Norman Mailer Research Articles

Norman Mailer - the most influental critic of contemporary reality in the second half of the twentieth century

Norman Mailer, one of the most influential authors of the second half of the twentieth century, faithfully followed his principle that a writer should alsobe a critic of contemporary reality. Therefore, most of his works portray the reality of the United States of America and the complexities of the contemporary American scene. Mailer described the spirit of his time - from the terror of war and numerous dynamic social and political processes to the 1969 moon landing. Conflicts were often in the centre of his writing, as was the relationship between an individual and the society; he speaks of politicalpower and the dangerous power of capital, while pointing to the threat of totalitarianism in America. Mailer spent his entire career writing about violence, power, perverted sexuality, the phenomenon of Hitler, terrorism, religion and corruption. He continually pointed out that individuals were in constant danger of losing freedom and dignity.

Encyclopedia of the environment in American literature

This encyclopedia introduces readers to American poetry, fiction and nonfiction with a focus on the environment (broadly defined as humanity's natural surroundings), from the discovery of America through the present. The work includes biographical and literary entries on material from early explorers and colonists such as Columbus, Bartolome de Las Casas and Thomas Harriot; through Native American creation myths; canonical 18th- and 19th-century works of Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, Twain, Dickinson, et al.; to more recent figures such as Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, Stanley Cavell, Rachel Carson, Jon Krakauer and Al Gore. It is meant to provide a synoptic appreciation of how the very concept of the environment has changed over the past five centuries, offering both a general introduction to the topic and a valuable resource for high school and university courses focused on environmental issues.

Toward a broader dialectic: joining Marxism with Mailer to forge a multilectics that advances teaching and learning

I contrast the lenses that Norman Mailer, Herbert Marcuse, and Karl Marx bring to their analyses of social life, exploring the contributions and limits of their respective approaches. I then propose what I call a “multilectical” theoretical lens that encompasses the strengths of all three and leans on the insights of post-Marxist theorists. The multilectical lens is then applied to an event that transpired in a severely underperforming middle school.

Seymour Krim’s Courage

Seymour Krim’s Courage Richard Kostelanetz (bio) Mark Cohen, ed., Missing a Beat: The Rants and Regrets of Seymour Krim (Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art). Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2010. 275 275 Pages, Cloth, $29.95. I wanted Flaubertian sainthood, poverty be thou the bride, a religious quest in prose where Art was God and I pursued it like a driven priest. —Seymour Krim, “Norman Mailer” (1969) I recall Seymour Krim (1922–1989) as one of the most courageous writers I’ve ever known. He chose subjects that intimidated lesser writers, such as his own madness in “The Insanity Bit,” his failures, his envy of writers who were more successful (not just with publishers but with women, such as Norman Mailer, born a year later), and foul relationships with publishers. He wrote the sort of essay that editors haggle and bite their nails over, knowing that it should be published but identifying excuses for why they can’t. Simply by going where few went before, by exposing problems previously hidden from readers, Krim epitomized what was called The New Journalism a few decades ago. He influenced select successors, including me. Krim exhibited courage in his prose style, too, transcending the traditional notion that every sentence should be limited to one clear idea. Instead, a classic Krim sentence includes parentheses and asides too long to quote here. He also used familiar words in original ways: “I had a good chance of getting planked one night about three weeks ago, I was looking forward to it [End Page 175] because the girl was dark-eyed, salty and keen, quick to judge and glaring in opinion but this seemed merely to open up wide the potential excitement of rocketing with her.” My hunch is that Krim worked up his extended sentences and comparably inflated paragraphs, adding and changing, to give them a signature uniquely his. Because he wrote not for specialist academics but for people as intelligent as himself, he also was expanding laudably the editorial container of what the “common reader” might commonly read. Even in writing ostensibly about others, he often spoke about himself (as do I, sometimes). Although Missing a Beat lacks “The Insanity Bit,” it does include highly personal portraits of his colleagues Harold Rosenberg, Mario Puzo, Milton Klonsky, Mailer, and Dr. Joyce Brothers (whom he despised), four essays on black culture and Jews, four more on Jews (including, in Krim’s imagined posthumous conversion, Henry Miller!), and the classic autobiographical “What’s This Cat’s Story?” The range of Krim’s concerns was more obsessive than wide. In the end, he was a more exemplary “New York Jewish intellectual” than the arbiters who marginalized him. Needless to say, the Seymour Krim I knew in the 1980s was deferential and considerate, perhaps to a fault. He was, I’m told, a good teacher unable to score a permanent position. His overwrought sentences created the semblance of tough, unforgiving hysteria I did not find in the man. In person, before me, he seemed easily pushed around, perhaps the victim of too much misfortune, not to mention strong women and too many bullying editors. (The truth implicit in this book’s numerous “Acknowledgments” is that a courageous writer’s work necessarily appears initially in many places.) He spent the 1980s working up an epic tentatively titled “Chaos” that was never published. Life wore him down, alas. I remain surprised that he never discussed his relationship to another Krim, Arthur (1910–1994), whom he identified to me as a prominent relative he could call upon. Oddly, a Google search of their names together (“X” + “Y”) identifies Arthur only as one of Seymour’s many correspondents. Arthur, don’t forget, was a film mogul and, incidentally, finance chairman for the Democratic Party. Arthur’s widow, Mathilde (born 1926), gained certain fame in the late 1990s as a publicist for AIDS awareness. My hunch decades ago identified Arthur as Seymour’s secret patron, the supportive relative that every courageous (especially Jewish) writer needs. An obituary for Donald [End Page 176] Krim (1945–2011), the founder of Kino International, a quality film distributor, reveals that this Krim got his first film job...

