Have We Forgotten a Generation of Writers?

When Norman Mailer died on November 10, 2007 (a day before my 63rd birthday), I was teaching English to high school juniors at nearby Western Reserve Academy, a college-prep high school.

On Wednesday, the 14th, I gave a little talk about Mailer at our Morning Meeting (we had all-school assemblies on M-W-F mornings), and I was surprised, afterward, to learn that virtually no one had heard of him--even some very bright and well-educated faculty members.

Twelve years have ensued, and Mailer seems to have slipped even farther away from our cultural radar.

As have a lot of other writers whose work I read back in the day, writers who are joining Mailer in relative obscurity now. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, John Barth, Shirley Ann Grau, James Purdy, and many, many others. (I am not, of course, suggesting that no one reads or teaches these folks, but I am saying that the proverbial Person-on-the-Street is unlikely to have heard of them.)

A lot of it, I know, is natural. New generations have arrived, have attached themselves to new generations of writers. And those writers, I believe, represent a far more generous sample of our humanity and talent than was the case in my day when most were male and white--not that white male writers are irrelevant (I love the work of current writers Richard Ford, Richard Russo, Ian McEwan, and so many others).

But among the best novelists today, I think, are women--Elizabeth Strout, Yaa Gyasi, Kate Atkinson, Nicole Krauss, Jennifer Egan, Rachel Cusk--and so many others. And writers from minority groups are also finding publishers eager to distribute their work. It's been a great liberation, and the Readers of the World are the great beneficiaries.

But ... those Old White Dudes are not irrelevant. Far from it. And we should not be in such a hurry to forget them.

I thought I'd end here with the remarks I made about Mailer back on that November day in 2007:

Norman Mailer, R.I.P.

            Let me tell you a story …

            It’s not my story—I didn’t write it—but I’ve always liked it, and it’s not very long … so here goes …

            A man and a woman are walking along a city street.  They have been lovers.  And now they are breaking up.  Here’s the first sentence in the story: The writer was having a fight with his young lady.  They don’t walk far before she says, “I’m sick and tired of you being so superior.  What do you have to be superior about?”  The writer quietly disagrees.  Later—even more angry—she says he’s like a mummy, all wrapped up in himself.  As her anger deepens—and as her accusations become more bitter—he begins to feel uneasy, not about her anger (though that does bother him), but about the notebook in his pocket.  He had just thought of an idea to put into his notebook, and it made him anxious to think that if he did not remove his notebook from his vest pocket and jot down the thought, he was likely to forget it.  He tries to resist the impulse.  But can’t.  He stops in the street, pulls out the notebook, starts writing an idea for a story, a story about a writer breaking up with his girlfriend.  The young woman, seeing him, begins to cry.  “Why, you’re nothing but a notebook,” she shrieked, and ran away from him down the street, her high heels mocking her misery in their bright tattoo upon the sidewalk.  He stares after her.  Soon she’s a block away.  He starts jogging after her, yelling that he can explain.  And as he ran the notebook jiggled warmly against his side, a puppy of a playmate, always faithful, always affectionate.

            Norman Mailer published that story in 1951.  He was twenty-eight years old; I was seven.  He would publish much, much more over the years—novels, long works of nonfiction, essays, screenplays, poems, plays … you name it, Mailer probably wrote it.  He made films.  Ran for Mayor of New York (he lost).  Married four times.  Sired nine children.  Carried on feuds with some of the great names in American letters.  He won the Pulitzer Prize.  He won the National Book Award.  And countless other literary honors.  He never won the Nobel Prize, and that irked him, for Norman Mailer had an ego, a titanic ego that constantly crashed into icebergs of all sorts over the years.  He hit those icebergs, head on.  But he never sank.

            Here are some of his best-known books.  … [I SHOWED SOME FROM MY COLLECTION]

            His most recent novel is this one. [A Castle in the Forest, 2007] It’s a story about Hitler that came out earlier this year.  It’s been tottering atop the Tower-of-Pisan pile beside my bed, but I’ve not read it.  Not yet.  I’d read that he was sick.  And I had a feeling this would be the last novel he would ever write.  And I wanted to save it.  To savor it.  To remember it.

            Norman Mailer died last weekend.  He was 84 years old.  He was one of the heroes of my youth.  Several times, I have dreamed—actually dreamed, at night—of meeting him.  It never happened.

            I do have his signature on this book, The Time of Our Time [show it], a collection of pieces he published back in  1998.  It will have to do.  His name scrawled on the title page.

            So as I think this morning about that little story “The Notebook,” a story now more than a half-century old, I think how fitting a way it is to remember him.  Norman Mailer charged through his life, barging uninvited into rooms, banging into polite people, making rude noises and ruder gestures, taking swings at enemies, celebrating, loving ferociously, enjoying every second of his life.  Standing up for Civil Rights.  Protesting the Vietnam War.  Going to jail for his beliefs.

            And we should be grateful—all of us—that through all those years he carried that notebook with him, and even at the damnedest, most irritating times, he pulled it out.  And took his pen, whose ink mixed acid and fire and blood and even sometimes poison, and wrote those words that sometimes made us shriek and cry and run away.  But could also comfort and agitate and shame and inspire and chide and enrage.  And even make us weep.

            Which is exactly what I did last weekend when I read that he was gone.