Volume 24, Number 3 · March 3, 1977
Stuttering Giant
By Frederick C. Crews
Genius and Lust: A Journey Through the Major Writings of Henry Miller
by Norman Mailer
Grove Press, 576 pp., $12.50
In that overbearing but fertile treatise, The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom tells us that 'strong poets' get that way by implicitly diminishing the great predecessors who most threaten to intimidate them into silence. To be a powerful writer one must first be a misreader, exaggerating or inventing a weakness in the forebear that calls for the remedy of one's own gestating work. But despite all his swerving, an insecure writer may remain unconvinced of his right to exist. As an instance, Bloom cites Mailer: 'any reader of Advertisements for Myself may enjoy the frantic dances of Norman Mailer as he strives to evade his own anxiety that it is, after all, Hemingway all the way.'
Review, 2783 words
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