'Every Time I Try to Play Black, It Comes Out Sounding Jewish': Jewish Jazz Musicians and Racial Identity

'Every Time I Try to Play Black, It Comes Out Sounding Jewish':Jewish Jazz Musicians and Racial Identity1 Charles Hersch (bio) "Every time I try to play black, it comes out sounding Jewish."2 —Stan Getz Early in his memoir, Really the Blues (1946), Jewish jazz clarinetist Milton "Mezz" Mezzrow describes a conversion experience. Mezzrow and his friends approach a segregated lunch counter in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. As someone who is, in his words, "dirty from riding the rails and dark-complexioned to begin with," he is told, "We don't serve niggers in here." Clearly a mistake has been made, perhaps because of their dirty faces. However, the more he thinks about it, Mezzrow believes it was not a mistake: "We were Jews, but in Cape Girardeau they had told us we were Negroes. Now all of a sudden, I realized that I agreed with them." He vows to become a "Negro musician."3 Mezzrow's conversion from Jew to black is well known, but his is only the most extreme example of Jewish jazz musicians who identify with African Americans because of a felt sense of affinity.4 These musicians, [End Page 259] to use Jewish saxophonist Stan Getz's words, "played black," not only by becoming part of a musical genre whose most influential figures have been African Americans, but also by adopting black speech inflections.5 Although it is tempting to dismiss these Jewish artists as "white Negroes," to cite Norman Mailer's well-known phrase, their apparent adoption of black identity was made more complicated and interesting by its connection to their Jewishness. Even if they initially "became black," these musicians often came to blackness through Jewishness and ultimately struggled with a never-fully-buried Jewish identity. Thus, when Jewish jazz musicians tried "to play black," it sometimes "[came] out sounding Jewish."6 In the 1940s and 1950s, the ongoing negotiations of racial identity by Mezzrow, disc jockey "Symphony Sid" Torin, jazz trumpeter Red Rodney, and others emerged from both the history of Jewish racial ambiguity in America and the specific mixture of antisemitism and pressure to assimilate that they faced.7 "The African Character of the Jew" The notion of affinity between Jews and blacks has roots in historical perceptions of Jews as less than fully white. For antisemites, Jews were an inferior, "colored" race. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Jews were seen as having dark skin, which was considered a sign of inferiority [End Page 260] and disease. Reflecting a consensus among anthropologists and others, Robert Knox, in the mid-nineteenth century, spoke of "the African character of the Jew, his muzzle-shaped mouth and face removing him from other races." According to Knox, "the whole physiognomy, when swarthy, as it often is, has an African look."8 Well into the twentieth century, Jews were seen as a separate race, not as white.9 From this perspective, Jews were foreigners to the European-American musical tradition. The idea that the foreignness of Jews to Western culture was a threat to music had its most notorious exposition in Richard Wagner's 1869 essay, "Jewishness in Music."10 There, he argued that "European art and civilization . . . have remained to the Jew a foreign tongue," in which he or she can never create great art. Such attitudes were not confined to nineteenth-century Europe, however. In the 1920s in America, Jews were seen as "Orientals" who would contaminate American music. Author and composer Daniel Gregory Mason decried the influence of the "foreign type" Jews on modern music: "The Jew and the Yankee stand in human temperament, at polar points; where one thrives, the other is bound to languish. And our whole contemporary aesthetic attitude toward instrumental music, especially in New York, is dominated by Jewish tastes and standards, with their Oriental extravagance, their sensuous brilliancy and intellectual facility and superficiality, their general tendency to exaggeration and disproportion."11 Though in extreme form, Henry Ford also made the argument that Jews were musical foreigners, but for him they were in league with African Americans. Jazz was a "Jewish creation" whose "monkey talk" and "jungle squeals," presumably taken from blacks, "invade[d] decent homes."12 (Interestingly...

Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoirby Jay LiftonRobert. New York, Free Press, 2011, 448 pp., $30.00.

Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoirby Jay LiftonRobert. New York, Free Press, 2011, 448 pp., $30.00.

“Ali Even Motivates the Dead”: The Pursuit of Sovereignty in Norman Mailer'sThe Fight

Norman Mailer was haunted by the specter of social death—a specter created for him by living as a Jew between the parentheses created by the Holocaust and the prospect of nuclear Armageddon. As an antidote to social death, Mailer sought its opposite—sovereignty within and beyond his writer's sphere. In the boxer Muhammad Ali, Mailer found an exemplar of the seizure of sovereignty within and beyond a sphere.The Fightchronicles the heavyweight championship battle between Ali and George Foreman in Zaire, a country treated like a private bank account by its dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko. I argue that Mailer regrettably failed to emphasize fully the fact that Zaire was exhibit B (the Vietnam War being the writer's inevitable exhibit A) in the case Mailer passionately made that the Cold War brutalized the American psyche.

The participatory journalism of Michael Herr, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, and Joan Didion: creating new reporting styles

The participatory journalism of Michael Herr, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, and Joan Didion: creating new reporting styles

Hip to Post45

Hip to Post45 David J. Alworth (bio) Michael Szalay, Hip Figures: A Literary History of the Democratic Party. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. 324pp. $24.95. “[W]here are we now?” About five years have passed since Amy Hungerford asked this question in her assessment of the “revisionary work” that was undertaken by literary historians at the dawn of the twenty-first century.1 Juxtaposing Wendy Steiner’s contribution to The Cambridge History of American Literature (“Postmodern Fictions, 1970–1990”) with new scholarship by Rachel Adams, Mark McGurl, Deborah Nelson, and others, Hungerford aimed to demonstrate that “the period formerly known as contemporary” was being redefined and revitalized in exciting new ways by a growing number of scholars, particularly those associated with Post45 (410). Back then, Post45 named but a small “collective” of literary historians, “mainly just finishing first books or in the middle of second books” (416). Now, however, it designates something bigger and broader, a formidable institution dedicated to the study of American culture during the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. This institution comprises an ongoing sequence of academic conferences (including a large [End Page 622] gathering that took place at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011), a Web-based journal of peer-reviewed scholarship and book reviews (Post45), and a monograph series published by Stanford University Press (Post•45). Its increasing influence is palpable, evident in the ordinary language of academic sociality. When people ask, “What do you work on?” they know what you mean when you say “post–’45.” Michael Szalay’s Hip Figures: A Literary History of the Democratic Party (2012) is one of five books in the Stanford series, which is edited by Florence Dore and Szalay himself. As such, it not only constitutes an exemplary case of Post45 scholarship but also provides an occasion to reiterate Hungerford’s question: Where are we now? What is the current state of scholarly work on the period formerly known as contemporary? Hip Figures showcases what Hungerford called “the solid dominance of historicism” in her 2008 survey of the field, while reminding us that, to use her words, “close reading remains at the heart of . . . critical practice” for this generation of scholars (416). Throughout his study, Szalay deploys the technique of close reading in order to demonstrate, as he puts it in the very last phrase of the book, “how and why culture mattered to political life” (281), or more specifically how the novels of Robert Penn Warren, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, William Styron, John Updike, E. L. Doctorow, and Joan Didion “invoked hip on behalf of the Democratic Party” (3). His readings are dense, learned, theoretically informed, and often quite surprising; in all cases, they give us a sense of how these novelists worked as “political strategists of their time” (3). But the overarching method of the book, its combination of formal analysis and historical contextualization, is very familiar. And this method has sustained a variety of high-profile attacks in recent years from scholars, such as Rita Felski and Eric Hayot, who seek what Felski calls “transhistorical methodologies.”2 By assessing Hip Figures in what follows, therefore, I mean to consider how a resolutely historicist monograph stands up against a certain exhaustion with historicism that is increasingly evident in literary studies. My ultimate goal is not [End Page 623] to deplore the “solid dominance” of this method, which in Szalay’s hands produces a compelling argument along with a series of illuminating accounts of seminal novels, but to claim that there is, perhaps somewhat ironically, a good historical justification for scholars of this period to develop alternatives. Indeed, I want to suggest that as Post45 “continue[s] to expand [its] vision of this newly vital field,” it could remain a home for “groundbreaking work on U.S. culture after the Second World War,” while also serving as a sort of laboratory for experimenting with new methods of interpretation.3 The “central contention” of Hip Figures “is that, over the last fifty or so years, a range of predominantly white fantasies about hip have animated the secret imagination of postwar liberalism and, more concretely, organized the Democratic Party’s...

