Am I as Bad a Writer as Norman Mailer at His Worst?

Quite a horrifying thought.

I've been writing brilliant stuff for well over 40 years. I just want widespread recognition and fame and billions of dollars for it, what's the problem?

Unless the reason I haven't gotten widespread recognition is that I'm actually not a brilliant writer.

I don't really believe I'm not brilliant, but I worry that I might be brilliant only part of the time, and really, really stupid a lot of the rest of the time, like Norman Mailer. (OMG, was Norman autistic?) I'm not violent like Norman was. But I wonder whether what I once wrote about him, about how he "veers sharply from the sublime to the ridiculous from book to book, page to page, from one word to the next," doesn't apply every bit as much to myself.

Last night I saw a video of almost a half hour's worth of Norman at somewhere near his worst. I tell you truthfully, his attitude here is as grotesque as his hairstyle (Is he drunk? In the middle of the afternoon on a nationwide talk-show? That would not have been entirely unlike him). Finally, about 19:05, he briefly becomes coherent enough to state what is on his mind. The problem is, he's defending one of his worst books, perhaps the most atrocious one of them all, The Prisoner of Sex, his uncomprehending reaction to the Women's Lib movement, and he's reacting quite badly (to put it mildly) to good, constructive criticism from Gore. Granted, it was not flattering when Gore made a connection between Norman and Henry Miller on the one hand and Charles Manson on the other. But the way to refute the thesis that you bear no resemblance to a violent psychopath is not to behave like a violent psychopath. Don't feel obliged to subject yourself to this video if you don't have an especial interest in the literary feuds of mid-20th-century Murrkin literature.



Here's a much more impressive, much more rational performance by Norman, not particularly painful to watch at all, on the contrary, here Norman is rather charming, and promoting one of his better books, Armies of the Night, although unfortunately the man he's talking to is an insufferable weasel.



In both pieces Norman expresses his deep admiration for Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway was Norman's hero, his primary role model, and Norman shared this with countless other writers -- my God, there still may exist some writers who idolize that sheer jackass Hemingway. Hemingway may have damaged more potentially-good writers in more deep ways than anyone since Hegel, maybe even since Rousseau. The deaths by overindulgence in alcohol alone, which can be laid at Hemingway's feet... Before one even begins to consider the damage done to what could have been so very many very fine books. How many of those low, low points in both Norman's books and in his public behavior go back directly to this inexplicable admiration for that jackass Hemingway?

Oliver Stone And De Wimmins (Partly An Open Letter To Oliver Stone)

For just a split-second I thought, who'd be interested in a piece about Oliver Stone's Savages now, nearly a year after it was released? But after a split-second I realized that, of course, plenty of people would be interested, because, like me, plenty of people see movies for the first time when they come to cable. It may be that this piece (it's not really a conventional review) will not compete with a lot of reviews, because The Pros may see no need for reviews now, but they could be wrong. I'm not dissing The Pros, not at all. They will tell you that they are The Pros for a reason, and I don't dispute that. I don't dispute that, in any field, there are plenty of good reasons for going to The Pros. However, in any field, I think it's a mistake to assume that The Pros are always right about everything simply because they're The Pros.

My review of Savages could be contained in 5 words: it's an Oliver Stone movie. And this, of course, means that it offers up hearty servings of both the sublime and the ridiculous. Technically -- photography, editing, set decoration, sound, montage, etc, etc -- it's superb. 28 years ago, Stone's Salvador was technically superb, as has been every Stone movie in between. Some very good filmmakers seem to get stuck at one era's level of technical filmmaking, but Stone stays cutting edge. I don't know whether that's because he always hires the best crews, or because he himself is a hands-on tech-nerd director, but whatever's going on, kudos, Oliver. Also, as usual, the script -- as usual co-written by Stone -- is interesting and the acting is solid.

And as usual, what's going on with the women characters is weird. I'm not referring this time to the sexual triangle between best buds Ben (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Chon (Taylor Kitsch) and their shared girlfriend Ophelia "O" Sage (Blake Lively). I have no problem with people leading unconventional sex lives. If they're happy, I'm happy. And these characters are very happy with their unconventional setup. The weirdness to which I refer is the fact that O is yet another woman character in a Stone film who is a dingbat whose function in the film seems to be to interfere with the plot. And it's much worse than usual because O is right smack dab in the middle of the plot; you can't just fast-forward past her scenes like you can do with Sissy Spacek in JFK without missing anything. O is yet another woman character in a Stone film who is completely dependent on men. Her main occupations appear to be sex and shopping. Her only real function in the movie's plot is to require that her boyfriends save her. Why can't Stone create characters who are strong and independent? I know he's met at least one woman like that in real life, Katherine Bigelow. He probably knows many more -- Spacek is probably very strong and independent in real life, as are many other of the actresses who've played these strange stunted characters in Stone's movies. (Why do they play these characters?) He probably has met very many very independent women, but his movies offer little evidence that he has noticed any of them.

