Inaugural conference of the Norman Mailer Society, Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge, November 1, 2003, 10:45 a.m. Panel 1 of 3: Christopher Napolitano, Carol Polsgrove, and Gay Talese; Barbara Probst Solomon, moderator. Transcribed from the session recordings; the Society’s records hold the transcripts. Gaps the transcriber couldn’t hear are marked as they were then. Bios of the speakers are on the conference page.
The transcripts don’t record the order of the three talks; they appear here with Carol Polsgrove first, as her opening suggests, and Gay Talese, who answers her, last.
Polsgrove: I’m afraid they’ll say everything I have to say and I won’t have anything left. Uh, if you know the work the that I’ve done, I’ve been interested in how writers are socially constructed, you know, it takes a village to raise a child; it takes a city to raise a writer. And there are lots of people who come into play – editors, for instance. If an editor won’t publish your work, well, you can keep writing but it’s not quite the same, is it? Magazines played a large role, I think, in making the writer that we know as Norman Mailer. I was re-reading some his magazine work before I came and there’s just a heck of a lot of it. They, they played that role, not only by providing him money – sometimes extremely good money – not only by publishing it and giving him a forum but by making him known to a very large swath of the American public. If you think back on some of the major pieces –Superman Comes To The Supermarket for Esquire, 1960. For Harpers – well, ‘61. For Harpers – those pieces that came Miami and the Siege of Chicago. The Armies of the Night, before that. For Life magazine, the articles on the astronauts that became A Fire On The Moon. Then there was his long boxing match with the feminist movement – The Prisoner of Sex - which appeared in Harpers. The question I’d like to pose in this opening round is why were these magazines so interested in Norman Mailer? His novels had not really been doing well when he started writing for Esquire. He had a reputation for being quarrelsome. He turned out to write much too much for most magazines. And he put dirty words in, which in the ’60s at least was not yet okay. So what his appeal then to a magazine famous for its cartoons – Esquire- or a sincere but stodgy magazine like Harpers or America’s favorite coffee table book, Life. I think the simple answer is that these magazines were tired of being what they were. They were faced in the 1960s with the challenge of television and with a culture that had gotten very rowdy. And the magazines, in turn, were trying to wake themselves up before they died, which in the case of Life they did anyway. They were engaged in deliberate self-transformation and they were looking for writers who would help them to do that job. Mailer had attracted attention in the late ’50s by writing The White Negro for Dissent and publishing Advertisements For Myself. So here these magazine editors could see what the man who could break through the stale conventions of magazine writing. At Esquire, two young men, Clay Felker and Harold Hayes, were duking it out for the top job. The office was left empty so they could say that it would be there for whoever won. Clay Felker is the one who brought Mailer into the magazine with the assignment to cover the 60 convention where John F. Kennedy appeared. And Harold Hayes at first thought it was really a dumb idea. But when the piece came in, he could see that it was bold and forceful (he said this later) and that it stretched the boundaries of the magazine. Later, when he was talking about an Esquire column which Mailer wrote for about a year, Hayes, who was the ultimate victor in that contest with Felker, said of Mailer, “He had this audacity to address the President of the United States directly from our pages. Thus, we acquired that audacity. Most of the time when he shouted, people listened. And to hear him they had to read Esquire.” Mailer, in fact, seemed a natural for Esquire at that moment in time when it was being very iconoclastic. He seems far less natural for Harpers, as it had been under John Fisher. I don’t know if there’s anyone in the room who remembers John Fisher – he was a sincere, steady, but mostly conventional editor, more of a 50s sort of guy, it seems to me. Fisher had hired a new editor, however – I’m sure you all know him – Willie Morris from Texas – no, not from Texas – from Mississippi by way of Texas. And he had his eye on Mailer. He tried to get him into Harpers and failed with an excerpt from Cannibals and Christians. He argued to the other editors without