Everyone Here Hates Him

[Tim Gratz]

Why, Kathleen, as Commissioner of Internal Revenue, she would have had to approve the supposed deal to give Mailer relief from his tax problems in exchange for his embracing the "party line" that LHO was a lone nut. I assume you would have known that. She was of course appointed by William Jefferson Clinton. Perhaps Clinton is also a member of the conspiracy but he was quite young at the time of the assassination. Perhaps the conspirators were somehow able to manipulate Clinton to place their agent Richardson in place to effectuate the Mailer deal.

Edited November 12, 2007 by Tim Gratz

[Tim Gratz]

MAILER AS CHARTER SUPPORTER OF FAIR PLAY FOR CUBA COMMITTEE

From Time Magazine

Monday, Apr. 18, 1960

Winning Friends

For the intellectual, politician or celebrity, a tempting proposition this year is a trip to Fidel Castro's Cuba, where a visitor can see real revolution in action while enjoying the uncrowded comforts of a winter resort. The invitation usually comes from an overseas official of Castro's July 26 movement, who arrives bearing a free, first-class ticket on Cubana

Airlines and free reservations at such luxury hotels as the Habana Hilton. At rum-punch receptions and over dinners of Morro crab, the friendly visitor soaks up heady talk of revolution, sometimes from the "maximum leader" himself.

The Loud Praisers. Trips are arranged to schools, hospitals and agricultural coops, or to beaches, cockfights and nightclubs. All that the visitor need contribute is a little quotable praise of Cuba or criticism of the U.S.—and the kind of visitor selected is usually glad to oblige.

Joe Louis says "there is no place in the world except Cuba where the Negro can go in the wintertime with absolutely no discrimination." Jack Paar (who paid his own way down) deplores the "untruthful things I've read about what was happening in Cuba. This man Castro is beloved by these people." Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre called the Cuban revolution "the most original I have known" and dismissed the U.S. as a "headless nation."

The Fair Players. All this sentiment got a loud echo in Manhattan last week from something called "the Fair Play for Cuba Committee," a group of 28 including Sartre, his friend Simone de Beauvoir, Novelists Norman Mailer and Truman Capote (who explained that "my stepfather is Cuban"), and British-born New Yorker Drama Critic Kenneth Tynan ("Americans tend to judge a regime on the extent to which it likes America"). In a seven-column, $4,725 ad in the New York Times, the Fair Players charged that the U.S. press is deliberately distorting the news from Cuba. Item: press reports of Communism in the Castro government are "consistently used to create a smoke screen behind which the social objectives of the Cuban revolution can be attacked and sabotaged."

The nominal head of the committee was Author Waldo (America Hispana) Frank, but the real organizer was Robert Taber, a Columbia Broadcasting System newsman, and one of a group of U.S. journalists who won gold medals from Castro for getting through to interview him in his Sierra Maestra days. Frank has been a guest of Castro, and Taber of a Cuban publisher. Taber drew up the ad, and Frank mailed it out to his many friends among the intellectual set. They got enough names and money to pay the bill, but a more impressive list could be made from those who ignored the plea or pointedly turned it down. This group ranged from Ernest Hemingway, Carl Sandburg and Jacques Maritain to Eleanor Roosevelt and Luis Munoz Marin.

[Tim Gratz]

I wrote:

Norman Mailer was a leftist, Castro-admiring member of the FPCC.

To which Mr. Drago replied:

No, Tim. There is no evidence to support such a claim.

Based upon your statement above, you are either a mistaken or an idiot.

Well, Charles, what do you have to say now? (See my immediately previous post.)

[William Kelly]

MAILER AS CHARTER SUPPORTER OF FAIR PLAY FOR CUBA COMMITTEE

Ah, Yes, Mailer's corpse leads us to Robert Taber, the CBS journalist who was hanging out with the COPLEY (See: CIA) reporter and a Lt. Harvey Oswald at Sloppy Joe's in Havana, having survived fighting with the Cubans at the Bay of Pigs..... an incident that John Armstrong calls our attention to:

http://home.wi.rr.com/harveyandlee/Comrade/Luaces.htm

From Time Magazine

Monday, Apr. 18, 1960

Winning Friends

.......The nominal head of the committee was Author Waldo (America Hispana) Frank, but the real organizer was Robert Taber, a Columbia Broadcasting System newsman, and one of a group of U.S. journalists who won gold medals from Castro for getting through to interview him in his Sierra Maestra days. Frank has been a guest of Castro, and Taber of a Cuban publisher. Taber drew up the ad, and Frank mailed it out to his many friends among the intellectual set. They got enough names and money to pay the bill, but a more impressive list could be made from those who ignored the plea or pointedly turned it down. This group ranged from Ernest Hemingway, Carl Sandburg and Jacques Maritain to Eleanor Roosevelt and Luis Munoz Marin.

