Another battle which took place on The Dick Cavett Show was between two authors whose names I heard when I was a child growing up in northeastern Ohio: Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer. One of Mailer's books was called, Advertisements For Myself. (My dad thought that title was kind of bogus, lol.)
--------------------- [excerpt] ----------
FIRST ADVERTISEMENT FOR MYSELF
Like many another vain, empty, and bullying body of our time, I have been running for President these last ten years in the privacy of my mind, and it occurs to me that I am less close now than when I began.
Defeat has left my nature divided, my sense of timing is eccentric, and I contain within myself the bitter exhaustions of an old man, and the cocky arguments of a bright boy. So I am everything but my proper age of thirty-six, and anger has brought me to the edge of the brutal. In sitting down to write a sermon for this collection, I find arrogance in much of my mood. It cannot be helped.
The sour truth is that I am imprisoned with a perception which will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time. Whether rightly or wrongly, it is then obvious that I would go so far as to think it is my present and future work which will have the deepest influence of any work being done by an American novelist in these years.
I could be wrong, and if I am, then I'm the fool who will pay the bill, but I think we can all agree it would cheat this collection of its true interest to present myself as more modest than I am.
{Advertisements For Myself, by Norman Mailer. 1959 -- Harvard University Press.}
________________________________
------------------- [excerpt from Gore Vidal's review of Advertisements For Myself - January 2, 1960, in The Nation]
I first heard of Norman Mailer in the spring of 1948, just before The Naked and the Dead was published. He was living in Paris or had been living there, and just gone home when I arrived in France, my mood curiously melancholic, no doubt because of the most dubious fame I was enjoying with the publication of a third book, The City and the Pillar; at twenty-two I should have found a good deal more to please me than I did that spring and summer in the foreign cities.
I do recall at one point Truman Capote telling me about The Naked and the Dead and its author: a recital which promptly aroused my competitive instincts . . . waning, let me say right off, and for reasons which are relevant to these notes. Yet at the time I remember thinking meanly: so somebody did it.
Each previous war had had its big novel, yet so far there had been none for our war, though I knew that a dozen busy friends and acquaintances were grimly taking out tickets in the Grand War Novel Lottery. I had debated doing one myself
and had (I still think) done something better: a small cool hard novel about men on the periphery of the action; it was called Williwaw and was written when I was nineteen and easily the cleverest young fox ever to know how to disguise his ignorance and make a virtue of his limitations.
(What an attractive form the self-advertisement is: one could go on forever relighting one's image.) Not till I began that third book did I begin to get bored with playing safe.
_______________________
On You Tube, type in
norman mailer gore vidal cavett
Uploader:
The Dick Cavett Show
24 minutes and 56 seconds
They say some stuff you wouldn't expect. (Although you can't hear all of it because some gets "beeped" out...) There is audience participation (unplanned, I believe) and a third guest, Janet Flanner, sits between them, "reffing" occasionally.
(I thought the lady was playwright Lillian Hellman, at first, but it's Janet Flanner, who was Paris correspondent for The New Yorker magazine from 1925 until she retired in 1975.)
She wears a great scarf, and has just the right word or phrase at the right moment.
-30-
No comments:
Post a Comment