Word: mailer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...PRESIDENTIAL PAPERS by Norman Mailer. 310 pages. Putnam...
Those who sometimes wonder what happened to the American left, which disappeared in a cloud of vapidity round about the start of the Eisenhower years, should consider the case of Norman Mailer...
...point to be made is not that Mailer's image is a direct steal from Robert Louis Stevenson, who said it much better. The point to be made is that with this the editors of The New York Review of books have chosen to introduce their fourth issue. Inside the same issue is the exquisite Genet review by Lionel Abel which exemplifies everything that the Review can do. One is not convinced that the editors have learned to distinguish between them...
Abel brings in sexual detail when it is necessary, amusing, or relevant in discussing Genet. It often, but the sensation one has even during the most graphic descriptions of homosexuality is that Abel is involved in clean, thoughtful, important discussion. Mailer's subject (despite one very graphic seduction in Miss McCarthy's book) is intrinsically far less sexual than Abel's study of Genet. Mailer manages somehow to be at once less interesting and dirtier...
...suggesting that the future of The New York Review balances on a choice between these two critics. There will no doubt be reviews more able than Abel's and others even worse than Mailer's. The question is whether the Review can develop a nucleus of writers such as Abel, more concerned with their subject than with themselves...