success that Mailer quote was attuned to America, and people paid attention to him, even when they disagreed with him. Then in 1967 after Mailer went on the anti-war march on the Pentagon, Morris agreed to pay Mailer. By this time he was running the show at Harpers. He agreed to pay him $10,000 which was a really whopping sum for Harpers magazine – it was a really whopping sum for Esquire magazine. It was a lot of money. And Harpers ran all 90,000 words that Mailer wrote – it was the longest magazine piece in the history of magazines. Longer even than Hiroshima by John Hersey. It became – it was The Steps Of The Pentagon and it became Armies Of The Night. Willie Morris would say in his recent memoir, New York Days, “It opened radical new ground in subject matter and in uses of the language in popular national journalism.” Then Mailer covered the ‘68 conventions for Harpers. And that reporting became his classic Miami and the Siege of Chicago and then The Prisoner of Sex which he took on the women’s movement and ended Willie Morris’s career as an editor. In just a blink of the eye, the company headquarters in Minneapolis had called him in and he was out, I think, within two weeks’ time. He resigned, but he could see the writing on the wall. One of the company men said – who are you editing this magazine for – a bunch of hippies? If Mailer was a stretch for Harpers and a stretch Harpers was ultimately not able to make over the long run, consider Life which was a cheerleader for American culture. It wasn’t wholly a cheerleader, it did some very good stuff on the civil rights movement, but it was the magazine for all of us, all of us, but it was on its last leg and it, too, sought new energy from Normal Mailer. If I were Mailer, I’d come up with a really good metaphor, but I’m not. Assigning him to write a series on the astronauts. It was not his best work, I think, for a variety of reasons but I can’t help but think that the challenge of writing for Life’s vast, amorphous audience wasn’t one of those reasons. So to the question – why did this magazine turn to Mailer? – I would say the man did not mind pissing in the wind, he opened the door for inventive journalism. He made space for other inventive journalists like Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson – this before we called them journalists. That’s what happens with magazine, Harold Hayes once said. One writer stretches the limit of what can be done, raises the bar and makes room for other writers to do the same. So if the magazines in the ’60s made Mailer what he was, Mailer made magazines in the 60s what they were – it was a glorious symbiosis.
Napolitano: I have a few small thoughts and hopefully it won’t take much time eating them up, or spitting them out, I should say. The basic gist is just that Norman Mailer affected Playboy and in some small way Playboy has affected Norman. In the 60s when Norman was associated with Esquire and the other magazines, Playboy has always been an odd magazine. We had this [unintelligible], naked girlies and then the written words. Hopefully good words, hopefully by people you’d want to read. But there’s always that tension there. It’s a sales device, really. You bring everybody into the big tent with the centerfold and you get them to stay by featuring the best writers you can. It – looking back at Norman’s contributions or participation in the magazine, it’s interesting to see because I always think of – I’ve worked there for 15 years – so I think of it as a sort of static place and the fact of the matter is, it hasn’t been. The formula has been there but it changed somewhat. So whether we were trying to slip him in in some way or we couldn’t land him for certain bits of writing, his participation in the 60s, the bulk of it was something called the Playboy panel. And he did write features for Playboy. I think that the reason why he appeared in so many Playboy panels is that that’s kind of the way that Playboy thought. And that was the reception, too, the way I think the people in general thought, it was a mainstream magazine and it’s interesting to see how that’s kind of changed. What were the subjects of these Playboy panels – sex and censorship in literature and the arts – that’s a natural for – the womanization of America – that’s a Norman idea. He spoke much about that and also about the technological society. For a guy like me, coming very late to the party, you see, I think of Norman Mailer as, forgive me, as an establishment figure, all right? And that’s ridiculous – he’s anything but. And the ideas that he was laying out in these long-form panels, these Q&A’s – just to give you a type