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Go Home Remembering Mailer

OPEN UNIVERSITY NOVEMBER 16, 2007

Remembering Mailer

BY MARIN COGAN

 A commentator on my last blog suggested that it was time to shut this blog down. I took to the suggestion, thinking that I was being too self-indulgent, letting these blogs go in every which direction, expressions of a fickle and perhaps unstable mentality. But this then is what they are, unpaid snippets of a long life that includes sixty years of writing in a semi-professional (unpaid articles and stories for literary magazines) and then professional life. I was thinking about this as I drove north for my granddaughter's second birthday and heard the news of Norman Mailer's death in the hospital where, twenty-nine years earlier, my mother died. It made me think of her astonished anger when she saw the angry little hole his cigarette made on her precious table. He and I had been talking, perhaps drinking a little and, in Norman's case, obliviously and carelessly. It was in the semi-relaxed, semi-intense mode which is once recorded in the piece which he named "Hip, Hell and the Navigator," and included in the book Advertisements for Myself, and reprinted in at least one anthology and talked about every now and then as his favorite interview. Apparently Lionel Trilling has either hailed or mocked it as a piece of extraordinary theology which back in the late Fifties would have gratified Norman enormously. He was not at the top of the wave. The two novels which followed The Naked and the Dead, The Deer Park and Barbary Shore, had been poorly reviewed, rightly so, except that half The Deer Park was, I thought, strong and interesting. That came up in the interview. I thought that his writing a preface to the dramatic version of the novel which said that its setting was actually Hell was a pretty inexpensive way of recharging the exhausted story. I can't remember if that initiated the switch from the discussion of Hip and its meaning for a writer to theology, but it was Norman's sudden, epiphanic insight that God, like Norman himself, was involved in a great struggle, and that much of what puzzled, dismayed and tormented his creatures could be traced to this which was to so please Norman later when he readied the interview for publication, first in the Western Review and then in the book which was to once again turn him into what mattered so much to him, the great literary challenger of the given, the obvious, the status quo ante Norman. His competitiveness was well-known. Since I was a friend of Saul Bellow, he usually asked me what Bellow was about. I'd told him about Henderson the Rain King, which I'd read in manuscript. "Guess that makes him Number One," he said, reflectively. I remember that this was said from the wheel of his car. Out each of the rear windows stuck the head of a black pointer, striking, if contradictory turn signals. Such an odd, innocent picture; and so odd and innocent a driver.Yes, this greatly talented man, who could tell you where the grocer bought his suits and what radio programs he listened to, who knew why the Cape Canaveral launchings brought out every tinkerer within five hundred miles, who knew why Jack Kennedy's hauling his injured shipmate to safety as he did (teeth gripped on the man's belt) revealed his ferocity, this brilliant reporter of the world's stuff, had a depth of innocence which he'd grown to dislike almost as much as he disliked and disowned the handsome Jewish boy swaddled in his herring bone suit on the back cover of The Naked and the Dead. "I never looked like that," he told me. In his eyes, he never did. As he disowned that boy, so he poured Nietszchean and other highfalutin' glop over the brilliant worldly reports of prize fights and movie stars, political conventions and the space program, burying his reportorial gift under Zaruthustrian rubble. A few times between his trips to where we summered in Twin Lakes, Connecticut, I drove down to the house he and his beautiful wife, Adele Morales lived in the dull countryside of southern Connecticut. The town's other literary light was Van Wyck Brooks; I don't think they'd met. There one would be coaxed into an old cedar orgone box to smoke marijuana or into an improvised ring where crouching, gesturing Norman would spar with you, his face menacingly innocent, his punches making little breezes by your ear. When he stabbed Adele in the breast and was put into Bellevue, I wrote him that I'd testify to his sanity or essential benevolence and got back a touching penciled letter of gratitude and semi-contrition.The few times I've seen him in the last twenty years, he was in official positions (President of PEN) or at the annual luncheon of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His gray hair was waved, his blue eyes were genial under agitated eyebrows, he was beautifully dressed and looked more like a banker than many at Davos. I'd become more and more the quiet burgher, Norman more and more the contrarian, often brilliant commentator and manufacturer of books which I think much of him knew were not the marvelous novels he wished to write. When the excellent book on Gary Gilmore received the National Book Award for Fiction, I wrote him (and the Times) that it was so carefully and deliberately a documentary work that it should have received the award for non-fiction. He wrote a good letter of partial agreement, but Jim Atlas, then working for the Times, felt the letters were somehow "self-serving," and they weren't published. The New York Review of Books did publish a comic exchange between us about what Norman had said or didn't say to an elevator operator after he'd finished talking at a Modern Languages Association meeting in Chicago. The dispute, genial as it was, saddened me as I drove north now on the Outer Drive, for it indicated the distance which had come between this decent, fascinating man and me which of course now would never be spanned.

--Richard Stern

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29 comments

Don't go, Mr Stern. Keep tha anecdotes coming-- political opinion's not worth the pot it's boiled in, and in any case we all go to the same place in the end, as Mailer's passing reminds us.

Some of the most surprising tributes to Mailer come from conservatives like WF Buckley and Suzanne Fields of The Washington Times. Great anecdotes in each, here:

Buckley recalls his debating partner's gift to him and his wife one night in Manhattan:

article.nationalreview.com

"Mailer took two practical steps that bounced off our Chicago exchange. The first was to sue Playboy—on the grounds that, manifestly, his essay was worth more than the $5,000 paid to us. That done, he said he wished to explore with me a string of Buckley-Mailer debates throughout the country, “beginning in Carnegie Hall.”

