17th
Mailer You Significant Bastard.
So I’ve started doing something I’ve put off for years and years.
New Years Day 2005, 4 in the morning, I’m leaving Divina Patagonia with the waitstaff and headed back to a waitress’s apartment accompanied by her live-in boyfriend (or roommate?) and my friend and future roommate Danielle. We all get rip-shit stoned and the waitress tells me - in Spanish - that she’s a mother, and waits entirely too long before she points to her plants on the balcony. On the bookshelf, translated into Spanish, is every single book by Norman Mailer. I’m in Buenos Aires for the first time, South America for the first time, in the southern hemisphere for the first time, and nowhere I’ve traveled (including the US) have I seen this many books by Norman Mailer. I think, “What the fuck is going on? Is Mailer all the rage down here???”
That Argentine’s bookshelf has been in my imagination for a long time. I finished Gay Talese’s first book in an evening and read in a NYT article that he was a prominent attendee of Norman Mailer’s Memorial at Carnegie Hall last week. I Googled “Talese Mailer” and pulled this quote from New York Magazine’s website (Talese’s comments at the Lapham Quarterly launch this past November):
“Mailer, Wolf, Halberstam. They didn’t read the Internet! What has the Internet done? Indoors! People are sitting indoors and watching screens that are the parameters of their world. I don’t watch that shit! I want to go out there and make eye contact, go out from here to there, trap people, I don’t mean trap them. I mean see them, grab them, look at their faces. Indoors!”
And so I thought, Talese is a hell of a stylist, I’ll give this Mailer a try. So I bought a copy of The Naked and the Dead. Here’s how the first chapter ends:
“At that instant, before his rage and pain had begun to operate, he had felt only a numb throbbing excitement and the knowledge that his life was changed to some degree and certain things would never be the same. He knew that again now.”
The emotions described amount to less than what you’d find in the most contrived writing. But the paragraph continues:
“Hennessey’s death had opened to Croft vistas of such omnipotence that he was afraid to consider it directly. All day the fact hovered about his head, tantalizing him with odd dreams and portents of power.”
And right there, in those “portents of power,” Mailer is softening his glare into a brief and honest smile, directed only at me; he may have me for a few more pages.