http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/feb/28/recalling-a-friendship-with-mailer/
By Robert L. Pincus
February 28, 2010
Street art acquired a new level of legitimacy during the last
presidential election with the embrace of Shepard Fairey's Obama
images. Back in the 1970s, when graffiti artists were first "writing"
on subway cars and walls, precious few people regarded them as
artists. Most saw them as criminals. But one prominent writer argued
their case in an insightful, eloquent and sometimes soaringly poetic
essay for a book containing Jon Naar's photographs. The book,
published in 1974, was "The Faith of Graffiti" and the essay was by
Norman Mailer.
A new edition (It Books, $19.99) reminds just how good an essayist,
journalist and critic Mailer could be. Delving into the psychology of
this kind of artist, Mailer wrote: "At night, the walls of cars sit
there like the mechanical beast of omnibus possessed of soul. ...
What a presence. What a consecutive set of iron sleeping beasts down
all the corrals of the yard, and the graffiti writers stealthy as the
near-to-silent sound of their movements working up and down the lines
of cars, some darting in to squiggle a little toy of a name on twenty
cars their nerve has no larger surge others embarking on the
first or their hundred-and-first masterpiece, daring the full
enterprise of an hour of living with this tension after all the other
hours of waiting. ..."
No matter what your position on the moral efficacy of street art,
there's no denying the power of this prose. Mailer, who died in 2007,
always thought of himself as a novelist first, from the time of his
major critical and commercial success with his first novel, "The
Naked and the Dead," in 1948. And he was a pioneer in the transfer of
prose in the style of a novel to the world of journalism which
became known as New Journalism along with Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe,
Joan Didion and others. But it was probably as a public intellectual
and literary celebrity that he was best known, feuding with Gore
Vidal on television, running for mayor of New York or making a splash
with his coverage of the 1968 political convention, "Miami and the
Siege of Chicago" (and he covered nearly every major convention
thereafter, including the 1996 Republican one in San Diego).
Mailer could be pugnacious and obnoxiously macho, but he backed up
his celebrityhood with substance, as "The Faith of Graffiti" reveals.
His writings often displayed remarkable powers of observation about
the workings of American society, which is what made his coverage of
political conventions better than virtually anyone else's. He could
apply a novelist's observations about character, place and social
dynamics to political events. His greatest moment, in that arena, was
probably his 1967 book about a massive march against the Vietnam War
in the nation's capital, "The Armies of the Night," which carried the
great subtitle "History as a Novel, the Novel as History."
This hybrid of journalism, fiction, autobiography and history earned
him a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. In it, he turned
himself into a kind of comic hero of his nonfiction novel, writing of
himself in the third person (with a stated nod to the most famous
autobiography told in the third person, "The Education of Henry
Adams."). He depicted himself as a kind of wise fool, who was "an
egotist of the most startling misproportions, outrageously and often
unhappily self-assertive, yet in command of a detachment classic in
its severity."
"Armies" brings the people and the atmosphere of the anti-war
movement alive. It captures the spirit of the movement in all its
complexity, as a coalition of numerous personalities and points of
view and does so in a way no straightforward history could.
In "Armies" and elsewhere, Mailer generally depicted himself as a man
prone to excesses, a writer in the romantic mold who championed
radical individualism the source of his admiration for the street
artist. And critics and the mass media were in agreement on that,
too. But the relationship between a famous writer's image and the
person who lives day to day can be a complex thing, as a new memoir,
Dwayne Raymond's "Mornings With Mailer: Recollections of a
Friendship" (Harper Perennial, $13.99), shows us, in its charming and
poignant way.
In 2003, Mailer hired Raymond who, like the writer, was a longtime
resident of Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod to be a kind of
research and all-around assistant. Raymond was making his living
waiting tables, but had previously worked in various capacities as a
writer and editor. Mailer needed help with what turned out to be
voluminous research for his novel about the young Hitler. "The Castle
in the Forest." Published the year that Mailer died, it was his first
major work of fiction in more than 10 years and turned out to be one
of Mailer's best.
He became more than an assistant, cooking meals for Mailer and his
sixth wife, Norris Church Mailer, whom he married in 1980. And
Raymond became a close confidant of the family, embraced by Mailer's
nine children as well.
Raymond intermittently points to the gap between the Mailer he had
known about and the Mailer he came to know. He raises this issue in
relation to himself, since Raymond is openly gay and had read that
Mailer had antipathy toward gays. On this, he writes, "Norman was
anything but bigoted, and as far from homophobic as a man could be.
It forever amazed me that such untruths abut him prevail. If
anything, Norman was the consummate male because he had no
apprehension about gay men. … He was gentle about my relationship
with Thomas. …" And, Thomas, who is a carpenter, ends up doing work
for the Mailers, too.
From a firsthand observer like Raymond, you get a view of a writer
you simply don't from a more formal biography. There was the
obsessive nature of Mailer's research for a book. He had Raymond help
him track down hundreds of books on topics for "The Castle in the
Forest," from every aspect of Hitler's life to the care of honeybees.
Then, there was Mailer's happy marriage to Norris and his deep
attachment to all of his children (eight biological, one adopted).
A telling segment of the book details his decision to appear in TV's
"The Gilmore Girls" in an episode for which a part was written for
him, simply because it would help his son's career as an actor. When
the offer came, Raymond writes, "Norman wrestled with the idea for a
day of two, and finally agreed to do it, on the condition that his
son Stephen, a fine and accomplished actor, be cast in the part
opposite him, as a reporter interviewing 'Norman Mailer,' and that
the TV executives agree to pay Stephen as much as they paid Norman."
They agreed to his terms.
Mailer was quick to use his fame, as Raymond points out, if it would
help one of his children. He may have had an outsize ego, but the
Mailer that emerges from these pages isn't someone fixated on
himself. His last years seem to have been relatively mellow ones, too
perhaps happier ones than those when he was at the height of his
literary celebrity.
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Robert L. Pincus: (619) 293-1831; robert.pincus@uniontrib.com
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