"This initiative brought him and his wife to our house in Stamford, Connecticut, and I took him out on my 36-foot sailboat. He could not believe it when I turned the wheel over to him, pointing out a course to the end of the harbor. It was very cold by the time we had finished dinner, but he ordered his wife Jeannie to the back of his motorcycle, and they zoomed off to Brooklyn.

"There were other episodes. There was the night in New York when, after dinner, I said I needed to file a column, but he wasn’t ready to go home, pursuing us to our apartment nearby. Wobbling up the steps, his then current wife passed out and was placed by my wife in a spare bedroom. Norman climbed upstairs with me to my study, and spoke disparagingly of the column as, paragraph after paragraph, I gave it to him to read. Finally he said it was time to go home, and we walked down the stairs to where his wife had been taken. But rousing her from that sleep defied any resource we were willing to deploy, so Norman announced fatalistically that, never mind, she would eventually rise, go out the street door, and get a cab. “Me, I’m going home, Slugger,” as he called my wife. I helped him find a cab....."

Suzanne Fields recalls her "crush" on Mailer in the 1960s:

washingtontimes.com/.../EDITORIAL

"Mr. Mailer, who died last week, was a demonic force, a man who was tough when it was tough to be tough, after the idea of manhood had been hijacked, softened, neutered and finally feminized. He believed it important that a man "earn manhood." He took the idea over the top, stabbing the second of his six wives and springing from prison a romanticized killer who would then kill another man. But in his best work he challenged both convention and himself. He liked playing the buffoon, making it hard sometimes to tell whether he was serious or merely making fun of himself and of whomever he was talking to.

"He gave me my 15 minutes of elusive fame with the description of me in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book as "surprisingly adorable and childlike to be found in such a liberal academic coven." When he passed up my boeuf bourguignon to take his bourbon in a coffee mug up the street to the scruffy old Ambassador Theater for more rant against the war, he apologized and added the novelist's detail that he dared the look of rejection in my innocent eye, "which was almost balanced on a tear." He was Don Quixote, the bombastic hero, and I was thrilled to be Desdemona, damsel-in-distress. But it was impossible to take offense because he had the intoxicating power to charm.

"Mr. Mailer was a notorious womanizer. "Mailer had not been married four times for nothing," he observed, referring to himself as usual in the third person. But I took as praise that I was "vivid, bright-eyed, suggestive of a fiery temper and a child-like glee." He never enjoyed parties unless there was a wicked lady present: "An evening without a wicked lady in the room was like an opera without a large voice." But I couldn't sing Aida...."

- teplukhin2you

November 16, 2007 at 6:53pm

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Mr. Stern I have different reactions to your posts, but even at the most irriitated I would not for one second suggest that you stop blogging here.

I loved the generosity and open-heartedness of your too short reminiscence of the great Mailer.

And it stands in such contrast with Leon Wieseltier's smug and self-reductive short attempt at a take down of Mailer  and mailer's last book in Wieseltier's last diary piece in these pages and with the incredibly pinched and slanted TNR compilation of writings in TNR by and about Mailer, aimed primarily at jeering at him.

As your moving piece suggests, Mailer was large and contained multitudes. You capture nicely the mixture in him of beautiful genius, especially when he hitched his open ended and constantly exploring mind to the stuff of quotidian reality. His lovable and entirely forgivable nuttiness when he failed to anchor the his metaphysical ship with the weight of the actual world was a province of his largeness. If he was egocentric, it was of a piece of his own courtly and expansive consciousness, for he was no less generously attentive to those he loved or to those who aroused his admiration. If he was less than stellar as a politician, political commenatator, film maker, systematic thinker, playwright, other things, and perhaps even a novelist, it matters not; for he was unrivalled in what to my mind he did best, which was, partly, as you say, being a "brilliant reporter of the world's stuff", but, more, infusing that reporting with his brilliant literary talents, which found their true home in taking on the world as is.

I need to add that I thought he was a great and sensitive literary critic. I still remember being the moving emotions and aonder he aroused in me, even though 35 years ago, reading his Prisoner Of Sex in answer to the wooden robotics of Kate Millett's Sexual Politics by his sensitive appreciaton for entirely persuasive defence of Hemingway, Lawrence and Henry Miller from her shrewish and llimiting indictment of them.

Now, 35 years later, I am moved to intense bemusement by the pygmies around TNR who balefully feed their own self-satisfaction with the delusion they have taken Mailer's measure in their stinting belittlement of him, when clearly in his world eating largeness, they are as gnats to his elephant.

A few days ago Charlie Rose had a retrospective of his interviews with Mailer over the years, and in seeing Mailer's world-lighting-up smile when delight struck him, I could have cried.

So much has passed.

- basman

November 16, 2007 at 10:55pm

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I am really sorry for the typos and errors above, The small font makes editing virtually impossible. And I would have wanted what I wrote to be free of any mistakes.

- basman

November 16, 2007 at 11:00pm

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Ah what the hell, for what it is worth let me try to get the spelling and grammar right.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Mr. Stern I have different reactions to your posts, but even at the most irritated I would not for one second suggest that you stop blogging here.

I loved the generosity and open-heartedness of your too short reminiscence of the great Mailer.

And it stands in such contrast with Leon Wieseltier's smug and self-reductive short attempt at a take down of Mailer  and Mailer's last book in Wieseltier's last diary piece in these pages, and in contrast with the incredibly pinched and slanted TNR compilation of writings in TNR by and about Mailer, aimed primarily at jeering at him.

