Norman’s Conquests
Three months before the Americans committed their greatest foreign policy blunder ever, I had gone up to Cape Cod to interview my friend of fifty years, Norman Mailer. Towards the end of his life Norman called himself a Left- Conservative, and went as far as to agree that losing one’s culture through immigration was not a good thing. But he remained adamant about the evils of American corporations. He blamed them for making America an uglier place to live in since World War II, a country full of “50 - story high-rise architecture as inspired in form as a Kleenex box, shopping malls encircled by low level condominiums, superhighways that homogenise our landscapes, and plastic, ubiquitous plastic, there to numb an infant’s tactile senses.” He told me he was opposed to the notion of an American Empire because of the all-pervasive aesthetic emptiness of the most powerful Americans corporations. “There are no cathedrals left for the poor - only sixteen-story urban renewal housing projects that sit on the soul like jail. Sometimes I am tempted to think that I am not so much a left-conservative as a left-medievalist.”
Being a left-conservative, he told me, is an oxymoron, “but there are elements in the remains of left-wing philosophy that are worth maintaining.” Such as ? I asked him. “Such as the idea that a very rich man should not make 4,000 times as much in a year as a poor man.” I remember sitting outdoors in the brilliant sunshine with him , and after he said that, I told him that my father—who employed around 5 to 10 thousand workers—made sure the disparity was never enormous because that is what breeds not only communism but also hatred for the haves. “Try telling that to Henry Kravis,” he snorted. We then discussed God. “If you start to talk about God with the average good liberal, he looks at you as if you are more than a little off. But I do believe there is a Creator who is active in human affairs and is endangered. I also believe there is a Devil who is equally active in our existence and is all too often successful.”
This was back in 2002. In the five years he had left to live Mailer wrote The Spooky Art, on writing, The Castle in the Forest, a novel about Hitler (or the Devil) The Gospel According To The Son, a novel on how Jesus discovers his divinity and the painful and powerful journey that ensues, and finally a book on God which made mincemeat of all those atheists and publicity seekers whose names will never appear in this column. His ability to write alternately fiction and non-fiction, essays and journalism, plays and films singled him out as a very brave writer who was not afraid to risk. He wrote about all things important, such as space, politics, war and peace and sex and feminism. He was not as good a boxer as his son Michael, but he was very brave inside the ring. He was not afraid to get hit, and it never entered his mind that Michael might be holding back. In 1998, a great party was given for him at Rockefeller Centre to celebrate his fifty years of writing. Mohammed Ali was there and the whole Mailer brood lined up with the champ for a picture. “Wait a minute, I need a fascist in here,” announced Norman, “Taki, get your arse up here.” So up I went on the stage and had my picture taken standing between Norman and Ali, aka Cassius Clay, and I suppose it was my greatest moment ever. “Are you really a fascist?” asked the champ.
I spent the day of Norman’s death with his first born son. Michael is probably my closest friend in the Bagel and he confides in me. His dad recently told him “I couldn’t have been the writer I am today and also been a good father.” Michael understood. When Gunter Grass admitted he had volunteered for the SS when very young, Mailer defended him while the rest jeered. “It was a writer’s romantic conceit, seeking experience,” said Norman. He once gave a dinner party for about twenty in honour of Abbie Hoffman, then the number one fugitive from the FBI. He told Michael to sit on the steps outside his house and if he saw any fuzz to yell “Geronimo!” A few hours after his death we had a boys lunch with Michael, Chuck Pfeiffer (a double silver star winner in Vietnam), Nick Simunek (Coldstream Guards and producing a movie with Michael, one in which I appear and play a grand master of Karate) and yours truly. We got very, very drunk, just Michael and I as the other two had given it up. Next to us was Liz Smith, the best known gossip columnist in America. Liz came over and told us a Norman story. During Arianna Stassinopoulos’s wedding to oil-billionaire Michael Huffington, Norman got bored with the glitzy people that had packed the church to the rafters, turned to Liz and asked why the two of them had never gone to bed together. ”Well,” said Liz. “First of all we were born the same day of the same year. And second, I’d rather go to bed with Norris.” (Mrs. Mailer). Norman shrieked out loud, said Liz, and people turned around, wondering what had happened.