Aha, but wait! you're saying. There's another female character in this very movie, Elena Sánchez, played by Salma Hayak, who is very very strong and independent. She runs a whole huge Mexican drug cartel. To which I respond, aha! but you see, Hayak's character only reinforces the weirdness. Yes, she is very strong, but she is very grotesque. She is a monster. Maybe we have here the answer to the question of why Stone goes to such unusual lengths to avoid strong female characters: maybe to him strong women are monsters. Elena Sánchez' hair is grotesque, but when a chink is shown in the wall of her strength -- that is, when her maternal instincts are confronted, causing the dominant persona she had displayed constantly until then to utterly collapse, and she screams at all of her goons to leave her alone so that no-one can see her fall to knees and weep helplessly, when she is alone, we see that the grotesque, helmet-shaped hair is a wig when Elena casts it off. The TRUE Elena wears no helmet and is a weeping helpless mother. In short -- Oliver, you have issues. Read some Freud for God's sake.

The other characters are, uh -- not subtle. As usual in Stone movies, most of the characters are not complex human beings so much as Representations of Principles. O represents an ideal of dependent womanhood -- man, Oliver, do you have issues! -- Elena represents a helpless woman disguised as a brutal amazon, Chon represents warriordom, Ben represents sainthood -- he has a wispy beard like a Medieval saint in a painting and his scrunchied mane of curly hair from many angles resembles a halo, because Stone is Mister Not Subtle. O's name is O Sage -- like Osage, the Native American tribe, get it? Huh? Huh? Eh? Yes, Oliver, I get that she's named Osage, but I haven't figured out why yet -- maybe because to you O represents Nature, which men must protect and nurture, and so do Native Americans. And I'm not sure to whom or what, if I'm right about that, that would be more condescendingly insulting: women, Native Americans or Nature.

Anyway, Oliver, I wouldn't even be talking to you about any of this if I didn't think your movies are very good. You're sort of like a cinematic Norman Mailer, and I mean that as very high praise. Kids, if you're not familiar with Norman Mailer, picture an older, novelist version of Oliver Stone, veering sharply from the sublime to the ridiculous from book to book, page to page, from one word to the next, grandiose like Stone, occasionally falling flat but never afraid to take the next leap, like Stone, with severe issues about women, like Stone. Mailer was also occasionally a movie director. He directed the big-screen version of his novel Tough Guys Don't Dance, a book so good -- at least 70% sublime, less than 30% ridiculous -- that it was shocking how bad most of the movie turned out, made by the same man. (It reminds you that just because a person is a great writer doesn't necessarily mean that they go around looking at and listening to real 3-D life.) Unless you disregard the 98% of the movie which is awful and focus on the couple of minutes' worth of greatness. Which in my opinion is the only sensible way to look at anything. Many people seem to actually prefer mediocre movies (or books or records or paintings or people or what have you) which are consistently mediocre, with no unusual awfulness. I'll never understand that point of view, I'll never want to. 2 minutes worth of breathtaking scenes and the rest just cringingly awful -- that means that Tough Guys Don't Dance beats 99%+ of the other movies made hands down. As do yours, Oliver.

Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway, Myself and Other Superstars

Hemingwaywrote "d--n" instead of "damn." In some of his works, at least. In The Naked and the Dead,Norman Mailer may have spelled out all of the other dirty words, but instead of "fuck" he wrote "fug."

And it was published and it was a huge success, and the reason, Mailer said, that in all of his later works he spelled out all of the naughty words is that when he was first introduced to Dorothy Parker, she said, "Ah, you're the young man who doesn't know how to spell 'fuck.'"

This would have been the late 40's. Hemmingway was still alive then, he lived until after 1960. I don't know whether he and Mailer ever met. It seems strange to me that I don't know that. I also don't know whether by the late 40's Hemmingway had begun to spell out the naughty words.

Clive Owen plays Hemmingway in a new HBO movie. He wears spectacles and a big moustache and a goofy expression, but still it's very flattering physically to Hemmingway.

Okay, okay. I'm not complaining about how much better-looking Cate Blanchett is than Elizabeth I was, or that Owen played Walter Raleigh opposite Blanchett.

And if we get right down to it (Mailer was a shrimp!), it's possible that if I had had more success as a writer, and as a young writer like Hemmingway and Mailer, I might have spent less of my life sneering at Hemmingway and Mailer.

That's either all the way right down to it, or painfully close.