Norman Mailer as The Novelist and Norman Mailer as The Star

Norman Mailer “loved the pride and the arrogance and the confidence and the egocentricity he had

acquired over the years, that was his force and his luxury and the iron in his greed, the richest sugar of his

pleasure, the strength of his competitive force...”

Oh, but with what a smile Grace read this passage in Mailer’s The Armies of the Night. She viewed

this very egocentricity as the catalyst for Mailer’s inclusion of himself---from two points of view---as the

central figure in Armies. Arrogance indeed, and what a penetrating eye, a dexterous wit, a positively explicit

voice it lent to Mailer in print!

Grace was pretty egotistical herself. When it came to her writing, anyways. No, in her speaking as

well. Pretty much all communication with others, then. She had a keen insight, a unique perception,

dammit, which she was willing to impress upon share with anyone who would listen. She felt it to be the

eternal burden of the writer; to feel as though nobody really “got it” through their own lenses, and that it was

up to that writer to provide ideological lucidity for the dim masses- in however many words it took.

Grace had already abandoned the idea of traditional journalism as a career option, disgusted at the

idea of excluding her involvement in the newsworthy topic; she could not imagine reading a piece of her

own writing without a channel of societal banter, personal interpretation, biting sarcasm snaking through the

prose.

She took refuge online, in the new realm of highly personalized communication. Blogging, forum

monitoring, Twitter. Fortunately, Web 2.0 offered many an option for the self-regarding analyst. Web People

actually paid Egotistical People to write witty narratives starring themselves, all for the purpose of

uniqueness, point of view, voice, of catching the roving eye of the Web Surfer with an attention span of

about, well, it was probably gone five minutes ago.



She also scoured the genre of Literary Journalism, delving inside the soul-baring prose of A.J.

Liebling, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, Michael Herr, of course Hemingway, and, yes, Norman

Mailer--- the literary canon of concurrently self-deprecating and egotistical “me” prose---and forged

friendships. Yes; the informal tone, unique point of view, confessions, reactions, outbursts! within works

starring the writer gave a reader the sort of insider knowledge and intimacy one would feel towards a close

friend.

But what about making two different friends in one book? What Grace found even more

extraordinary about Armies was the presence of two Mailers (and how hard to digest the possibility of one

body of work bearing the personality of not one, but two Mailers): Mailer the Participant, the fictional

character, and Mailer the narrator, or Historian. Mailer once said in an interview with The Academy of

Achievement in 2004,

Fiction is the attempt to summarize artfully a set of human experiences that might possibly happen at some

time just like this. Whereas nonfiction is the attempt to include what you consider to be all the necessary elements in a

story, and in the course of including them, and getting bogged down in dull prose, you destroy the reality of the story.

And so, as I say, from the word go it seemed to me there's no sense in separating the two... My feeling is that there's

no such thing as nonfiction. Everything is fiction, because in the moment someone tries to relate an experience of what

happened to them, it's gone. The reality that was felt at the moment is almost impossible to describe. It's one reason

why there are writers, to come close to how it felt when it happened.

And as such, how ingenious to include a fictionalized character of oneself! From this angle, he

could converge on all aspects of reliving history by both an as-it-happened account and posterior play-by-

play commentary. In his own words, “to come close to how it felt when it happened.” Perfect!

This was Mailer’s brainchild, the product of his own extensive self-regarding; however, Grace found

it interesting to compare his technique of self-inclusion with that of others. Mailer the character is outright

presented, by Mailer, as Mailer in a nonfiction novel; Ken Kesey, in an entirely fictional approach, manages


to create a likeness of himself in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Unlikely hero Randle P. McMurphy, in

all his raucous, hike-up-your-jeans-by-the-beltloops and kick-the-dust-off-your-cowboy-boots glory is akin to

Kesey, no doubt.

Having been a Ken Kesey advocate since devouring Tom Wolfe’s deceivingly sensical prattle in

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Grace was delighted as she read Kesey’s characterization of McMurphy in

the opening chapters of Cuckoo’s Nest. This was no entirely fictional character! And how better to get inside

the psyche of one’s own storybook hero than to dive inside your own first?

In Acid Test, Wolfe crystallizes his first encounter with Kesey as “my first brush with a strange

phenomenon, that strange up-country charisma, the Kesey presence.” He describes Kesey’s entry onto

Perry Lane in a paragraph that almost sounds as though he could have pulled it right from the pages of

Cuckoo’s Nest:

All the established Perry Laners could see Kesey coming a mile away. He had the Jack London Martin Eden

Searching Hick, the hick with intellectual yearnings, written all over him. He was from Oregon- who the hell was ever

from Oregon?- and he had an Oregon country drawl and too many muscles and callouses on his hands and his brow

furrowed when he was thinking hard, and it was perfect. (p. 31)

In Grace’s mind, McMurphy’s ascension to the throne of Bull Goose Loony in Cuckoo’s Nest ran

synonymous with Kesey’s real-life emergence as the Leader of the New Cool on Perry Lane. The unlikely

hero, belched from the underbelly of America!

Grace really couldn’t get enough of Tom Wolfe; as centrifugal literary force Terry Southern once put

it, she found him a real “groove and a gas.” She also found that he illustrated her point far better than she

could explain it, and thus found it necessary to include another, rather lengthy excerpt from Acid Test, this

one an anecdote from Kesey’s youth:

...and a little run-in at Gregg’s Drive-In, as it used to be called, it is now Speck’s, at Franklin Boulevard at the

bridge over the river. That was the big high-school drive-in, with the huge streamlined sculpted pastel display sign with


streaming streamlined superslick A-22 italic script, floodlights, clamp-on trays, car-hop girls in floppy blue sacks,

hamburgers in some kind of tissuey wax paper steaming with onions pressed down and fried on the grill and mustard

and catsup to squirt all over it from out plastic squirt cylinders. Saturday nights when everybody is out cruising- some

guy was in his car in the lot at Gregg’s going the wrong way, so nobody could move. The more everybody blew the

horns, the more determined the guy got. Like this was the test. He rolls up the windows and locks the doors so they

can’t get at him and keeps boring in. This guys vs. Kesey. So Kesey goes inside and gets a potato they make the

french fries with and comes out and jams it over the guy’s exhaust pipe, which causes the motor to conk out and you

ain’t going any which way now, bub. The guy brings charges against Kesey for ruining his engine and Kesey ends up

in juvenile court before a judge and tries to tell him how it is at Gregg’s Drive-In on a Saturday night: the Life- that

feeling- The Life- the late 1940s early 1950s American Teenage Drive-In Life was precisely what it was all about- but

how could you tell anyone about it? (p. 34)

Oh, the noble rebellion of the antihero! Be it potato to the exhaust pipe, or fist to the hospital

windowpane; exposing one’s neck on the chopping block of authority, all for the greater good of the rest!

Given their similarities, reading about Kesey in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test elicited a longing

within Grace to become his friend, in the same manner as reading about McMurphy in One Flew Over the

Cuckoo’s Nest elicited a longing for Kesey’s friendship just the same. In the same manner as The Armies of

the Night drew her to Norman Mailer; in fact, either of the two Mailers in the story would do. She found it a

real shame that so many writers throughout time, fiction or nonfiction, but particularly the latter, passed up

on the glorious opportunity to immortalize themselves in print and in doing so, gain such a camaraderie, a

fellowship of intimate friends, among their readers.