Tom Smith

As I commented to my wife, Mailer must be “fixin to die” as he progresses in years, hence he concern with G-d and the devil. And I can appreciate this.

Mr. Mailer missed the best of them all, ie; “Saddam-Hussein-and-his-weapons-of mass-destruction”, repeated ad nauseum by Bush and every member of his administration for months prior to the invasion of Iraq

The immense ego of city people.

How do you conceive your own death, your own unimportance in all that man-created immensity, through all the marble vaults and brick ridges and the furnaces that lead to the market place? You always believe somehow that the world will end with your death. It is all more intense, more violent, more rutted than life anywhere else.

The Naked and the Dead, p. 328.

Gore Vidal said about himself, “I used to be known as a famous novelist – I didn’t change, but there’s no such thing anymore.” We don’t look to novelists to explain the world anymore, so it’s a nostalgic pleasure to watch throwbacks like Mailer and VIdal hurl their thunderbolts, as if anything a writer could say could change the world. As if there was any opinion important enough for one writer to punch aother writer in the face about. That’s the world I always wanted to live in, one in which engaged people still felt like they have the ability to affect history.

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes! But even though the world of podcasts and youtube and bloggity-blog-blogs has shattered that old world like a blast from the death star, I still hope, with my own novels, to carve out a place for myself on whatever tiny, soil-less asteroid remains of that old world. I am young enough to superficially belong to the new world, and just old enough for my heart to have been nurtured in the old world. Both have value, and I will always be fond of Mailer and (especially) Vidal for their works.

Indeed !

For CheeseMoose: Yeah. Mailer is a lion, literary and (at least when younger) physically. One can psychologize motives for his off-and-on pugnaciousness and his appetitious gallantry for women, but what we see in his male display is, well, strength. He can stand up to verbal and physical battle; he can take his shots ‘like a man’; he’ll admit his culpability, poor judgment, alcoholic mistakes — and learn from it all.

The celebs of today are as flimsy as any page of People Magazine. The young female singers are eaten alive by the adulation and ultimate discard. Paris Hilton is Pia Zadora with her own big money. I suppose the only gutsy one has been Madonna, but she’s been, frankly, from the start, a mediocrity. Andy Warhol’s ironic (?) “15 minutes of fame” jibe has become an ideal.

Mailer’s fame was earned.

For Lumiere: I would also be curious to ask M a few questions, not least what the meaning of his work meant for him. Look, the guy’s still writing! He’s still enlarging his ‘visual field’ or articulating the details.

His is an idiosyncratic search. Somewhere he said that we define our own categories. No one dips into Mailer for spiritual refreshment — too dainty a phrase. Yet, that’s where he’s angling, I’m convinced. He’s like an expanding universe, establishing new space through self-movement. And, conscious of his own movements, he questions what he’s doing and what it is that what he’s doing does to those around him.

If any writer/artist from the past 80 years is authentic, it’s Mailer. He’s just not sedate about it. He’s just not sanctimonious about it. He’s not founding or placating a school of thought as academic theorists do. He’s just not orthodox. He has called himself a ‘left conservative’ — a label that makes sense when you think it through, and you have to think it through.

It would be mistaken to discount the public Mailer simply as an egotist. What he’s done is shown us what courage it takes to make public the ideas we have that should be made public. In doing that, he (and we, if we braved it) exposes his privacy — the soft parts vulnerable to adversaries who can’t quite take him on frontally.

Thar ya go…

I would say that the initial purpose of art is to lift the spirit to a place where the “essential horrors and suffering” fail to penetrate.
A place where, finally, one could be possessed of a moral consciousness.

bwtfdik

In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.

I think it’s bad to talk about one’s present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

That, ultimately, may be what he’s best remembered for. It’s why I still read his work and still listen to him when he speaks. It’s a worthy, tragic quest. The Devouring Eye has multitudes of lambs willing to sacrifice themselves on its altar. Sacrificial Lions, not so many. Mailer’s great value to his time was his belief that he could take on the red eye and beat it. It devours him like it devours all the others, but lions like Mailer make more interesting meals than lambs like Britney Spears.