As your moving piece suggests, Mailer was large and contained multitudes. You capture nicely the mixture in him of beautiful genius, especially when he hitched his open ended and constantly exploring mind to the stuff of quotidian reality and  his lovable and entirely forgivable nuttiness when he failed to anchor the his metaphysical ship with the weight of the actual world. That latter was a province of his largeness. If he was egocentric, it was of a piece with his own courtly and expansive consciousness, for he was no less generously attentive to those he loved or to those he admired. If he was less than stellar as a politician, political commentator, film maker, systematic thinker, playwright, other things, and perhaps even as a novelist, it matters not; for he was unrivalled in what, to my mind, he did best, which was, partly, as you say, being a "brilliant reporter of the world's stuff", but, more, infusing that reporting with his immense literary talents, which found their true home in his taking on the world as it is.

I need to add that I thought he was a great and sensitive literary critic. I still remember the moving emotions and wonder he aroused in me, even though 35 years ago, reading his Prisoner Of Sex in answer to the wooden robotics of Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, by his sensitive appreciaton for, and entirely persuasive defence of, Hemingway, Lawrence and Henry Miller from her shrewish and limiting indictment of them.

Now, 35 years later, I am moved to intense bemusement by the pygmies around TNR who balefully feed their own self-satisfaction with the delusion they have taken Mailer's measure in their stinting belittlement of him, when clearly in his world eating largeness, they are as gnats to his elephant.

A few days ago Charlie Rose had a retrospective of his interviews with Mailer over the years, and in seeing Mailer's world-lighting-up smile and the twinkling dance of joy in his eyes when delight struck him, I could have cried.

So much has passed.

- basman

November 16, 2007 at 11:11pm

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I always find your posts so touching, Mr. Stern.  You have a rare, gentlemanly concern of your readers opinions and a generous soul.  Why would you leave us to the hacks and meanies of the political world? You make TNR human. Do please stay.

I saw Norman Mailer speak several times. He often said that if he'd been born a generation later, he would have exclusively made films (much to our loss, needless to say).  By the time I saw him the last time, he had enormous trouble walking to the lecturn, but once he was there, he owned the room.  Even as he aged, his lectures usually included at least one semi-fight with a questioner, often with someone pestering him about feminism, I always took his side on that.  He flirted shamelessly with women and was utterly successful in doing so.

As an audience member, I once asked him which subject he'd like to make a film on if he could (it was late 1993), He smiled a beautiful, wicked tiger smile and said "Well, my dear - I'd like to make a film on the Paula Jones story of course."  He loved the whole Clinton gossip world, couldn't get enough of it.  I adored being called My Dear by Norman Mailer and I'd read everything he wrote since I was 12 years old, even the stuff that stunk up the joint.  I have a hard time accepting that he is gone and can't quite picture the world without him in it yet.  

- Wandreycer1

November 17, 2007 at 10:17am

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I concur with personal Plank favs basman and wandrey: Stern's emotive piece is elegant and touching. Far cry from the sour, smartest specimen in the seminar contribution of LW.  What to make of this sourpuss?  A smart and talented editor for sure - his books and arts section is often the sole rationale for continued subscription to this old rag - but he can be the strange and annoying manifestation of a certain kind of intellectual life - the arrogant know it all. His Mailer piece belongs in the Spine, where social and emotionally arrested, intellectually mutated know it alls pack up, like boney, hungry curs...

My favorite memory of Mailer is from the docu When We Were Kings, the film on the Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire. Mailer's gleeful descriptions of Ali's first round right hand leads  (does LW even know what a right hand lead is?  I rather doubt it) is a joy to watch, especially if you know a little something about right hand leads and how incredibly outrageous it was for Ali to be leading with his right against a anvil like puncher like Big George.

Thanks Stern, great piece...

- thejauntyboulevardier

November 17, 2007 at 12:49pm

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Digression:

Tep, Jaunty, Wandrey and anyone else running the fingers of their mind along this thread. Speaking of large men lving large, here is a recommendation for your consideration about another bulking American genius in his own right:

GOIN' HOME: A TRIBUTE TO FATS DOMINO

I have listened to the first 6 tracks of disc one of its two discs and it's the next best thing to listening to the Fat Man himself. Plus listening to him in his effortless pop effervescence makes you take how great he is for granted. Hearing others do him, for as good they may be, reminds you what a unique and wonderful talent he is and how durable and terrific his songs are. So far I can tell you, imho:

1. John Lennon--Ain't That A Shame. The tune is so good that it makes Lennon's thin vocals work.

2. Tom Petty & The H.Breakers--I'm Walkin'. Another tune so great that it helps Petty's singing. But him being so good he puts his own good twist on it.

3. B.B. King--Goin Home. A dud that the tune can't rescue. B.B. was a great singer any number of years ago-a real Blues declaimer. But now it's like listening to iron drag over gravel.

4. Elton John--Blueberry Hill. Great talent, great song, but he cannot put it over like Fats does.

5. Taj Mahal and The New orleans Social Club--My Girl Josephine. What a fantastic song, one of Fats's best and Taj Mahal does an interesting and catchy and world inflected version. But I gotta' go in the end with the Fat Man's.

6. THe Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Joss Stone and Buddy Guy--Every Night About This Time. I used to think Joss Stone was somewhat faux.  I have always been a huge devotee of Buddy Guy. And I am only part way through this track. But Joss Stone's take here is knocking me about. I have got to listen to it more, but this may be the first tune I hear that can rival Fats. We'll see and hear.

Don't know why really I am writing all this, but I am in a great mood for a variety of reasons and this record is helping  make my day.

Regards,

Itzik

- basman

November 17, 2007 at 3:22pm

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Digression:

Tep, Jaunty, Wandrey and anyone else running the fingers of their mind along this thread. Speaking of large men lving large, here is a recommendation for your consideration about another bulking American genius in his own right:

GOIN' HOME: A TRIBUTE TO FATS DOMINO

I have listened to the first 6 tracks of disc one of its two discs and it's the next best thing to listening to the Fat Man himself. Plus listening to him in his effortless pop effervescence makes you take how great he is for granted. Hearing others do him, for as good they may be, reminds you what a unique and wonderful talent he is and how durable and terrific his songs are. So far I can tell you, imho:

1. John Lennon--Ain't That A Shame. The tune is so good that it makes Lennon's thin vocals work.

2. Tom Petty & The H.Breakers--I'm Walkin'. Another tune so great that it helps Petty's singing. But him being so good he puts his own good twist on it.