[Tim Gratz]

A very remarkable post. Anyone else know anything about the incident in Sloppy Joe's Bar in Habana?

When did this report first surface (I mean to the public)?

Can you tell from ther names who got copies of it?

Is there any information to indicate it was given to the WC?

One would assume it would have been.

And I assume Taber was alive in 1963-1964 and could have been interviewed about the report.

Curious indeed!

Reminds me of a song by Foreigner!

Edited November 12, 2007 by Tim Gratz

[Tim Gratz]

Bill, I think the most interesting information you posted probably belongs in the "Fair Play for Cuba Committee" thread rather than in the Norman Mailer thread. Do you agree? But it certainly merits discussion!

[Tim Gratz]

ROGER KIMBALL DID NOT THINK MUCH OF MAILER EITHER

The news that the novelist Norman Mailer died earlier today at the age of 84 has already elicited little hagiographical murmurs. That hushed choir will doubtless turn into a deafening chorus of praise in the coming days and weeks—how much space do you suppose The New York Times will devote to its (I predict) front-page obituary? What grand superlatives will be dusted off and rolled out to commemorate the polyphiloprogenitive wife-stabber and booster of homicidal misfits? “Genius” will be paraded early and often, I’ll wager, as will the extended family of adjectives emanating from the word “provocative.” One early notice described Mailer as “the country’s literary conscience and provocateur” and characterized The Armies of the Night as one of his (presumably many) “masterworks.” Perhaps, before the celebratory paeans entirely drown out critical judgment, there is room for a few dissenting observations.

Mailer epitomized a certain species of macho, adolescent radicalism that helped to inure the wider public to displays of violence, anti-American tirades, and sexual braggadocio. It didn’t start out that way. Born in Long Branch, New Jersey, in 1923, Mailer was brought up in Brooklyn, “a nice Jewish boy,” as he once put it, from a middle-class family of first-generation immigrants. It was a background from which he had long endeavored to escape. “Mailer,” Norman Podhoretz observed in his memoir Ex-Friends, “would spend the rest of his life overcoming the stigma of this reputation as a ‘nice Jewish boy’ by doing as an adult all the hooliganish things he had failed to do in childhood and adolescence.” After a dutiful childhood, Mailer matriculated at Harvard in 1939. His parents had made a “big sacrifice” to send their intense, studious son to the elite institution, and he was “not going to let them down.” Although he did some writing in college, he majored in aeronautical engineering, graduating in 1942. In 1944, he married for the first of six times; and then from 1944 to 1946, he served with the U.S. Army in the Philippines and Japan.

In 1948, when he was only twenty-five, Mailer’s war novel, The Naked and the Dead, was published. For most critics of war fiction, The Naked and the Dead ranks somewhere between the novels of Herman Wouk (e.g., The Caine Mutiny) and James Jones (From Here to Eternity). It is more pretentious, but less well-crafted, and its narrative develops less momentum. Its heavy-handed psychologizing and use of four-letter words were thought smart in 1948; most contemporary readers will find them quaint if not downright embarrassing. Nevertheless, The Naked and the Dead was an immediate and immense success. The novel catapulted its young author to an atmosphere of wealth, adulation, and celebrity from which he has yet to descend. Whatever else can be said about it, the reception of The Naked and the Dead is an object lesson in the perils—what it might please Norman Mailer to call the “existential” perils—of early success. Mailer himself has never recovered.

For readers who did not witness his elevation to the role of literary-political culture hero, it is difficult to appreciate the awe with which Norman Mailer was regarded by the literary and academic establishment from the 1950s through the 1960s and into the 1970s. A typical paean is Diana Trilling’s convoluted 1962 essay on “The Radical Moralism of Norman Mailer,” which concludes by comparing Mailer to the prophet Moses “with a stopover at Marx.” “His moral imagination,” Mrs. Trilling assured her readers, “is the imagination not of art but of theology, theology in action.”

Which means … ? Very little, alas, although talk of “theology in action” (as distinct, perhaps, from “theology asleep”?) doubtless sparked interesting vibrations in susceptible souls. As Mailer more or less admitted in what is probably his best-known collection, Advertisements for Myself (1959)—a title that could be used again for his complete works—he was a sucker for mystification: “mate the absurd with the apocalyptic, and I was captive.”

No one combined critical regard, popular celebrity, and radical chic politics with quite the same insouciance as did Mailer. From the late 1940s until the 1980s, he showed himself to be extraordinarily deft at persuading credulous intellectuals to collaborate in his megalomania. Although he modeled his persona on some of the less attractive features of Ernest Hemingway—booze, boxing, bullfighting, and broads—he managed to update that pathetic, shopworn machismo with some significant postwar embellishments: reefer, radicalism, and Reich, for starters. The glittering example of Mailer’s commercial success was obviously the cynosure that many aspiring writers set out to follow: his neat trick was to combine cachet with large amounts of cash.

