Round the rampant rugged rocks
Rude and ragged rascals run.
—W.H. Auden
Queasy koalas quarrel and quibble
Noisy gnus nag and nibble
Hefty horses heave and hoe
Shameless sheep shop and show
Playful pigs prance and preen
Careful cats cook and clean
Dancing dogs dally and drink
Thirteen thoroughbreds thank and think
Buoyant bunnies broil and bake
Rampant rhinos rush and rake
Slippery seals splash and splish
While wayward weasels wonder and wish
by Richard W. Bray
I’d like to read one of W. H. Auden’s best-known poems and one of the best-known poems, I suppose, modern poems of the last ten years. Probably someone will find that it was written in the last nine years, but it doesn’t matter…”As I walked Out One Evening.”
—Dylan Thomas (from the Caedmon Collection)
No poet consistently knocks me on my tailbone the way W.H. Auden does. Listening to Auden read Death’s Echo from the Voice of the Poet recordings makes me want to lie down in the fetal position and turn out all the lights.
As I Walked Out One Evening, depressing as it is, leaves me with some hope, however. At my lowest points, I try to remind myself that my life remains a blessing although I cannot bless.
Each stanza of “As I Walked out One Evening” is by itself a masterpiece, containing more literary merit than you will find on this entire blog.
The theme of the poem is certainly nothing new: Everything human beings do and feel is ephemeral. But a poet’s task is not to discover new themes. As Richard Wilbur notes, the “urge of poetry” is to bring its subject matter “into the felt world.”
The poem has many notable lines, but I’d like to focus on one that seems mundane at first reading, line seven:
“Under an arch of the railway”
There are, of course, many less lovely ways to express this particular image: Beneath the railroad line, below the arch which a train passes over, underneath the elevated train tracks, etc. But Auden’s construction magically sings itself off the page and into my brain where it will remain until such time as I am forced to surrender my smidge of nitrogen to the World Fund
Richard W. Bray
W. H. Auden
Which is more significant, a person or a star?
People could not exist without stars. Not only does our sun provide us with essential warmth, light, and sustenance, but astronomers believe that all solid matter, ourselves included, is made up of the debris from former stars.
Compared to a person, our abiding sun is surely great and grand. But as far as we can tell, a star is neither sentient nor alert to its own existence. So unlike a human being or even a shih-poo who responds to the name of Max, a star will never want for anything.
W. H. Auden ponders his unreciprocated affection for stars and correctly concludes that despite a star’s magnificence, between the two, the poet himself is ultimately “the more loving one.”
Thus human beings gaze at stars with a longing that the stars themselves could never “return.”
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
And although the breadth of a star’s life is incomprehensible to a human being, a star is nonetheless ephemeral like everything else in our universe. (When the dividend is eternity, all quotients are miniscule.) Someday every star will “disappear or die.”
Getting back to my original question, is a star’s immense, blazing endurance a match for a human being’s cognizance and sensitivity? It’s a rhetorical question, of course. Even if it weren’t a false alternative, the answer would still lie beyond the scope of human imagination. We could not survive in a universe without stars, and as Richard Wilbur inquires,
How shall we dream of this place without us?–
For his part, Thomas Hardy maintains that the “disease of feeling” is overrated, and “all went well” prior to “the birth of consciousness,”
None suffered sickness, love, or loss,
None knew regret, starved hope, or heart-burnings;
None cared whatever crash or cross
Brought wrack to things.
If something ceased, no tongue bewailed,
If something winced and waned, no heart was wrung;
If brightness dimmed, and dark prevailed,
No sense was stung.
Auden is similarly cynical about the ultimate value of human sentimentality:
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total darkness sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
by Richard W. Bray
Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels, and sex certainly gives no meaning in life to anything but itself.
—Gore Vidal, United States: Essays 1952-1992 (37)
Sex. What’s with the persistent human propensity to study, describe, imagine, define, categorize, restrict, denounce, regulate, prohibit, criminalize and constantly talk, talk, talk about what other people are doing in private with their naughty bits?
Sex is a basic human need, essential to the survival of the species. But this is only part of the answer. Human beings require shelter, for example, yet the subject of housing barely elicits a fraction of the chatter that the Big Nasty generates amongst human interlocutors.
