A Tale of Two Modernisms – 2/27/07 Notes for presentation at Norman Mailer Society convention October 2007, Provincetown, MA Preparatory note: During the mid- eighties, after a run of several years, the television sitcom “Happy Days” starring the greaser “The Fonz” took a downturn. It became clear that the writers for the show had run [...]
A writer is judged by their ability to tolerate a bliss state in which transcendent thought and spiritual emotion are reified into text. Fitzgerald’s tolerance of this state of mind was far greater than Hemingway’s tolerance of his own bliss. Hemingway may have had grace under pressure but the pressure of grace and its sublimity [...]
F.Scott Fitzgerald taught young Americans how to flirt and kiss and play romantic games. Hemingway showed them how to hunt and kill animals and people. Which one of these writers would Americans deify? The killer, of course. “November rain had perversely stolen the day’s last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence – the [...]
Gordon Lish was as important to Raymond Carver’s success as Maxwell Perkins was for Thomas Wolfe. Lish was the “Fifth Beatle” for Carver. Would anyone suggest that we return to “Sergeant Pepper” and edit out the George Martin influence? Carver – Carved up postmodern fiction. I’ve known a LeMessurier who measured, a Kammerer who photographed. [...]
Novelist Thomas McGuane got caught in the crossfire of the New Yorker turf war between Roger Angel and Gordon Lish. Up until the late seventies McGuane’s novels “The Sporting Club” and “Bushwhacked Piano” had created a sensation. McGuane captured a counterculture zeitgeist tapped by Donald Barthelme and Sam Shepard. McGuane was reviewed everywhere as the [...]
Roger Angel anoints Donald Barthelme as the reigning fiction- meister of The new Yorker in the late sixties and American literature swerves toward a surreal, soulful preciousness. Risk-taking abounds. In 1980 The New Yorker swerves again, more like a stylistic spin-out when Gordon Lish edits Raymond Carver setting off a stampede of literary After forty [...]
Donald Barthelme and Matisse were both caught in the intellectual / emotional gravitational field of a true believer. It was Paul Signac with Matisse and Donald senior for Barthelme. There is only one way to reach escape velocity from a true believer and that is to become the avante- garde. One must trump the reigning [...]
Hemingway’s Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls, is a knight errant of sorts wandering Spain for adventures and serving his maiden Maria who lived in her castle (cave). Hemingway and Fitzgerald leaned heavily on Don Quixote, getting their literary ticket punched so that academic recognition could be achieved i.e. proof that they were [...]
Don Quixote has committed enough unwarranted assaults by chapter three to land in prison for years. He is a violent psychopath. He has ruined the health and perhaps the lives of many innocent men. Why is this funny, charming, endearing, acceptable? Because Don Quixote is landed gentry, a nobleman, though penurious. Nobles get away with [...]
In the fall of 2006 Norman Mailer invited me to visit him at his home in Provincetown, Massachusetts . We had been corresponding for nine years at the time, exchanging a few letters each year. Our friendship began in 1997 when I wrote him a letter about his new book Picasso as a Young Man, [...]