Betsy Lerner -- Norman Mailer

Finished reading The Forest For The Trees, by Betsy Lerner (NY agent and editor), and am now taking notes from it.

She writes, in Chapter 4 -- "The Self-Promoter":

> > > > How does a writer negotiate a capricious world that would just as soon destroy him as praise him?

[Norman] Mailer, who is clearly going to go out kicking and screaming, reveals the high cost and anguish involved in continuing to produce: "If I am going to go on saying what my anger tells me it is true to say, I must get better at overriding the indifference which comes from the snobs, arbiters, managers and conforming maniacs who manipulate most of the world of letters....

There may have been too many fights for me...too much brain-blasting rage at the minuscule frustrations of a most loathsome literary world, necrophilic to the core -- they murder their writers, and then decorate their graves."
...

Whether you throw a long shadow or hide within its dark fold, never leaving home but through the tapping out of your own Morse code, as Emily Dickinson did through the long winters of her life, or run for mayor, punch out people twice your size, and stab your wife, as Norman Mailer did while producing some of his generation's most influential prose, you will ultimately live or die by your line. < < < <

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Earlier in my life, reading only a brief sampling of Norman Mailer's writing was off-putting to me: harsh, disgusting, violent -- I was like, "Aaaauuggghhh!!!"

Needed a Jane Austen paragraph as antidote.

But I liked the above Mailer quote:
"brain-blasting rage"
"conforming maniacs"
"a most loathsome literary world."

O-kay.

And when he writes, "I must get better at overriding the indifference..." -- I could relate to that; often resolve in my mind to "get better at" something....

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