Taki Theodoracopulos — a founder of The American Conservative — turns a column about smartphones and the decline of literary culture into a small memoir of Mailer in “The Dumb and Joyful Masses”.
The frame is Flaubert by way of grievance: stupidity, Taki argues, is the secret of the smartphone age’s happiness, and the combative mid-century writers he came up among — Hemingway, O’Hara, Irwin Shaw, James Jones — have no heirs. Mailer belongs to that lost company. “I wish my friend Norman Mailer was alive so I could show him this column,” Taki writes; he remembers him as “an arch contrarian, an intellectual who reacted like a truck driver when pushed to the brink.”
Two details are worth keeping. Taki recalls going up to Provincetown with Scott McConnell in 2003 to interview Mailer for the magazine’s third cover story, and being warned that Mailer’s “head was full” because Gore Vidal had been staying with him “and challenging every word.” And he passes along Mailer’s pet theory that writers’ heads are “literally harder, hence the head butting” — which is about as Mailer a sentence as one could ask for. A fond, late witness.
Norman Mailer, c. 2003 — the year of Taki’s Provincetown visit.