Norman and the Mad Grad Student
Reflections: Norman Mailer at 100, ed. Gerald R. Lucas and Maggie McKinley (The Norman Mailer Society, 2023), p. 3; transcribed from the final interior PDF
From Reflections: Norman Mailer at 100 (The Norman Mailer Society, 2023), p. 3.
Norman and I met in May 1970. I wrote my way into his life with a relentless barrage of letters from graduate school. Mike Lennon tells me those letters now make up one of the larger files in the Ransom Center archives. Please do me a favor and never read any of them.
Between the pressure of PhD orals, a quietly sad divorce, a repressed childhood trauma forcing its way to consciousness, and a lot of beer and bourbon, I pretty much cracked up between 1969 and 1973. Those letters sitting in Texas are the evidence of it.
Norman saw past it, and we ended up with a modest friendship and a long correspondence.
He was careful with me when I was at my lowest. I was vulnerable, exploitable, but he treated me with respect when other men were not so mindful of my condition.
I remember meeting him one chilly night in his favorite Brooklyn Heights coffee shop. I walked in wearing a cloth coat and silk scarf on my head folded into a triangle and tied under my chin, 1940s style. Norman contemplated me walking toward him and said, “You make that World War II bandanna look like the height of fashion.”
I was flustered and glanced down and away from him as I took off my coat and slid into the booth.
“Ha!” he said. “You’ll never get anywhere until you can learn to take a compliment without ducking your head.”
I was so struck by the truth of it that I forgot to be shy, looked him straight in the eyes, and said, “My God. You’re right, aren’t you?”
He liked that.
He was a good friend to me.
Carol Holmes Alpern