The first time I came across Norman Mailer was in Jackson Street Booksellers on the liner notes of William S. Burroughs Naked Lunch. It was an old edition of the book and his praise of the banned author came across as redemptive. This came across to me as meaning that this man Norman Mailer was once an authority of the American literature scene.
A decade later after reading much pulp fiction, a better portion of the canon of G. K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Douglas Wilson, Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, F. Scott Fitzgerald and William S. Burroughs, much to my own confoundment on the last writer mentioned, I realized I had over educated myself and was quite alone in my esoteric knowledge I remembered the notion I had had of Norman Mailer being an authority of American literature. So I sought him out through Amazon and bought his break through novel The Naked and the Dead.
The Beautiful and Damned is a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was published in 1922. It starts with a man falling in love with an attractive and rich woman and ends with him choosing to not pursue the relationship to its fruitful end for him to fade into obscurity to provide for himself riding a bicycle around New York City. The Naked and the Dead is a novel about soldiers in The Pacific theatre of World War II. It was published in 1948. One of the soldiers dies of a venerial disease he contracted from a black woman in a shack in the Deep South. Another character is an officer who earns the position through education and loses the position by an assassination from the troops true leader who successfully leads the troop thereafter over the mountain and back which was their mission. This book was such a hit that it propelled Norman to instant fame. He had signed up for World War II as a soldier with hopes to earn the experience to write a great novel about the war in the style of Ernest Hemingway to write fiction that was truer than history.
The writer Norman then wrote the Barbary Shore (1951) that was not as well received. A book about the intimate details of characters living in tenement housing in New York City. The next book he wrote was The Deer Park (1955). I enjoyed reading this book about characters living in the golden age of Hollywood. JFK also told Norman Mailer that he enjoyed reading the Deer Park along with his other books up to that point that included The Naked and the Dead and Barbary Shore.
Advertisements For Myself and Cannibals and Christians are two collections of writing from Mailer. They include essays and poetry from the author on American Society in the 1950s and 60s respectively. Deaths for the Ladies and Other Disasters (1961) is a book of poetry that Mailer published that included a poem about stabbing his lover. The infamous line, “So long as you use a knife, there's some love left”, was about real life as he did stab his wife in reality in 1960. I ordered this book as my most recent order from Amazon but never received it and did not pursue why figuring it was probably for the best since this act of his along with the publishing of such a book containing such sentiment is heinous.
An American Dream (1965) was his next novel where he details a toxic love affair with a rich bitch that he murders by throwing off a balcony and subsequently gets away with. Norman’s wife in real life that he stabbed did not press charges against Norman Mailer because she loved him so much and was overwhelmed with the power of the treacherous betrayal from her Husband who she had had child with. The act was done in New York City on a night with a group of their acquaintances in a room and on impulse the drunken Mailer charged his wife like a bull from across the room with a knife. When his friends went to call the ambulance he screamed, “Let the bitch die.”
In 2007 Norman Mailer died. In 1997 William S. Burroughs died. It’s the year 2022 as I write this and there is not much of a literary scene in the classic sense anymore. Radio, television, movies, technology, and social media has rendered the knowledge of books to an esoteric crowd. Back in 2008 when I first picked up Naked Lunch (1959) I thought it was a book that was full of secret knowledge inaccessible to those who were not hip and wise enough to understand it. The book doesn’t make any sense and neither did his Trilogy that I read including the Soft Machine (1961), the Ticket that Exploded (1962) and Nova Express (1964). William S. Burroughs used a method of writing that placed him as the first post-modernist writer where he would cut up his writing and rearrange it before publishing so that his message or vision would go straight into the readers subconscious understanding without letting the reader comprehend the writing through the “brainwashing” technique of understanding what the hell you are reading.
He wrote a book called Junkie (1953) however that is written in normal prose and contains the ultimate hipster proverb that the only secret is that there is no secret. In 1951 William S. Burroughs shot his wife in Mexico City. He got away with it. Allegedly he shot his wife in the forehead by accident because they were playing a game where he was to shoot an apple off the top of her head with a pistol. He claimed it was a stunt called “William Tell”. Later his story changed to authorities in Mexico that the gun discharged accidentally after he set it on a table and sent a bullet through his wife’s forehead.
what they want
“
Vallejo writing about
loneliness while starving to
death ;
Van Gogh’s ear rejected by a
whore ;
Rimbaud running off to Africa
to look for gold and finding
an incurable case of syphilis ;
Beethoven gone deaf ;
Pound dragged through the streets
in a cage ;
Chatterton taking rat poison ;
Hemingway’s brains dropping into the orange juice ;
Pascal cutting his wrists
in the bathtub ;
Artaud locked up with the mad ;
Dostoyevsky stood up against a wall ;
Crane jumping into a boat propeller ;
Lorca shot in the road by Spanish
troops ;
Berryman jumping off a bridge ;
Burroughs shooting his wife ;
Mailer knifing his.
—that’s what they want :
a God damned show
a lit billboard
in the middle of hell.
that’s what they want,
that bunch of
dull
irnarticulate
safe
dreary
admirers of
carnivals.”
-Charles Bukowski (1977)
