Norman Mailer: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 3)
Norman Mailer
When I started Volume 3, I read from the back forward. The reason is simple: Norman Mailer. It didn't hurt that Salman Rushdie was second to last, but few in this world have the presence of Norman Mailer. Picasso did. Hemingway, too. And Mailer mentions Hemingway in the interview -- his horror of learning of Hemingway's death, the story he made up to shake away the image of suicide:
Mailer: I was truly aghast. A certain part of me has never really gotten over it. In a way, it was a huge warning. What he was saying is, Listen all you novelists out there. Get it straight: when you're a novelist you're entering on an extremely dangerous psychological journey, and it can blow up in your face.
Andrew O'Hagan: Did it compromise your sense of his courage?
Mailer: I hated to think that his death might do that. I came up with a thesis: Hemingway had learned early in life that the closer he came to daring death the healthier it was for him. He saw that as the great medicine, to dare to engage in a nearness to death. And so I had this notion that night after night when he was alone, after he said goodnight to Mary, Hemingway would go to his bedroom and he'd put his thumb on the shotgun trigger and put the barrel in his mouth and squeeze down on the trigger a little bit, and -- trembling, shaking -- he'd try to see how close he could come without having the thing go off. On the final night, he went too far. That to me made more sense than him just deciding to blow it all to bits. However, it's nothing but a theory. The fact of the matter is that Hemingway committed suicide.
Just as Mailer does here to Hemingway, I would like to approach Mailer and his work via his persona. Mailer discusses politics, broken friendships, and reincarnation, and the interviewer challenges him. But what caught my attention the most for now is the discussion of violence. It's a theme so powerful in Mailer's existence that it orchestrates not only a great deal of Mailer's literature but also how the larger reading public views his person. The interviewer knows it, and he pursues the topic at length, meandering from gossip to the role of literature:
Otto Dix, Wounded Soldier
Andrew O'Hagan: Do you have violent dreams?
Mailer: No, I don't. I put those dreams into the work.
AH: A capacity for violence clings to your concerns as a writer, and it clings equally to your reputation.
Mailer: The reputation is worse. The legend is much fatter than I am....
[Here Mailer and the interviewer discuss some examples of the legends, i.e., gossip, about Mailer's rage.]
AH: Are you sick of it?
Mailer: Oh, I'm beyond being sick of it, you know. You have to shrug.
AH: Yet your work has always been taken up with violence.
Mailer: The interest in violence is legitimate. I always thought it was one of the frontiers left to us as novelists. The great novelists of the nineteenth century dealt with love, they dealt with disappointment and love, the dealt with honesty, they dealt to some degree with corruption, they dealt with the forces of society as general abstract forces that could bend a person's will. Then came the twentieth century. Hemingway was fascinated with violence because his body was torn apart in the war. Violence was central to him. When I read Hemingway I was fascinated with the way he treated violence, but never satisfied.
AH: Was part of it your knowledge that man was living under the threat of mass violence?
Mailer: But that was the irony. That individual violence was taboo and yet we lived very seriously with notions of mass violence. There were perfectly serious people in both the Soviet Union and America in those years who spent their days and nights dreaming about how they could absolutely destroy the other country. I mean, they asked themselves how much damage would we have to suffer to destroy the Soviet Union totally. Those are the kind of calculations that were being made all the time.
AH: Let's keep to the line here. We come into this period when your generation of American novelists really begins to have a nuanced understanding of how violence exists both in our imaginations and in our societies. Please take that up.
Mailer: I was always alert to the animosity that the literary world felt when having to deal with violence. This was during a period when it wasn't at all certain we'd make it to the end of the century. We lived with that -- we still live with such uncertainty. At the same time, individual violence is considered very unpleasant and not to be talked about, and for me violent moments are always existential moments. They are crucial. One looks at them and says, Maybe I can do something terrific with this.
The year the interview was made, Mailer's novel about Hilter's childhood had been published, The Castle in the Forest (2007). He discussed the idea of continuing on with Hilter's adult life in order to take on the devil and evil. He died later that year. He had also just published On God. An Uncommon Conversation. Those two books, good and evil, and god and the devil are discussed at length in the interview.
Share on FacebookThe Naked and the Conflicted (New York Times)
A few weeks back, I posted about writing sex and violence. Sex is a topic I've been chewing on a lot lately. I find New York American publishing quite prudish these days.
Recently in the New York Times book section, Katie Roiphe drew a line in the sand between how a previous generation of male writers (Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Henry Miller) and the male writers of more recent vintage (Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen) write sex. The upshot of the argument seems to be that contemporary male writers have lost the drive and the spark, wallowing in a post-feminist anxiety rather than confronting rage and desire:
The younger writers are so self- conscious, so steeped in a certain kind of liberal education, that their characters can’t condone even their own sexual impulses; they are, in short, too cool for sex. Even the mildest display of male aggression is a sign of being overly hopeful, overly earnest or politically un toward. For a character to feel himself, even fleetingly, a conquering hero is somehow passé. More precisely, for a character to attach too much importance to sex, or aspiration to it, to believe that it might be a force that could change things, and possibly for the better, would be hopelessly retrograde. Passivity, a paralyzed sweetness, a deep ambivalence about sexual appetite, are somehow taken as signs of a complex and admirable inner life. These are writers in love with irony, with the literary possibility of self-consciousness so extreme it almost precludes the minimal abandon necessary for the sexual act itself, and in direct rebellion against the Roth, Updike and Bellow their college girlfriends denounced. (Recounting one such denunciation, David Foster Wallace says a friend called Updike “just a penis with a thesaurus”).
I, like Roiphe, am interesting in finding more sex -- more raw, masterfully written sex -- in mainstream and literary American books. I do wonder, however, why a writer like Steve Almond isn't mentioned in the article. He strikes me as part of this generation denounced as "boys too busy gazing at themselves in the mirror to think much about girls, boys lost in the beautiful vanity of 'I was warm and wanted her to be warm,' or the noble purity of being just a tiny bit repelled by the crude advances of the desiring world." His work would upset the thesis. And similar other straight male writers can be found, I'm sure.
I also worry about the quotes chosen for Roiphe's article. They are the one liners that capture our attention with blatant sexual mechanics, rather than the dramatic scenes that force us to confront something possibly eerie or forceful or contradictory within the characters or within ourselves about desire and the acts of sex. The quotes, in other words, don't do much for me, and without good examples, it's hard for me to nod along with Roiphe. I'm betting that this flaw has much to do with the limitations imposed upon the article by the New York Times. How often do such articles include lengthy quotations? Rarely. The reader's attention, you see, might be lost. Or the jaunty voice might be compromised. My point is that even here, in an article about sex in male fiction, sex is pretty flaccid. This makes me ask why the writer attacks only today's writers, rather than including an attack on the business of writing itself, such as the constraints put upon writers by news sources or by New York publishers afraid of pissing off their public with something too lewd and scary.
Update: Jump over to Conversational Reading to get Scott Esposito's take on Roiphe's essay.
Share on Facebook