Documentary novel and literary journalism in the USA and Slovenia

Factual Fictions: Narrative Truth and the Contemporary American Documentary Novel by Leonora Flis offers an evaluation of the postmodern documentary novel and literary journalism, which emerged in the USA in the 1960s and in Europe a little later. While evaluating the literary importance of the two genres and presenting their socio-cultural context, this study discusses the pertinence of truth and referentiality and focuses on the selected texts by Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, John Berendt, and Don DeLillo. Flis's book is characterized by a multicultural approach that also examines postmodern Slovene literary and journalistic production.

The Role of the Reflexive Self in Mailer's Proests

In The Armies of the Night (1968) and Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968/2008) Norman Mailer details the exploits of the anti-Vietnam war protestors and his role in the protests. With an ethnographer’s eye for detail and a novelist’s eye for imagery, he constructs a picture of youthful fear and exuberance, a totalitarian reaction to protest, and documents an America which he realises is slowing eating itself. In these nonfi ction novels, he places himself at the centre of events, interpreting the data through his own frazzled, drink-fuelled, mischievous self. This article utilises Pierre Bourdieu’s methodological framework of refl exive sociology to both critically analyse Mailer as an ethnographer and qualitative researcher and ask whether inquiry into social protest can be adequately conducted through the autobiographical gaze of a novelist. It is argued that by using such literary resources and techniques, we can, in the spirit of C. Wright Mills, move to a more public sociology where literary techniques are valued, rather than dismissed as unscientific.

My Father’s House

My Father’s House Robert Lacy (bio) Reading My Father: A Memoir by Alexandra Styron (Scribner, 2011. 304 pages. Illustrated. $25) Alexandra Styron was the last born of the late William Styron’s four children, arriving long after the other three. She was not her father’s favorite, and she knew it. Yet she also knew, as she wrote in her journal in 2000, “that I, at the last, will have to tell this story. Someday.” Reading My Father represents her effort to do so. It’s the story of a talented but troubled man and his much abused wife and children. William Styron was, by his daughter’s account, a tyrant and a bully in his own home, even as he was being lionized in the larger world for his charm and wit and novel-writing skills. At home he was the Great Man who was not to be disturbed on any account while he pursued his muse. His wife, Rose, bore the brunt of his verbal attacks, but the children also came in for their share. At age sixty, forced by his failing health to give up the alcohol that had long fueled him, he cracked up and fell into a deep clinical depression. But, being Bill Styron and the gifted writer that he was, he managed to capitalize even on that grim situation by writing Darkness Visible, which became a surprise best seller. His daughter, after poring over the hundreds of letters from troubled readers of the book she found in her father’s archives at Duke University, was moved to ask herself: “How could a guy whose thoughts elicit this much pathos have been, for so many years, such a monumental asshole to the people closest to him?” William Styron, at least in his daughter’s version, was in many ways a man at war with himself. A southerner by birth, reared in Virginia and educated at Duke, he spent most of his adult life living in the Northeast, in places like Brooklyn and Manhattan, and in the family homes in Roxbury, Connecticut, and on Martha’s Vineyard. Buoyed by the success of his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, he married Rose Burgunder, a department-store heiress from Baltimore, in 1953; and, despite the household cruelties and his many infidelities, the marriage would endure until his death in 2006. Together the two of them embarked on a life among the rich and famous at the time: the youthful hell-raising Teddy Kennedy was a favorite neighbor on the Vineyard; Arthur Miller a friend and neighbor in Connecticut; Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, James Jones, Mike Nichols, Carlos Fuentes, Willie [End Page xvi] Morris—the list of pals and drinking buddies goes on and on. But the man little Alexandra Styron saw when he came home was not the bon vivant, not the literary man about town. “My father used to scare the crap out of me,” she told the mourners at a memorial service for him in 2007, and then she related how he used to come into her room at night and tell her stories about ghosts and demons in the Roxbury house, leaving her lying there shivering in the dark. Once, when she was eight and in a girlish horse-loving phase of her life, he told her that the governor of Connecticut had banned horses in the state and then left her alone to deal with that. She could never decide whether he was being consciously cruel or merely carelessly indifferent. “He’d lob his invective into the room, storm away, and leave everything behind him in flames,” she writes. Styron had been a Marine Corps officer in the waning months of World War ii, but, like Scott Fitzgerald before him in World War i, did not experience combat then or in Korea. This appears to have been critical to his development, both artistically and emotionally. Mailer and Jones had served overseas and had come back home to write big best-selling novels about their experiences. War was to be the theme for writers of his generation, Styron saw; and he wanted, his daughter says, “to paint on that...

