The Naked and Dead Gospel According To The Executioner

Norman Mailer gave a lecture here last night (if the title of this post didn't make sense to you, just skip the rest of it). It was a slightly uncanny experience for me---Mailer gave a similar talk almost 50 years ago when my dad went to Yale, and the two of them stayed up drinking together all night. When I got a chance to talk to Mailer about it, he asked what class my dad was in. And when I told him 1959, Mailer immediately asked whether or not he was still alive. Typical Mailer no-bullshit-bullshit. (My dad, btw, is still alive, keyn yehiratzon.)

What to say about Mailer? He is the dual heir of Hemmingway and Lawrence, and even after all these years, and despite a very limited, um, vertical stature, Mailer is still a formidable presence. His voice is tough, deep, resonant Brooklyn, refined but not at all softened by education and "literariness." Hearing him read some of his writing---while there is still time to do so---is a genuine pleasure.

Okay, I could praise Mailer at length, but this site is not about langorous fellatio, so I'll be moving on to criticism. After denying that he had come to discuss politics, and spending a few minutes fishing for an audience question about politics, Mailer launched into a 10-minute-or-so rendition of a soon-to-be-published NYRB piece on the election---which means on the Iraq war. Mailer's theory? It was fought for the following reasons: 1) oil; 2) to allow white men to feel like they have big cocks.

Point 1) is part of a grand and paranoid conspiracy theory that Mailer's been nursing for years. Point 2) is psycho-twaddle---although I think there is a kind of contra-positive kernel of truth to it, namely that the Bush re-election strategy hinges, to some extent, on assuring the Heartland that John Kerry has too small and French a penis to be a fit commander-in-chief.

The real trouble with prickly old Algonquinists like Mailer is that they've spent a lifetime creating small, self-contained possible worlds (their novels), in which their own psycho-analytic instincts are the laws of nature. Add to that the fact that their worldviews crystallized at a time when assuming ~p whenever the government claimed p was a reasonable heuristic mechanism for getting at the truth, and you can see why Mailer has a great deal of difficulty distinguishing between those worlds in which he is omniscient and those in which he is not (the actual world falling into the latter category). And in his old age, he seems to have abandoned even the pretense of healthy empiricist inquiry, preferring instead to intuit the conditions of the external world---and the internal states of mind of key policymakers---from the comfort of his study.

As for the comic relief of the night, seated next to me throughout the speech was an older woman from somewhere in Eastern Europe, who began loudly clicking, hissing, and booing as soon as Mailer began speaking uncharitably about the president. Fortunately, we were far enough towards the back of the auditorium that Mailer and the majority of those present didn't hear. After Mailer concluded his remarks, this woman (referred to only as "Nadya" in today's YDN*) more or less accosted Mailer during the subsequent one-on-one time, literally shrieking at him for having the audacity to attack the president, since he had not personally survived Hitler and Stalin and therefore couldn't appreciate the greatness of America. Mailer yelled back, "I'm just as fucking Eastern European as you are," and looked ready to head-butt the woman the way he once did to Gore Vidal. When I left the auditorium about 15 minutes later, Nadya was outside, shrieking at a visibly uncomfortable bystander about the various evils of Mailer's speech, and its potential to corrupt the youth.

*The article in the YDN managed to butcher one of Mailer's best-delivered lines of the evening. The reporter, Yassmin Sadeghi, quoted Mailer as saying:

They impeached Clinton because he had an interaction with a lovely woman which was relatively modest, [but] Bush is screwing half of the world.

In reality, Mailer said:

"They impeached Clinton because he was visited by a lovely young woman for a relatively modest sexual transaction...."

I'm surely paraphrasing slightly (and that's because I'm not a reporter), but the joke was about a "relatively modest sexual transaction," not "an interaction...which was relatively modest." Don't these people take notes? Does the YDN frequently mangle quotations like this? Inquiring minds (at least mine) want to know.

UPDATE: For an extended critique of Mailer's (and Vidal's) approach to politics, read this.