J. Michael Lennon – Archivist, Biographer, Educator

The Majesty of the Mailer Experience

On July 18, 2024

Owen Gleiberman has posted a review of Jeff Zimbalist’s documentary How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer on Variety. Gleiberman writes:

Norman Mailer is the kind of writer people now tend to look at and appraise by saying, “He could never get away with that today.” And maybe that’s true. In Mailer’s case, however, the that they’re referring to could be any of the following things: his confrontational public statements; his misbehavior on talk shows; his ardent bad-boy meditations on subjects like sexuality and violence; his propensity to drink and drug and fight (he liked to literally butt heads with people at parties); and great lyrical swaths of his writing.

Forget what Mailer could or could not get away with today. He was feeding the fire of controversy and provocation 50 and 60 years ago; even then, he was considered a figure of singular outrage. Yet it was all part of his mission to make a difference in his time, to wake us all up — to what was happening in society (not just the busy surface but beneath it), to how the government and the corporation were working in cahoots to perfect a new brand of authoritarianism (something he was explicitly onto in — yes — 1948), to the secrets and mysteries we were living inside. When Diana Trilling, the venerable lioness of a literary critic, declared Mailer to be “the most important writer of our time,” she wasn’t kidding around.

Read the rest on Variety.

Mike at Documentary Premiere

By webmaster

On June 16, 2024

In Event

Mike will join Jeff Zimbalist and Michael Mailer at the premiere of How to Come Alive with Norman Mailer for a question and answer session on Saturday, June 29, 2024 at the Film Forum. For more information and to purchase tickets, see the Film Forum web site.

The Archivist’s Apprentice

By webmaster

On December 4, 2023

In Article

This essay is an account of how I became the archivist, and ultimately, the authorized biographer of Norman Mailer, including brief profiles of my mentors, Dr. Nancy Potter, and Dr. Robert F. Lucid, and Mailer himself. The process of creating the Mailer Archive, now located at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas-Austin, is presented at some length as is my friendship with Lucid and Mailer.

Read the essay in Volume 6 of Lifewriting Annual: Biographical and Autobiographical Studies.

MLD Now on Audible

By webmaster

On November 21, 2023

In Media

Mike’s memoir Mailer’s Last Days: New and Selected Remembrances of a Life in Literature is now available as an audiobook through Audible.

Purchase

Mike in WSJ

By webmaster

On April 24, 2023

In Article

Five Best: Books On Sparring Partners

The Red and the Black By Stendhal (1830)

1. Arguably the first authentic psychological novel, “The Red and the Black” centers on the career of Julien Sorel, a young Frenchman from the provinces who, like his hero Napoleon, is striking, intelligent and calculating—striking enough to seduce women above his social station; intelligent enough to memorize the entire New Testament; calculating enough to become private secretary to the Marquis de la Mole. Julien becomes the lover of the marquis’s aloof daughter, Mathilde, and rises to the highest tier of Parisian aristocratic society. His first and greatest love, however, is the wife of the mayor of Verrières, Mme. Renal, “a tall well-made woman, who had been the local beauty.” The heart of the novel is the web of subterfuges, quarrels and reunions that comprise Julien and Mme. Renal’s love affair. Near the stunning ending, Stendhal defines the novel as “a mirror carried along a high road. At one minute it reflects your vision of the azure skies, at another the mire of the puddles at your feet.” His finest novel is a handbook for both romantic dreamers and crass opportunists.

The Reckless Truth-Teller

By webmaster

On February 27, 2023

In Mailer, Media

Mike and John Buffalo Mailer are interviewed in the latest episode of the Open Source podcast “Norman Mailer Turns 100.”

We are summoning Norman Mailer in his hundredth-birthday season, what could be his revival time, to tell us what happened to his country and ours. Mailer lived and wrote it all: 40 books of eagle-eyed fact and fiction. First as a soldier in the Philippines, in the 1940s; then: epic poet of the Sixties in America; eventually as a celebrity and popular artist of Duke Ellington or Frank Sinatra proportions.

Listen to the full episode on their site.

Mailer in TLS

By webmaster

On February 17, 2023

In Reviews

Mailer’s swaggering machismo outstayed its welcome even in his lifetime, and today his hipster reflections on the “White Negro” might strike readers as both tiresome and offensive. Yet he caught the American imagination as a pundit and cultural critic like few writers before or since.

By Martin Ivens

Norman Mailer boasted to a television audience in 1971, “I’m going to be the champ until one of you knocks me off”. Gore Vidal had just been given a practical demonstration of this literary ambition. Mailer had head-butted him in the green room before the show. As James Marcus writes in his lead review of books published to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Mailer’s birth, the Brooklyn bruiser took his cue from Ernest Hemingway – “he treated writing and fighting as interchangeable agonies”. Mailer’s swaggering machismo outstayed its welcome even in his lifetime, and today his hipster reflections on the “White Negro” might strike readers as both tiresome and offensive. Yet he caught the American imagination as a pundit and cultural critic like few writers before or since.

Interview on Deep Cover

By webmaster

On February 8, 2023

In Media, Memoir

An interview with Mike discussing Mailer’s Last Days is featured on the January 31, 2023 episode of Deep Cover with host Damen Dynan. Listen on Apple Music.

A Hundred Years of Norman Mailer

By webmaster

On February 2, 2023

In Mailer, Media, Memoir

Published in time for Mailer’s birthday, Ronald Fried has interviewed J. Michael Lennon about his latest memoir Mailer’s Last Days: New and Selected Remembrances of a Life in Literature, Lennon’s relationship with Mailer, and American literature in general. Fried writes:

At the age of 80, Lennon has lived long enough to see how writers’ reputations change over the decades. Since his death in 2007, Mailer’s reputation is still undergoing a transformation. To writers of my generation, Mailer was like a member of the family, in the good and the bad sense: omnipresent, sometimes disappointing, sometimes appalling, often brilliant, always calling attention to himself, and impossible to ignore. But to many younger literary types, Mailer is close to anathema, for his trafficking in misogynistic and racial stereotypes and the near-fatal stabbing of his wife Adele Morales, among other reasons. I talked with Lennon about his relationship with Mailer, Mailer’s contemporaries, and the challenges he faced as an academic and critic writing a highly personal memoir.

Read the complete interview.

Putative Son

By webmaster

On December 19, 2022

In Reviews

A review of Mailer’s Last Days by Robert Begiebing.

The title essay of J. Michael Lennon’s new book is a diaristic recounting of Mailer’s final illnesses, beginning in 2005, until his death in 2007, written by the man who eventually became Mailer’s closest literary colleague and confidante. How Lennon became close to Mailer is one tensile truss that binds the book and raises it beyond mere gallimaufry. The book is an artful amalgam of personal memoirs, critical essays on Mailer and his literary contemporaries, and interviews with and about Mailer.