violence. Indeed, from this point on, Mailer's ideas about violence and power come with more caution, nuance, and in a brilliant turn to begin his moral argument about the cause of aggression in the culture, he penned his brief, obscene. Fantastically incandescent novel Why Are We In Vietnam: if Stephen Rojack was the result of a psychically emasculated man given to floating voices and lunar impulses in the wan hope of being delivered from what is killing him by the inch, only to become a more complicated expression of those mechanisms that generate the larger, global evil, Why Are We in Vietnam? Takes a more expansive view. The question isn't answered, nor is Vietnam even mentioned until the book's last page. Yet, by the time you reach the end of this brief and ingeniously offered account of an Alaskan bear hunt, we've gone through something primordial, cultural conditioning that produces a need for violence at the most rudimentary level of the culture.
Mailer's habit of romanticizing violence and macho performances end with this second book, and the serious shift into the causes, conditions of our troubles begins in earnest, leading Mailer through a fantastic series of novels and nonfiction. He dared what other literary writers only feigned, and actively engaged the world in ways and manners that he thought would make reality surrender some of its secrets. The hope, of course, would be that he might be able to change the way men and women viewed themselves in a political reality that had stripped the individual of all creative drive and hence empowers them to change the substance of their world. Grand ambition, yes, and a failed enterprise, but in the attempt are left a string of brilliant books -- The Naked and the Dead, The Executioner's Song, Why are We In Vietnam, Armies of the Night, An American Dream, Harlot's Ghost,-- that, among others, form a body of work at once daring, daunting, vain and arrogant, preening, breathtakingly on target, raunchy, clipped, rich and rolling and lyrical like the grandest music. An infuriating writer, yes, but even so, one whose work stands tall in the era he wrote.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Peter Manso: notes of a displeased groupie
The pair even shared a beachfront house in Provincetown, MA. Mailer had written to the local newspaper, stating that P.D. Manso is seeking gold in the arid desert of his inner life, where lies and distortions are the sole source of sustenance for him." Ouch. But what puzzles me is that Peter Manso has seemingly nurtured the hurt for over thirty years and now takes a few too many pages to give his account, share gossip, insult Mailer friends. The aggrieved author seems less a wounded innocent than a gold digger irritated that this vein will yield no more.
The lesson, I suppose, is that one ought not live with their heroes. I'd agree that Manso's Mailer biography is a fascinating read as far as it goes; it's hard to go astray when you've got a group of interesting people giving an intimate account of a singularly intriguing and often brilliant personality like Mailer. But based on this, Manso's introduction to the new edition just sounds like 44 pages of sour grape he wants everyone to take a sip from. The issue with having heroes who embody every virtue and goal one desires for themselves is that they will betray you, whether they're doing it out of love or not.
I've no idea what went on between the two men while they occupied that beachfront property, but it's very possible Mailer had other things he wanted to do besides listening to the sound and sight of a dedicated fanboy sucking up; perhaps Manso crossed over from being a mere acolyte and exhibited a malignant sycophancy. Or maybe not; Manso would have served himself better getting over a three-decade-old slight and finessed his remarks a tad more. It was Mailer's particular genius to make himself, as subject, fascinating in ways a reader wouldn't have suspected. That same talent isn't Manso's. Would that he merely republished his worthy oral history and gone onto another book.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
notes on "The White Negro"
Moreover, any kid, black, white, Hispanic or Asian ambling down school halls emulating 50 Cent is regression of an odious sort, a realization of Norman Mailer's romantic ideal of “The White Negro”. It's doubtful even Mailer would find this trend enviable, a generation of young people placing a value on the ill formed locutions of millionaire goons and wallowing in a subculture that prizes accumulation of material and money at any costs, including the sacrificing of one's humanity and the community one lives in.
Being from Detroit in the 8-Mile Road area, I know full well what “Wiggers” are, and I'm old enough to realize that the phenomenon is not a new wrinkle in the scheme of things. Times and styles change, but a constant in my life and in my parents' life was white kids affecting the style and musical habits of the current edge of black culture. My reference was to Norman Mailer's famous essay “The White Negro”, written in 1957, where he argues that whites who want to free themselves of crushing and killing conformity must emulate the style and language of blacks because blacks, he opined, are closer to violence and thus privy to kinds of rapidly deployed existential knowledge that a bookish and emotionally neutered dominant culture could never know.
Mailer had a continuing theory that living close to violence, the kind of violence that is an intractable quality of your race's metaphysical being, was an entry to spectacular influxes of new perception and awareness that dismantles the many veils of false consciousness. It's all beautifully if boggling argued in the essay, and there is an insightful discussion here of Mailer's work, ideas and this particular essay here [www.english.upenn.edu]; the short of it is that Mailer thought whites blessed to be attracted to black style and culture and sought to emulate it with "spontaneous bop prosody” (Jack Kerouac's phrase) were the hope of the white race. Mailer was speculating that the kind of knowledge of violence that blacks had would do well to help the questing Hipster gain new perception and new experience and allow him to create a truthful world where real choices are possible and individual responsibility for them is a matter of what private, divinely derived ethics one has made with the God of their understanding.