In 1955, Mailer helped to found The Village Voice, which, though always riven by internal dissension, quickly became a megaphone barking New Left thought, such as it was, into the mainstream culture. By the mid-1960s, he had emerged as an established antiestablishment guru. The spectacular success of works like The Armies of the Night (1968)—Mailer’s bloated, “non-fiction novel” about the 1967 march on the Pentagon and his own role in the demonstration—bore witness to his gifts for literary demagoguery. Subtitled History as a Novel, the Novel as History, the book followed Truman Capote’s example in In Cold Blood (1966), deliberately blurring fact and fiction, a procedure gratefully seized upon by a public eager to sacrifice truth to the demands of ideological zeal. Indeed, it was a procedure that characterized the intellectual—or, more accurately, the anti-intellectual—temper of a generation battened on mind-altering drugs and taught to regard any appeal to facts as an unacceptably “authoritarian” threat. Among anti-Vietnam War radicals—which is to say, among nine out of ten establishment intellectuals—Mailer’s exercise in narcissistic psychohistory was greeted with ecstatic hosannas, and duly picked up both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Sample adulation from the critic Richard Gilman: “Mailer has opened up new possibilities for the literary imagination and new room for us to breathe in the crush of actuality.” From the writer Nat Hentoff: “Mailer has won clear claim to being the best writer in America.”

In fact, like almost all of Mailer’s books, The Armies of the Night is badly written—almost preposterously so. It has often been observed that Mailer’s early literary heroes were Hemingway and John Dos Passos. But his own writing totally lacks Hemingway’s lapidary craftsmanship and Dos Passos’s cinematic control. When The Armies of the Night was serialized in Harper’s, to the great excitement of the editor, Willie Morris, a young copy editor complained about Mailer’s prose and, as one witness recollects, asked, “I wonder what he writes like when he’s sober?” The unfortunate copy editor was promptly fired. But she was right: The Armies of the Night is a hyperbolic, self-indulgent mess that looks sillier and more naive with every year that passes. Its famous third-person narrative strikes one now as a facile gimmick: “Mailer discovered he was jealous. Not of the talent. [Robert] Lowell’s talent was very large, but then Mailer was a bulldog about the value of his own talent… . Nonetheless, to Mailer it was now mano a mano.” That “mano a mano” is about as close to Hemingway as Mailer got.

The adulation that greeted The Armies of the Night underscores an important fact about Mailer’s success. It was part of Mailer’s genius to have been able to calibrate his appetites and deficiencies precisely to the appetites and deficiencies of the moment. His obsessions have been celebrated as brave insights because they have mirrored the defining obsessions of the time. For a moment—but only for a moment—they appear to be revelatory insights. Well into the 1970s, anyway, Mailer instinctively knew exactly what register of rhetorical excess would galvanize the left-wing intellectual establishment. This talent made him an important figure in the long march of America’s cultural revolution. It proved to be immensely profitable, financially and in terms of prestige. By the time Mailer came to write The Prisoner of Sex (1971), he was widely rumored to be up for a Nobel Prize, a rumor that absorbed his full attention for the first thirty pages of that execrable book.

This is not to say that Mailer escaped criticism. His second and third novels, The Deer Park (1955) and Barbary Shore (1961), were widely attacked, as indeed was An American Dream (1965). An American Dream was the infamous novel in which the hero, Stephen Rojack, a savvy, tough-guy intellectual—just like Norman Mailer, you see—starts out by strangling his wife. He then walks downstairs and buggers his wife’s accommodating German maid, a former Nazi who declares, “I do not know why you have trouble with your wife. You are an absolute genius, Mr. Rojack.” (Buggery—another “B” to put alongside booze, boxing, bullfighting, and broads—was to become an obsession with Mailer.) There are numerous Mailerian fingerprints in the novel. President Kennedy (“Jack”) calls to convey his condolences; Rojack’s wife is rumored to have had affairs with men high up in the British, American, and Soviet spy agencies; even Marilyn Monroe—who was to become another of Mailer’s notorious obsessions—makes a posthumous cameo appearance: when Rojack fantasizes about having a telephone conversation with a dead character, he reports that “the girls are swell. Marilyn says to say hello.” But the chief point of the book is that Rojack gets away with the murder. Such, Mailer wanted us to believe, is the real if unacknowledged “American dream.”

For those in the know about Mailer, the novel carried an additional frisson. A few years before, at a party he threw to announce his mayoral candidacy on the “Existentialist” ticket, Mailer got drunk and stabbed his wife Adele (number two), nearly killing her. (In 1969, Mailer ran for mayor again, this time on the “Secessionist” ticket, which included proposals that New York City become the fifty-first state and that disputes among young criminals be settled by jousting tournaments in Central Park.) Adele declined to press charges, and so Mailer escaped this outrage with a fortnight in Bellevue for observation.

