Word: mailer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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HERE is Norman Mailer, peeling the skin off his own body, scraping the underside of his skin with pin pricks. And here is Norman Mailer, mythmaking, raising himself to new celestialities, o you Sergius O'Shaugnessy...
...Mailer's book-length piece in this month's Harper's Magazine, "On the Steps of the Pentagon," is an orgy of self-flagellation and self-exaltation, with the one and the other glowing intertwined in a kind of frenzied chromosomal spindle. "The Steps of the Pentagon" is the ultimate realization of Mailer's one great talent--masturbation--the quintessence of self-love and self-debasement...
Amusedly saddened by his own middle-aged moral spread, Mailer moves with almost prissy distaste among the rabble. His sharpest barb is reserved for Poet-Polemicist Paul Goodman, who "looked like the sort of old con who had first gotten into trouble in the Y.M.C.A., and hadn't spoken to anyone since." Arrested himself during the opening hours of the Pentagon siege, Mailer winds up in the same paddy wagon with a tall, ferocious American Nazi, and stares him down in the inevitable Mailerian confrontation of wills. "You Jew bastard," shouts the Nazi. "Kraut pig!" replies Norman, only...
...Nations. The Atlantic allots an equal amount of space to an assessment of the national mood under the stress of the Viet Nam war. The onlooker: Freelancer Dan Wakefield, 35. While Mailer indulges in broad polemics, Wakefield prefers quiet irony. Roaming the U.S., or the "Supernation," for four months, he discovered within it two nations. Not the traditional rich and poor. Not even the generation gap, though that exists. But what might be called the organizational gap. The well-organized, Wakefield found, generally support the war in Viet Nam; the organizational dropouts...
...Norman Mailer is a novelist of essentially the same ail-American genre, but Mailer has developed a narcissistic devotion to his own quirks of mind; Kerouac a far less talented man, nevertheless compels more respect for his dogged and humble concern to tell a plain tale and to explain himself, rather than demonstrate the wickedness or folly of others. Nor is Kerouac capable of the brutal vulgarity of a writer such as James Jones, whose books strike anyone of any sensitivity as weary, stale, flat-and profitable...