Norman Mailer at Harvard

Now Mailer was often brusque himself, famous for that, but the architecture of his personality bore resemblance to some provincial cathedral which warring orders of the church might have designed separately over several centuries, the particular cathedral falling into the hands of one architect, then his enemy. (Mailer had not been married four times for nothing.) If he was on many an occasion brusque, he was also to himself at least so supersensitive to nuances of manner he sometimes suspected when in no modest mood Proust had lost a cell mate the day they were born in different bags. (Bag is of course used here to specify milieu and not the exceptional character of the mothers, Mme. Proust and Mrs. I. B. Mailer.) At any rate, boldness, attacks of shyness, rude assertion, and circumlocutions tortured as arthritic fingers working at lace, all took their turn with him, and these shuttlings of mood became the most pronounced in their resemblance to the banging and shunting of freight cars when he was with liberal academics.


I'll admit that part of me expected this 1967-fied, Armies of the Night Norman Mailer to show up at the First Church in Cambridge for the Harvard Book Store-sponsored leg of his latest book tour. That evaporated for a minute as the 84-year old writer hobbled to the stage on two canes. But even without a podium and a drink, Mailer was able to bring the feisty--while settled comfortably in an armchair, no less. It was difficult to hear him at first; the church, while beautiful and clean and open, had lousy acoustics for Old Man Voice with Crappy Microphone. But his voice got stronger as he got into the interview (the name of his interviewer escapes me right now, but it's his official biographer), and you could tell he still gets off on being the center of attention.

Just about all of the topics focused on his new book, The Castle in the Forest. Based on the given description of the book as a deeply imagined look at Hitler's early years, I'm not sure I'll pick it up--at one point, the interviewer mentioned that the first fifteen pages are essentially an SS officer talking about incest. Maybe I'll catch Mailer on the next novel. By the way: he mentioned that the book ends with a "To Be Continued?" First of all, risky game, tempting the calendar like that. Second, are real writers actually allowed to do that? Anyway, I'm not super keen on Hitlerian history, and it sounds like there's much Freudian stuff mixed in. So all WWII/mother obsessives, have at it, and let me know how it turns out.

When the floor opened up to questions, things took a much more current, political slant. I'm pretty sure "Don't you hate Bush?" has been a theme at 90% of the book events I've been to in the past year. But Mailer seemed game, and took whatever bait was thrown by offering opinions on the war, Hillary and Obama, etc. At one point he tried to goad the biographer guy into insulting him, just to generate God knows what kind of soundbite, but unfortunately the guy demurred. Probably out of respect or something. Lame. A Pulitzer winner asks you to insult him, you do it, dammit.

As Mailer is definitely an Endangered Author, I'm quite pleased to have gotten to listen to him while he's still in some kind of prime. It's not every day that you get to hear someone who's been fiercely literary, fiercely talented, and just plain fierce in his time.