Da Norman Mailer a Matthew Barney. Il mito post-umano di Gary Gilmore

Gary Gilmore, a murderer who was condamned to death in the USA in 1976, gained international notoriety thanks to his decision to accept and encourage his death sentence, refusing every kind of juridical appeal, surprisingly turning his own execution into a public and intentional suicide. For its power to make American institutions wonder about ethical and political problems, like the legitimacy of death penalty or the relationship between individual freedom and public law, this case inspired in 1979 The Executioner's Song, a non-fiction novel by Norman Mailer. about twenty years later Gilmore became a character of The Cremaster Cycle, one of the most important works by the american video-artist Matthew Barney, who based the plot of his Cremaster 2 (the second episode of this five-movie saga) on Mailer's novel. The comparison between Cremaster 2 and its literary model will provide an example of the transformation of a story between different artistic languages, but also between different historical and cultural backgrounds: in the post human era the story of Gary Gilmore has lost most of its political and ethical meanings becoming a symbol of the struggle between human willingness and biological destiny.

Jorge Ahmad

Jorge Ahmad

Renaissance Man, Man of his Times: Norman Mailer’s "The White Negro" and Literary Manhood in 1950s America

Cet article reexamine l’essai controverse de Norman Mailer publie en 1957, The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster, etudiant sa reception historique ainsi que le role qu’il a joue dans l’elaboration et la redefinition des notions de masculinite dans l’Amerique des annees 50. Il examine d’abord la maniere dont l’essai de Mailer a ete percu par differentes generations d’universitaires specialistes de litterature. Cet essai a ete, en grande partie, sorti de son contexte historique par la premiere generation de critiques de Mailer et c’est son importance par rapport aux œuvres de fiction ulterieures de Mailer qu’ils ont prise en consideration. A l’inverse, une nouvelle generation de critiques s’est beaucoup interessee a The White Negro, mais pas beaucoup a l’œuvre de Mailer. Au lieu de cela, ces critiques ont vu dans cet essai un signe historique des preoccupations des annees 50, epoque souvent marquee par la croyance naive en un individu transcendant et par une vision de la notion de race simpliste et essentialiste. L’article avance ensuite l’argument que ces deux points de vue critiques sont pertinents, mais que leur faiblesse vient de ce qu’ils negligent d’etudier. Cet article suggere qu’une lecture mesuree de l’essai peut etre faite en l’examinant a la fois a partir de la place qu’il occupe dans la tradition litteraire americaine (et de la maniere dont Mailer la percoit), tradition considerant l’auteur comme un genie (mâle) persecute et eprouvant le besoin d’echapper aux contraintes d’une societe (feminisante), et en meme temps comme la reflexion de quelqu’un qui est preoccupe par les questions des annees 50 : conformite, culture de masse et problemes raciaux. Il propose que l’essai soit lu comme une condamnation de la definition de la masculinite dans les annees 50, la solution donnee par Mailer a ce probleme etant la liberation sexuelle, ce qui equivaut a un repositionnement de la masculinite americaine, qui n’est pas vue uniquement comme definie par une classe moyenne blanche heterosexuelle.

