June 29, 2024

Catch Up Day

Saturday is usually reserved for one thing: cheat day. That entails little or no work and good food. However, since Wednesday was a short day and Thursday was a no-work day, I need to use today to make up some time in the reading room. I’m still looking at correspondence, and I have only a few more boxes to cover. As Mailer gets more famous, his letter-writing grows.

First, I started from the newest box, from 1967, hoping that it would have something about his short fiction, but there was nothing. He and Eiichi Yamanishi speak about a “Collection,” but they make it sound something like AFM. I know there was a short fiction collection published in Japan called A Selection from the Short Fiction of Norman Mailer, but this “Collection” seems to be something else. Nothing really about the short stories.

Box 536 had this little interesting passage in a May 25, 1959 letter to Ann Morrissett:

“ I’m taking the liberty of sending you a copy of “The White Negro” which perhaps you haven’t read. The heart of any radical ideas I have are probably in there and I think a few liberal dilemmas may be revealed for the evasions they are. ”

Yes, WN does contain the kernels of his musings from Lipton’s and those he illustrates in his stories. In a letter dated February 15, 1959, Mailer confirms that he does not want “Yoga” printed in an anthology: “As for ‘Yoga,’ let’s forget it. I like the piece but not for the purposes of your book—I don’t feel its representative of the real character of my work.” I think Mailer was trying to get the editor to use “Advertisements for Myself on the Way Out,” but the editor wanted “Yoga.” That elicits the following: “If you can see your way to changing your stubborn mind about this one, I'd admire to have you in the book, among all us chaps with conjugated balls.” LOL and WTF?!

This box also contains the original letters that Mailer sent to the fourteen critics for their support of the literary merits of “The Time of Her Time.” I wrote about their generally positive responses yesterday. The folder calls it “The Time of Her Time Letter.” He’s looking for positive responses to avoid “extraordinary costs for [Walter] Minton and myself.”

As an aside—having nothing to do with my research, I found a letter to Mailer from Kurt Vonnegut, dated December 29, 1959. It begins: “I have just finished reading your ad for yourself — a lot of it twice, at your suggestion. Since my reputation is worthless, my comments on the book would be worthless, so fuck them.” And the rest is just as funny.

OK, I started Box 537, but only just got into it. There’s already some correspondence about Mailer’s stabbing of Adele, but a paucity of anything on the short fiction.