Mailer’s obsession with violence against women seems to have had a long gestation. Carl Rollyson opens his biography of Mailer with the story of John Maloney, a drunkard and a friend of Mailer and William Styron. In 1954, Maloney stabbed his mistress and fled. He was later jailed but released when charges were dropped. Styron recalled that at the time Mailer said to him: “God, I wish I had the courage to stab a woman like that. That was a real gutsy act.” That tells one all one needs to know about Norman Mailer’s idea of “courage.”

What is perhaps most alarming about Mailer’s violence against his wife was that it seems to have titillated more than it repelled his circle of friends. In any event it brought very little condemnation. “Among ‘uptown intellectuals,’” Irving Howe wrote “there was this feeling of shock and dismay, and I don’t remember anyone judging him. The feeling was that he’d been driven to this by compulsiveness, by madness. He was seen as a victim.” Readers who wonder how stabbing his wife could make Mailer a “victim”—and who ask themselves, further, what Mailer’s being a victim would then make Adele—clearly do not have what it takes to be an “uptown intellectual.”

If Mailer’s attempted murder of his wife met with little censure, An American Dream did not escape so easily. It had its admirers. But the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, in a devastating review called “Norman Mailer’s Yummy Rump,” spoke for many when he judged it “a dreadful novel,” “infinitely more pretentious than the competition,” a book whose “awfulness is really indescribable.”

Something similar, in truth, can be said about all of Mailer’s books. The journalist Raymond Sokolov, writing about Mailer in 1968, said that “in the end it is the writing that will count.” Indeed. Sokolov that Mailer commanded “a superb natural style that does not crack under the pressures he puts upon it, a talent for narrative and characters with real blood streams and nervous systems,” etc. What do you think? Consider The Gospel According to the Son (1997), Mailer’s effort at rewriting the Gospel story in the first person. It is after all a tall order to write not simply about but as Jesus. “I’m one of the 50 or 100 novelists in the world who could rewrite the New Testament,” Mailer said when the book came out, explaining that “I have a slight understanding of what it’s like to be half a man and half something else, something larger.” But breathtaking though Mailer is about The Gospel According to the Son, the apogee of his pretentiousness probably came with Ancient Evenings (1983). This phantasmagoric tale features reincarnation and is set in Egypt around 2000 BC. Mailer really indulges his fondness for buggery in this “novel,” picturing it—along with various other sex acts—taking place between and among various characters as they mutate in and out of existence. Actually having a body does not, for Mailer, seem to be a prerequisite for any form of sexual congress. The one thing that can be said for Ancient Evenings is that it displays Mailer’s great gifts for unintentional comedy. He is funniest when he waxes solemn:

“Let me tell you again. There is the magic we invoke, and the magic that calls upon us. Do you recall that Isis dropped the fourteenth piece of the body of Osiris in the salts of Yeb, and saw battles to come between Horus and Set? That was a warning to find a proper sacrifice or there would be no peace. She heard Her own voice tell Her to slaughter a bull, but as she killed the beast, Her voice also told Her that the sacrifice was not great enough to compensate for the evil powers of Set. She must add the blood of a more painful loss. She must cut off her own head, and replace it with the bull’s face.” Menenhetet now giggled.

Ancient Evenings illustrates why readers who came to Norman Mailer in the 1970s and 1980s have a difficult time understanding the reverence with which he was once regarded by literary intellectuals. Who could take the author of this book seriously?

“Even in the first years I knew Him, I do not believe He had many thoughts which were not of battle, prayer, Nefertiti, or His other true taste—the buttocks of brave men.

“After the Battle of Kadesh, however, He was like an oasis that finds new water beneath its palms and divides to a hundred trees where before there were three. Our good Pharaoh came back from Kadesh with more hunger for the sweet meat of women than any man I knew in all of my four lives. He must have gained the seed of the Hittites He killed, for his loins were like the rising of the Nile, and He could not look at a pretty woman without having her. But then, He could like ugly women as well.”

The truth is that Norman Mailer very quickly became a parody of himself. Since the Sixties was itself a ghastly caricature of political radicalism, few people at the time seemed to notice just how ridiculous Mailer’s preening exhibitionism and blustering political and sexual pronouncements were. But as the years passed and Mailer became more and more indiscriminate in his enthusiasms, Mailer the existential sage was gradually revealed as Mailer the buffoon.

The point of no return was probably Marilyn (1973), a picture-book-cum-biography of the actress Marilyn Monroe. It is difficult to say with confidence which of Mailer’s books was really his worst: he has managed to be truly awful in several distinct ways. But Marilyn was certainly his silliest book. Over the years, Mailer’s fascination with the Star Who Slept With the Kennedys developed into another of his obsessions. In John Simon’s definitive description, what Mailer gave us with Marilyn was “a new genre called transcendental masturbation or metaphysical wet dreaming.”

