Word: mailer
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...Bech's works as well as criticism of them. Travel Light, Bech's highly praised first novel, seems to carry strains of Kerouac's On the Road and Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March. Brother Pig, a novella, hints ever so slightly of Mailer's stylishly oblique and politically muddled Barbary Shore ("Puzzling Porky" is Updike's title for the TIME review). When the Saints, a collection of essays and sketches of the kind that often get published from the sheer momentum of a downsliding career, contains such elegies of West Side...
...away and his insides pour out. It is at once the film's most repulsive and instructive moment. From that time Yossarian cannot accept the escape bargain his superiors finally offer him: "All you have to do is like us." He cannot betray his fellow victims of what Norman Mailer called "exquisite totalitarianism." It is then that the rabbit must run or perish...
Every autumn in the U.S., faithful as falling leaves, rumors fly that either Norman Mailer or W.H. Auden has won the Nobel Prize. It is hard to know why. The old gentlemen of Stockholm who award the prize have a way of bypassing big and/or distinguished names in favor of astounding alternatives. But not since Icelander Halldór Laxness was plucked from above the tree line in 1955 has there been such total befuddlement as greeted the 1968 award to Novelist Yasunari Kawabata...
...Fiascoes. The crowning debacle, and the funniest bit in the book, was Mailer and Breslin's appearance on their own TV show. It cost them $3,400 and untold votes. For starters, Mailer insisted on a live production with no rehearsal and no notes. To add to the studio men's panic at such conditions, he slipped out for a few drinks ten minutes before air time. During the broadcast, Breslin forgot the punch line to an otherwise effective speech. Then Mailer, contrary to instructions, leaped out of his seat and began to roam the set while...
...this and other fiascoes, Flaherty writes: "The things I cherished in Mailer as a writer−his daring, his unpredictability, his gambling, and his bluffing−were the very things that made me want to strangle him as a politician. It was a revelation that returned my sanity." Flaherty might have got it back a lot sooner had he realized from the start that for someone like Mailer New York is a great place to campaign in, but you wouldn't want to win there...