The term I would use for those phrases is authenticity.
People relate to each other base on shared experience, so being a media maven isn’t too relevant. The preoccupation with the artist as an identity proxy is the crux of the discussion.
People read the work and want to know the relationship between the artist and art work. I think the reason is that the work is made more ‘sticky’ by way of a consistency or cohesiveness with the artist’s outlook. I can’t imagine people ever reaching for a computer generated novel – mirror neurons?
As for morality:
People are full of conflict stemming from a universal human centricity. Artists, quite naturally, would be more sensitive to the oppressive conformity of society. The conflict dynamic releases itself in the work and outward at society – so there is a consistency or cohesiveness between the artist and the work based on conflict – morality isn’t necessarily in play regarding the artistic process.

My question for Mailer is a very personal question:
Looking at the totality of your work, what meaning do you derive from it – not what meaning WE should get from the work – what did it do for you?

There’s no question Mailer is a good publicist of his own work. He’s stated that more than once. It’s something of an extraneous point that relates more to book sales and to interesting interviews than his literary art. From the late 1950s, he realized — possibly following the example of French writers like Sartre, Malraux, and so on — that European intellectual engagement led to something like a fusion among author and writing and social environment. He just managed an American ’spin’ on it, the ‘advertisement’ factor, the guy on stage, the public risk-taker.

His artistry — what does he say on this site? — may rank among the ‘20′ who see themselves around the top. I don’t think that’s arrogant. Quite the opposite. Some folks (Mailer may be one) put Saul Bellow near the top. Frankly, I’ve never been able to connect there; it may just take me time. Kerouac is best seen as a humorist, a kid in class who does wrong things for the joy of it and who people like, but he’s a sad case of high-pitched enthusiasm running out of its own steam. Phillip Roth’s personae I can relate to, yet his style is a bit thin for me. I mentioned Updike before: he’s a master, very smart, with a light precision none of them has — very good.

But Mailer fills things. In his (younger) life, he may have been approximating some of the Hemingway bluster, but the style is antithetical — half-page sentences built off shrunken clauses qualifying personal appraisals of psychological states related to cosmic stakes. These are all-day meals — potlatches!

As to the morality of his positions — well, I can’t attest to the morality of my last week.

I do remember when the Abbott incident took place and the story was hot on TV. A camera caught Mailer — in a hallway, waiting for an elevator? — and there he was in an long, expensive, white coat, the perfect Victim for a TV camera to lay blame on.

He stared at that red eye. He stared back and said nothing as he moved his body quite naturally, but kept his stare right at the camera. He knew what he had done; he knew what Abbott had done. He knew part of the responsibility for the dead man was being morally laid at his feet.

But the quiet, accusing, red eye of that camera was there to take cheap shots. It had no moral standing whatsoever. And his glare bore witness to that. He was taking the heat. The camera and its implicitly condemnatory audience was feeling a thrill of entertainment.

We may get the sense that Mailer is a guy who’s been trying to carve out an image — not just as a shallow celebrity, but as a man whose ideas and actions must be taken into consideration. Some people in this thread prefer guys who don’t ‘try consciously to achieve and do so’, but merely ‘achieve through a natural grace that has no ulterior motive and no blame’.

Let me suggest that Mailer not only tried, but he succeeded.

Unlike others on this site I don’t consider Mailer anything special. He is a pretty good writer and I have enjoyed some of his books. As a human being he is not my cup of tea along with my stated reasons I also would say having 9 kids with 6 different wives is not any indication of a person with a solid moral foundation.

I once read a comment by some one who said when he was in college he asked one of his english profs if there were any writers he hated. He came up with 2 Theodore Dreisler, “Because he was such a terrible writer and Norman Mailer because he was such a terrible person”.

Some think because of Mailers literary proweess that his opinions on world events and life in general are to be valued and held high for all to behold.

My opinion is this: Mailer and other writers are no more likely than anyone else to have something intelligent to say.
They are just far more likely to say it.

???

It doesn’t surprise me to see the remark about his ‘religiosity’ since he helped me see the (relative) sense of an ‘existential god’, one who is stiving to make things good from the imperfections found about. Something like Tillich’s evolving god, not a pinned-down, written-for-all-time, rationalized-by-the-hierophants kind, but a creative force working with obstinate material.

Have loved reading his books for over 40 years, and I go back to them periodically. People don’t give enough credit to his Of A Fire On The Moon — remarkable not just as one finer extension of his ego dealing with matters of the time, but as a clean exposition of a scientific subject.

On occasion I’ve used passages from his work in my classrooms, and it’s clear from student reactions that his ideas and expressiveness have no less bite in 2007 than they had in 1957. That he can outrage some and make others laugh from surprise credits him ongoing.

