Word: mailer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Mailer quotes the Time story in its entirety at the beginning of his article, then writes, "Now we may leave Time in order to find out what happened." Mailer really tells us, and he is far more merciless on himself than Time...
...Mailer's book-length piece in this month's Harper's Magazine, "On the Steps of the Pentagon," is an orgy of self-flagellation and self-exaltation, with the one and the other glowing intertwined in a kind of frenzied chromosomal spindle. "The Steps of the Pentagon" is the ultimate realization of Mailer's one great talent--masturbation--the quintessence of self-love and self-debasement...
Ostensibly, the piece is journalism (whatever that means). It is a long, digressive, discursive account of how Mailer (he refers to himself, his protagonist, in the third person throughout) gets invited to this March on the Pentagon, and how he goes to Washington and marches on the Pentagon and gets arrested for "transgressing a police line," as he tells a reporter (me, in fact), and how he goes to jail and gets tried and gets out of jail and goes home and decides to write about his adventures for Harper's Magazine (hello, Norman Mailer...
...reason "The Steps of the Pentagon" is Mailer's best work, as Harper's boasts on the cover, is one magnificent ten-page passage about Thursday Night at the Ambassador Theatre. Time Magazine described the scene in a red-bordered box last October, telling how Mailer slurped bourbon from a coffee mug and yelled obscenities at the audience, as Mitchell Goodman, Robert Lowell, and Dwight MacDonald--the other speakers--sniggered at him patronizingly in the wings...
After the audience has deserted Mailer, it heaps its affections upon soft-spoken Lowell. Mailer describes his feelings as he watches Lowell perform: Mailer felt hot anger at how Lowell was loved and he was not, a pure and surprising recognition of how much emotion, how much simple and childlike bitter sorrowing emotion had been concealed from himself for years under the manhole of his contempt for bad reviews...