In real life, Marilyn Monroe was an unhappy sexpot, a sometimes amusing but distinctly mediocre comic actress whose air-headedness was almost as much of an attraction as her pneumatic bustline. The unhappy truth, as Clive James observed, is that Marilyn Monroe “was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.” According to Mailer, though, Marilyn Monroe was a combination of Aphrodite and Ellen Terry. On the one hand, he says, Monroe was a “superb” actress who “possessed the talent to play Cordelia”; she was “Madame Bovary and Nana all in one”; “one might literally have to invent the idea of a soul in order to approach her.” On the other hand, she was “a very Stradivarius of sex,” “the angel of Sex”: “she had learned by Mind,” Mailer wrote, “to move sex forward—sex was not unlike an advance of little infantrymen of libido sent up to the surface of her skin. She was a general of sex before she knew anything of sexual war.”

No one in our sex-obsessed culture is likely to underestimate the importance of sexual gratification in the lives of most people. But Mailer advanced the idea that sexual gratification was the existential center of life. In the world according to Mailer, every activity revolves around sex. In Marilyn, he remarked in passing that “it is a rule of thumb today: one cannot buy a Polaroid in a drugstore without announcing to the world, one chance in two, the camera will be used to record a copulation of family or friends.”

One chance in two? Writing about Mailer in Commentary, Joseph Epstein observed that “it is a sign of the deep poverty of Norman Mailer’s imagination that the only climax he can imagine in any human relationship is really just that—a sexual climax.” It is all the more ironical, then, that Mailer should have displayed such a profound misunderstanding of sex. It is his one true subject, but he got it all wrong.

Indeed, if Marilyn Monroe is “the angel of Sex,” Norman Mailer is its Walter Mitty. He constructed absurd melodramas of sexual conquest and then cast himself as their inevitable hero. His ubiquitous descriptions of sex are wince-makingly embarrassing. In “The Time of Her Time,” for example—a fictional sketch that concludes Advertisements for Myself and of which Mailer was particularly proud—the hero refers to his penis as “the avenger” and is taken to saying things like “For her, getting it from me, it must have been impressive.”

Mailer’s penchant for bombast makes him a difficult writer to parody; one can never be sure that he hasn’t said something even more ridiculous than the caricature. Still, Elizabeth Hardwick caught something essential about Mailer in the parody she wrote (under the pseudonym Xavier Prynne) of The Presidential Papers (1963) for The New York Review of Books:

This 6th note was ignored by LBJ, but attacked by the Black Negroes and the FBI. One admits that a lot of it is lousy—I was having personal troubles at the time—but I still think it lousy but good. The Bitch Goddess didn’t quite get into bed with me this round, but at least she didn’t get into bed with Bill Styron either, up in his plush Connecticut retreat. All the Bitch did was blow into my ear—one of those mysterious pre-psychotic Jackie Kennedy whispers. My answer to the FBI would run this way: The existential orgasm would make atomic war and even atomic testing impossible …

The problem with this virtuoso performance is that it is virtually indistinguishable from the writing it set out to spoof. Its perfection as an exercise in mimicry renders it void as parody.

The unwitting comic dimension of Mailer’s writing is large. But its many sinister elements far overshadow its humor. Norman Mailer may have been unintentionally funny; he was deliberately repulsive. He was an important figure in the story of America’s cultural revolution not because people found him ridiculous but, on the contrary, because many influential people took the ideas of this ridiculous man seriously.

Mailer wrote a great deal about politics. Yet in the end, he regarded politics the way he regarded everything else, as a coefficient of sex. As he put it in Advertisements for Myself, “the only revolution which will be meaningful and natural for the twentieth century will be the sexual revolution one senses everywhere.” Even his identity as an “existentialist” was filtered through sexual anxiety: “a man is in a more existential position than a woman,” Mailer assured us: “he has to get an erection.”

In fact, in Mailer’s writing, the term “existential” and its cognates are little more than hortatory epithets, devoid of anything except sexual wish-fulfillment. He began his essay “The White Negro” by telling his readers that “the American existentialist” is “the hipster,” and then goes on to say that “to be an existentialist, one must be able to feel oneself—one must know one’s desires, one’s rages, one’s anguish, one must be aware of the character of one’s frustration and know what would satisfy it.” Elsewhere he wrote that “we find ourselves in an existential situation whenever we are in a situation where we cannot foretell the end.” In other words, Mailer’s conception of existentialism is scarcely more substantial (though it is a lot less amusing) than Delmore Schwartz’s wry observation that existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you.