Literary Houston (review)

Reviewed by: Literary Houston Steven L. Davis Literary Houston. Edited by David Theis. (Fort Worth: TCU Press, 2010. Pp 508. Index. ISBN 9780875654409, $24.95 paper.) In 1952, more than a decade before Houston became designated “Space City,” novelist George Williams grasped its propulsive energy: “Houston, that fabulous city, growing explosively—with skyscrapers shooting up like rockets, industrial areas rolling out from it like smoke, wide patches of ugly residential sections dropping like shattered fragments all about its perimeter, great mansions glowing within like flameflowers, and people, people hurling themselves through it” (375). Williams was a longtime creative writing teacher at Rice University; his students included Larry McMurtry and William Goyen. He is among the fascinating voices brought together by editor David Theis in Literary Houston, the latest installment in TCU Press’s distinguished “Literary Cities” series. The selections in Literary Houston are excellent throughout, and Theis includes several forgotten treasures, such as 1950s newspaper columnist Sig Byrd and nineteenth-century humorist Alexander Sweet, who wrote perceptively of the seaport-fueled rivalry between Houston and Galveston. He also covers most of the city’s well-known qualities: its vigorous capitalism and lack of zoning, its congested [End Page 427] freeways and air pollution, the Ship Channel, the Astrodome, NASA, Enron, and the Hurricane Katrina refugees. Numerous Houston personalities are profiled, including Howard Hughes, Barbara Jordan, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Dominique de Menil. As editor, Theis proves to be an excellent tour guide. He provides concise, helpful introductions to each selection, and the book is very well organized, making it easy to navigate despite its rather impressive bulk. In the section titled “Visitors,” Theis offers glimpses of Houston through the eyes of notable personalities such as H. L. Mencken, Norman Mailer, and French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir. During her visit, de Beauvoir attended a wrestling match and then went out for a drink, finding that, “the walls are covered from floor to ceiling with huge photographs of prize bulls and cows . . . It seems that most of the cafes are decorated in this style” (183). De Beauvoir concludes, “This evening I’ll go to sleep with no regrets. I don’t think that any of Houston’s seductions remain hidden from me” (183). While Ms. de Beauvoir was undoubtedly too quick to dismiss Houston, other notable cultural figures were greatly enriched by their experience. Willie Nelson, for example, spent a significant portion of his early career in Houston, where he struggled mightily and wrote some of his greatest songs: “Crazy,” “Night Life,” “Mr. Record Man,” and “I Gotta Get Drunk.” The portraits assembled by Theis are mostly affectionate, and he sidesteps the more critical writings on Houston. This kinder, gentler approach is represented in the Larry McMurtry excerpt, which avoids the novelist’s crude description in his 1970s novel, Moving On. There, McMurtry has a character sniff the air and proclaim, “Houston smells like a crotch.” (Moving On, 221) Instead Theis relies on a milder metaphor, excerpted from a later novel, Anybody Can Whistle: “I touched a button and my window went down, letting in the old fishy smell of Houston, moist and warm, a smell composed of many textures.” (384) As Theis freely admits, an anthology is not an encyclopedia, and inevitable gaps exist in the coverage. Literary Houston provides relatively little information about the city’s petrochemical industry, its legendary business and civic leaders such as Jesse Jones and Roy Hofheinz, and its burgeoning multiethnic character, which has transformed the once redneck-hearted place into a buoyant international metropolis. Taken as a whole, however, Literary Houston is an excellent collection, illuminating the spirit and history of this “swaggering, flamboyant city” (143). Steven L. Davis Texas State University–San Marcos Copyright © 2012 The Texas State Historical Association

Truman Capote and the legacy of In cold blood

Ralph F. Voss was a high school junior in Plainville, Kansas in mid-November of 1959 when members of the Herbert Clutter family were murdered in Holcomb, Kansas, by four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives, an unimaginable horror in a quiet farm community during the Eisenhower years. No one in Kansas or elsewhere could then have foreseen the emergence of Capote's book-which has never gone out of print, has twice been made into a major motion picture, remains required reading in criminology, American Studies, sociology, and English classes, and has been the source of two recent biographical films. Voss examines Capote and In Cold Blood from many perspectives, not only as the crowning achievement of Capote's career, but also as a story in itself, focusing on Capote's artfully composed text, his extravagant claims for it as reportage, and its larger status in American popular culture. Voss argues that Capote's publication of In Cold Blood in 1966 forever transcended his reputation as a first-rate stylist but second-rate writer of Southern fiction; that In Cold Blood actually is a gothic a sophisticated culmination of Capote's artistic development and interest in lurid regionalism, but one that nonetheless eclipsed him both personally and artistically. He also explores Capote's famous claim that he created a genre called the non-fiction novel, and its status as a foundational work of true crime writing as practiced by authors ranging from Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer to James Ellroy, Joe McGinniss, and John Berendt. Voss also examines Capote's artful manipulation of the story's facts and circumstances: his masking of crucial homoerotic elements to enhance its marketability; his need for the killers to remain alive long enough to get the story, and then his need for them to die so that he could complete it; and Capote's style, his shaping of the narrative, and his selection of details-why it served him to include this and not that, and the effects of such choices-all despite confident declarations that every word is true. Though it's been nearly 50 years since the Clutter murders and far more gruesome crimes have been documented, In Cold Blood continues to resonate deeply in popular culture. Beyond questions of artistic selection and claims of truth, beyond questions about capital punishment and Capote's own post-publication dissolution, In Cold Blood's ongoing relevance stems, argues Voss, from its unmatched role as a touchstone for enduring issues of truth, exploitation, victimization, and the power of narrative.