And as W.H. Auden pondered: Why should so much poetry be written about sexual love and so little about eating—which is just as pleasurable and never lets you down—or about family affection, or about the love of mathematics.
According to Gore Vidal, “the sexual attitudes of a given society are the result of political decisions” (539). This explains why we see so many professional moralists and politicians “solemnly worshiping at the shrine of The Family” (601). (Like when our president recently went out on a limb to courageously declare that Motherhood is the toughest job in the world.)
Barack Obama’s other recent bold pronouncement, that he has evolved to the point where the idea of gay marriage no longer gives him the willies, made much bigger headlines.
So why the big fuss? To borrow a phrase from Thomas Jefferson, regardless of my own prejudices or proclivities, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg if Adam wants to marry Steve. (Yes, I know that Steve could be entitled to partake in Adam’s medical benefits, perhaps raising my health care premiums, but the two fellows will also be paying higher taxes, so I’d be willing to bet that the monetary consequences of their union would probably be a net gain for society at large.)
Gore Vidal contends that our political overseers ghettoize certain types of sexual behavior as a means of maintaining their hegemony over the populace: “In order for the ruling class to rule, there must be arbitrary prohibitions” (442). Sexual preference is just one of the many divisions, such as race, class, religion, age, region, gender, etc., which are exploited by los que mandan. Thus we are informed, particularly from the pulpit, that when it comes to sexual preference, there are only two ways to be: “One team is good, godly, straight; the other is evil, sick, vicious” (442).
Like homosexuality, divorce is also dangerous to the status quo because “A woman who can support herself and her child is a threat to marriage, and marriage is the central institution whereby owners of the world control those who do the work” (540). Vidal notes with his characteristic wit that heterosexual couples are expected “to do their duty by one day getting married in order to bring forth new worker-consumers in obedience with God’s law, which tends to resemble with suspicious niceness the will of society’s owners” (540). Of course, over the last four decades divorce has become so common that many of the leaders who rail in favor of “family values” are themselves divorced. This helps explain the fury we hear from some quarters against the damage done to our sacred family unit by homosexuals. At any rate, “it does not suit our rulers to have the proles tomcatting around the way that our rulers do” (606).
The mechanisms which enforce such twisted mores are designed to produce citizens who “serve society as loyal workers and dutiful consumers” (540). This is not an originally American arrangement; it is merely the machinery of power and profit in action. And any “activity that might decrease the amount of coal mined, the number of pyramids built, the quantity of junk food confected will be proscribed through laws that, in turn, are based on divine revelations handed down by whatever god or gods happen to be in fashion at the moment” (339-340).
In 1948 Gore Vidal courageously published The City and the Pillar, a coming of age novel about homosexuality. But Vidal is not celebrated as a hero for gay activists today largely because he rejects the “American passion for categorizing” which endeavors “to create two nonexistent categories—gay and straight” (606). Vidal therefore scoffs at the notion that such a thing as the “gay community” could ever exist. (“What in God’s name do Eleanor Roosevelt and Roy Cohn have in common?” he quipped.)
Experience has taught Vidal that “it is possible to have a mature sexual relationship with a woman on Monday, and a mature sexual relationship with a man on Tuesday, and perhaps on Wednesday have both together (admittedly you have to be in good condition for this)” (581).
by Richard W. Bray
Men have an innate desire to celebrate athletic achievement. This is probably because Our Hunting Fathers relied upon their athletic prowess for survival, and it is no surprise that the best hunters and warriors are revered and rewarded in nomadic societies and lionized in folklore. Anthropology is the field which best explains why modern men are hardwired to want to be like Mike.
Professional sports–grown men playing children’s games in public for money—is a multibillion dollar obsession in this country. (Of course, this includes Division One college football and basketball—a malignant growth on our system of higher education, but that article has already been written.) Millions of American males (myself included) spend an absurd amount of time not merely witnessing this grand spectacle, but talking about it, reading about it, and digesting hours of sports radio and television shows.
