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.
Somebody – Octavio Paz, Robert Frost, I don’t know who but somebody – said that “Literature is journalism that stays journalism.” I’ve always taken it to mean that writing that truly reflects its time stays fresh and relevant.
Whatever it does mean, I thought of it while reading J. Michael Lennon’s huge and satisfying biography, “Norman Mailer, a Double Life.” Lennon recounts the famous scene in Mailer’s great book about the 1967 march on the Pentagon, “Armies of the Night,” when Robert Lowell tells Mailer, “Norman, I really think you are the best journalist in America.” Mailer, taking slight umbrage, replied that he sometimes thought of himself as “the best writer in America.” (I love that “sometimes”; Mailer thought he was the best every waking minute of the day and in his dreams.)
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