Word: mailers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Wasp group that Norman Mailer [Feb. 8] has attacked with such venom, may I say that I resent being lumped into a segment of society that is so widely diversified that it links the richest with the poorest and the sometimes not-so-saintly with the so-called very angelic crowd...
...While Mailer is not one to repeat himself. there is much here that we have seen before. There are the ritual reports on his bowels, liver, and marriages; his preoccupation with the small town mind; the constant dualities of vision: the stylistic brilliance, the quick substitutions of abstract for concrete; the sweeping flights, within single phrases, from the commonplace to the sublime (Hemingway's brains are "scattered now in every atmosphere"); metaphors that reach out and grasp every aspect of common experience; and the quick observations that outgun entire works of lesser writers (as when Frank McGee is described...
...READING Mailer and other writers with central visions of America, one questions their assertion that the country has a meaningful inner core, and one wonders whether it is not all chaotic egomania in which the sub-cults and the marginalia, the government and the governed, have been left to grow by themselves, to extend in any direction, restrained only by the dictates of inner logic. Tom Wolfe takes precisely this view as the underlying theme of his journalism. Mailer, however, bites at the poisoned artichoke with the unspoken premise that if the American psyche has been fragmented to this degree...
...universal catharsis is a short commodity lately. Everyone seems to end up in their own Edge City, and allowing Time magazine to push debauch one week and utopia the next without contradicting itself. Mailer suggested a few years ago that war may be the final tonic, that we should "buy a tract of land somewhere in Amazon . . . and throw in Marines and Seabeas and Air Force . . . invite them all, the Chinks and the Aussies, the Frogs and the Gooks and the Wogs . . . We'll have war games with real bullets and real flame throwers, real hot-wire correspondents...
...Mailer recognizes this dilemma and his works generate a heat of verbal sensuality and direct experience in answer to it. If others listen, he may well play a large role in moving literature from its current sterility into a romanticism of a much larger dimension than before, especially if he turns back to the novel. He has already exploded the journalistic form; hopefully he will again write serious fiction and give the novel its first claim to life since Pale Fire. Last spring Mailer said that it was his dream (as well as contract) to write that big novel...