Sports media is ultimately a discussion about morality. This is acutely apparent on sports talk radio, a large and growing presence in radio markets large and small. And sports talk radio is largely a debate about what constitutes manhood. (The overwhelming majority of the hosts and callers are male, and on the rare occasions when women’s sports are discussed, they are often held up for ridicule.) No matter what the subject, high salaries, steroids, what it takes to be a champion—it’s about what type of men these athletes are. The hosts and callers argue endlessly about whether particular athletes are winners, whiners, losers, or stand up guys.
But athletic competitions are not morality plays. Despite our inherent tendency to assign virtue to the victors, when one team defeats another on the sporting green, it signifies little about the actual character of the men involved. But something inside us wants to believe that the winners are more virtuous, or that they practiced harder, or that they are simply better people who deserved to win.
Sadly, however, grace under pressure in the athletic realm has no correlation to one’s behavior in real life. This is confirmed by a cursory look at the Jurisprudence section of the local sports page. The NFL is our favorite sport by far despite the frequency with which the exalted men who play professional football are being arrested for all manner of malfeasance, including rape, murder, assault, and drunken driving. (For a literary example of this phenomenon, see John Updike’s novel Rabbit Run. Like so many real life jocks, Rabbit Angstrom is a winner on the basketball court but a louse and a loser in his personal life who abandons his pregnant young wife and calls her a mutt).
When it comes to sports, people are inclined to ignore one of life’s basic lessons: an unexplainable alchemy of talent, luck, and preparation add up to worldly success. The winners are not necessarily superior to the losers, and Jesus doesn’t love them any better than He loves anyone else.
Hollywood understands all this. Witness the perpetual onslaught of tedious formulaic movies where our hard-working and virtuous hero almost always wins. Movies like Rocky and The Karate Kid are more cliche than storytelling, where lovable underdogs prevail against opponents who are simply depraved monsters.
There are many outstanding sports movies which defy and often even ridicule our expectations, including Dodgeball, Happy Gilmore, CaddyShack, Raging Bull, White Men Can’t Jump, Eight Men Out, Moneyball, North Dallas Forty, Million Dollar Baby and Friday Night Lights.
by Richard W. Bray
Harold Bloom
The Perils of Bardolatry: Harold Bloom’s Limited Perception of Hamlet
The activity of art is based on the fact that a man, receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man’s expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it.
—Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? (178)
The essential function of art is moral. Not aesthetic, not decorative, not pastime and recreation. But moral.
—D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (180)
When Kurt Vonnegut was working on Slaughterhouse-Five, he told movie-producer Harrison Starr that it was going to be an anti-war novel.
“Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?” Starr quipped.
Vonnegut found the comment amusing, agreeing that wars are “as easy to stop as glaciers.” This knowledge did not dissuade Vonnegut from completing his masterpiece because he realized that no work of art could ever rectify the human situation, and only the silliest sort of fool creates a work of art hoping somehow to fix the world. (This is what logicians refer to as assigning an irrelevant goal.)
But literature has its uses. And W. H. Auden notwithstanding, poetry makes all sorts of things happen. Great works of art render our world a lot more beautiful and slightly less confusing.
Harold Bloom, one of America’s most acclaimed literary critics, has released a curious collection of musings on William Shakespeare’s Hamlet entitled Poem Unlimited. According to Bloom, “of all poems” Hamlet is the “most unlimited,” and, as a “meditation upon human fragility in confrontation with death,” the play “competes only with the world’s great scriptures” (3).
Bloom has long been an idiosyncratic critic, cocksure about his own brilliance and emphatic about the singular authenticity of his opinions. His general predisposition towards even the most revered literary figures is often miserly in terms of handing out approbation. For example, Bloom dismisses Matthew Arnold’s oeuvre in one sentence: “Arnold, long admired both for his poetry and for his literary criticism, was not particularly good at either” (The Best Poems of the English Language 684).
And like the notoriously fussy Mikey from the Life Cereal advertisement of my youth, when Bloom finally comes across something that pleases him, he really likes it.
Hamlet remains our world’s most advanced drama, imitated but scarcely transcended by Ibsen, Chekhov, Pirandello, and Beckett. You cannot get beyond Hamlet, which establishes the limits of theatricality. (7).
Of course, Bloom is hardly the first critic to gush over Hamlet.
