Volume 18, Number 11 · June 15, 1972
Keeping Up With Norman Mailer
By Thomas R. Edwards
The Long Patrol: 25 Years of Writing from the Work of Norman Mailer
edited by Robert F. Lucid
World, 739 pp., $15.00
Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work
edited by Robert F. Lucid
Little, Brown, 310 pp., $6.95
Existential Errands
by Norman Mailer
Little, Brown, 365 pp., $7.95
At this relatively quiet moment in a noisy career, it may be tempting to try to see Mailer steadily and whole, as Professor Robert Lucid's anthologies invite us to do. One gasps at the subtitle of The Long Patrol—has it really been twenty-five years since The Naked and the Dead? Even though the strictest answer is 'no, not quite,' a lot of Mailer has indeed happened since 1948, as well as a lot of other things, and the institutional reek of 'the man and his work' smells at least less inappropriate to the subject than it would have a few years ago. If Lucid's professorial coupling of Mailer with Washington Irving and Longfellow in a tradition of 'public writers' is a bit unsettling, still Mailer has never notably shied away from the idea of becoming an institution, the champion, the mayor, the president of letters, though he insists on his own terms, as in his remarks upon accepting the National Book Award: 'It is nice to have awards and to accept them. They are the measure of the degree to which an Establishment meets that talent it has hindered and helped.' One notes who meets whom here, while relishing the precision of 'meets,' which I suppose can only mean 'comes into conformity with.'
Review, 2715 words
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