3. B.B. King--Goin Home. A dud that the tune can't rescue. B.B. was a great singer any number of years ago-a real Blues declaimer. But now it's like listening to iron drag over gravel.

4. Elton John--Blueberry Hill. Great talent, great song, but he cannot put it over like Fats does.

5. Taj Mahal and The New orleans Social Club--My Girl Josephine. What a fantastic song, one of Fats's best and Taj Mahal does an interesting and catchy and world inflected version. But I gotta' go in the end with the Fat Man's.

6. THe Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Joss Stone and Buddy Guy--Every Night About This Time. I used to think Joss Stone was somewhat faux.  I have always been a huge devotee of Buddy Guy. And I am only part way through this track. But Joss Stone's take here is knocking me about. I have got to listen to it more, but this may be the first tune I hear that can rival Fats. We'll see and hear.

Don't know why really I am writing all this, but I am in a great mood for a variety of reasons and this record is helping  make my day.

Regards,

Itzik

- basman

November 17, 2007 at 3:23pm

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Poor LW; I didn't realize that finding Mailer to be gassy and silly (which he was much of the time) was a hanging offense.  Personally, having slogged through THE NAKED AND THE DEAD and THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG in toto and several of his shorter pieces (including his long, weird essay about the 1992 Republican Convention that didn't make any observations that everyone else hadn't already and again highlighted his obsession with buggery), I never got the fuss.  The first novel feels like a clumsy, mean-spirited warm-up for James Jones' THE THIN RED LINE, which is much wittier, captures the rhythm of boredom-and-sudden-battle more acutely, and attacks the stupidity of commanding officers much more acutely than Mailer did (it also has a scene involving Situational Homosexuality that Mailer's panicky sense of masculinity would never have permitted him to write).  The second book was Mailer's attempt to grab the gold and trophies awarded to Truman Capote for IN COLD BLOOD.  I've always felt that the former was over-rated, but compared with THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG, it's a bloody masterpiece.  Capote may have been too soft on Perry Smith, but Mailer tried to make Gary Gilmore into some sort of existential hero.  And then there is the matter of authorship; Capote may have taken Harper Lee with him to Kansas to ease the interviewing process, but Mailer was essentially handed research and interviews already done by Larry Schiller and his assistants and used that to churn out the book.  After all, existential hero or no, the company of a suicidal, burnt-out double murderer was DEPRESSING; much more fun to hang with Ali and Foreman or Jack Kennedy.

In case you missed the point, I'm not impressed with Norman Mailer . . .

- norval13

November 17, 2007 at 8:50pm

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"The second book was Mailer's attempt to grab the gold and trophies awarded to Truman Capote for IN COLD BLOOD.  I've always felt that the former was over-rated, but compared with THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG, it's a bloody masterpiece.  Capote may have been too soft on Perry Smith, but Mailer tried to make Gary Gilmore into some sort of existential hero.  And then there is the matter of authorship; Capote may have taken Harper Lee with him to Kansas to ease the interviewing process, but Mailer was essentially handed research and interviews already done by Larry Schiller and his assistants and used that to churn out the book.  After all, existential hero or no, the company of a suicidal, burnt-out double murderer was DEPRESSING; much more fun to hang with Ali and Foreman or Jack Kennedy.

In case you missed the point, I'm not impressed with Norman Mailer . . .

November 17, 2007 8:50 PM"

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I don't have the strength and could not do bettter than this any any event  so, wtf, here it is:

'I Want to Go Ahead and Do It

By JOAN DIDION

The Executioner's Song By Norman Mailer

t is one of those testimonies to the tenacity of self-regard in the literary life that large numbers of people remain persuaded that Norman Mailer is no better than their reading of him. They condescend to him, they dismiss his most original work in favor of the more literal and predictable rhythms of "The Armies of the Night"; they regard "The Naked and the Dead" as a promise later broken and every book since as a quick turn for his creditors, a stalling action, a spangled substitute, "tarted up to deceive, for the "big book" he cannot write. In fact he has written this "big book" at least three times now. He wrote it the first time in 1955 with "The Deer Park" and he wrote it a second time in 1963 with "An American Dream" and he wrote it a third time in 1967 with "Why Are We in Vietnam?" and now, with "The Executioner's Song," he has probably written it a fourth.

"The Executioner's Song" did not suggest, in its inception, the book it became. It began as a project put together by Lawrence Schiller, the photographer and producer who several years before had contracted with Mailer to write "Marilyn," and it was widely referred to as "the Gary Gilmore book." This "Gary Gilmore book" of Mailer's was understood in a general way to be an account of or a contemplation on the death or the life or the last nine months in the life of Gary Mark Gilmore, those nine months representing the period between the day in April of 1976 when he was released from the United States Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, and the morning in January of 1977 on which he was executed by having four shots fired into his heart at the Utah State Prison at Point of the Mountain, Utah.

It seemed one of those lives in which the narrative would yield no further meaning. Gary Gilmore had been in and out of prison, mostly in, for 22 of his 36 years. Gary Gilmore had a highly developed kind of con style that caught the national imagination. "Unless it's a joke or something, I want to go ahead and do it," Gary Gilmore said when he refused legal efforts to reverse the jury's verdict of death on felony murder. "Let's do it," Gary Gilmore said in the moments before the hood was lowered and the muzzles of the rifles emerged from the executioner's blind. Gary Gilmore's execution in 1977 was the first in the United States in ten years, and the last months of his life were expensively, exhaustively covered, covered in teams, covered in packs, covered with checkbooks and covered with tricks, covered to that point at which Louis Nirer was calling Provo in a failed attempt to add some class to David Susskind's bid for the rights, covered to that pitch at which the coverage itself might have seemed the only story.