It is perhaps not necessary to emphasize the quality of the prose in Hamlet. Here are passages which represent the highest point Shakespeare ever reached in this medium….it is the excellence and the importance of the prose which separates Hamlet from, and in many ways above, all the other plays (George H. W. Rylands, Words and Poetry 159).
So Bloom, a devout secularist who considers “Bardolatry” to be “only another name for authentic response to Shakespeare,” is ecstatic about Hamlet (7). This play’s the thing for Bloom, and its eponymous hero is the pinnacle of literary achievement, eliciting rapturous bellows of praise from the usually cantankerous critic:
[Hamlet] himself is a frontier of consciousness yet to be passed (7);
Hamlet always has had nothing in common with his father, his mother and his uncle. He is a kind of changeling…fathered by himself (9);
Hamlet becomes the freest artist of himself in all literature (51);
We cannot play upon him: he is cleverer than we are, and more dangerous (54);
[T]he likes of] whom we have scarcely encountered before (82);
[H]e is more intelligent than you are, whoever you are (88);
[H]e is a mortal god in an immortal play (90);
Hamlet is the truth, insofar as any hero of consciousness can be (96).
Thus inebriated in adoration, Bloom almost completely ignores the enigma at the core of Hamlet’s personality which has confounded and infuriated critics for centuries: Yes, Hamlet is a devilishly clever young man, full of all sorts of wonderful words. But he is also cruel, capricious, and ditheringly indecisive. Indeed, the very expression “playing Hamlet” is a synonym for indecisiveness.
No one could seriously question Bloom’s assertion that Hamlet is a font of fabulous words. But if, as D. H. Lawrence argues, the moral function of art is paramount, then there is no escaping the fact that Hamlet is an abject failure as a man. If Hamlet had simply killed Claudius (the man who murdered Hamlet’s father), so much senseless death and mayhem could have been avoided. The Polonius family—who, whatever their faults, were decent, loyal and loving human beings—is utterly destroyed due to Hamlet’s vacillating stupidity.
Unlike Hamlet, Laertes has no need to navigate a sea of words in order to determine the right course of action. Hamlet himself speaks of Laertes as a “great gentleman,” and Hamlet admires the “bravery of his grief.” Furthermore, the similarity of their plight is not lost on Hamlet, who says of Laertes, “by the image of my cause, I see/The portraiture of his.”
Yet Harold Bloom will have none of it: “Laertes is too absurdly slight to be Hamlet’s ‘second self,’ as many critics aver” (104).
Along with Laertes, the other heroic figure in Hamlet is Horatio. According to Hamlet, Horatio is
A man that fortune’s buffets and rewards
Hast ta’en with equal thanks: and blest are those
Whose blood and judgement are so well commedled
That they are not a pipe for fortune’s finger
To sound what stop she please. Give me that man
That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him
In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart,
As i do thee.
Again, Bloom is unwilling to listen, not even to Hamlet:
Though critics have asserted that Hamlet finds qualities in Horatio that are absent from himself, they are plainly mistaken. Hamlet is so various that he contains every quality, while Horatio, totally colorless, has none to speak of (15).
Alan Lerner jested that “The French don’t care what they do actually/As long as they pronounce it properly.” Similarly, Harold Bloom doesn’t care what Hamlet does, actually—whom he berates, whom he stabs, whom he has murdered, whom he brutishly badgers to the point of suicide, how many ways he contradicts himself, how many people die for his indecisiveness—as long as Hamlet collocates his lovely words better than anyone else.
by Richard W. Bray
Yes and No
Paradox and irony perplex the mind of man
The latter happens when we seek a god who has a plan
And the former is the find of all who hope to understand
Our limited perceptions and our overactive brains
Leave us ill-equipped, yet so hungry to explain
It’s a wonder every one of us hasn’t gone insane
Our vices and our virtues correspond, you see
And the rightness of an action depends upon degree
When is cowardice mere prudence? Buddy, you tell me
Auden heard a Whisper, declaring it was sad
But vanities and envies were really all we had
And love was an illusion, or just a silly fad
Like so many questions that might occur to you
One could spend a lifetime trying to pursue
All the implications of whether this were true?
