Allen Ahearn, remembrance
Reflections: Norman Mailer at 100, ed. Gerald R. Lucas and Maggie McKinley (The Norman Mailer Society, 2023), p. 2; transcribed from the final interior PDF
From Reflections: Norman Mailer at 100 (The Norman Mailer Society, 2023), p. 2.
It was 1968. I was working for the Navy. My wife Pat and I had always been heavy readers and I had gotten interested in first editions (first printings) of collectible literary authors. My first encounter with Mailer’s work was when I picked and read The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster, the first separate edition published by City Lights in 1957, with the 35 cent cover price. I’m not sure I understood everything Mailer laid out, but it made me interested in his work. We were sending out lists of books for sale and building up a retail stock, which is why I picked it up for resale; don’t remember what it was selling for then but about $300 now. Since the publication of The Naked and the Dead, Mailer had been praised and fine copies of his first editions were sought after. Copies of The Naked and the Dead, in a fine dust jacket, were selling for $25 or so at the time (big price), versus $2,500 and up, at present. More, of course, if signed or inscribed by Norman.
We did actually meet Mailer once, before Mike Lennon set up the Norman Mailer Society, at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre in Washington in January 2002, when Mailer as Hemingway, George Plimpton as Fitzgerald, and Norris Church as Zelda, performed in “Zelda, Scott and Ernest,” a three-way dramatic reading. Afterwards, Mailer came out to a table set up for the audience to line up, and I basically get a few words with him and perhaps a book signed. Oddly enough we were the first to show up and we got to converse a bit. I had recently bought about 120 first editions by Georges Simenon, and Pat had decided to read all of them. He wrote more than 500 novels. Pat mentioned she was reading Simenon and Mailer, who had just come offstage, perked up and said he thought he had read all of Simenon but to send him a list to see if there were some he had missed. He said that Simenon was a great writer and he and other authors had gotten many ideas for plots from his novels. We did send the list, but I don’t recall that he ever responded. Guess he had them all.
Allen Ahearn