The limits of ferocity: sexual aggression and modern literary rebellion

The Limits of Ferocity is a powerful critique of the culture of extremity represented in the works of D. H. Lawrence, Georges Bataille, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer. Daniel Fuchs provides close readings of their literary and intellectual texts, which convey a loathing of middle-class culture or, as the case may be, society itself, in favor of a rebellion often expressed as an aggressive, even apocalyptic, sexuality. The Marquis de Sade is the precursor of this literature, which idealizes the self that violates taboos and laws in the search for erotic transcendence. Fuchs shows as well how these writers reflected and contributed to a broader cultural assault on liberal moderation and Freudian humanism. He explains Freud’s theories of culture and sexual aggression and describes how they were rejected or reworked, sometimes in favor of a liberating violence, by theorists including Wilhelm Reich, Norman O. Brown, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Fuchs concludes with a reflection on books by William Burroughs, Bret Easton Ellis, and the sociologist Philip Rieff. This absorbing study illuminates the utopianism and narcissism in works of intellectual and artistic “ferocity” that characterized the turn in American consciousness from the period after the Second World War to the late 1960s and 1970s.

5. Small Figures in Large Landscapes

5. Small Figures in Large Landscapes Anthony Channell Hilfer Paul Bowles’s first view of North Africa was enough to tell him that he had landed in his landscape of desire. Only twenty-one years old and still a musician rather than a writer, he had found his spiritual home: Straightway I felt a great excitement. Always without formulating the concept, I had based my sense of being in the world partly on an unreasoned conviction that certain areas of the earth’s surface contained more magic than others. Had anyone asked me what I meant by magic, I should probably have defined the word by calling it a secret connection between the world of nature and the consciousness of man, a hidden but direct passage which bypassed the mind. (The operative word here is “direct,” because in this case it was equivalent to “visceral.”) Like any Romantic, I had always been vaguely certain that sometime during my life I should come into a magic place which in disclosing its secrets would give me wisdom and ecstasy—perhaps even death. And now, as I stood in the wind looking at the mountains ahead, I felt the stirring of the engine within, and it was as if I were drawing close to the solution of an as-yet-unposed problem. (Without Stopping, hereafter WS, 125) This is one of the many passages in Bowles’s writings where he reveals a passion for North Africa and, most of all, for the Sahara, at least equal to Abbey’s for his desert and Broyles’s and Bowden’s for theirs. It’s all the more odd that Bowles found his way there by chance concatenations, especially the suggestion of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas that he go to Africa as an alternative to the trite American apprenticeship in France. Bowles later declared, “Like my fifteen-year-old counterparts all over the world, I was seduced by Lafcadio’s acte gratuite” (WS 67). While it seems unlikely that fifteen-year-olds all over the world were reading André Gide’s novel Les Caves du Vatican, whose protagonist’s principal ethos is to act on whim, in one incident pushing a man out of a train to his death simply because the thought occurs to him, the tendency is consistent with Bowles, who let gratuitous suggestions lead him to momentous choices. Eventually, the Sahara became not only Bowles’s muse but also part of his being in the world. He discovered in it the nothing that is: “I realized that I loved all those things: the sun, the silence, the nothingness” (Conversations with Paul Bowles, hereafter C, 225). When very young, Bowles adopted the “practice of pretending not to exist” (WS 131), but this did not work well in Morocco; a blond westerner could hardly escape notice. Still, the desert’s appeal was in its negation of ego. As Bowles commented to an interviewer, “I don’t see myself, really, I have no ego” (C 115). This [End Page 270] is why he didn’t engage in the kind of literary gamesmanship for which, say, Norman Mailer is known: “To take part in such games, you have to believe in the existence of your personality in a way that I don’t” (C 119). This skepticism about the value of salient selfhood very much carries over to his fiction: “For years critics have objected to the facelessness of my fictional people, although that is deliberate on my part. And at the time I was writing [. . .] I did not have reactions to people as people, but only as forces to propel me, as a glider uses air currents” (In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles, hereafter L, 439). The gratuitous act substitutes for personal motivation. More importantly, it is the landscape, not the people, that is central; the usual foreground and background of fiction switch off: “Places have always been more important to me than people. That is to say, people give the landscape scale; the landscape is not a background to them” (L 440). Thus in The Sheltering Sky the apparent protagonist, Port Moresby, dies halfway through. The Sheltering Sky is not quite like...

