Norman Mailer claimed he was âimprisoned with a visionâ which would âsettle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.â Unfortunately for Mailer, he was far too good a writer to ever do that.
The writers who have achieved such a ârevolutionâ have always produced poorly written and unrelentingly dull books. Marx and Hitler may have changed history, but âDas Kapitalâ and âMein Kampfâ will never be page turners, let alone literature.
As for Mailer, he wrote over 40 books, a dozen of which are important works of literature. No small feat when considering how often Mailer was reckless with his talents. Now Joseph Mantegna has directed a documentary film, called âNorman Mailer: The Americanâ, which examines the life of the great novelist, journalist, film director, and actor and promises to reveal the man behind these multiple lives, with unseen footage, and interviews from his wives, his children, his lovers, his enemies.
When Martin Amis unflatteringly compared Mailer and his legacy to the ruins of Ozymandiasâ two vast and trunkless legs of stone, languishing in the desert, Amis failed to appreciate how Percy Bysshe Shelleyâs poem had made the great King immortal. Mailerâs life and books donât need a Shelley, but itâs certainly about time someone assessed the great manâs life and work, and thankfully it looks like Joseph Mantegna has stepped up to the plate.
Marshall McLuhan would have turned 99 years old today, and his status as the god-daddy of media studies still seems pretty rock-solid. I wasnât previously aware of how often the Canadian theorist appeared on TV, and was especially unaware of his November 1967 duet with New York novelist Norman Mailer on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation show The Summer Way, bravely moderated by Ken Lefolii.
Recovered from recent treatment for a benign brain tumor he suffered while teaching in New York, McLuhan gamely tugs at a few of Mailerâs pretensions. Mailer is recently back from levitating the Pentagon with the Yippies, with the siege of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention in his future.
McLuhan pops off a bunch of gems, including:
The planet is no longer nature, itâs now the content of an artwork.
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Nature has ceased to existâŚit needs to be programmed.
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The environment is not visible, itâs informationâitâs electronic.
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The present is only faced by any generation by the artist.
Communications maven Michael Hintongoesspeculative on his heroâs televised meeting with the Jersey-raised boxer-novelist, but of course itâs best to just check the thing out yourself.
I have revered Gore Vidal my entire life. He’s a great writer and he’s a great American, perhaps THE great American gadfly amongst men of letters. The older he gets, the more spiteful he becomes about the state of this country. Interviews with Vidal in recent years fall into one of two categories, sometimes they’re terribly amusing, but alarming, other times just alarming. Lately, he’s really letting it rip. He’s 83, why should he pull any punches? In this long interview from London, a cranky Vidal holds forth on the Obama presidency with a jaundiced eye:
Gore Vidal is not only grieving for his own dead circle and his fading life, but for his country. At 83, he has lived through one third of the lifespan of the United States. If anyone incarnates the American century that has ended, it is him. He was America’s greatest essayist, one of its best-selling novelists and the wit at every party. He holidayed with the Kennedys, cruised for men with Tennessee Williams, was urged to run for Congress by Eleanor Roosevelt, co-wrote some of the most iconic Hollywood films, damned US foreign policy from within, sued Truman Capote, got fellated by Jack Kerouac, watched his cousin Al Gore get elected President and still lose the White House, and ?˘Ç¨Äú finally, bizarrely ?˘Ç¨Äú befriended and championed the Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVeigh.
Yet now, he says, it is clear the American experiment has been “a failure”. It was all for nothing. Soon the country will be ranked “somewhere between Brazil and Argentina, where it belongs.” The Empire will collapse militarily in Afghanistan; the nation will collapse internally when Obama is broken “by the madhouse” and the Chinese call in the country’s debts. A ruined United States will then be “the Yellow Man’s Burden”, and “they’ll have us running the coolie cars, or whatever it is they have in the way of transport”.
A Scotch is fetched for him as he is wheeled into the corner of the bar. “I was like everyone else when Obama was elected ?˘Ç¨Äú optimistic. Everything we had been saying about racial integration was vindicated,” he says, “but he’s incompetent. He will be defeated for re-election. It’s a pity because he’s the first intellectual president we’ve had in many years, but he can’t hack it. He’s not up to it. He’s overwhelmed. And who wouldn’t be? The United States is a madhouse. The country should be put away ?˘Ç¨Äú and we’re being told to go away. Nothing makes any sense.” The President “wants to be liked by everybody, and he thought all he had to do was talk reason. But remember ?˘Ç¨Äú the Republican Party is not a political party. It’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth. It’s full of hatred. You’re not going to get them aboard. Don’t even try. The only way to handle them is to terrify them. He’s too delicate for that.”
When he compares Obama to his old friend Jack Kennedy, he shakes his head. “He’s twice the intellectual that Jack was, but Jack knew the great world. Remember he spent a long time in the navy, losing ships. This kid [Obama] has never heard a gun fired in anger. He’s absolutely bowled over by generals, who tell him lies and he believes them. He hasn’t done anything. If you were faced with great problems in chemistry ?˘Ç¨Äú to find the perfect gas, to gas a population ?˘Ç¨Äú you won’t know for a long time whether it works. You have to go by what people tell you. He’s like that. He’s not ready for prime time and he’s getting a lot of prime time on his plate at once.”
Is there any hope? “Every sign I see is doom. But then people say” ?˘Ç¨Äú he adopts a whiny, nasal voice ?˘Ç¨Äú “‘Oh Mr Vidal, you’re so negative, can’t you say something nice about America? It’s a wonderful country, everybody wants to live here.’ Oh yes? When was the last time you saw a Norwegian with a green card who wanted to come here because of the health service? I’ll pay you if you can find one.”
Gore Vidal feuds with Norman Mailer on The Dick Cavett Show
The famous incident where Gore Vidal faced off against William F. Buckley during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Apparently calling someone you disagree with politically a Nazis obviously isn’t anything new!