of – I’ll go ahead – it was the segregation of magazines from then till now, [unintelligible]. Just using it as a very objective thing. It was not uncommon for us to go 20,000 or 30,000 words. Not quite the 90 that he did for Harpers. These days we sit around as editors killing ourselves to try to get something from 8,000 words down to 7, you know? I mean, I don’t know – a lot of it is economics, paper costs money and we try to cram a lot in. There is this sneaky suspicion that people have short attention spans and we’re contributing to it. So nobody’s trying to reverse the tide, I’m afraid. But the idea that you would have, for me, this is profound, maybe you’ll just nod in agreement and kind of laugh at me but the idea a mainstream magazine such as Playboy, read by up to 10 million people, still is every month, would discuss such lofty ideas. And when you hear, when you see Norman’s words, Mr. Mailer’s words in these panels, the ideas that he is expressing, you have to stop and take a breath after every other sentence, just to contemplate the scope of what he’s saying. And that’s very unusual, particularly for today and perhaps not as unusual for the 60s. So you had him participating in these kinds of things – he did a few sort of bits of writing for us and then came the 70s and Playboy was changing a little bit where we were actually getting up out of the armchair and engaging the world a little bit. I think the world had settled and the issues of race weren’t as prominent, the cold war wasn’t prominent – these were things that Norman would go on about eloquently in these panels. It’s just astounding to go back and read them now. And so he, as Playboy became more engaged with what was really happening, Playboy really didn’t take note of the hippies out there. We went from Frank Sinatra to disco pretty quickly. The two big things that we can be proud of at Playboy is that the editor – my old boss, Arthur Kretchmer who is a great guy, sent Norman to Zaire to cover the Muhammad Ali fight with George Foreman which he wrote about for Playboy. I don’t think anybody knew the scope or the size of the event. We felt that Foreman would knock out Ali and it would be a short-reported sports story. It was anything but. Norman went back and forth to Africa twice, caught a little bug for his stomach and in the course of waiting and in the course of flying back and forth to Africa, he went on about race in Africa, race in America, the nature of Muhammad Ali, the nature of George Foreman. We published two 30,000 word pieces back-to-back, again, another unusual publishing event that doesn’t really happen today. That was one, that was great. And then we also in the 70s had the good fortune of publishing an interview with Gary Gilmore that was conducted by Lawrence Schiller and, I believe, Barry Farrell? And it just reminds me of the focus that the nation was spending on this particular case. And then later, spent I think the enormous sum of $100,000 to do a 3-part excerpt. Again, it was around 25,000 words each of The Executioner’s Song. And we really, you know, the lure of Playboy – these were two major events. Playboy has never been better than when we were doing those types of things. In the 80s we ran excerpts and pieces of fiction by Mailer which is another kind of like shift that we would go from panels to participatory journalism to fiction as the – and I think as a sense of Mailer changed in the country so our sense the magazine changed and the magazine’s goals were different. Everything was starting to move faster. Not only were we competing with TV, we were competing with cable TV and VCRs and things were starting to get messy. And as I look back at this, the thing that strikes me is that somebody of my generation, you think of Mr. Mailer as a writer, perhaps as a novelist, and with the passion of the newly-converted, I would say he’s so much more than that. We’re talking about somebody akin to Leonardo DaVinci – we all know the Last Supper – but you looked around and noticed the thing that he was engaged in the 50s and the 60s and the 70s – the way his mind works. So, we’ve come full circle, we’ve asked him to write something for our 50th anniversary and like the sort of fool I am, around the fourth read, I got more and more dumbstruck by the talent of this guy. He plays with a different set of Lego than any other writer that was ever brought to the table. It’s just amazing. As an editor, you just have to run it, there’s nothing really much that you can do with it, because not only is his unique writing style very apparent and working and fresh and imaginative, but he’s also thinking at a metaphysical