July 2, 2024

Arrival Day

Just a few hours until Autumn and the boys arrive! I requested three boxes this morning, which maybe my last few. Today’s walk seemed particularly hot, but I made it into the HRC by 10:00 ready to do some work. The owner of my cottage said that I could keep it through July 7, so as of today, my official plan is to leave early that morning. Good thing, too, as Hurricane Beryl could be coming to town. That is something I’ll have to watch.

Not too much today, as expected. While not apropos, Box 559 contained an interesting paragraph that Mailer wrote for Harper’s in 1962, based on their solicitation: “ANTI-DOTES... This game—devised by Michael Menzies, and which any number can play—provides the tonic exhilaration of voicing anathemas. It is a matter of answering a dozen questions: Which PLAY... BOOK... [etc. . . .] has seemed to you dismal, disastrous and distasteful; and, if you care to comment, why?” Here’s Mailer’s paragraph:

“ I detest Pommes Persilles, Clams Casino, Crabmeat Crepes Maison. Full stop. Bay Scallops Saute a l'Orange are an abomination of the root. They tend to create such banquets as the Macnamara McBundy Megadeathburger. The worst celebrity in America is of course J. Edgar Hoover, the worst play would be the one he most enjoyed—was it JB? One is tempted to say that Pigeon Feathers is a dreadful book but I might be doing Mr. Updike an irreparable injustice since I’ve not looked into his pages. Not yet. “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” made me think of a suicide on tranquilizers. Leonard Bermstein deserves to be insulted—he’s a decent, hardworking, vividly alive host, but there’s something executive about his musical art, it is plastic like Styrene. So he never saves, he never misses. The worst place in America is the ground floor of the Time-Life Building—it looks like a vast operating room for sick whales and sclerotic sharks. The worst mental attitude: attention to mental hygiene; the worst humor inevitably is clean humor (cleanliness prefers after all a voyage into the realm of wit) and so the one virtue nobody can support is patriotism without wit. God bless Vice President Johnson. Governor Barnett. The only certain activity to which I can in good conscience object is an informal White House supper to which one is not welcome. Alas, the nearest I come to the White House is the whites of the Secret Service eye to eye. ”

Oh, and of course Mailer’s famous letter to Playboy, dated December 21, 1962:

“ I wish you hadn’t billed the debate between William Buckley and myself as a meeting between a conservative and a liberal. I don’t care if people call me a radical, a rebel, a red, a revolutionary, an outsider, an outlaw, a Bolshevik, an anarchist, a nihilist, or even a left conservative, but please don’t ever call me a liberal. ”

I know how he feels.

And that’s about it. At least I have to call it for today and head to the airport. I’m going to comb through the database once more to see if there’s anything else I should be looking at—maybe in the mid-eighties when he was publishing The Essential Mailer (1982) in England and the hardback version of SFNM (1980) or when he was working on The Time of Our Time (1998) in the nineties.

OK, time to see the family!