June 14, 2024

Friday Research

Bird Bird Biscuit looks awesome. Yes, I’m already planning my Saturday eats. A chicken biscuit for breakfast? Oh, yeah. I’ll probably order early and get on the bike to fetch it. The more I look around at potential restaurants to try, the more I see I might have to start riding. Or at least trying Uber. I’m also going to check out Sound Sanctuary and maybe even Austin Home Systems since they’re pretty close to one another. And maybe Jewboy Burgers, since the Cantina is so tasty. It’s good to have a plan. Can you tell I’m hungry after my walk to campus?

The original TOC for SFNM?

Beginning with Box 75 today. The first documents are two handwritten tables of contents, as Mailer looked for a way to organize his 19 short stories included in The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer—the first one I include here.

This folder also contains what appears to be an alternative introduction, both handwritten and typed. Reading through it, it seems like it might be the introduction to Existential Errands. He talks about how he has come to use “existentialism” rather than “hip,” for the latter, he foresaw, “would end in a box on Madison Avenue.” Heh, how right he was. He goes on to characterize his collected stories as “excursions into existentialism” which he originally wanted to title The Saint and the Psychopath:

“ Because these are writings on two themes, violence and the mystical, writings about what is criminal and what is religious, and the root of my perception all those years ago (after marijuana first stole into the keep of my psyche and began to lower the bridges one by one) was that the saint and the psychopath were united to one another, and different from the mass of men. ”

Yes, this very idea he discussed in Lipton’s, like in entry 31. This theme is explored in “The White Negro,” of course, but the short fiction are a kind of application of his existentialism to fictional narrative. The best of his stories explore various types of men and how they act and react to various crucial decisions—whether genuinely or through the lens of societal expectations.

Most of the rest of the archive is a draft of the SFNM, which Mailer basically gathers from annotated and corrected pages he’s torn out of already published books.

Box 107 contains folders on Existential Errands, so I figured there might be an item or two of interest. There’s a curious document called “From Norman Mailer’s Treasury of Quotations.” It’s several quotations (made up) about fucking from various literati.

I’ve made my final box requests for the first part of the archive—I still have a few to go through, though I’ve probably exhausted those on his short stories. The next ones I’ll request contain correspondence which may take a bit more time to go through, since I’m looking for specific content. He wrote quite a few letters in his lifetime, but I only need those from the mid-1940s through the mid-1950s, I think. This is pretty good progress for my first week+ of work in the reading room. I need to take some time to read what I’ve collected more carefully and make notes. And maybe write that book proposal? PS is still interested in co-authoring a book on the short fiction, so that seems to be the way I’ll proceed for now. I have to finish that bibliography, too.

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