level that you just don’t see. I grew up with TV and whatever, I got to contemplate in high school and college a little bit and then we gladly forgot. And so it’s a re-education and hopefully, we’ve come full circle and we will kind of use this to impress the people who do pick up this issue, chiefly our readers because I think that they are going to encounter something that they have never seen before – certainly not in this magazine in 10 or 15 years. The other thing that Arthur wanted me to make sure I mentioned is that Playboy is self-promoting and we are delusional. We really are – it’s just that what happens, you kind of like get a little isolated, people pick on you a little bit and you just get this sort of like syndrome of knowing everything about this cult. But one of the things that Hef will say and the magazine will repeat is that, you know, Playboy started the sexual revolution, and responsible for all the good things that have ever come down the pike. Got some men and women and everything , we fixed that dilemma right there. Arthur, who’s much wiser and ran the magazine for about 30 years wanted me to point out that The Time For Time was for him, for a guy who grow up in the 50s, the most revelatory thing he could discover about sex for his generation, and these were the men who went on to liberate the country – but they were liberated by Norman. For Arthur, he said, it was our group of people, my generation of men where the woman was the dumb shoe, we never thought that she could participate in her own pleasure and that we might have to do something about that. And so, you know, how did we affect Norman? This is an anecdote that Arthur told me, again which is kind of amusing, and it will be my last thought. Arthur ran into Mr. Mailer in an airport lounge prior to The Executioner’s Song before they were boarding a plane to New York. And he thought, how odd to see Norman there and they said hello – Norman went up to him to say hello – and Arthur felt very awkward because this was the days when Playboy – I’ve heard a lot of these stories, too – had some money from the casinos and lots of money to spend and everybody flew first class if you were an editor. Those most have been the days. Not only do you get to edit 30,000 word stories, but you flew first class, you know? And so they avoided an issue of like where’s he’s sitting or anything like that. And Arthur waited for about 5 minutes before the plane took off as he was want to do – he’s a very tall, lanky guy, elbows and knees. And he went onto the plane and took his seat and saw that he was going to sit right next to Mailer. And in the time that Mailer had been on the plane for awhile and he had spread papers out all over the tray and all over the vast huge seats. Papers all over the place, legal pads covered with numbers and homemade vertical rules that were really precise, just spread out all over the place. And Arthur said, Norman, what are you doing? And Mailer said, this is your fault. And he said, my fault, how is this my fault? And Mailer proceeded to say that you guys ran a story by, we believe one of sportswriters, Larry Lindenman did it, and it had something with the title of “The Amazing System for Betting on Baseball” and Mailer had gotten hooked on it fully – just, he fell for it really, really hard. And the concept was pretty ludicrous – you had to make a small bet everyday on every team, okay, and keep it moving along. You had to play all summer. And he said, I read the piece, it made perfect sense and I’ve been doing it ever since. And Arthur said, are you ahead? And Mailer said, no, but I’m going to be. And so the idea is that he fell for it in a way that only a compulsive, brilliant, focused person can. Here was a guy who was contending for the championship, you know, just an amazing guy who was taking on Hemmingway and every other idea of writers that we had, and he fell for some goofball, surefire way to make money on baseball. And that’s about it. Thanks for having me.
Talese: Well, I’ll say what I was going to say if I were up there – I’ll say it now. Carol was absolutely right that Norman Mailer was someone all the writers [garbled] others you go on and on and name did open up the field for us. Did allow us to be risk takers, perhaps [garbled] really key, has always been and still is. But to get kind of a concession from editors that we wouldn’t have had had Norman not broken down doors, knocked some heads around on our behalf prior to our showing up. So, I think we are all greatly indebted to and will be forever grateful to Norman Mailer. If I had a microphone now, why don’t I just go on and get this over with?
