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"I had been a hero-worshiper of his since being zapped by his writing, the closest my brain has come to hosting a meteor shower."

— Wolcott, James (b. 1952)

Author

Wolcott, James (b. 1952)

Work Title

Norman Mailer Sent Me [from Vanity Fair]

Date

November 2011

Metaphor

"I had been a hero-worshiper of his since being zapped by his writing, the closest my brain has come to hosting a meteor shower."

Metaphor in Context

What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the author of The Naked and the Dead and American literature's leading heavyweight contender, to Dan Wolf, the delphic editor of The Village Voice. It was the reason I had left college after my sophomore year, spoiling my parents' dream of my becoming a teacher, collecting a regular salary, wearing a grown-up tie to work, and getting those great summers off. How I got to Mailer was the equivalent of firing a paper airplane out the window and having it land at J.F.K. I had been a hero-worshiper of his since being zapped by his writing, the closest my brain has come to hosting a meteor shower. I was in high school, Edgewood High School to be exact, just down the highway from Cal Ripken's hometown of Havre de Grace (known to the local Restoration wits as "Haver Disgrace"). I was lounging around the local library and flipping through the latest magazines, which may lend the impression that the library was simply an after-school hangout for a teenage layabout, a sanitarium to hole up in before heading home to listen to everybody holler. Not so, or at least not entirely. It was also the portal into that strange, unfamiliar, near-distant realm where the smart people were, the adults I longed to join. On its shelves I discovered Gore Vidal, William F. Buckley Jr., George Plimpton, and similar Bengal lancers. Mailer I was aware of only because I had once cracked open The Naked and the Dead and shut it soon after, the few pages I waded through striking me as thick, ropy, and swampy, making me feel as if I were in the jungle, too. I didn't want to be stuck in the steaming jungle fighting fungus, not at that stage of my literary upbringing, when I was more at home with The Catcher in the Rye, identifying with Holden Caulfield to a distressingly conventional degree. But on this particular afternoon I fished up the latest issue of Harper's, which was devoted entirely to Mailer's report on the anti-war march on the Pentagon, just to browse. The warp drive in my brain clicked, and I remember looking up from the magazine 10 or 15 minutes later and staring through the library window to the sun-bright parking lot of the supermarket across the way, as if checking to make sure everything was still where it had been the last time I looked. I was imprinting into memory the time and place of the point of impact when Mailer's writing first hit, the wow moment. The solo blitzkrieg that became The Armies of the Night has subsided into its proper rest spot in journalistic-literary history, many of its passages now reading lathered-up and rhetorically Wagnerian, and never again would Mailer gleam at his own egotistical foibles and others' through a monocle of mocking irony (as with the drawing-room comedy of Mailer and Robert Lowell trading lofty compliments like exquisite slices of baloney). But at the time, which is the only time that matters when it comes to the transfiguring moment that divides before and after, it was like having the power grid switched on, inaugurating a cerebral hum that I still hear when I read Mailer at his best. Writing about yourself in the third person as an actor in a newsreel drama struck me as a genius device on Mailer's part. Other writers may have done it before, but they did it as recording angels or passive lenses (camera eyes with fancy lashes), whereas here was Mailer writing about himself from the panoramic outside while documenting himself in the thick of it, a militant subjectivity that swept all before it. I had no idea who most of the names were that Mailer was banging into—I hadn't read Lowell's poetry, had only the haziest notion of who Dwight Macdonald was, and the gibe at Paul Goodman ("the literary experience of encountering Goodman's style … was not unrelated to the journeys one undertook in the company of a laundry bag") I found completely mystifying, and still do (what journeys one undertakes in the company of a laundry bag?)—but turning them into real-life fictional characters nullified the need for knowing their backstories. For someone as cautious, culturally limited, and socially corner-pocketed as I was (I could relate to the character in Barry Levinson's Diner who muses, "You ever get the feeling there's something going on we don't know about?"), Mailer dynamited a way open, revealed a combat mode any writer could emulate if he could pry himself free of all those inhibitions handed down from loving parents and kind teachers to help keep you in line.