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ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF (532 pp.) -Norman Mailer-Putnam...
Like other writers struck by early success, Novelist Norman Mailer, 36, is fond of discussing his talent, often in terms that make it sound like a prize begonia. "America is a cruel soil for talent," he writes. "It stunts it, blights it, uproots it, or overheats it with cheap fertilizer." In this book, Author Mailer (The Naked and the Dead) sets aside the arduous business of novel writing and takes up horticulture. His first book in four years is a rock garden of schoolboy short stories, failed poems, fragments of plays, snippings from old novels and lumps from...
Elsewhere in this collection, Mailer speculates coyly about what future Ph.D. candidates will say of him, shoots back, wadded into spitballs, most of the unfavorable reviews he has received, and reacts with the fury of an upstaged diva to a photograph he considers ill-chosen. In effect, what Mailer has produced is a record of an artistic crackup. By the early 1950s the spare, controlled prose of The Naked and the Dead had turned sour and turgid, and its author was drifting in a haze of liquor, seconal and marijuana. Mailer has stopped using "the minor drugs," he says (although...
...Naked and the Dead (RKO Tele-radio; Warner), to those who never read Norman Mailer's mammoth 1948 war novel, will seem a grim, visually gripping film. It is one of Hollywood's more rugged excursions so far into neorealism. The naughty words "hell" and "damn" are sprinkled like matinee popcorn through the script, and enough torsos are dismembered to satisfy Jack the Ripper. But those who read Author Mailer's bestseller will miss its biting honesty and unrelenting conclusion...
...single voice as its very own. In so complex a world, no one voice, or even a chorus of voices, would be enough. Rather than take on any untried creative artists, the young prefer to read what the New Critics have to say about the artists of yesterday. Mailer and Jones have had their brief fling, such as it was. Colin Wilson never achieved any vogue at all. There is no cult of the "beat generation," and the San Francisco literary renaissance has scarcely begun to penetrate the ivy. "Maybe," wrote Princeton's Carlos Baker recently, "this...