Years of contemplation that you could undergo
Ruminating endlessly until it’s time to go
Is folly for the answer is simply “yes and no”
by Richard W. Bray
Christina Rossetti
Richard Wilbur
e e cummings
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
from Uphill by Christina Rossetti
Let Observation with extensive view,
Survey mankind, from China to Peru:
Reark each anxious toil, each eager strife:
Then say how hope and fear, desire and hate,
O’spread with snares the clouded maze of fate,
Where wavering man, betrayed by venomous pride,
To tread the dreary paths without a guide,
But scarce observed, the knowing and the bold
Fall in the general massacre of gold;
Wide-wasting pest! That rages unconfined,
And crowds with crimes the record of mankind;
For gold his sword the hireling ruffian draws,
For gold the hireling judge distorts the laws;
Wealth heaped on wealth, not truth nor safety buys,
The Dangers Gather as the Treasures rise
from The Vanity of Human Wishes (The Tenth Satire of Juvenal Imitated) by Samuel Johnson
We have it and it doesn’t do us any
Good because nobody gets what they
Deserve more than everybody else.
from Family Values by Robert Pinsky
I am tired of tears and laughter,
And men that laugh and weep;
Of what may come hereafter
For men that sow to reap:
I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
And everything but sleep.
from Garden of Proserpine by Algernon Charles Swinburne
Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of Roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten:
In folly ripe, in reason rotten.
from The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd by Sir Walter Ralegh
Joy’s trick is to supply
Dry lips with what can cool and slake,
Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache
Nothing can satisfy.
from Hamlen Brook by Richard Wilbur
“I see the guilty world forgiven,”
Dreamer and drunkard sing,
“The ladders let down out of heaven,
The laurel springing from the martyr’s blood,
The children skipping where the weeper stood,
The lovers natural and the beasts all good.”
So dreamer and drunkard sing
Till day their sobriety bring:
Parrotwise with Death’s reply
From whelping fear and nesting lie,
Woods and their echoes ring.
The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews,
Not to be born is the best for man;
The second-best is a formal order,
The dance’s pattern; dance while you can.
from Death’s Echo by W. H. Auden
To fight aloud, is very brave —
But gallanter, I know
Who charge within the bosom
The Cavalry of Woe —
from To Fight Aloud is Very Brave by Emily Dickinson
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek.)
from I Knew a Woman by Theodore Roethke
and nothing quite so least as truth
—i say though hate were why man breathe—
because my father lived his soul
love is the whole and more than all
from my father moved through dooms of love by e.e. cummings
No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard
Or keeps the end from being hard.
from Provide, Provide by Robert Frost
by Richard W. Bray
any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
—John Donne
My grandfather lived to be a hundred years old. He had a remarkable career in which he enriched the lives of thousands of people. In fact, he loved his job teaching Geology so much that he continued to go to work every day for over thirty years after he retired. He was a respected family man and a pillar of the community. None of us could reasonably ask for anything more out of life.
If every person’s death makes me smaller, then it would be natural to assume that the passing of a kind, decent, and noble man like my grandfather would represent the greatest type of loss for humanity.
However, I believe that, paradoxically, the opposite is true: A life squandered in pursuit of violent and vindictive hatred is a failure for all of humanity because, as Donne noted in his famous sermon, no man is an island.
I’m not saying this to scold people who exalt in the death of someone who has committed heinous crimes. This is perfectly natural and I am in no way superior to anyone who would cheer when a bad man gets a bullet to the head. I feel petty and vindictive impulses every day, which are usually directed towards those whom I love the most. That’s simply a function of having an ego.
Being human, the best that I can ever hope to achieve is pity for the wicked in the rag and bone shop of my crooked heart.
by Richard W. Bray
Some Thoughts on The Spooky Art
The problem with naturalism is that there are just so many ways of saying that life is futile. About a hundred years ago when God was freshly deceased in the modern mind, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane had room to ruminate about the bleak, harsh unfairness of it all without getting stuck in naturalism’s inevitable cul-de-sac. Artful naturalism can still be written (see Being Dead by Jim Crace), but novelists with a metaphysical predisposition have many more aesthetic avenues to explore than devout nonbelievers.
Unlike so many twentieth century writers who were unable to reconcile belief in an anthropomorphized deity with the carnage and horror of two world wars and the Holocaust, Norman Mailer saw the supernatural everywhere. He was a confirmed mystic who was constantly groping after salvation in his tempestuous personal and artistic life.