A Secondary Bibliography of the International War Crimes Tribunal: London, Stockholm and Roskilde

January 25, 2012 (9:31 am) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3102\russell 31,2 064 red.wpd 1 See Russell’s exposure of this derogatory contraction of “Viet Nam Cong San” (“Vietnamese Communists”) in his War Crimes in Vietnam (London: Allen and Unwin, 1967), p. 45n. On the importance of language, cf. the legendary remark of Russell’s correspondent, Mohammad Ali: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.… No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.” Russell attempted to enlist Ali on behalf of the iwct (see the ra for their letters of 8 April, 18, 31 May, 11 Sept., 17 Oct., 15 Nov. and 16 Dec. 1967). russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 31 (winter 2011–12): 167–87 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036-01631; online 1913-8032 ibliographies, rchival nventories, ndexes A SECONDARY BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE INTERNATIONAL WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL: LONDON, STOCKHOLM AND ROSKILDE Stefan Andersson stefankarlandersson@live.com i.wintroduction T he International War Crimes Tribunal (iwct) on the United States’ warfare in Vietnam was founded in 1966 through the moral outrage of the British philosopher and political activist Bertrand Russell, his private secretary Ralph Schoenman, Ken Coates, Chris Farley and other people connected to the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. They wanted to inform the world about the us government’s attempts to convince the Vietnamese population (who were mainly peasants) that capitalism is a better political-economical system than communism, by killing as many “Vietcong”1 and unarmed seniors, women and children as possible with regular carpet bombing, cluster and phosphorus bombs, napalm, Agent Orange and other illegal weaponry, and oTering the survivors pleasant lodgingsinwired-inhamlets far away from their homes and the graves of their ancestors. This charm oTensive went on for more than ten years, and although three times as many bombs fell on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia as were dropped during the whole Second World War, surprisingly enough the Vietnamese were not to be converted. In the 1960s this macabre spectacle could be watched on television all over the world, but very few protested against it. Until 1968 the majority of American January 25, 2012 (9:31 am) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3102\russell 31,2 064 red.wpd 168 stefan andersson 2 See Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (New York, New American Library, 1968). He met up with Noam Chomsky, “a slim sharp-featured man with an ascetic expression, and an air of gentle but absolute moral integrity” (p. 180). Both were arrested and spent a night in prison together. 3 See Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 348. See also Natalie Atkin, “From Margin to Mainstream: American Peace Movements, 1950s– 1970s”, in issue “Peace Movements in Western Europe, Japan and the usa since 1945”, Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen, no. 32 (2004): 175–92. 4 See May 1970: Birth of the Antiwar University (New York: PathWnder P., 1971). 5 The so-called “Chicago conspiracy trials” or “Chicago 7 trials” that followed, when sevendefendants—AbbieHoTman,JerryRubin,DavidDellinger,TomHayden,Rennie Davis, John Froines and Lee Weiner—were charged with conspiracy and inciting to riot, showed that the us government was not going to tolerate such “unpatriotic” and “criminal ” behaviour. See James Tracy, Direct Action: Radical PaciWsm from the Union Eight to the Chicago Seven (Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1996), pp. 145–51. 6 See Mark Kurlansky, 1968: the Year That Rocked the World (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004), and David Caute, 1968: the Year of the Barricades (London: Hamish Hamilton , 1988), pp. 3, 7–8, 12z–13. 7 Fredrik Logevall, “De Gaulle, Neutralization, and American Involvement in Vietnam , 1963–1964”, PaciWc Historical Review 61 (1992): 69–102. citizens were for the war, although some earlier, well-attended rallies against it, like the 1967 march on the Pentagon in late October,2 might have made some think diTerently. sds (Students for a Democratic Society)3 and other antiwar organizations never became the united force that could challenge the government ’s reliance on what Nixon called the “silent majority”. It was not until the us attacked Cambodia...