Word: mailer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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AFTERWORDS: NOVELISTS ON THEIR NOVELS, edited by Thomas McCormack. The anxiety, excitement and loneliness of confronting blank sheets of paper, sharply recalled and brightly written by 14 novelists, including Norman Mailer, Truman Capote and Louis Auchincloss...
...that sexual expression is primarily a social phenomenon. Far from asserting a primordial urge, it varies from culture to culture and from individual to individual. In Polynesia, what the West calls foreplay is epilogue, not prologue, to coitus. Gagnon notes that for some writers-among them Lawrence, Hemingway and Mailer-sex is as much a political as a procreative process; Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover struck a calculated blow against the morality of the time. To prostitutes, it is only a livelihood, and frequently no more erotic than punching a clock. Some clerical celibates abstain for life...
...imagines Vidal pressing these occasional pieces into hard covers, pronouncing them a book, then hurrying back to the new novel. The irony is that, like Norman Mailer and James Baldwin among others, Vidal is more "creative" at nonfiction than fiction. The tart, slight, often exquisite perceptions in this book-concentrated as sour fruit drops-are really his forte...
...Organization Man" syndrome of modern sociology, do have different spiritual centers even if their everyday behavior seems tightly organized and compulsively conformist. The simple fact that most of us have genes and cultural traits acquired somewhere else than in America necessitates a fence-straddling approach to national identity. Norman Mailer, among others, has tried to speak to the American side of us, i.e., to the side that we have acquired since getting off the boat. Philip Roth, on the other hand, has attempted to bring us back to the boat while we sit, stagnant, in America and has superbly evoked...
...fusion remains necessary, not only if Mailer or Roth would like to become the next "great American writer," but also because we all are in pursuit of roots and future at the same time. So the radical interpretation of history, whether in arts or in archives, must save us from solipsism at the same time as it delivers us from the social scientists...