Selected Letters of Norman Mailer by Norman Mailer

Author:Norman Mailer [Mailer, Norman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8609-9
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2014-12-01T16:00:00+00:00

Dear Don,

[.…]

Look, I’m going to give a little back to you. Your letter gave me a pain in the ass. As far as I’m concerned, you pulled the unforgivable insult, which is you credited me with a crude mind. If I have one pride left it is that my mind can strain a few nuances. I do not accuse you of selling your ass to women’s liberation, nor did I accuse you of selling your ass to Hollywood. I suggested that they were factors in the books, and that they were factors that were not necessarily working to the health of the book. If you think I have an animus against women and against the idea of featuring women as heroines, then I feel sorry for your grasp of the effete eastern intellectual’s mind. You’re beginning to think in such totalitarian matrixes as the worst of the ladies in women’s liberation.

What I was saying to you, and it wasn’t easy to say, is that you were using ideology as a crutch for the first time in your work, you were working on the fundamental notion that women are good, women deserve to be liberated, etc., etc. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with those ideas as social ideas or revolutionary ideas or even viable life ideas. It is just that they are no better or no worse, which is to say, therefore, awful when it comes to writing a good novel. One cannot write, in my belief, a good novel on a program. And Jody McKeegan got programmatic, which is what fucked it up. What you are upset about is you didn’t write as good a book as you should have written, and this has nothing to do with whether you sold out to Hollywood or I’ve sold out to journalism, both of which could unhappily prove correct. What it has to do with is you did not employ your deepest and best skills as a novelist. I’ve no bitch with that. There are years in our lives when we are not as good as we want to be. But it killed me that you started off with such a marvelous book and ended up trying to get by on fire, speed, and fashion. It’s all very well for you to say that the missing 20 years is recapitulated in the second half of the book, but for me it wasn’t, and if it wasn’t for me then it seems it won’t be for a good many other readers, and if you don’t like it, fuck it, Don, you asked me for my opinion and you got it.

[.…]

Dislike me if you wish, but realize one thing. I feel like I’m one of the first to have come across your talent, and one of the first to recognize it to some degree, and I think you’re an important novelist and I’m not happy you’re leaving the novel, and I am truly miserable with your crying about it. Face up, Don. Writing novels is ball-breaking activity for all of us, you and me too.

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