What Mailer could make of this apparently intractable material was unclear. It might well have been only another test hole in a field he had drilled before, a few further reflections on murder as an existential act, an appropriation for himself of the book he invented for "An American Dream," Stephen Rojack's "The Psychology of the Hangman." Instead Mailer wrote a novel, a thousand-page novel in a meticulously limited vocabulary and a voice as flat as the horizon, a novel which takes for its incident and characters real events in the lives of real people. "The Executioner's Song" is ambitious to the point of vertigo, and the exact extent of its ambitiousness becomes clear at the end of the first chapter, when a curious sentence occurs, a sentence designed as a kind of Gothic premonition. Brenda Nicol, a forthright woman in her thirties who "hadn't gone into marriage four times without knowing she was pretty attractive on the hoof," has gotten a call from the penitentiary at Marion saying that her cousin Gary Gilmore was coming home--by way of St. Louis, Denver, Salt Lake--to Provo. "With all the excitement," Chapter One of "The Executioner's Song" closes, "Brenda was hardly taking into account that it was practically the same route their Mormon great-grandfather took when he jumped off from Missouri with a handcart near to a hundred years ago, and pushed west with all he owned over the prairies, and the passes of the Rockies, to come to rest at Provo in the Mormon Kingdom of Deseret just fifty miles below Salt Lake."

Against the deliberately featureless simple sentences of "The Executioner's Song," sentences that slide over the mind like conversations at K-Mart ("Gary was kind of quiet. There was one reason they got along. Brenda was always gabbing and he was a good listener. They had a lot of fun. Even at that age he was real polite."), the relative complexity and length of this sentence at the end of Chapter One is a chill, a signal that the author is telling us a story of some historical dimension. Notice the intake of breath on the clause "and the passes of the Rockies," notice the long unbroken exhalation that ends in a fall on "just 50 miles below Salt Lake."

It is a largely unremarked fact about Mailer that he is a great and obsessed stylist, a writer to whom the shape of the sentence is the story. His sentences do not get long or short by accident, or because he is in a hurry. Where he does or does not put the comma is a question of considerable concern to him: his revisions on "The Deer Park" are instructive in the extreme. Brenda Nicol may not have been taking into account that handcart, those prairies, those passes of the Rockies, but Mailer was, and, in that one sentence, the terms of the novel had laid themselves out: a connection would be attempted here, a search for a field of negative energy linking these events and these people and the empty melancholy of the place itself.

"The Executioner's Song," then, was to be a novel of the West, and the strongest voices in it, as in the place itself, would be those women. Men tend to shoot, get shot, push off, move on. Women pass down stories. "Well, I am the daughter of the very first people who settled in Provo," Gary Gilmore's mother, Bessie Gilmore, said once to herself when Gary was 22 and sentenced to 15 years for armed robbery in the state of Oregon. She said it again to herself on the July morning in 1976 when her niece Brenda and her sister Ida called to say that Gary was under arrest in Provo on Murder One, two counts. "I am the granddaughter and great granddaughter of pioneers on both sides. If they could live through it, I can live through it." This is the exact litany which expresses faith in God west of the 100th meridian.

I think no one but Mailer could have dared this book. The authentic Western voice, the voice heard in "The Executioner's Song," is one heard often in life but only rarely in literature, the reason being that to truly know the West is to lack all will to write it down. The very subject of "The Executioner's Song" is that vast emptiness at the center of the Western experience, a nihilism antithetical not only to literature but to most other forms of human endeavor, a dread so close to zero that human voices fadeout, trail off, like skywriting. Beneath what Mailer calls "the immense blue of the strong sky of the American West," under that immense blue which dominates "The Executioner's Song," not too much makes a difference. The place at which both Gary Gilmore and his Mormon great-grandfather came to rest was a town where the desert lay at the end of every street, except to the east. "There," to the east, "was the Interstate, and after that, the mountains. That was about it."

In a world in which every road runs into the desert or the Interstate or the Rocky Mountains, people develop a pretty precarious sense of their place in the larger scheme. People get sick for love, think they want to die for love, shoot up the town for love, and then they move away, move on, forget the face. People commit their daughters, and move to Midway Island. People get in their cars at night and drive across two states to get a beer, see about a loan on a pickup, keep from going crazy. It is a good idea to keep from going crazy because crazy people get committed again, and can no longer get in their cars and drive across two states to get a beer. Nicole Baker, Gary Gilmore's true love, got committed the first time at 14. April Baker, Nicole's sister, had been a "little spacey" ever since she got bad-tripped and gang-banged when her father was on leave in Honolulu. "I am a split personality," April said when she was asked about the July night in Provo when she went to the Sinclair service station and the Holiday Inn with Gary Gilmore and he seemed to kill somebody. "I am controlling it pretty good today."

"The Executioner's Song" is structured in two long symphonic movements: "Western Voices," or Book One, voices which are most strongly voices of women, and "Eastern Voices," Book Two, voices which are not literally those of Easterners but are largely those of men--the voices of the lawyers, the prosecutors, the reporters, the people who move in the larger world and believe that they can influence events. The "Western" book is a fatalistic drift, a tension, an overwhelming and passive rush toward the inevitable events that will end in Gary Gilmore's death. The "Eastern" book is the release of that tension, the resolution, the playing out of the execution, the active sequence that effectively ends on the January morning when Lawrence Schiller goes up in a six-seat plane and watches as Gary Gilmore's ashes are let loose from a plastic bag to blow over Provo. The bag surprises Schiller. The bag is a bread bag, "with the printing from the bread company clearly on it . . . a 59-cent loaf of bread."

