A Conversation with Norman Mailer

Abstract

In this opening chapter of Mailer and the Time of His Time, Jonathan Middlebrook recounts an evening of drinks with Norman Mailer at his family’s converted barn in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, with his father joining partway through. He reads Mailer through tone of voice more than stated opinion: his caution, his deference to Harvard and to the Berkshires’ literary past, his worry about the decay of language, and his ease with talk of politics and the Kennedys. Middlebrook places Mailer among Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, and Fitzgerald as an outsider who prizes what he feels he was not born to. He then argues that the soldier’s heroism at the center of Mailer’s imagination is giving way to a civilian imagination of family and aging. He contrasts Mailer’s military idea of courage with his own experience in the civil rights movement in Mississippi.