Letters to the Editor
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Mailer was a pompous ass
kudos to Vidal for outliving Mailer, and recognizing that he was longwinded. does anyone give a shit what the lunatic fuckers Podhoretz or Buckley Jr. had to say about Mailer 50 years ago? these people are scum and actually responsible for the sorry state of our world today. incidentally, Updike is a pretty god looking good guy....one doesn't walk around with a fake accent 6 months after the war accidentally; great anecdote from Brando but shows to go what a pretentious ass mailer obviously was...if you saw "when we were kings", he ruined it.
nice stories about New York in the 50's. mailer was a jerk that stabbed his wife. today we call those people abusers, and felons....
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Thanks...
...for the compilation.
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Lion Meets Lamb
Many years ago, in the early '80s, Mailer participated in a program that brought Eminent Persons for a week's residency at the mid-Atlantic university where I studied. The house I lived in was one of his principal hosts for the week, a dubious honor as it turned out, as he was, to be kind, a fair amount of work.
My memory of him is dominated by two things: his leading a discussion, for a religious studies class, of his book on Marilyn Monroe and of Monroe as a goddess-figure - he seemed startled by the seriousness with which we approached the actress, even though his book was without doubt one of the most solemnly portentous things I've ever had to read.
The lowpoint of the visit, though, was a post-prandial session in our dining hall, when what started out as a discussion of campus life turned into a truly Mailerian tirade on Ungrateful Youth, with an odd fixation on the fact that the recently redecorated room featured plastic chairs, a fact, he declared, that would doom us all to mediocrity. Vidal's comment - "interesting but longwinded" - was more or less spot on, at least on that occasion, if more of the latter than the former.
Looking back, I realize that I must have been a somewhat fetching young thing - aggressively androgynous, New Wave-haired and made-up, and fairly solemn myself about, to Mailer, hot-button issues like gender and (lack of) traditional masculinity. He seemed genuinely fascinated, if I say so myself, and ended the evening by saying, "Well, if you are a boy, it's a loss..."
I think I was flattered, but I'm still not sure.
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Norman Mailer remembered
A great writer. I remember reading the Naked and the Dead in high school literature class in the late 1960's. First I had seen the movie starring a young Frank Sinatra,Earnest Borgnine and Burt Lancaster. A really great movie. I followed Mailer rants and editorials and Articles in the New Yorker for years. He will be greatly missed. A true American hero.
William Scanlon
Associate Professor of English
Guangdong Baiyun University
Guangzhou, China
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Mailer's work
Mailer's work was uneven. His best novel remains The Naked and the Dead which I read before starting college in 1964. It was timely, as Vietnam was just being ramped up.
Most of his other novels were mostly forgettable.
His entry into non-fiction was a non-starter. In Oswald's Tale, for example, it was evident he had taken the Warren Commission's "kool aid" that Oswald did it. Which no one with more than air between the ears now accepts. (See also my early letters to do with the JFK assassination on Salon- just click on 'droogoy's other letters' and hit the first 1-5 pages)
That said, Mailer like other larger than life authors, did make life interesting, especially in the 60s.
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I'm so sick of hearing this, I MUST speak out
Mailer has an uneasy feeling that Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, between them, have written everything worth writing
If he'd read Babel or Bulgakov, he might have changed his mind.
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Norman Mailer was fun--
and wrote some of the most relevant, important, and fascinating non-fiction about politics during the 1960s--early, mid-, and late, and on into the 1970s.
Was he an "ass," and the like, as some insist? Only to the humorless who failed to see his enormous humor (and insecurity) and tendency to spoof and play with the overly serious.
He'll be missed as a pot-stirrer of the most fascinating kind; and as a political commentator with original insights to offer.
As for the religio/cottage industry notion that JFK was killed by a conspiracy: where, after all these years, is the "evidence" for that which can withstand analysis for intellectual honesty and logic?
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What's fascinating is that the left now
Positively cringes from Mailer's brand of obscene directness. Both as a writer and as a celebrity.
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Editor? Please?
This is a nice collection of remembrances, but what's with all the typos?
The increasing lack of copy editing at Salon.com is truly shameful.
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He was, whatever else, a genius with heart
For those who condemn Mailer for being an ass: Yes, he could be an ass, and yet he was as honest as he could be about his own asinine side. His outrageous argument about feminism, people often forget, was born of his explicitly announced fear of the irrelevance of men, which of course doesn't excuse his rage and hate, but was, whatever else, a stand that he knew wouldn't stand in the long run. And he put himself on the line his entire life, which few of our current writers do. I don't think anyone else could have produced a work like The Executioner's Song, and that was precisely because Mailer had gone to the excessive before, and was wise enough by then to rein it in. If that alone was all he had done, his place in American letters would be secure. But he also captured the lost soul of this country in Armies of the Night, and -- barely mentioned by most obits -- Miami and the Siege of Chicago. What more do the small people want of him?
Thomas L. Dumm
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A pompous Ass & a sexist.
I once ecountered Norman Mailer at a performance arts event at in San Jose Ca. He grabbed my freind, forced her on his lap kissed her hard on tehe lips and whispered in her ear. She boltd off his lap red faced and angry. She would not tell us what he said, as she said it could not be reapeated. Maybe it was part of his performance. As we left we saw him insulting and pawing other women. He was completely full of himself.