It is in his ideas about sex, especially as he relates them to the rest of life, that Mailer was influential and most destructive. It would be difficult to overstate the crudeness of his position. In 1973, in one of the countless interviews he gave, Mailer was asked for his opinion about legalized abortion. Mailer thought well enough of his answer to reprint it in Pieces and Pontifications (1982):

I think when a woman goes through an abortion, even legalized abortion, she goes through hell. There’s no use hoping otherwise. For what is she doing? Sometimes she has to be saying to herself, “You’re killing the memory of a beautiful ****.” I don’t think abortion is a great strain when the act was some miserable little screech, or some squeak oozed up through the trapdoor, a little rat which got in, a worm who slithered under the threshold. That sort of abortion costs a woman little more than discomfort. Unless there are medical consequences years later.

But if a woman has a great ****, and then has to abort, it embitters her.

Whatever else can be said about this statement, it is the declaration of a moral cretin.

Indeed, it is one of the moral peculiarities of Mailer’s writings about sex that he seemed barely able to distinguish it from violent physical conflict. His depictions of lovemaking are almost always cast in terms of struggle and domination. There is scarcely any room for warmth or tenderness. Desire reveals itself first of all as a desire for conquest. No doubt this is one reason that sodomy features so prominently in his writings. Sex in Mailer is not so much an act of union as brute subordination. This is part of what makes it, for Mailer, so “existential.” As a macho existentialist, Mailer sees, or pretends to see, everything as a battle, a “war.” Indeed, despite his virulent anti-Vietnam War stand, “war” was one of Mailer’s abiding passions. It was part of his Hemingway pose: he likeed to bluster about life being a continual struggle—mano a mano as he might have put it—with the void.

In “A Public Notice on Waiting for Godot,” in which Mailer had the effrontery to tell us that he regards Samuel Beckett as “a minor artist,” he wrote that “man’s nature, man’s dignity, is that he acts, lives, loves, and finally destroys himself seeking to penetrate the mystery of existence, and unless we partake in some way, as some part of this human exploration (and war) then we are no more than the pimps of society and the betrayers of our Self.” Destroys himself? Pimps of society? “Betrayers of our Self”? Mailer was clearly the captive of a debased and self-aggrandizing Romanticism. He manufactured melodramas to ventilate the tedium of his comfortable, bourgeois existence. It is a familiar adolescent gambit. But Mailer managed to prolong his pubescent rage into his seventies. It is what made him so productive of comic relief. It is also what underlay his fascination with violence.

Many critics believe that The Executioner’s Song (1979) is Mailer’s best book. Subtitled A True Life Novel, it tells the In Cold Blood-type story of the arrest and execution by firing squad of Gary Gilmore, a psychopathic killer who spent most of his thirty-odd years in jail. Written in a clipped, unembellished style, the book contains some of Mailer’s most urgent and compelling prose. Considered as a moral document, however, The Executioner’s Song is profoundly repulsive. For Mailer does not simply delve into and display the humanity of the tortured killer he wrote about: He offers him up as a kind of hero, a courageous “outsider” who deserves our sympathy as a Victim of Society and our respect as an implacable rebel. Gary Gilmore, he said, was “another major American protagonist,” a man who was “malignant at his worst and heroic at his best,” implacable in his desire for (his clinching virtue) “revenge upon the American system.”

After Gilmore had been executed, Mailer’s attention was captured by Jack Abbott, a violent convict and self-declared Communist who began writing Mailer long “existential” letters about life in prison. Mailer loved them. He helped Abbott have them published, first in The New York Review of Books and then as a book, called In the Belly of the Beast (1981). In his introduction, Mailer described Abbott as “an intellectual, a radical, a potential leader, a man obsessed with a vision of more elevated human relations in a better world that revolution could forge.” It seems clear that Mailer’s interest helped to expedite Abbott’s release from prison: “Culture,” Mailer declared at one point, “is worth a little risk.” Abbott had scarcely set foot in New York when he stabbed and killed Richard Adan, a twenty-two-year-old Cuban-American waiter. Mailer testified on Abbott’s behalf at the ensuing murder trial. Asked about Adan’s family at a press conference following his testimony, Mailer said: “I’m willing to gamble with a portion of society to save this man’s talent.” A reporter from The New York Post then asked “who he was willing to see sacrificed. Waiters? Cubans?” Questions to which Mailer had no response but bluster: “What are you all feeling so righteous about, may I ask?” Clearly, he did not know the answer to his own question.

