Charlie Rose - An appreciation of Norman Mailer

An appreciation of Norman Mailer. Mailer died of acute renal failure on the morning of November 10, 2007, a month after undergoing lung surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, New York. He was 84 years old. He led with his left on the literary scene for more than a half-century, beginning with his stunning debut novel, "The Naked and the Dead," in 1948 Mailer was on the program 11 times over the years, talking about his books, the art of writing and America. He had a lot to say about all this - and so much more. I am going to be devoting my program tonight to this legendary novelist and non-fiction writer.

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Mailer the Writer

This show is an appreciation of Norman Mailer. Mailer appeared eleven times on the Charlie Rose show. The appreciation consists in excerpts from the shows. I found the political excerpts which came more towards the end of the show less interesting. The heart of the shows and the appreciation was Mailer talking to Rose about writing, the novel, that which concerned him most. These clips were for me enormously enjoyable. Mailer has a winning manner, a sense- of- humor about himself , and a metaphoric brilliance, a way of saying things in an especially surprising way. One piece I especially loved had Rose listing all Mailer's book and Mailer reporting on the way that they were reviewed. So many of them were reviewed badly or not reviewed at all, that it can give heart to any far less talented writer. Mailer , I think extraordinarily misestimated the respective value of his own works with his giving high marks to two 'Harlot's Ghost' and 'Ancient Evenings' which most found unreadable. In any case Mailer's description of his own writing process( There is a beautiful piece in which he talks about the way the idea for a book comes to a writer as a kind of first hint in winter of spring) of his zigzag career, of his being at a loss when he overnight became famous for writing 'The Naked and the Dead' is very interesting stuff. Mailer talks about his similarity to Picasso two people who became very well- known early on and had to live with a kind of dread and worry over their work for the rest of their lives. He tells about his writing of the life of Jesus, and of how only through this did he come to understand certain parts of America he had not known before. He too answers Charlie Rose and ranks himself among the top five of the novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. Bellow, Updike, Roth are the other three and he refuses to name a fifth out of a desire not to alienate his friends.
What is interesting is how many big bad books he wrote on odd subjects which he seemed to never recognize as bad books.
He also describes the process of aging, and how he gets to do things in such a slower way than he did before.
These are top-flight interviews. Rose and Mailer seem to speak as real friends who truly like and understand each other.
December 6, 2007

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