Word: mailer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...hear, and fingers for the note in their report. It was as if the drink he took in now moved him millimeter from one hat into another. He would be driven yet to participate or keep the shame in his liver--the last place to store such emotion! --Norman Mailer, 'Miami Beach and Chicago...
Mellowed Nixon. Like many of the commentators on the left this year, Mailer is much more charitable toward the Republican Convention than the Democratic. He was surprised himself at his diminished hatred for Nixon. The man still suffered from slickness. "His ability to slide off the question and return with an answer is as implicit in the work of his jaws as the ability to bite a piece of meat." Yet, adds Mailer, adversity seems to have mellowed, even deepened him. "The new Nixon had finally acquired some of the dignity of the old athlete...
...Mailer felt a wrenching change in his own politics. It came to him when he was waiting for the Rev. Ralph Abernathy to show up for a press conference. "It was a simple emotion and very unpleasant to him," writes Mailer. "He was getting tired of Negroes and their rights. It was a miserable recognition, and on many a count, for if he felt even a hint this way, then what immeasurable tides of rage must be loose in America itself? He was so heartily sick of listening to the tyranny of soul music, so bored with Negroes triumphantly late...
Return of the WASP. Though no writer has spoken more disparagingly of the small-hearted WASPs of small-town America, Mailer begins to seem almost sympathetic toward them. "They had been a damned minority for too long, a huge indigestible boulder in the voluminous, ruminating government gut of every cow-like Democratic Administration. Perhaps the WASP had to come to power in order that he grow up, in order that he take the old primitive root of his life-giving philosophy-which required every man to go through battles, if the world would live, and every woman to bear...
...Happily, Mailer remains a minor character in his work. He indulged, it is true, in a bit of cop-baiting at the Democratic Convention and got into a scuffle with a hippie-hater. But it was mercifully brief and it is briefly told. Otherwise, his subject matter keeps him too occupied to find much time for self-dramatization. In the process, he may have become an uncertain friend of the left. To youth's search for spontaneity and sensual gratification, he offers a 45-year-old's caution: "The best things in life were most difficult to reach...