Mailer’s flirtation with criminals like Gary Gilmore and Jack Abbott must be seen as the fulfillment of his celebration of the “psychopath” as an existential hero. In “The White Negro,” first published in Dissent in 1957, and reprinted in Advertisements for Myself, Mailer definitively articulated an ethic that underlies not only his own view of the world in all his later writings, but also the view that would inform the cultural revolution of the 1960s. In tone, “The White Negro” is a panoply of “existentialist” rant. In content, it is a manifesto on behalf of moral nihilism. Mailer speaks casually about “the totalitarian tissues of American society” and invokes “the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years.” The only authentic response to this dire situation, he says, is “to divorce oneself from society” and “to encourage the psychopath in oneself.” This is the strategy of “the hipster,” who has “absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and [who] for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro.” (Mailer’s stereotypical portrayal of blacks as beastlike sexual athletes is one of the many distasteful things about the essay.)

One is Hip or one is Square, … one is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.

The rest of “The White Negro” is a glorification of the hipster and his ethic of promiscuous sex, drug-taking, and criminal violence. The hipster, Mailer explained, is part of “an elite with the potential ruthlessness of an elite, and a language most adolescents can understand instinctively, for the hipster’s intense view of existence matches their experience and their desire to rebel.”

Mailer conjured up the image—it is what made the essay infamous—of eighteen-year-old hoodlums who “beat in the brains of a candy-store keeper.” For Mailer such behavior is acceptable, even laudable, because the psychopath, by murdering, demonstrates his “courage” and “purge his violence.” To the objection that it does not take much courage to kill someone older and weaker, Mailer explained that

one murders not only a weak fifty-year-old man but an institution as well, one violates private property, one enters into a new relation with the police and introduces a dangerous element into one’s life. The hoodlum is therefore daring the unknown, and so no matter how brutal the act, it is not altogether cowardly.

Mailer goes on to explain that “at bottom, the drama of the psychopath is that he seeks love.” Not, however, “love as the search for a mate, but love as the search for an orgasm more apocalyptic than the one which preceded it. Orgasm is his therapy—he knows at the seed of his being that good orgasm opens his possibilities and bad orgasm imprisons him.” This is one reason that the hipster adores jazz: “jazz,” Mailer tells us, “is orgasm, it is the music of orgasm, good orgasm and bad, and so it spoke across a nation.” The hipster’s quest “for absolute sexual freedom” entails the necessity of “becoming a sexual outlaw.”

It is not only sexual morality that the hipster discards.

Hip abdicates from any conventional moral responsibility because it would argue that the results of our actions are unforeseeable, and so we cannot know if we do good or bad… . The only Hip morality … is to do what one feels whenever and wherever it is possible, and … to be engaged in one primal battle: to open the limits of the possible for oneself, for oneself alone, because that is one’s need.

“The White Negro” adumbrates practically everything that went wrong with American society under the assault of left-wing radicalism in the 1960s, from the addiction to violence, drugs, pop music, and sexual polymorphism, to the moral idiocy, jejune anti-Americanism, and mindless glorification of narcissistic irresponsibility and extreme states of experience. It was, as David Horowitz notes in his autobiography Radical Son, “the seminal manifesto of New Left nihilism… . In New Left thinking, criminals were only ‘primitive rebels.’” Although many critics took issue with Mailer’s exoneration of violence, the real message of the essay—if it feels good, do it!—was just then beginning to sweep the country with irresistible force. “The White Negro,” along with some of Mailer’s other essays from the late 1950s, represented an important opening salvo in the war on convention, restraint, and traditional morality. This, not his literary accomplishment, was the ultimate secret of Mailer’s broad appeal. Mailer, as Joseph Epstein observed, “was one of the key men responsible for releasing the Dionysian strain in American life.” He promised his readers what they longed to hear: that ultimate, self-centered ecstasy was theirs for the taking. Mailer once said that he would “settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.” He did not make the revolution, but he assuredly became one of its most egregious abettors.

Edited November 12, 2007 by Kathy Beckett

[Tim Gratz]

Since it probably got lost in the above, I would like to repeat my question to Mr. Drago why he stated I must be either ignorant or an idiot (maybe one coulld even be both) for stating that Norman Mailer was a Castro-loving charter member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (since I have now shown he was).

[Guest Stephen Turner]

Charles you are welcome to box me in with others as accessories after the fact. That does not affect me. I do not feel reduced as an entity because you have pronounced me so. I have only me to answer to, and I know exactly what I believe. Kennedy did not just belong to you, he belonged to everyone. That you make the statements you do and feel you are entirely within your rights do to so, without concern for any position taken by the other side, IMO violates free speech, for you do not want your opponents to be allowed to respond. Ay, there's the rub.

Kathy

Kathy, you took the words off my keyboard.

[Dawn Meredith]

To Dawn and Kathleen,

Respecting the writings and logic of Mr. Oglesby, I find the statement attributed to him somewhat hard to believe.

Dawn, did he explain to you how the conspirators managed to recruit Margaret Richardson into their vast conspiracy?

Kathleen, how about you? Can you explain her participation?

