Mailer is like America. Loud and colorful, diverse, sometimes brilliant, often the victim of his own self regard, believer in an exceptionalism mostly glimpsed in the mirror, and willing to die trying or for the right cause. As he said about his own country: “The thing that distresses me about America is that for all the country’s done, I don’t think it’s done one quarter of what it should. I believe it was destined, by history, if you will, to be the greatest country that ever existed. I don’t think it’s come near it.”
Author: webmaster Page 22 of 37
When J. Michael Lennon was a graduate student at the University of Rhode Island in the early 1970s, he did something unusual for someone writing a dissertation about a famous writer.
Instead of researching someone who’d been rotting underground for scores of years, he wrote about a live author — Norman Mailer.
Norman Mailer was 75 in May of 1998 and had just published a 1300-page retrospective anthology of his work, The Time of Our Time. The defining event of the collection is the Cold War, and Mailer could have read from any number of excerpts, fictional and nonfictional, that unfold under its huge shadow, but because the Monica Lewinsky scandal was then being hotly debated, and the impeachment of President Clinton looming, Mailer read first from two recently published pieces about Clinton.
J. Michael Lennon is most recently the author of Norman Mailer: A Double Life. This conversation also references essays contained in the new Mailer collection, Mind of an Outlaw.
Photo by Gerald Lucas. See more images from this year’s Norman Mailer Society Conference.
Thanks to J. Michael Lennon, we see the pugnacious pontificator in all his glory and warts.
J. Michael Lennon’s biography is the first that interprets Mailer from within, not as a public spectacle. Unlike his predecessors—Mary V. Dearborn, Peter Manso, Carl Rollyson, and others—Lennon was Mailer’s friend and collaborator; he has read 45,000 of his letters, and talked to an enormous population of friends and enemies, from gangsters to editors. He shepherds a prodigious variety of events into well-organized chapters, sometimes cluttered with irrelevant details like the names and addresses of movie houses where Mailer watched gangster films as a teenager.
A video of Norman Mailer, Mike Lennon, Gore Vidal, and Norris Church Mailer in Don Juan in Hell, in October 2002.
The author of the critically-acclaimed new biography of Norman Mailer is J. Michael Lennon ’63, an English major at Stonehill and a contributor to The Cairn, the student literary magazine.