In The Spooky Art, a compilation of the novelist’s musings about the craft of writing, Mailer insists that an “ongoing and conceivably climactic war between God and the Devil” manifests itself in the quotidian world of human strife (307). This is no mere literary affectation. Although Mailer did not ascribe to a particular faith, he was afflicted with a mercurial temperament which sought a deity that was, interestingly, much like himself:
“I confess that I have no attachment to organized religion. I see God, rather, as a Creator, as the greatest artist.”
Mailer enjoyed quoting Kierkegaard — I have a theory that Kierkegaard is more quoted than read. And he was deeply concerned with matters of good, evil, courage, and existence. Mailer argues that it is ludicrous to contemplate a universe without an active deity and some form of an afterlife (Mailer’s money is on reincarnation).
“Carnage walks the aisles of history hand in hand with philosophy. If there is no afterworld where the contest continues, then existence is indeed absurd” (148).
Sparkling literary careers have been wrought from that absurdity (see Brecht, Vonnegut, Kafka, and the Hebrew wit who wrote the Book of Job). But a diverse group of modern writers, including Fyodor Dostoevsky, G. K. Chesterton, Graham Green, Flannery O’Connor, John Updike, W. H. Auden and T.S. Eliot, have been theists.
It is not surprising that the pugnacious novelist and raconteur would have an idiosyncratic approach to religion. Mailer submerged everything that frightened and confused him into a big, dark pit which is alternately seen as hell or his own subconscious. For Mailer, the two are deeply connected. He asks us to
“Suppose the unconscious has a root in the hereafter that our conscious mind does not”(138).
For a novelist, the subconscious is a magic and mysterious font “and you never know where your words are coming from, those divine words” (70). Mailer, who was “always a little uneasy when my work comes to me without much effort,” liked to think of his unconscious as a “separate creature”(127, 143).
The novel Nightwood is a mad dreamy reactionary assault on society written by a brilliant, confused and obviously self-loathing woman, Djuna Barnes. In the section “Watchman, What of the Night?” Dr. Matthew Mighty O’Connor argues that night time—sleep time—is when the devil does his battling. Nightwood is a bizarre and disturbing book for many reasons, but Dr. O’Connor’s rant about sleep, “that unpeopled annihilation” in many ways explains how Mailer sees his own relationship with his unconscious (95).
…the day and the night are related by their division. The very constitution of twilight is a fabulous reconstruction of fear, fear bottom-out and wrong side up. Every day is thought upon and calculated, but the night is not premeditated. The Bible lies the one way, but the night-gown the other (87).
Norman Mailer takes his craft seriously and he fears the decline of “serious” novelists such as himself because “[n]ovels that reinvigorate our view of the subtlety of moral judgments are essential to a democracy” (161). Surveying the present state of fiction in America, Mailer laments how “the smart money would bet against the serious novel”(51). (Mailer’s observation, “I don’t think Jackie Susann went to bed with Rainer Maria Rilke on her night table,” gives us an idea about his regard for un-serious novelists(49).
For Mailer, the difference between “serious” novels and bestsellers is that the latter generally do not challenge their readers:
“mega-best-seller readers want to be able to read and read and read–they do not want to ponder any truly unexpected revelations. Reality might lie out there, but that is not why they are reading” (51).
Norman Mailer was not sanguine about the future of fiction in America, a profession that has long been plagued with “various pirates, cutthroats racketeers, assassins, pimps, rape artists, and general finks (57).” And he has even less faith in our press which produces a “[n]ausea-broth of TV pundit-heads, coming to an intellectual climax every night” (83). A co-founder of the Village Voice in 1955, Mailer is hailed as an “innovator of narrative” . Here is his portrait of the journalist’s life:
“One half is addiction, adrenaline, anecdote shopping, deadlines, dread, cigar smoke, lung cancer, vomit, feeding The Goat; the other is Aloha, Tahiti, old friends, and the free ride to the eleventh floor of the Sheraton-Chicago, Patterson-Liston Press Headquarter, everything is free.” (185).
by Richard W. Bray
Laughter hope sock in the eye's Blog 