Among the problems with all this righteous forecasting and waxing poetic is that the Revolution as described never starts, and Heaven does not arrive at the planet, conditions that are easily explained away by revisions to theory where it practice is at fault, not the catechism. The romanticization of major criminal acts as a people's spiritual rebellion against crushing falseness and capitalist hegemony is one of the trends and marketing clichés. Above all this is Marcuse’s fleeting notion of “repressive tolerance”, often mocked and maligned but prophetic, timeless and tersely wise when one witness their idealistic style turn into advertising slogans and their manifestos become the humorless rationale for being a monster, a thug. Everything is allowed, everyone has their say, each word of dissent and radical exception is allowed, nothing is forbidden, and everything is the same. Nothing happens.
Simply put, the Man, as he was affectionately called in the Sixties, makes your protest and revolutionary style ineffectual by allowing you the means to express yourself and your peculiar take on the erring course the culture has taken. Your protests become part of the news cycle, more factoids to fill the spaces between advertisements. Nearly fifty years later one wonders if Mailer would approve of the bragging self-regard that black style has turned into, and if he would admit that "wiggers", albeit emulators of black style, are merely followers of fashion and consumers after all is said and done with.
It would seem that an especially troublesome tract from the recently belated Norman Mailer's writings will be his essay The White Negro, published in Dissent in 1957 and later included in his landmark 1959 collection Advertisements for Myself. In a rough paraphrase, Mailer argues that whites need to emulate some of the jazz-inflected style of black Americans, whom, he said, had developed an attitude, a lived philosophy in the face of the violence they face daily solely because they are black. Mailer placed a good amount of hope that the Beats might be such an evolution in the Caucasian mind. Authenticity,a self, rooted in primal reality and not lodged in a language-locked template, was the goal. Mailer's assertions, to be sure, came under attack, not the least of the asides being that he was taking something of an exotic and racist view of the lives of black people. The misgivings are understandable.
It is true that Mailer added violence to the equation for its potential to transform the individual, but he was worried about the constant and pointless violence for its own sake. What he saw in the urban black culture of the time was a particularly acute style and manner that could accommodate and hone the violent impulse and use the energy to a more creative purpose. This presents all sorts of problems for intellectuals, and gullible whites (and blacks) attracted by the flashy density of Mailer's writing, but it should be noted as well that Mailer modified his pronouncements. Mailer, believe it or not, matured. Which is not to say there wouldn't be sufficient grounds to argue with his later writing. I agree, Mailer’s tough guy stances were a species of posing, and it seems to me that he had a rude and crucial awakening after he nearly killed his wife Adele by stabbing her when he was crazed on Benzedrine.
It is interesting that two of his best novels are An American Dream and Why Are We in Vietnam? are two lyric flights that are fueled by the sort of rage he gloried in a decade earlier, the first book being something of a Blakean purge where his hero, Stephen Rozack, attempts to berserk himself into transcendence through violence against targets that he felt undermined his tenuous grasp on self. Transform he does, but he is an unenviable mess for the carnage, someone stuck on some psychotic edge with virtually nothing to build a new life on. Mailer seemed content to let the violence, the raging burn itself out in the novel, with there being the tacit moral that “encouraging the psychotic within” is a dead end, a nihilist fantasy. The second novel is poised to investigate, through metaphor, the source of this insanity, an obscene cruise through American repression, obsession with masculinity, racism, and an insane obsession with individualism, guns, and God. So many polarities battle each other in the book that the question posed in the title is thus: we were in Vietnam because, as a nation crazed on many ill and contaminated streams, we had to be.
William Carlos Williams is said to have remarked that the “pure products of America go insane”, an idea that Mailer accepts in the form of the book’s crazed, multi-voiced narrator DJ who, representative of a complex cultural stew that will not blend but rather form a thickening cluster of unpalatable projections on the face of the planet, is compelled to expand upon, disrupt, dominate, and decimate the people and resources outside its actual borders. Mailer here echoed Susan Sontag (in attitude at least) that the white race was the cancer on the face of humanity. In any event, we’ve been lucky enough that Mailer had the sense to forgo his armchair philosophizing for long enough intervals, so he could do some real work; I am a fan of his novels, but along with most Mailer partisans, I think it will be his non-fiction that will secure his reputation, Executioner’s Song and Armies of the Night, certainly, but also Of a Fire on the Moon and Oswald’s Tale.
