The Seminar Table at Trinity University
Reflections: Norman Mailer at 100, ed. Gerald R. Lucas and Maggie McKinley (The Norman Mailer Society, 2023), pp. 8–9; transcribed from the final interior PDF
From Reflections: Norman Mailer at 100 (The Norman Mailer Society, 2023), pp. 8–9.
Here’s a quintessential Mailer vignette, replete with requisite elements of spilled blood, compelling serendipity, and the pleasantries of poise and grace. In the spring of 1990, I organized and hosted a visit by Norman to Trinity University in San Antonio. He delivered a memorable public reading and commentary in the evening, and the next afternoon he joined my seminar on the work of Norman Mailer and D. H. Lawrence — a course limited to fifteen students and entitled “Configurations of the Ego.” Each weekly meeting involved a rotating series of student presentations in the form of critical evaluations, research papers, dramatized scenes, and press conferences that reproduced the fictional voice and demeanor of the respective character in the novel under discussion.
The subject for the afternoon’s visit by Mailer was The Executioner’s Song, during which a well-prepared student delivered, in the persona of Gary Gilmore, an embattled press briefing about his impending execution and the murders that prompted it.
In an unexpected and improvised moment, the student — who was holding the prop of an unopened can of beer during his remarks — suddenly tossed it across the large and venerable table toward Mailer. It landed forcefully between his thumb and forefinger, creating a deep gash, with blood spurting from Mailer’s hand onto the table. While two students rushed out for paper towels, Mailer calmly removed his fancy handkerchief from his impeccable suit jacket, tied it tourniquet-style around the wound, and simply stated, “I’m ok, let us continue.” Talk of grace under pressure, he stayed for four hours.
In the immediate years after his visit, crafty members of the Admissions Office would often show prospective Trinity students touring the university the engrained evidence on a damaged table of a highly “participatory” visit by a great writer to this seminar classroom. Campus legend maintains that when the building was razed and the aged table dismantled, an enterprising student retained a deep-stained slab of the table as a totemic remnant of that April afternoon.
Perhaps Norman’s resonant words about the moon more than twenty years before his visit can be adapted with eerie relevance to his experience at Trinity:
“Marvelous little wooden plank, what the Devil did it say?”
Peter Balbert