I think I can remember exactly what I said. I am of the generation in the age of Aquarius that follows Norman, not very well always, but always with a sense that he had been there first and left very traceable footprints. I came to New York in 1955. I had read as a boy in my last year in high school The Naked and the Dead and as Carol and Barbara both said, in those days even Norman Mailer could not get certain words in print. That wouldn’t last long but it certainly was true in The Naked and the Dead. But I read avidly what he wrote and admiring, beginning then and forever after then, his prose style, his vision of the world. And his vision of himself, too, because what was interesting then, and would continue to be so, that Norman gave to the printed word a stature that also was image-making because Mailer was an image maker of himself and the great magazines of the 50s, 60s and 70s would often have on the cover a representation of Norma Mailer either in sketch or in photography. I think I’ve seen his face probably dozen of times in various main line magazines. I remember particularly Life magazine, I remember The New York Times, I remember, of course, Esquire. And many, many others – Bob Lucid provided me with a list but I can’t remember what was on the list, but I know the list was long. And I think now, this is not the age of the magazine piece, this is in fact a kind of moratorium I think for magazine writing – magazines are pretty atrocious, I wouldn’t want to write a section of The New Yorker for any magazine right now, with all due respect to Chris and Playboy. I would not write for Chris and Playboy because I don’t want to make second string to some centerfold, but that’s my particular Catholic upbringing [unintelligible] But back to Mailer, Mailer was a man on the cover, he was a cover boy. He was a magnificent feature in terms of exploiting himself as he explained to us the world around him of which we were a part. I think now about the magazines of the 90s and the 21st century – they’re pretty much taken over by Hollywood. The images are of Nicole Kidman as the color of the month; Tom Cruise would be a cover. Millions of untalented people could easily be the Hollywood stars on the cover of magazines we see in airports and subways and wherever we go. But there was a time, a glorious time, when the writer personified by Norman Mailer was worthy of a cover on major magazines. Why? Because he could communicate to a national audience. Why? Because he had a national sense of self, because he could write in ways that would be edifying and also stimulating and also evocative of a larger truth than we could get then out of newspapers or magazines, for sure, or even the books by the so-called serious thinker who were compatible with and contemporaries of Norman Mailer. I think that Norman Mailer, though, was also a very, very sweet man. Reference is made now and reference has been made from years and years ago, the bellicosity of this man. Enjoying a drink and so on, taking a swing at someone, someone named Gore Vidal, which probably was not true, but it was part of the image, maybe a cultivated image, I don’t know. But I know the Norman Mailer I did know, I did know him through social life in New York having been there for half century and I do know as a member of PEN, as a vice president, in fact, or one of the vice-presidents when he was the president of PEN in the mid-1980s. I do know that he was a man who cared greatly about other writers. Being as old as I am and being in the city of New York for so long, the capitol of publishing, I think I’ve come to know, either as a fellow resident of, or maybe people passing through, I’ve come to know just about, I’d say 80% of the major American writers. I would guess because my wife’s in publishing, has been 44 years of our marriage and I have been around since the mid-1950s. I’d say I know a lot of very well-known, very important, award-winning writers who are American or European or Asian who come to New York and stay for a while or come in for the awards, then leave. And I never think I know very many nice people who are writers. I don’t think writers - the more renown they are the bigger shits they are – they really are not very nice people. And that long-time exception is Norman Mailer. I remember when I first came to New York, my first job was a sportswriter. I got out the New York Times and they had an opening in the sports department. And I didn’t know very much about sports but I did like writing about people and people who were athletes were fun to write about. Particularly prize fighters because I felt prize fighters like writers were solitary figures. They had to do it on their own. If they lost, if they were humiliated, if they lost by decision, they really couldn’t blame their agent, they couldn’t blame the publisher or the sales department – they really had to take the whole rap – it was really awful to be a fighter. And I remember the great writer Norman Mailer liked fighters and I met him actually at ringside at some small arena – St. Nicholas Arena which I think is near the ABC building and West 6th Street, out in Queens. There was a place, there was a gym on 14th Street where