RIP Norman Mailer.
When John Lennon died, part of mourning that loss for many musicians was listening to & playing his music.
I’ve been silent on this blog for the past week mainly because of Norman Mailer’s death. I’ve been reading & re-reading the work of his that hit me like a literary sledgehammer roughly a decade ago (he hit that same sensitive spot that Kerouac & Pink Floyd nailed when I was a teenager).
Mailer could be a difficult fellow, pugilistic, rude, brillaint, cranky, barely in control at times, and he pointedly tried to explore some of the darkest, nastiest, most brutal parts of a man’s heart. Many people dislike him for this.
However like watching a world-class speedskater, I frequently see Mailer doing things on the page that leave me as awed as watching Wotherspoon or Kramer on the ice.
His retrospective The Time of our Time, is specifically the “greatest hits album” I’ve been listening to.
Mailer was fascinated with boxing, was great friends with Muhammad Ali, and opened his retrospective with a selection describing another writer who dabbled in boxing, Hemmingway, getting the snot kicked out of him in the ring.
This is how he ended that bit, I think he meant this to describe himself as well-
Most men find their profoundest passion in looking for a way to escape their private and secret torture. It is not likely that Hemingway was a brave man who sought danger for the sake of the sensations it provided him.
What is more likely the truth of his long odyssey is that he struggled with his cowardice and against a secret lust to suicide all of his life, that his inner landscape was a nightmare, and he spent his nights wrestling with the gods.
It may even be that the final judgment on his work may come to the notion that what he failed to do was tragic, but what he accomplished was heroic, for it is possible he carried a weight of anxiety within him from day to day which would have suffocated any man smaller than himself.
There are two kinds of brave men. Those who are brave by the grace of nature, and those who are brave by an act of will.
Inspiration can come from many directions of one’s life, thanks Norman, for what I have felt & thought while reading your words.
Filed under: Quotes
I was driving my car when listening to NPR I heard of Norman Mailer’s death. I thought to myself, I wonder how many people in this country actually know of him… Glad you do. For, like Jazz musicians, his kind of talent is sometimes celebrated more abroad than in this, the land of the free.
I learned more about Utah and its people from reading Executioners Song than the 25 years spent living here.