I had known both James Jones and Irwin Shaw, tough guy writers, and Norman, the toughest of the three, now completes the trio up in Heaven.
Comments
I once read one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s letters, to his son, if memory serves, in which Tolkien complained of the homogenizing, culture-destroying tednecy of American culture. This during WWII, as well, when one had thought the Brits would be happy for our fellows to be there giving them some help.
On the other hand, one of my Brit friends took up US citizenship at least partly because there were no Wal-Marts to go to when he visited his old home town near Wales.
Go figure.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Mailer was white hating racist to the bitter end. Went so far as to agree, did he? That amounts to nothing more than back-handed gloating over the successful holocaust he helped to engineer. Of course it’s not a good thing, not good for YOU! He never disagreed with that.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
John Smith: Like most Leftists, Norman Mailer all but declared war upon the White Race and Western Civilization.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Taki’s and Mailer’s very wise comments on architectural blight find a scholarly foundation in Roger Scruton’s Aesthetics of Architecture. Scruton, an Englishman, doesn’t consider the special American form of the blight: How the automobile has dictated our architecture and city planning. Take and Mailer have.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Take - Taki
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Funny enough, I am, by profession, an “urban planner”.
America is a sick, sick society, and you can see it in it’s landscape.
I look out my office window and see a “big box” department store lying alone, next to a 6 lane “boulevard”, everyone alone in their cars, anonymous.
Interestingly enough, just last night I was reading Walker Percy’s “The Moviegoer”, and the narrator, “Binx”, was commenting that he has a car, but prefers to ride the buses and streetcars, because he feels so anonymous in an automobile, that all people see are his tail lights as he drives by…
I believe it was Russell Kirk (or Richard M Weaver) that called the automobile “mechanical Jacobins”. No doubt Norman Mailer would have agreed. Being
Jewish and/or “liberal” doesn’t automatically make one an opponent of traditional culture, although being a “liberal” does make it much more difficult for one to implement, as it were, traditional culture/design in a city. This is the failure of the “New Urbanism” architecture - it divorces the design from the traditional culture it wishes to imitate. Without a fundamental “conversion”, American urban design will remain Jacobin.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
I appreciate and second the comments of Mr. Cundiff and Mr. Capp. As Russell Kirk wrote:
“With great buildings as with small, the architecture of our mass-age in this latter half of the twentieth century,has been wondrously boring. Also it has been an architecture of sham: the outward symbol of a society which, despite all its protestations of being ‘free’ and ‘democratic’ rapidly sinks into servility.”
http://www.mmisi.org/ma/26_02/kirk.pdf
Click to flag this comment as abusive
...only sixteen-story urban renewal housing projects that sit on the soul like jail…
Sorry, this had nothing to do with American business - this was a Stalinist solution to ‘housing’ poor people. The Left’s concentration camps. Thankfully, many have been blown up in recent years.
In Kanada, however, we’re tearing them down and building them again.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
<<Sorry, this had nothing to do with American business - this was a Stalinist solution...>>
Really, are there any differences between a “Stalinist solution” and solutions to social ills offered by both American businesses and American politicians?
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Just a quick note. “The Gospel According to the Son” was published in 1997. Parts of it appeared in “The Time of Our Time” which served as something of a collection of Mailer’s greatest hits. While I had problems with some parts of the book, Mailer included a number of excellent scenes, mainly the tempting in the desert.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Americans don’t think of it this way, but Britain was American-occupied from the buildup for D-Day until some time after the war. The Brits had a nasty saying that the Yanks were overpaid, oversexed, and over here.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
@Andy Capp
“Really, are there any differences between a “Stalinist solution” and solutions to social ills offered by both American businesses and American politicians?”
Yes: Business creates wealth; government/socialism destroys it. Wealth is probably the best hope for solutions to social ills.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
If he was so anti-White Male why did Taki like him
so much?
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Reg
It’s very true that American men are over- sexed. A Russian was puzzled that women in Europe would gather around an American. I informed him that Americans are gifted in certain areas where European men are lacking (I lived in Europe for nearly three years).
By the way Reg, is it true that Englishmen think that doing the dishes is foreplay?