Cus Damato held forth, Jose Torres, who’s later on going to make a grand appearance I’m told – he gets up at 3 in the afternoon, so we’re going to have to wait for a while. But, Jose Torres was one of them, Floyd Patterson, young Mike Tyson used to be at this Gramercy gym on 14th Street and Mailer would go there. And that’s how I met Norman. It wasn’t at any literary cocktail party, it was at the ringside of men who sweat as solitary battlers and Mailer was a solitary battler himself, admiring this profession that may be involved with street science. In later years I became a member of PEN and in time in the mid-60s was one of the vice-presidents when Norman was elected – or was appointed – president. Nobody wanted the job. I was on the committee to try to get distinguished writers to be president – I will not embarrass people that I know have in this room – but I can tell you the list of distinguished writers that turned that down , is at least 5 in number. And the reason they did is because it interfered with their work. They had serious work to do and the serious work they were doing didn’t concern the welfare of or the concerns of other writers or the state of literature. I remember being on the phone encouraged by Bernard Malamud to call Norman and I had his phone number I think through some source of my wife, and I remember asking if he would be president of PEN but I did say, Norman, a lot of us here really want to help you. I was anticipating him saying, Oh, I have another novel to do, I have to go to China – whatever. But he said, okay, okay. I said when are you coming to New York – so we got together and he agreed to become president of PEN and it was the most lucky event for PEN that he did become the head of this organization. Which up till then respected it as it may have been since it was founded in the 1920s as an international organization. It was virtually unknown outside of small tea party circles in New York. Mailer pushed this organization into the headlines, international headlines as well as national, because in 1986 he was the one that pushed for the Congress – the International Congress of Writers, PEN International, to be centered in New York and that’s when I was active and involved to a degree as part of his staff. I remember, I remember that meeting – it was in one of the hotels on 59th Street where we met, think it was a Donald Trump hotel, I remember going with Norman to Donald Trump and getting Trump sometimes considered an avaricious real estate guy but he gave it to us for nothing. I can’t remember the hotel, near the St. Regis but it wasn’t the St. Regis. But I remember Norman being at the center of this international gathering of all the great writers who came. And Mailer was really the ambassador to America, to the world of letters, to the international world of letters. And he was a great, great person. I remember following a meeting after the conference was over in which the executive board of PEN consisting of about 30 people – we were going to change the by-laws. I don’t remember what the by-laws were changed for or remember anything about these by-laws. A boring set of rules and regulations. But Mailer was the president and I remember when the discussion about by-law change came to the forefront of this discussion in the PEN headquarters which was then and now still on lower Broadway. Mailer said, let me see, what were these by-laws prior to this year that we’re changing. And he started looking at them and he was sitting at the desk like this and the rest were sort of standing around him and he took a pencil and he started to write, changing the by-laws. And I think leaning over him, as I recall, I could be wrong but I know John Irving was active then, Susan Sondheim was hovering around somewhere, Grace [Baylor ?] was surely in her room, being skeptical. Anything Mailer did, she did not approve of, at least after till a year of being beaten down by other people. But I remember seeing the great Norman Mailer sitting there, on a yellow-lined pad rewriting with his own hands the by-laws. Jesus! And here’s there’s other writers, these pretenders to the Pulitzer Prize and aspiring people, all famous. I remember them looking over his shoulder and saying, well, Norman, put the comma here. And I’m seeing the great man at work. It’s not going to be published, but those by-laws that were rearranged in 1987, were written by Norman Mailer on a yellow pad and typed up by somebody, some lawyer probably okayed it and now is set it type somewhere. But I remember the scribblings of Norman Mailer on his pad before me and I thought, I’m witnessing an interesting moment. Here’s the writer himself writing. How often did we see writers write? There was Mailer sitting there at this desk and all these people looking over his shoulder and he got it done, handed it in, and then he said goodbye and he went home. And I always remember Mailer being a man who really was generous in spirit and it was so gratifying that this organization now is settling into a longer relationship that it can bring a new generation of writers and thinkers and appreciators to the grand man himself, Norman Mailer, and I’m happy to be with you. Thank you.