Monday, September 22, 2008
GRAND KIDS OF THE WHITE NEGRO
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Miami and the Seige of Chicago.
Miami and the Siege of Chicago
By Norman Mailer
(New York Review Books)
We've all heard the remark used too often to describe an egocentric's prerogative to to be self-consumed and reticent to acknowledge the rights and opinions of fellow citizens: " It's his (her)world, we're just living in it..." There are infinite variations and elaborations , all headed for the same punchline no matter the navigation the teller chooses, with hardly an improvement on the insight. The phrase, in fact, is stale and in need of retirement.
The phase had been used recently in a chat I had recently with someone regarding the re-release of Norman Mailer's account of the 1968 Republican and Democratic Conventions, and the mention made me want reach for the imaginary lever for the equally imaginary trap door down which the utterer of petrified phrases would fall, the bottom chamber of which they would remain until they appreciate that cliches are no substitute for an original aside, a choice metaphor, a wild ride of associations that prove that one has been paying attention to the events about them. Paying attention is precisely what the literary journalist in his nonfiction writings, and what Miami and the Seige of Chicago (blessedly reissued by NYR Books)shows is that for all his self-obsession, Mailer was no mere narcissistic punk considering the world his realm and its inhabitants his subjects. What gives the narrative its tension is Mailer's knack for addressing the world as he thinks it used to be what it ought to become and then confronting blunt facts that won't bend to his wishes, give in to his whims, follow a script he might have written. Mailer is a counter puncher, to use his parlance, someone who reacts with a mind that brings details , thesis and counter thesis , call and response into spinning loops of image-saturated language. Miami/Seige , like a good amount of the nonfiction Mailer wrote during the sixties and seventies, is a richly nuanced , feverishly grandiloquent mid century reversal of Whitman's latter day desire to contain multitudes and find himself in each breath , phrase and circumstance of every American's story; Mailer, an early idealist who wanted to forge a revolution in the consciousness of the nation, as he announced in Advertisements for Myself, refuses bitterness and despair when his designs become moot and embraces ambivalence and irony instead. This makes for a desireable place from which to wrestle with the things that irritate his senses and insult his intelligence.
Saturday, July 19, 2008
USED BOOKS: The Poems of Norman Mailer
Modest Gifts:Poems and Drawings
Norman Mailer (Random House Trade)
Some of us think Norman Mailer ought to win the Nobel Prize for literature because of the sure and quarrelsome genius of his books and the ideas they contained; like him or consider him an aberration in the culture, a number of the styles he took, particularly the novel, the essay and journalism, gave you a personality that was hard to ignore.
Many who thought him a lout , a grind, an egomaniac had to admit, after reading him to counter his many assertions about many things, that Mailer was, after, a Great Writer. Joyce Carol Oates, an astute critic of Mailer, offered that Mailer's ideas were dangerous because he wrote so well.This, though, isn't one of those books," Modest Gifts" being, at best, a gussied up reissue of a lone book of verse he produced in the early Sixties,"Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters)". Now, as then, the pieces are slight, skeletal, un-propelled by anything resembling a notion that the reader cares about. For a writer who's composed some of the richest prose and lyric flights this side of Faulkner and DeLillo, these efforts are so minimal that even a verbal skinflint like Hemingway would call these gifts not modest ,but cheap. The poems were written in the early sixties when the author had several professional , legal and marital crisis hanging over him, a situation that had given him writer's block and which, as a professional writer, placed an additional burden on him.
Brief, truncated in content, artless in the lack of interest of achieving the sort of ambiguity that is poetry's to apply to the senses, the poems are more like pained gasps of someone airing their gripes, bitches, and congested rage in a sequence of angular phrases. These are the kinds of things you might hear in an operating room when the patient's ether and pain killers wear off. The splintered style, rough and absent color, rhythm or graceful metaphor, is what Mailer wanted to present the public, though, and thought it in his best interest to write about his troubles in a language that lacked the elegant buttressing his essays and journalism could achieve. Of interest to scholars, perhaps, who can examine these puny bits in context with the larger body of work--many of his life long obsessions are to be found here--the reader desiring Mailer's talent for metaphor, adjective and metaphysical fancy had best look elsewhere for some of the brilliance some of us claim for him; this volume is an embarrassment in the late author's career. Mailer explains interestingly that these were put together at a bad time in his life when he could not compose--stabbing your wife will tend to dampen your willingness to wax--and that he found something therapeutic in their existence, but there never has been a compelling reason for these things to be put between covers and sold. Unlike some, I think that a great writer's less great work, the unformed work, the jottings, the juvenilia,the notebooks, the scraps and crumbs, need to remain in the drawer, and not committed to the judgment of history. This poetry is so minimal that it can't even raise a stink.
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