The women in the "Western" book are surprised by very little. They do not on the whole believe that events can be influenced. A kind of desolate wind seems to blow through the lives of these women in "The Executioner's Song," all these women who have dealings with Gary Gilmore from the April night when he lands in town with his black plastic penitentiary shoes until the day in January when he is just ash blowing over Provo. The wind seems to blow away memory, balance. The sensation of falling is constant. Nicole Baker, still trying at 19 to "digest her life, her three marriages, her two kids, and more guys than you wanted to count," pits Gary Gilmore, plus Gary Gilmore's insistence that she meet him beyond the grave, reads a letter from Gary in prison and the words go "in and out of her head like a wind blowing off the top of the world."

Control is fugitive. Insanity is casual. The love-death seems as good a way of hanging on as any other. Gary and Nicole make wishes on a falling star and Nicole has "a rush of memories then like falling down in a dream." Gary's mother Bessie, sitting alone in her trailer in Oregon, gets a call about the murders from her sister Ida and she feels "vertigo at the fall through space of all those years since Ida was born." A sister-in-law of Nicole's thinks of sinking "right into the swamp of misery." A friend of the family is trying to sleep one night when she hears Gary, whose visit she has declined, shatter her car with a tire iron. "She let it go. It was just one more unhappiness at the bottom of things."

These women move in and out of paying attention to events, of noticing their own fate. They seem distracted by bad dreams, by some dim apprehension of this well of dread, this "unhappiness at the bottom of things." Inside Bessie Gilmore's trailer south of the Portland city line, down a four-lane avenue of bars and eateries and discount stores and a gas station with a World War II surplus Boeing bomber fixed above the pumps, there is a sense that Bessie can describe only as "a suction-type feeling." She fears disintegration. She wonders where the houses in which she once lived have gone, she wonders about her husband being gone, her children gone, the 78 cousins she knew in Provo scattered and gone and maybe in the ground. She wonders if, when Gary goes, they would "all descend another step into that pit where they gave up searching for one another." She has no sense of "how much was her fault, and how much was the fault of the ongoing world that ground along like iron-banded wagon wheels up the prairie grass." When I read this, I remembered that the tracks made by the wagon wheels are still visible from the air over Utah, like the footprints made on the moon.

This is an absolutely astonishing book.

- basman

November 17, 2007 at 11:50pm

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On another point, but related to something I said before: I do not kow what he thinks of Mailer, but there is one critic I have read in TNR whose critical depths and intellectual power seem up to to the task of treating of Mailer adequately, whether positively or not or something in between:  that is Lee Siegel.

- basman

November 18, 2007 at 12:05am

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Obviously, someone with a different opinion.

- norval13

November 18, 2007 at 10:20am

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norval13 hit upon an obvious truth that there is generally a bifurcated standard for literary analyses: Critical analyses from the literary community of scholars and reviewers, which generally embraced Mailer's best books like The Naked and the Dead and The Executioner's Song. This perspective is supposed to be based upon objective standards of analysis; and popular response, made up of all us readers, who bring our subjective personal tastes, and literary predilections to the reading of any novel.

So, the obvious point is that people have a different opinion and I agree.

What has always intrigued me about Mailer is that he remained an unreconstructed liberal and it was this aspect of his life, his politics, that I always suspected brought such tension to his relationship with tnr. Let's face it, despite tnr's bleats to the contrary, they really don't like liberals and much of their criticism of Mailer referenced his politics and much as his literary style.  Unapologetic liberals do not do well at tnr, be they authors, politicians, or staffers.

- thejauntyboulevardier

November 18, 2007 at 11:29am

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Ken:

I'm not so sure that there is generally a bifurcated standard for literary appreciation. Time is a great resolver. For now it seems beyond dspute that Bellow is an American literary giant of the second half of the twentieth century. Mailer's place in that pantheon seems to me to assured, but time will tell. As Matthew Arnld said, more or less, greatness is what the best minds say is great over time.

But your remarking the politics of TNR's treatement of Mailer seems disappointingly correct to me.

- basman

November 18, 2007 at 11:41am

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Itz,

I completely agree.  Of course, there has almost never been universal accolades for any work of art but the broad consensus of comment in Mailer's time and of his best works, held those books up as if not the Gold, at least a shining Silver Standard. His work, like Nicole Diver's beauty and craziness, will hold up over time.

We will miss Mailer, for many reasons.  Personally, I will miss his trenchant boxing analyses almost as much has his literary gift.  Plus, he was a pugnacious liberal, who stayed liberal to the very end.  You gotta love that...

A toast to a hell of a guy...

- thejauntyboulevardier

November 18, 2007 at 1:07pm

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Ken:

I'll drink to that in particular (even though I would drink to most anything.)

Regards, my friend.

- basman

November 18, 2007 at 1:39pm

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Re "basman" and "As "basman" seems interested in what Lee Siegel would say of Mailer, as well as critical of "Executioner's Song' relative to "In Cold Blod," here material to address the interest.

On Lee Seigel on Mailer overall, Seigel wrote in  glowing depths in his January review of “The Castle in the Forrest.”  Perhaps Seigel’s most summary assessments of Mailer in that piece were the following statements. The first, on the use of a triple negative by “Castle”’s narrator, reads “Alone among American writers, Mailer has earned the right to use a triple negative.” the second on the breath and integrity of Mailer’s vision reads, “Mailer is one of the last Western writers to create a self-contained intellectual universe out of strong, idiosyncratic convictions about the relationship between spiritual, psychic and social existence.”