Discussion
Solomon: That was wonderful and you just backed-up my theory which is that if we took back and censored sex in the movies, the visual and everything, and went back to that period where the revolution of sex took place on the printed page, we would again have a country of readers. That was one of the things that was totally the domain of writers, books and magazines then. And I’m beginning to think that one of the problems today is not failure but that Mailer won, this kind of writing won – it’s sort of like what happened back to Picasso. Picasso [unintelligible] won and then we were in this period, not of failure but of what to do next and I want to ask you some questions about that, particularly the other night I’ve heard it said, Russell Baker is speaking about – and I admire that how he tried at one point to write a memoir – and he said, you know I was trained never to put yourself in and I thought of memoirs as belonging to – I don’t even know how to do this. And I thought, that is really what the newspaper culture was. And his audience looked perplexed. And I realized the reason they looked perplexed is that this other vision – the Mailer, the Esquire, the Gay Talese youth – has so taken over that the audience didn’t know when he was talking of that when he said, well what do you do when you’re putting your self’s own words. So that where the man is winning and not failing. And now I’d like to open it again. The three of you who heard each other and probably want to speak a little bit more on these things that have been thrown out. Then I think we should throw it out to the general audience.
[sound quality is diminished, as speakers are not talking directly into microphone]
Polsgrove: I just want to add a little about covers – I wish I had brought the Esquire cover that you mentioned and I have the one where Mailer has Germaine Greer, I think it is, in his arms and he’s King Kong and she’s Faye Ray. It seems to me that one reason that we have what we call public intellectuals who are really well-known to people, to people who watch television, partly television, they could go on television. Mailer was on television, James [Baugh] was on television, but also we had these big general interest magazines that would put intellectuals and writers in the public eye. So, not just novelists, not only novelists but exploring political times and so on. So, there’s a period in the 60s up into the early 70s, you know, when I was young I remember that intellectuals at all times were celebrities in a way that they simply are not now outside of the academy. I think magazines had a very big role in that. They not only published their work but they put them on the covers and they made them known figures. Now you know those magazines that did that went under, Life, Saturday Evening Post, Esquire in the early 70s became a service magazine [unintelligible]
Talese: I don’t think of Norman Mailer as being an outsider but I guess I’m wrong. I think that all of us in the 60s and 70s benefited upon the sense of being off the mark, looking at the larger world and I can only give you my viewpoint. But more important than my viewpoint, is the boldness to express themselves. I look what he did and [unintelligible] who are inspiring [unintelligible] I’ve read about this ridiculous administration [unintelligible] but in the 60s and 70s and 80s there was a boldness that maybe was not there. Why is there not much to read in magazines. Why is there not much celebration of the contrary writer that could write? One can go on and on lamenting the fact that we’ve become too educated. I didn’t think of writers being educated in the way that I was because I wasn’t educated [unintelligible] because I never thought of it as a member of the educational system. While Mailer went to Harvard, I never thought of Mailer as a man of Harvard. I thought that Mailer was kind of a man of Harvard but [unintelligible]. Harvard didn’t do much for Mailer. And Mailer didn’t care about doing much for Harvard. So say I [unintelligible]. It was enough to know about him the way that I did, removed as it way, when I was coming to New York. But he did have this sense of arrogance, of confrontational spirit, willingness to take on people who seemed to be very, very powerful. Be they a president of the United States, [unintelligible] purporting to have the right to exert upon our lives, the world, the law or of public opinion. There is in journalism today a feebleness that I’ve never in my long life seen prior to this insignificant period. 21st century lack of gumption, this fearfulness about being unpatriotic. What we’re having now, I would not if I had a son or grandson, have him in journalism because journalism has really given up again for the power of the Pentagon. This is not [unintelligible]. But Mailer was or still for half a century has been in battle, using the power and his particular power and not being afraid about what people want to say but was going after government, going after Germaine Greer [unintelligible] He wasn’t afraid and I think that if this organization bottles some of that courageousness that was the essence of Norman Mailer and spread it around a bit, we would have a healthier forum [unintelligible].