Huh? Carl said Mailer wrote Oswald's Tale because he had IRS problems. No "vast conspiracy" was disussed. Just my disgust at Mailer's truncoat actions. And as for what you find hard to believe, frankly my dear

Dawn

[Ron Ecker]

Re Margaret Richardson, Bill Clinton is quoted in one of the books about him (it may be Stephanopoulos's) that he would use the power of his office "to help our friends and (expletive deleted) our enemies." As I recall, this was specifically in the context of using the IRS.

I don't think this was anything new with presidents. I remember Nixon on the Watergate tapes saying that one his enemies was going to have "damnable, damnable problems," presumably with his taxes.

I would therefore assume (though I do not know) that Margaret Richardson, like heads of the IRS before and after her, would do whatever she was told to do by the criminal in the White House. As a case in point, Clinton "enemy" Joe Farah, head of WorldNewsDaily, has claimed that the Clinton regime tried to break him through the IRS.

If Clinton saw Mailer as one of his "friends," and helped him with his tax problems as a result of Oswald's Tale, it's understandable on two counts. One, Clinton has been in bed with the CIA since at least the Mena, Arkansas drug-running days, and so would be more than willing to help promote the LHO lone nut theory. And two, Clinton and Mailer were apparently real soul mates, both being obsessed with sex and practitioners (one through knifing and one through rape) of violence against women.

Edited November 12, 2007 by Ron Ecker

[Kathleen Collins]

Re Margaret Richardson, Bill Clinton is quoted in one of the books about him (it may be Stephanopoulos's) that he would use the power of his office "to help our friends and (expletive deleted) our enemies." As I recall, this was specifically in the context of using the IRS.

I don't think this was anything new with presidents. I remember Nixon on the Watergate tapes saying that one his enemies was going to have "damnable, damnable problems," presumably with his taxes.

I would therefore assume (though I do not know) that Margaret Richardson, like heads of the IRS before and after her, would do whatever she was told to do by the criminal in the White House. As a case in point, Clinton "enemy" Joe Farah, head of WorldNewsDaily, has claimed that the Clinton regime tried to break him through the IRS.

If Clinton saw Mailer as one of his "friends," and helped him with his tax problems as a result of Oswald's Tale, it's understandable on two counts. One, Clinton has been in bed with the CIA since at least the Mena, Arkansas drug-running days, and so would be more than willing to help promote the LHO lone nut theory. And two, Clinton and Mailer were apparently real soul mates, both being obsessed with sex and practitioners (one through knifing and one through rape) of violence against women.

I find it a little difficult to believe that Clinton was involved with Mailer's tax problems, blackmailing him to write a book saying Oswald did it alone. But Geraldo Rivera has done as much on TV. Clinton admired Kennedy. According to someone presumably in a position to know, when Clinton took office, he called in chief military advisors and said, "I want to know 2 things. I want to know about the Kennedy Assassination and the existence of UFOs."

And the military chiefs responded, "You don't have high enough clearance."

I can't prove this conversation took place, but it came from someone I trusted who has to remain anonymous. This person also told me that during the Clinton years, there were 200 political murders, starting with Vince Foster. You know, a lot of strange suicides and such. I'm not saying Clinton was behind this, but they occurred during his Administration. And if the above conversation did occur (and why wouldn't it) with his top military advisors, Clinton really didn't have control over anything. Not even his paltry sex life.

The Presidents aren't the ones pushing the buttons.

Kathy Collins

[Kathleen Collins]

Bill, I think the most interesting information you posted probably belongs in the "Fair Play for Cuba Committee" thread rather than in the Norman Mailer thread. Do you agree? But it certainly merits discussion!

Can you imagine Mailer's shock, sitting at the bar, watching the coverage, when they released information about Oswald, that he was a commie and an active member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee? Mailer liked Kennedy very much, even loved him.

Kathy Collins

[Kathleen Collins]

From where I'm sitting, Kathy's tribute is on the money.

BK

Thanks, Bill. I really appreciate it.

Kathy Collins

[Ron Ecker]

I find it a little difficult to believe that Clinton was involved with Mailer's tax problems, blackmailing him to write a book saying Oswald did it alone.

It would not have been Clinton's idea, as I doubt that he was keeping tabs on Norman Mailer. Clinton would have simply passed along to the IRS any instructions or suggestions to relieve Mailer of his tax problems.

According to someone presumably in a position to know, when Clinton took office, he called in chief military advisors and said, "I want to know 2 things. I want to know about the Kennedy Assassination and the existence of UFOs."

And the military chiefs responded, "You don't have high enough clearance."

According to Web Hubbell, it was Hubbell whom Clinton told to find out for him who killed JFK and about UFOs, when Clinton gave Hubbell a high-ranking job at the State Dept. Hubbell eventually reported back that he couldn't find anything out.