Word: mailer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...forthcoming biography The Beatles to McGraw-Hill for $150,000. Harold Robbins gets $500,000 in advance for every novel he dictates. Kathleen Winsor (Forever Amber) got $500,000 from New American Library for the paperback rights to her 1965 slow-selling novel Wanderers Eastward, Wanderers West. Norman Mailer's contract with the same publisher guarantees him $450,000 apiece for his next two novels-plus a possible bonus...
Later, Saturday at the Pentagon, Mailer again confronts himself. With Lowell and MacDonald, he decides to get arrested. All he has to do is cross the military policy line and the deed is done. "Let's go," he says and walks over the line, not looking behind him. But MacDonald and Lowell stand still. They do not cross the line with Mailer: It was as if the air had changed, or light had altered; he felt immediately much more alive--yes, bathed in air--and yet disembodied from himself, as if indeed he were watching himself in a film where...
THAT kind of description is one that a writer can only write about himself. I saw Mailer cross that line that Saturday and walk up to an MP and get arrested and I took a picture of him. And I thought, "There is Norman Mailer getting arrested in his three-piece pin-striped suit. What a comfortable feeling it is to see Mailer. He makes everything seem so friendly. There is such solace in respectability." But Mailer, at the very same instant, was not feeling the way I had imagined him: The subject was not absolutely calm...
...journalist, I could only describe Mailer as I saw Mailer. But how relevant or how real is that judgment? What counts is how Mailer saw Mailer, for that is what Mailer really was at that moment as he was being arrested. This is the justification for this kind of personalized journalism. It is the answer to the doubt Mailer expresses in his piece: To write an intimate history of an event which places its focus on a central figure who is not central to the event, is to inspire immediate questions about the competence of the historian...
...Steps of the Pentagon" is a true nonfiction novel. Mailer is eminently a novelist and eminently a journalist--he is remarkably accurate at being both. The combination is a daring achievement. Novak and Evans or Knebel or Galbraith write novels based on contemporary journalistic events, but they are related to their own reality as science fiction is related to science--a fantastic but logical extension of reality. What Mailer achieves is a deep personalization of the event. And his success as a journalist can be attributed to his talent as a novelist. As he writes of himself...