Norman Mailer and FPCC

[John Geraghty]

I found an FBI file on Truman Capote on the FBI FOIA act page after reading some RFK material.

I found this

'A number of prominent people lent their names in an advertisement to Fair Play in its earlier days. These included playwrite, Truman Capote, novelist James Badwin, critic Kenneth Tynan, authors Norman Mailer and John Paul Sartre. They no longer support the group'

http://foia.fbi.gov/tcapote/capote_truman_pt01.pdf

Is it mentioned in Mailers 'Oswalds tale' about this previous connection of Mailers to FPCC. I just find it interesting.

John

[J. Raymond Carroll]

http://foia.fbi.gov/tcapote/capote_truman_pt01.pdf

Is it mentioned in Mailers 'Oswalds tale' about this previous connection of Mailers to FPCC. I just find it interesting.

John

I read Oswald's Tale very carefully and do not recall even a hint by Mailer that he himself was a supporter of FPCC. In the many interviews with Mailer about Lee Oswald that I have seen or read, there is no reference to Mailer's involvement with FPCC.

No one denies Mailer's talents as an imaginative writer, but his Oswald book reeks of intellectual dishonesty, with the FPCC issue being a glaring example. Mailer and all the other literati who had subscribed to the principles of FPCC showed their cowardice following the assassination when they all went and hid under the bed.

From Washington Post Book World April 10, 1994, Sunday, Final Edition

WHERE THE BOYS ARE

By Van Gosse

Verso. 270 pp. $ 59.95; paperback, $ 18.95

IT IS ODD and not a little perverse that just as Communist Cuba teeters on the edge of oblivion, a book should appear that splashes around in the dingy bath water of Castro's diminished charisma.

To be sure, Van Gosse does not admit that this is what he is doing in Where the Boys Are. (The peculiar title -- part of the author's sometimes kitschy attempt to tease political meanings out of pop culture -- comes from a long-forgotten novel and film.) Gosse says that he is writing a social and cultural history about the way that Fidel and fidelismo burst onto the American scene in the late '50s, seizing the national imagination and ultimately sparking the "renewed social and political struggle known as the sixties." Yet this is one of those solidarity-minded and awkwardly engage' books that emerges from the politicized university these days, and Castro -- revolutionary magus and Creator of the New Man -- is definitely the ghost in Gosse's machine....

It is also true that Castroism became mixed up with the euphoric homegrown existentialism of Norman Mailer and his lucubrations about White Negroes and Hipsters. Yet Gosse tends to confuse the inchoate yearnings of a few individuals with a potential mass sympathy. A few years ago members of Hollywood's self-defined political elite were serving up Daniel Ortega at their cocktail parties like an exotic hors d'oeuvre, but it would be wrong for a writer of the future to generalize from this fact that very many citizens supported the Sandinistas.

Gosse spends a good deal of time tracing the evolution of Fair Play for Cuba. For others, this tiny collection of unrequited liberals, church people trudging toward secular humanism, Beats, pacifists, socialists, etc. was a fringe group. For Gosse, it is the prefiguration of the new politics to come, a coalition which, when joined by remnants of the Old Left, formed "a pattern of fundamental, polycentric radicalism that has endured ever since." Fair Play might have been wrecked by its unfortunate association with Lee Harvey Oswald, but before leaving the scene it provided a blueprint for the New Left, a movement that Gosse insists throughout his book is not dead but only resting."

[John Geraghty]

It is interesting that Norman Mailer does not mention this in his book, I have not had the opportunity to read it yet, but I would assume that Oswalds ties to the FPCC would come up at some point. This must be deliberate, as I'm sure Mr. Mailer would recall his support for the group, especially seing as he gave his name to an advertisement for the group.

Intriguing.

John

[J. Raymond Carroll]

This must be deliberate, as I'm sure Mr. Mailer would recall his support for the group, especially seing as he gave his name to an advertisement for the group.

Intriguing.

John

The FPCC episode is one of a number of episodes from Mailer's life that he would prefer that we forget. When he writes about the occasional arguments between Lee Oswald and Marina, Mailer does not mention the time that he (Mailer) stabbed his wife. To prove his bravery, Mailer stabbed her in the back. Only his status as a celebrity writer saved him from the prison sentance that he deserved.

When Mailer passes judgement on Lee Oswald's character, he doesn't mention the time he lobbied for the release of convicted killer Jack Henry Abbot. In Mailer's judgement, Abbot had shown he was rehabilitated by his gift for writing. Shortly after his release, Abbot took a dagger and stabbed a young man to death in a restaurant in Greenwich Village. Everyone who knew the victim said he was a wonderful person, full of promise. Chalk up another one for Norman Mailer.

Now that the US Dollar is so weak, you can buy Oswald's Tale in hardcover from Strand Books for $5.95 plus another $5.95 to ship by Int'l Surface. Strand is the greatest bookstore in the U.S. If you order more than one book, the shipping charge is $2 per additional book.

http://www.strandbooks.com/qsearch/?quick=Oswald%27s+Tale

[Dawn Meredith]

[quote name='J. Raymond Carroll' date='Apr 1 2006, 05:00 PM' post='59194']

When Mailer passes judgement on Lee Oswald's character, he doesn't mention the time he lobbied for the release of convicted killer Jack Henry Abbot. In Mailer's judgement, Abbot had shown he was rehabilitated by his gift for writing. Shortly after his release, Abbot took a dagger and stabbed a young man to death in a restaurant in Greenwich Village. Everyone who knew the victim said he was a wonderful person, full of promise. Chalk up another one for Norman Mailer.

Mailer also conveniently forgets that he once hosted a huge fundraiser at his NY home to raise $ to keep HSCA going. I was fortunate to be one of the attendees and not one person there was of the LN persuasion. So years later when he went over to the dark side to vie for the Posner readership I was told that he'd done so due to IRS problems.

Immoral- consistent with stabbling his wife.

Dawn