June 28, 2024

Literature, Filth, or Both?

Taking yesterday off has messed me up a bit. It’s not that I’m behind on my work, but it feels odd to have not done any on a Thursday. That said, I’m glad Kip was able to come for a couple of days; we had a great time, sampling what Austin has to offer a couple of 50-somethings. Now, it’s back to it.

In the “Friends” folder of Box 534, I found a couple of mentions “Yoga.” In an undated letter (ca. January 1958) she asks about “Yoga”: “it’s a good story about something that matters but neither of us can figure out the purpose of the point-of-view device you used. Who the hell is ‘I.’” Mailer responds on February 13, 1958:

“ “The Man Who Studied Yoga” has an interesting I—yes—I’m surprised you didn’t dig it: the I is Sam’s sub-conscious, super-ego, whatever you want to call it, the cold furious superior part of himself which looks on with anguish at how his life takes place. I kind of like the story because it marks for me the beginning of a new kind of writing for myself. ”

Mailer’s comment sounds much like his letter from October 17, 1956 a part of which I posted a couple of days ago. However, the gold here is Mailer’s interpretation of the narrator as superego—something akin to the homeostatic or homeodynamic or, as we write in Lipton’s, “the individual essence that often stands opposed to social order and conformity.” Later, in Lipton’s, Mailer compares the H to the id “which becomes the censor, the resistance” to the societal forces that seek to control and repress it. So in this sense, the narrator is the voice of the H which becomes the resistance to Sam’s quotidian life.

Box 535 is correspondence from 1959, and one of the first folders concerns the publication of Advertisements for Myself. One of the originals tories that Mailer wrote for this collection is “The Time of Her Time,” and of course there is some questions about its appropriateness for publication. Mailer writes fourteen critics for their opinions, and thanks them with a version of the following:

“ I sent “The Tine of Her Time” to fourteen critics, some liked the piece, some liked it very much, a few đid not like it particularly, but thirteen of the fourteen felt that “The Time of Her Time” was not pornographic and should be published. I know this had effect on my publisher [Walter Minton of Putnum’s], and he is now willing to print it. So I’d like to thank you for the time and thought you gave to this. ”

See also my notes to Box 158. There are various other reactions to “Her Time,” but this excerpt from Lionel Trilling’s letter, undated but likely from July 1959, is quite good:

“ I should like to add this: that when I say that I think that the story should be published in your book, I an taking into account your particular position, your particular commitment, what I believe to be your conception of your work and your career. If you were a writer who had just happened to have written an explicitly sexual story as it were simply for literary reasons, I might still urge its publication but with a quite different emphasis and tone. In urging you to publish, I have in mind your avowed position as a moralist as well as a novelist. ”

Conveniently, the critics’ responses are then collected in a document. These could prove useful in my writing on the story.

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