Norman Mailer at 100 by Robert J. Begiebing;

Author:Robert J. Begiebing;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)
Published: 2022-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

6

MAILER AND

WHITMAN

The Interview on Democracy in America

True liberty will only begin when Americans discover IT . . . IT being the deepest whole self of man, the self in wholeness, not idealistic halfness. . . . The wholeness of a man being his soul.

—D.H. LAWRENCE, Studies in Classic American Literature

* * *

AUTHOR’S NOTE: My goal is to present Whitman in his own words, allowing for occasional elisions, transitional phrases and sentences, and similar unobtrusive devices of coherence and clarity, so that modern readers might measure for themselves the currency and significance of our most Emersonian poet’s ideas on American democracy. The means to this goal of allowing Whitman to speak his own words is rooted in his prose, none more so than Democratic Vistas, his “Preface” to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, and the rendition of his late-life conversations with his Boswellian acolyte Horace Traubel, published, beginning in the early twentieth century, in nine volumes as With Walt Whitman in Camden.

Might Walt Whitman’s body of work, even as glimpsed through the limited portal I offer here, represent one of those potentially salutary “wisdom texts” you will notice referred to during the interview with Mailer? Readers decide for themselves, of course, just as they will decide as to the relevancy of Whitman to twenty-first-century America. As one contemplates that relevancy or lack of it, one might want to keep in mind that the hope for the progressive evolution of a culture is not necessarily limited to a sealed time capsule labeled “Nineteenth-Century Idealism.” Everyone who ever dissented, protested, or placed his or her body as “a counter friction to stop the machine,” in Thoreau’s formulation, in the quest for humane change from the injustices of the status quo has accepted, and today still does, the proposition that things can get better (not that they will but that they can).

Whitman’s interviewer here, Norman Mailer, I treat with shameless freedom. Mailer’s readers will note points of convergence between Mailer’s own ideas and body of work and Whitman’s side of the interview. Mailer’s role here, however, is to engage and provoke Whitman to speak on the many facets of our living American experience that either enlarge or diminish, or even despoil, the republic (still far from flawless) first given to us by the American Revolution and those subsequent documents that established the foundation of our ever-evolving democratic freedoms and responsibilities.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.