Napolitano: The only thing I want to say is that everything is very fractured right now. You have the rebellious spirit that Mr. Mailer once invited might have now been sort of commercialized by [unintelligible] We used to, you now, at Playboy think of ourselves as an aspirational magazine and back at certain times thought that everybody had the same aspiration – we all wanted to be the Duke [unintelligible]. And now, a young guy may be growing up with a different aspiration, to not have a job, live at the beach and go surfing. That might be his dream. And so the spirit of Mailer, what he stood for and the changes that he served and helped cause, are out there but they’re just happening in many small ways. And that I think is apparent in magazine pages when you [unintelligible] color pictures and bold designs and you have computer graphics so you make it very, very busy. And we’re all sort of going with this rush. So there’s a lot of communication going on but very little is being said. One thing that could distinguish a writer today if they wanted to take on the challenge would be to try to be as honest as Mailer is all the time. When he sets his pen to paper, there’s very little of that honesty out there. Everybody’s sort of bumping in and thinking of themselves as authors instead.
Question: Mr. Talese, I’m curious to know when you witnessed Mailer writing the by-laws and intense organization, do you remember which specific by-law he altered or corrected or improved?
Talese: Well the question was, while I was watching Mailer during that PEN meeting referred to, did I notice anything he did that was an improvement or what was it that he wrote. No, I don’t, I don’t. I just don’t remember anything except seeing him looking at his page, pencil in hand and scratching his head, and going over this phrase or that phrase. And I just thought of the judicial process that writing is and I haven’t seen him doing. In his divisional take of it, it wasn’t that I don’t think ….
Question: I understand, but I was prompted to make the comment because about the order of mind, the accounting of the small baseball bets over the course of the summer. And it was characterized as being a similar activity. I think Mailer [unintelligible] write the by-laws at the PEN conference [unintelligible]. It’s important in the sense that as daily, moral accounting [unintelligible] and it would seem to me that that moral accounting he did is in the writing process [unintelligible]
Talese: You’ve been downplaying it – you brought to it, your comment brings more to what I was saying than I said. You are correct - he was a man of justice, a man of judiciousness, as I said for. Obsessive, compulsive, his notion of what was worthy of his time I think changed from minute to minute. But during that one minute he’s entirely focused on what my later be thought of as a trivial time. But Mailer’s obsessiveness was part of his genius and also probably made life miserable for those around him for a period of time.
Question: You haven’t mentioned – I thought Chris would mention it – and that is the literary interview which Playboy and Paris Review and the late, great George Plimpton pioneered. I think that that is one of the things that has persisted in the literary world, although perhaps there are too many of them right now. Could you say something about the literary interviews?
Napolitano: Sure, when Mailer sat for the Playboy interviews, it still is a long-form bit of journalism. It used to be about 12,000 words or so. He said he hated giving them, he hated sitting down for, he hated being – and he proceeded to just uncork more ideas, the knowledge to come up with in a lifetime in a span of a few hours. He said that in that interview, he said that every 2 or 3 years he felt compelled that he should just sit down and treat it as a housecleaning of his mind. This cleared out something – float them up, see if they were viable, see if he could expand upon them. And he, I think, just amazed and bewildered the interviewer. He was thinking of things at the spur of the moment. And again, very heavy thoughts. And so I think in other literary interviews that we had done, and other sort of political interviews that we had done, everyone’s a little more cautious and measured in the things that they say. These interviews – the distinction of Mr. Mailer’s interview from others is that he talked about things other than his own books. He talked about his concepts. It was 1968 and his concept at the time was womanization of America, technological society, the right wing and he was never going and try to resolve these issues in what to do tomorrow or who to vote for. He was always expressing it as somewhat one step removed and on a higher moral plain in speaking about emotional stuff. So, that venue is there for people who will come to seize it. We sit around now thinking who could we go after? But there’s – the people that our audience knows there are [unintelligible] and I don’t know if they would say anything that could sustain the length. So we have [unintelligible] a bit as we should, and it’s more of a device now for people who are coming up and promoting. Everything is tied into promoting, you know, a book. At this point, it’s remarkable [unintelligible] but these days that’s the way you get the people to sit for you.
The 2003 panels: Mailer and Magazines · Mailer and Film · Working with Mailer