Maileriana
Reflections: Norman Mailer at 100, ed. Gerald R. Lucas and Maggie McKinley (The Norman Mailer Society, 2023), pp. 83–84; transcribed from the final interior PDF
From Reflections: Norman Mailer at 100 (The Norman Mailer Society, 2023), pp. 83–84.
Perhaps that should be Mailerabilia. Remember this of Browning’s?
Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems, and new!
(“Memorabilia”)
That Norman Mailer stopped to speak to us, and that we spoke to him again, how strange it more than seems, and new. Yet seeing Mailer plain (or not all) was what you did, what you handsomely got. Not plain, the face, which was a more than becoming one even in old age, and better than a fine face, a magnificent head. Despite his having convictions all right, he didn’t speak at you. Sometimes he spoke of others of genius with whom there could be generous emulation, immortal combat: Brando as actor, Picasso as painter, Bob Dylan (with a touch of the right kind of perplexity) as voice and as being.
The best memories are of the ambience, the “felt life” of which Henry James spoke (Mailer was an intriguing responder to James), times when there was Mailer with us all. An occasion in New York when what he had to say about the “dialectical” could issue in neither a monologue nor a dialogue but a colloquy. (Not its pompous sibling, a “Colloquium.”) A “student-centred” roomful at Suffolk University when the relations with the young that he promptly established were the real thing in their showing how to argue intensely without quarrelling. Best of all such memories is of a conference of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers where Mailer was asked imaginative searching questions by his best Literary Scholar, Critic, and Writer, Mike Lennon. Was courteously and tellingly asked, not quizzed or questioned or interrogated, rather treated with and to a mutuality of friendship and esteem. And Mailer? He was himself. In his case, a very good and thoroughly existent thing to be. That the ALSCW had had the effrontery to invite Mailer did cost us the support of the Bradley Foundation, for Mailer is “anti-American,” don’t you know. Mailer, in person as well as on the page, helps us to know better.
Christopher Ricks