On “The Executioner’s Song” and, indeed, its relation to Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” Seigel wrote,  speaking of Mailer’s “sprawling” narratives, “The greatest of these is “The Executioner’s Song”….With its breathtaking panorama sweeping from the country’s small-time depths to its big-time shallows, “The Executioner’s Song” was like “The Naked and the Dead” stateside — or, given Mailer’s heightened powers at the midpoint of his career, “War and Peace” translated into the Great American Novel. The book’s sprawl made it the anti-“In Cold Blood”: where Capote pressed his real-life tale into a neat narrative, Mailer let his naturally respire through the billion pores of its accumulated, enveloping facts. The language is flat, smooth, shaved down, as if Mailer had produced his words by running a carpenter’s plane over reality. It is the fulfillment of Hemingway’s style: it has the same spare, unforgiving, unflinching neutrality, but without Hemingway’s deliberate literary manner. "

Re Norvall3 on  THE NAKED AND THE  James Jones' THE THIN RED LINE, the latter may well be a the best of our combat novel, but the comparison ios a bit mismatched.  DEAD is  not a combat nvel but a dystopian novel in which a combat narrative serves as conection via the "Time Machine" sections between the 1930s USA and the quasi fascistic future forboded by General Cummings.  

"Have you read The Naked and the Dead?" wrote George Orwell to David Astor in 1949, a few months before his death. "It's awfully good, the best war book of the last war yet." And as Hitchens has recently pointed out at Slate.com, Orwell like this dystopian composition, writing of it to David Astor in 1949, "Have you read The Naked and the Dead. It's awfully good, the best war book of the last war yet."

- ahicks

November 18, 2007 at 3:15pm

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Ahicks, thanks for your comments. I'll search out the the Seigel pieces you refer to.

I  enjoyed your brief comments on the other thread about Mailer bred by L.W.'s sour "diary entry".

Do you teach literature?

p.s. "The Castle in the Forrest" is in the queue.

- basman

November 18, 2007 at 3:38pm

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Just read it (when I'm not at the Movies or home loafing like a loaf of bread or teacing political science and sociology).

Cheers!

- ahicks

November 18, 2007 at 4:10pm

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basman - thanks for the Didion piece, which to my mind tells me more about Didion than about Mailer. Or for that matter, than about her putative subject, The American West. This esp strikes a former resident of the West with much experience criss-crossing the Rockies as BS:

Didion: "to truly know the West is to lack all will to write it down. The very subject of "The Executioner's Song" is that vast emptiness at the center of the Western experience, a nihilism antithetical not only to literature but to most other forms of human endeavor, a dread so close to zero that human voices fadeout, trail off, like skywriting. Beneath what Mailer calls "the immense blue of the strong sky of the American West," under that immense blue which dominates "The Executioner's Song," not too much makes a difference. The place at which both Gary Gilmore and his Mormon great-grandfather came to rest was a town where the desert lay at the end of every street, except to the east. "There," to the east, "was the Interstate, and after that, the mountains. That was about it."

Nihilism is a Baghdad clan member executing a dozen or so of his lifelong neighbors with a powerdrill. Nihilism is putting a tire around someone's neck and setting it on fire. Nihilism is hacking off the limbs of children. The men and women who hold jobs, raise children, shepherd those kids through schools and fotball games and college or not, and marriages, and raising the  enxt generation of American westerners, are not nihilists by any stretch of the imagination.

Visually, the American West is stunning, outlandish, bizarre. But its inhabitants aren't any more outlandish or bizarre than the denizens of Pittsburgh or Minneapolis or Danbury CT. To extrapolate from the first statement to a conclusion that somehow these ordinary people are spiritual confreres of murderers and madmen from the world's hearts of darkness is to repeat the pathetic fallacy, in a particularly distasteful and IMO smarmy way.

t

- teplukhin2you

November 19, 2007 at 12:35am

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Also, Basman - forgot to mention that your tribute to Mailer was one of the more elegant, incisive and moving ones I've read.

Stern, please don't leave, if only for the opportunity you afford me to sip not just your but also itzik's, wandrey's and JB's effervescences.

- teplukhin2you

November 19, 2007 at 1:58am

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The point about unreconstructed liberals not doing well in TNR reflects the fact that TRN is not an orthodox ideological journal.  I can' t discuss Mailer's views specifically but, to me, the point is that TNR is critical of anyone that has a rigid view of the world and is not open to opposing arguments.  I don't think that's bad.  IMO, saying someone is a pugnacious liberal (or conservative) means that they try to fit every event into a narrow black and white framework in a world that is not black and white.  For example, some of what Mailer wrote after 9/11--specifically his piece in the New York Review of Books--was absolutely ludicrous (such as the point about why should we concerned about 3000 people dying when more die in traffic accidents).  This has nothing to do with the literary merits of his work but I can't completely divorce his work from his politics (and his life in general).

- Mschneider

November 19, 2007 at 10:23am

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TNR is in the vanguard of the United Front Against Bullsh*t. Mailer's career was one long carnival of bullsh*t mixed with dazzling brilliance.  TNR + Mailer = oil + water

- teplukhin2you

November 19, 2007 at 11:10am

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Dunno Tep, if TNR is against bullsh*t, then most Republicans start off with an extra 100 points, at least.  