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Reg, John,
American response: The British are underpaid, undersexed and under Eisenhower.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
The un-indicted co-conspirators in the largest mis-allocation of Resources in the history of the planet, aka the American Development Paradigm is a triumvirate:
1. Private Industry
2. An easily bamboozled and woefully incurious American Public that thinks indolent gluttony a birthright.
3. American Government, at all levels and in particular, local Zoning Regulation
Several decades of the cheap fuel “get sumpthin fer nuthin” M.O. has insured that we have made a commitment to a way of life that we want to think is normal but is in fact, a tad septic on many levels, not the least of which is rampant ugliness and a kind of zero sum monotony that knows no bounds. It does not matter whether there have been good intentions or bad.
Leaving it up to big business to build well is just as big a fools errand as it is to leave it to our besotted government to regulate design and in the end, the American Public has so abdicated both citizenship and independent thought that it cannot be trusted to come to any cogent decision either.
Simply put, we have a three-way clusterboink.
We have turned both intellectualism and labor into a pejorative, leaving behind a great thicket of popular idiocy that creates the perfect consumer for the Homogenized Monolithic Corporation. Conventional Wisdom is nothing so much as a warden in a luxurious jail of Popular Culture. Fiat Money has bought itself a Fiat Culture.
We are not so much innovative in our dysfunction as much as we are ruthlessly jingoistic about it, like a drunk, telling all comers to “watch as I kick my own ass”.
The teat of antebellum factionalism we are gleefully attached to but again must be overcome so that we can return to a critical conversation about reclaiming meaning in a world where meaning seems to come more and more from the bombay doors of a jet fighter or the roadside bomb or a cash register.
Sure, Taki’s friend Norman made mistakes and was complicated and frequently contradictory but he remained a skeptic to the end and contributed to the larger conversation in his own way, full of bluster and cockiness. His self-characterization as a Left-Conservative is not as quixotic as it sounds. All labels today are suspect, given the cognitive dissonance that prevails.
200 years before we began to see inside the brain with modern technology, the Founders developed a Political System of Checks and Balances that was uniquely suited to and , in fact.... it possessed a predisposition to the potentials of the human brain. America was then and still is more an intellectual construct than a geographic location (go ahead, order me to tell this to the indians and mexicans and Phillapinos and Vietnamese and Iraqis and Cubans etc etc) .
The American, an individual conceived in liberty has decided to let his Republic lapse and be a good addict for a failed paradigm. The real surprise is how long it took. There are many many people capable of pulling this former Republic back from the abyss but given the ongoing counterintuitive approach to life, its a 50-50 bet at best. Relying on either the marketplace or government will not work until we can begin again to rely on ourselves, as was intended and empowered by the work resulting from arguments between the Founders.
Schopenhauer said “Life is a business that fails to meet expenses” . This being the case, it is up to us, not government, not business… to make the best of it and so we desperately need to dismount from our sacred little factionalist hobby horses and have a spirited conversation about authenticity in a relativistic world. In other words, we have to doff the ass hat and identify ourselves as the idiot we are, sans “higher power” and get to work building a better world immune from the Imperial Cartesian Vampires of the NeoCon persuasion and those who think the hidden hand of Adam Smith should be alowed to wear a boxing glove. To do this, we’ll have to rely more on our brains than our spleen ....or at the very least, use both, like Taki’s friend Norman did with admirable human imperfection.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Shame on Taki for taking Norman seriously (and remaining friends with the fiend). Here is all everyone needs to know about Mailer:
http://pajamasmedia.com/xpress/rogerkimball/2007/11/10/norman_mailer_a_dissenting_vie.php
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Left conservatism, even Left medievalism, is alive and well here in the land of Ruskin and GKC. See http://davidaslindsay.blogspot.com
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Post a Comment
By submitting this form, you give Taki's Magazine permission to publish this comment. Comments will be published at our discretion, and may be edited for clarity and length. Personal attacks, ethnic slurs, the riding of hobby horses and the beating of dead ones will be deleted as soon as they are detected by our small but alert staff. Repeat abusers of this policy will be barred from leaving comments. All comments reflect only the views of those posting them and not necessarily those of this website, its editors, or authors. For best formatting, please limit your response to one paragraph and don't hit "enter" to force line breaks.
Commenting is not available in this section entry.