It seems that I’ll be staying home today after all. I had thought of going out, having lunch, touring the Museum and perhaps seeing a movie. But I didn’t want to do any of these things terribly badly, and the weather’s wet and gloomy. What decided the matter was the showerhead in my bathroom, which has been coming loose, and now sprays water everywhere but on me. I shall have to wait for a maintenance man to come up this afternoon. I could certainly run out for lunch and be home in plenty of time, but why?

My new armchair beckons. Well, it was new in the spring, but I didn’t sit in it during the summer; the blue room is stuffy in warm weather. But it’s very cozy now, and I find that I can stretch out in the deep club chair, put my legs on the very same hassock that I propped myself up on when I was learning to walk, and fall into a pleasant doze. Yesterday, I seemed to spend hours reading about Norman Mailer, because Harper’s kept falling into my lap. Mailer is an almost tragic figure, because although he was supremely gifted as a writer of durable sentences, his thinking on almost every subject was regrettable and quick to stale. He seems to have had no personal imagination, and as a result he was sunk in the facticity of his masculinity. To recall Mark Edmundson’s phrase, the punch in the mouth was a part of his repertoire, and not just in real life. Reading first Christopher Beha and then Andrew O’Hagan (at Harper’s in print and at the LRB online, respectively), I was appalled to see the effect that the old fighter had on their young minds. Here’s Beha, posing as the “Young Writer” or YW.

In 1994, Mailer complained that the place in the culture once reserved for the novelist had come to be occupied by Madonna. The YW would say that in his own time this place belonged perhaps to Kanye West, but that Kanye more or less deserved that place, insofar as he had not just talent but Mailer’s fascinating combination of megalomania and vulnerability, Mailer’s willingness to make a fool of himself, Mailer’s belief in his own importance, and Mailer’s determination to take the case for that importance straight to the people. The YW remembered what Schiller (the German poet, not Mailer’s buddy) had said — that a man must be a good citizen of his age, as wedll as of his country. What the literary world needed was a few good citizens willing to tell the age tough truths.

The problem is that Mailer was such a poor citizen. He was barely housebroken, and incontinently rude. He may have been in possession of a few tough truths, especially about Vietnam, but his delivery mirrored the insensitive belligerence that characterized our profoundly “masculine” misadventure in Southeast Asia. Mailer’s comment about the place of the novelist is sheer fantasy, the opposite of a tough truth, for serious novelists (and Mailer wasn’t a very good one) have never been at the center of American culture, and rarely anywhere near it for much longer than the display at a newsstand of an issue of Time Magazine’s cover. And to propose that the writer of novels can be replaced by a calculatedly meretricious pop star is to betray the passion for celebrity — his own — that flogged Mailer throughout his career. Beha compounds all of this by extolling a chain of vices; I very much doubt that Schiller (the poet) would have urged his readers to pay attention to Kanye West.

Mailer was right: the old standards were rotten. But his life and his art suggested that one might live without standards, without discrimination. Folly! O’Hagan reports that Mailer attributed his failure to win a Nobel Prize to the Swedish Academy’s refusal to reward a man who had stabbed his wife in a drunken rage. Good for them, if it’s true.

O’Hagan is just as upsetting as Beha.

I came to him via Marilyn Monroe. I was always reading about her and trying to work out why her story felt so personal to so many of the people I knew. ‘She was every man’s love affair with America,’ Mailer wrote. I remember reading that sentence and going to Kilwinning library for more books. They had Ancient Evenings, his vast Egyptian tome (I read the first ninety pages) and The Naked and the Dead, which was filled with the word ‘fug’ and seemed both plain and good. The others came in quick succession, half-read, skimmed or devoured, and his book about the killer Gary Gilmore, The Executioner’s Song, became for me a book that defined good taste in journalism. I read some biographies in between and quickly saw how far, in many ways, he was from the writers I considered my favourites. He didn’t do location or quiet suggestion; he didn’t do family history, grace, silence or epiphany. He didn’t do the human heart or the things that are left unsaid. Mailer was a celebrity who knew what he wanted to say and who wasn’t afraid of the loudhailer and the truncheon. He was never a subtle writer and never a complete novelist but as a navigator it seemed to me he was one of the heads of the profession. In any event, he was an intellectual who wanted to deal in headlines not footnotes, which wrecked him for some but made him a hero to me.

All I can say is how happy I am never to have sensed this hero-worship in anything else that O’Hagan has written. I can’t make up my mind whether I’d like him to dilate on that bit about Mailer’s excellence as a navigator, but it would be interesting to now more about “trying to work out why [Monroe’s] story felt so personal to so many of the people I knew.” The awful truth about Mailer’s Monroe book is that it obfuscates the simple basics of the case. Marilyn Monroe disliked the hard work of memorizing lines and the inescapable tedium of shooting films; she was a star in fame only. She was accommodated by the Industry because her big-girl body was comically and lubriciously inhabited by a stubborn little girl, and not just any little girl, but a close relative of Eloise de Plaza. I’m willing to grant a magnetic personal presence that could weaken the knees of very strong men, but it stops there; on film, she is just another pin-up, and it doesn’t say much for America to propose that her celluloid desirability embodied it. Monroe’s appeal and Mailer’s surrender are alike in heralding a period in American life when adulthood was merely genital.

***

In the kitchen, I am watching The Remains of the Day, which is twenty years old this year. I was startled to see Mike Nichols’s name in the credits; I hadn’t noticed before that he was a producer of the film, and I watched for twenty or minutes or so in a daze of having been mistaken about thinking that this was a Merchant/Ivory project. (Keeps life interesting.) I don’t think that I had seen Hugh Grant before, although very soon afterward, I had the pleasure of watching him impersonate Chopin in Impromptu, a wonderful movie that seems to have been swept out of the way so as not to interfere with Grant’s shooting stardom, which took off a year after Remains of the Day, with Four Weddings and a Funeral, the previous kitchen movie, to which I’d linked from Easy Virtue. Kristin Scott Thomas was new to me in Four Weddings, and I liked her so much that I disliked the movie for pairing Grant with Andie MacDowell, who though admirable in other contexts was here both American and Southern. I guess that you would have to be English to prefer the likes of her to Ms Scott Thomas, whom I still adore. I have always wished that Kristin Scott Thomas and Charlotte Rampling would make a movie together, set in the Thirties, about the English wives of wealthy French aristocrats — perhaps they’d be mother- and daughter-in-law. There would a touch of murder, maybe even a royalist plot. Perhaps the Windsors could be off-screen presences. You figure it out! I’ll be watching Zardoz next, at this rate.

The maintenance man has made an appearance, only to go off with the old shower-head and, for good measure, the kitchen-sink sprayer as well. I await his return with unabated hunger pangs. Ah — the door squeals!

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, November 22nd, 2013 at 10:33 pm.