- Wandreycer1

November 19, 2007 at 1:05pm

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Wandrey - That's why it's the Democratic House Organ. Or used to be, anyway

- teplukhin2you

November 19, 2007 at 1:08pm

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mschneider,

Your comments are certainly thoughtful and in many ways, they do represent tnr and its [alleged] heterodoxy.  However, if you look at the ravings on The Spine, if you go back to the solipsistic cheerleading tnr gave to the Iraq war, if you look at the entire reality of tnr, you will find that this magazine often falls short of the standard you claim it represents, the absence of rigidity and the embrace of all viewpoints.  Tell that to Jim Baker.  Tell that to the folks who opposed this Iraq invasion in 2003 while Peter Beinart was questioning their courage and sense of national unity.

yes, Mailer and tnr did not mix.  But it hardly stems from the purity of heterodoxy that you suggest.  There is heterodox and there is heterodox.  Check out the Spine if you doubt me.

- thejauntyboulevardier

November 19, 2007 at 5:10pm

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Mschneider,

,

It's true that TNR is "not an orthodox ideological journal."  Once a Progressive liberal journal with an ancestry going back to inaugural editor and seminal Progressive Herbert Croly, TNR has been more eclectically Center-Left in recent decades. Indeed it recently has verged sufficiently on incoherence that I hesitate to affirm your implicit claim that TNR "open to opposing arguments" and instead simply state that it is, indeed, open to an ample range of views.   On Mailer I am less in agreement, he is hardly an "unreconstructed" liberal, showing as strong  Burkean as marxian lineage since at least the Armies of the Night.  Moreover, Liberalism-conservativism is not a continuum that well lines up views of the so-called "War on Terror" (dubiously named in so far as it may be so ineffective vis-a-vis the opponent and so antagonist vis-a-vis both those we would seek as allies and those we would discourage from embracing terror as to fail to merit its anti-terrorist name).

On Mailer's "ludicrous"' writing in the "War," Mailer never made the point "why should we [be] concerned about 3000 people dying when more die in traffic accidents." What he wrote in the NYRB (VOLUME 50, NUMBER 13 - AUGUST 14, 2003 ) was the following quite distinct statement that I leave it to readers to inderpret:"Maybe we will do well to learn to live with terrorism as a chronic condition, an ongoing upheaval to all sorts of good hopes, plans, and projects. All the same, until it reaches the numbers of our annual automobile accidents (more than 40,000 mortalities), can we recognize that there may be worse things in store for our Republic than projected weapons of mass destruction (which are, after all, never easy to deliver), and one of them is the shameless exploitation of American perception? A blinded democracy is soon on its knees begging for a leader to show the road." Maybe we will do well to learn to live with terrorism as a chronic condition, an ongoing upheaval to all sorts of good hopes, plans, and projects. All the same, until it reaches the numbers of our annual automobile accidents (more than 40,000 mortalities), can we recognize that there may be worse things in store for our Republic than projected weapons of mass destruction (which are, after all, never easy to deliver), and one of them is the shameless exploitation of American perception? A blinded democracy is soon on its knees begging for a leader to show the road.'  I would add, though, that this statement is, in its in it pessimism, quite conservative and one could hardly claim that Mailer is an accomodationist or pacifist in any of his strategies or politics.

- ahicks

November 20, 2007 at 8:31am

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TP2--thanks for writing about the Didion piece with more intelligence than I ever could have--I know that Didion was raised in California, but you'd never know it from what she wrote.  Indeed, there's not much evidence of human contact in general in that review . . .

- norval13

November 21, 2007 at 8:06am

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Tep, thanks for your thoughtful note on the Didion piece.

I agree with a fair bit of what she talks about: Mailer’s greatness and the condescension of those critics who, well, condescend to him; that Mailer made high art out of what she calls "intractable material"; his self-conscious obsession with style such as in the shape of his sentences and his utilization of diction—his heteroglossia in the contrasts in language and speech between the “Eastern Voices” and the “Western Voices” and those contrasts within the “Eastern Voices” themselves; the historo-mythic dimensions he layers into “Western Voices”;  his portrayal of the emptiness inclining to insanity of the West insofar as that is embodied by the Gary Gilmore universe and the connections between landscape and mindscape; the relative enduring quality of the women and the desperate dissolute-to criminal-to insane behaviour of the men; and other things; and her statement that “This is an absolutely astonishing book.”

As I read Norval13 to say, you make more clear to me than what I noted for myself is the biggest flaw in her piece: the conflation of Gilmore and his world with all of the West .

Nihilism is all the things you say; but it is also evident —and Didion is right to say that Mailer so says—in Gilmore’s remoreless killings and in what Mailer depicts in “Western Voices” as the particular conditions—personal, social, psychological, geographical— that can help conduce such killings. But, as you say, such nihilism isn’t specific to the West; it is everywhere. But it takes its specific Western bodying forth in the figure of Gilmore and all that specifically impinges on him.

The ubiquity makes me Ithink of William Carlos Williams’s poem:

The pure products of America / go crazy

The pure products of America

go crazy--

mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of

Jersey

with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves

old names

and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have taken

to railroading

out of sheer lust of adventure--

and young slatterns, bathed

in filth

from Monday to Saturday

to be tricked out that night

with gauds

from imaginations which have no

peasant traditions to give them

character

but flutter and flaunt

sheer rags succumbing without

emotion

save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry

or viburnum--

which they cannot express--

Unless it be that marriage

perhaps

with a dash of Indian blood

will throw up a girl so desolate

so hemmed round

with disease or murder

that she'll be rescued by an

agent--

reared by the state and

sent out at fifteen to work in

some hard-pressed

house in the suburbs--

some doctor's family, some Elsie

voluptuous water

expressing with broken

brain the truth about us--

her great

ungainly hips and flopping breasts

addressed to cheap

jewelry

and rich young men with fine eyes

as if the earth under our feet

were

an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners

destined

to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains

after deer

going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September

somehow

it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that

something

is given off

No one

to witness

and adjust, no one to drive the car

Cheers,

Itzik

- basman

November 22, 2007 at 2:32pm

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