NM’s prose style, which he deals with in some places, but never takes as full a credit as he should, is someone’s future ‘academic meal ticket’. It has strength, sensitivity, intellective subtlety, humor, and stamina — really, it cuts across field from those focused on the spareness of Hemingway (whose works I love as well). Updike has a delicacy and Pynchon an oddity. Mailer fills the room.

And for those who see him as misogynistic — clean off your glasses! Mailer has spent his life (insofar as I can see) engaging women — respecting their ability to supply the half of him he, as a man, cannot himself provide, just as he offers his half to them.

This man is a gem.

i had a teacher (italian) in design school who para-phrased that picasso comment a little diferently..”one must learn not to borrow but to steal”

the context of the conversation was that one must get to the root of something, grow from it and not just superficailly copy…thus advancing without mere mimicary. but then that same teacher would say, as a compliment and a criticism..you must learn to embrace banality.

what has this culture of “sampling” done to our youth?

take your point..steal everything..our age sometimes seems detached from a greater context…placeless..
as another teacher would say..know the difference between silence and muteness.

Picasso said: steal everything and make it your own.

“Make it your own” means: move it forward, progress
The post-modernist only hears: “steal everything”

////understand the relationship between art and artist.\\\
This is my POV of the public interest in an artist vs. the work.
People are objecting to Mailer making himself the work; the way in which he can get people interested in what he says.

You can be a wretch of a human, but by producing great art, be a great artist.
So we can agree:
///I admire his writing skills. I abhor his personal behaviour.\\\

You said:
///morally incompetent artist\\\

This is a different tack entirely and where there can be ambivalence.
Can Mailer be a morally incompetent human and produce morally competent art? If he produces morally competent art, he is potentially a morally competent artist.

We can’t know his exact motivations, even as he has openly expressed them, because we don’t know if he is playing to the crowd – conflating.

My understanding is that art comes from inner conflict – I think Mailer’s got that.

ironic..i have heard it said that much of literature’s power springs from discovering that one is not alone in the world.

like the quote though.

Mailer knew Abbott was a dangerous murderer who would likely re-offend. The proffesionals in the prison system affirmed this. It was Mailers arrogance and huberis, a belief that his form of art, his value system trumped the consequences of letting Abbott loose on society. I guess you could say the family of Richard Adan got a good kick in the butt. Unfortunately Richard Aden recieved more than a kick in the butt.

Couple this with Mailers reapeated stabbing of his wife, and I think I’m on pretty strong ground when I say Mailer is not a great human. Mailer took risk here also and escaped with a few weeks in a psyco ward. Most people would be happy with that punishment for attacking their spouse with a knife.

Your father sounds great. Forgive me if I do not hold the same opinion of mr Mailer.

I attribute that to Thomas Mann, but can anyone find where he said it?

People are trying to understand the relationship between art and artist. I first wanted to deny that one can separate the artist from the art, but one can separate the artist from the art.

Many literary artists eschew the autobiographical nature of their work. This makes the work obscure and lends it an obliqueness.
As a visual artist, I say that my imagery is exactly who I am. I honestly believe this to be the truth, but at the same time, I know ( or I hope) it makes the work interestingly obscure.

Human greatness might not be what one thinks it to be – not a list of sublime items. The two greatest living humans are people who posses the most flaws known to me, my parents.

My father has always stood by me at every goofball turn of my life. He had a knack for being able to give me an ultimatum at just the right moment. I asked him for money once in my life and he said NO. He said it in a way…. a kick in the butt….I got the message that I am alone in the world and if I was to succeed, it was going to be by standing on my own. The more important allegory behind the narrative NO: he knew I could succeed.

Mailer took a risk on Jack Henry Abbott and it was a kick in the butt for all of us to see. The more important allegory behind the narrative: the risk, the failure, and the continuing on in the Wittgenstein-ian stream of life.

In the narrative, one may be able to separate the art from the artist.
By way of allegory, art and artist are inextricably linked.

Many people see this artistic greatness and tend to couple it with greatness in morality. They idolize the talent that this person represents and extrapolate this into other dimmensions of the heroes being.

My definition of human greatness? That is a tough question. I would not equate artistic greatness with human greatness. I can on the one hand appreciate O.J. Simpsons great artistry on the football field but do I feel he is a great human? No I do not. The same holds true with Mailer I admire his writing skills. I abhor his personal behaviour.

Probably not the answer your looking for but I’m rushed for time this morning.