Christopher Beha on Norman Mailer

The December issue of HARPER'S carries a review essay by Beha on the career of Norman Mailer.

This is in form a review of a recent biography, in conjunction with a release of certain posthumous writings. But Beha barely mentions either of the volumes supposedly under review. He simply writes his own essay on the like of Mailer.

Beha writes about Mailer in much the same manner that Mailer wrote about many non-fiction subjects, as for example in The Armies of the Night. Beha refers to himself as YW (for Young Writer) and speaks of YW's impressions of Mailer in the third person.

He  quotes Mailer thus, from a 1959 essay, "[W]hy then did it come as a surprise that people in publishing [in the years leading up to that one] were not as good as they used to be, and that the day of Maxwell Perkins was a day which was gone, really gone, gone as Greta Garbo and Scott Fitzgerald? Not easy, one could argue, for an advertising man to admit that advertising is a dishonest occupation, and no easier was it for the working novelist to see that now were left only the cliques, fashions, vogues, snobs, snots, and fools, not to mention a dozen bureaucracies of criticism; that there was no room for the old literary idea of oneself as a major writer, a figure in the landscape."

Then Beha brings in YW.

"When the YW thought about the problems facing writers of his own time, he was likely to put things in nearly those terms. But it wasn't the day of Fitzgerald and Perkins to which the YW and his peers looked with longing. they looked to Mailer's day, the time of Partisan Review and the early Dissent, the time of Trilling and Barzun, the time when Mailer himself might be found on television besides Gore Vidal or William F. Buckley or James Baldwin."

So Mailer was living in a golden age, while pining for a golden age that he thought had been lost. That point is often made (it is the theme of at least one Woody Allen movie) yet it still retains its poignancy.