Word: mailer
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...book that hardened my vague resolve to one day try my own writing hand. In a time when my household bills were not easily met, I thought nothing of buying multiple copies of that book to be thrust upon friends with commands that it be immediately read. Norman Mailer's early novels made their own strong impressions: I came to consider Mailer the American writer who best understood our society as it marched crazily through the present toward that outer rim falling away to fiery voids; he foresaw bits and pieces of tomorrow more readily than others. Fate would...
...comparison of the two, as men and artists, was inevitable. If Styron's writing was prettier, then Mailer's had more of blood and tissue in it. Mailer's work was barren of the personal grasses of childhood, while Styron poked in the dusts of his youthful past until one sensed that it haunted him in the night, blew grain-by-gain through his soul; sandpapered it. Mailer wrote of sex in terms of a fifteen-round fight in which red peppers were joyously thumbed into the other fellow's eyes: he saw fucking as vital confrontations. Styron wrote...
...Mailer who in a sense looked West, looked ahead, looked out to the horizon at that fiery outer rim: it was important to see who might fall off, and for what mad or ironic reasons, and in what style they would go over: screaming the sissy begging of pardons, or spitting and pissing into the flames? Styron looked South, looked back to where the land was burned out or spiritually polluted or lying fallow, and empty souls stood whispering their personal regrets: for him it was more important to consider what might have been than what might yet be. Mailer...
...Mailer in middle age continued to carry himself like a retired welterweight who might be thinking of a comeback, though he now pushed a bank clerk's belly. Age had performed interesting surgery on his face: cast him as a cab-driver, Chicago alderman, Irish cop, dart-champion in a workingman's pub, sly old convict; his face, like that of the late Everett Dirksen, told something of where he had been. Styron's face was a gentle mystery. Smooth for its forty-five years, it had of late come to look maybe a touch soft-trough so unblemished...
...flesh, deep in their eyes, Mailer was suspiciously aggressive where Styron was aggressively suspicious. Mailer hoped to get in the first blow; Styron hoped you would not steal his pocketbook. In private moods, one imagined, Mailer threw hot coals of rage where Styron brooded and sulked. One saw Styron in repose turning inward into himself, Mailer turning outward against the world; the first was sad and the second was angry...