To Honor a Battler, Literary Peace Breaks Out
By Patricia Cohen
The Norman Mailer who was honored Tuesday night by the glittery literati at a gala benefit was generous, nurturing and diligent, a big cuddly teddy bear with rumpled white hair and a rocking chair that faced the bay. Only occasionally did the more familiar Mailer appear, the wild, fierce, and contentious celebrity who probably deserved more punches in the smacker than he delivered in his lifetime.
“Norman Mailer lived a long time, and the ferocious genius, sometimes erratic personality was not the same at 75 or
One of the worst things you could do to a writer like Mailer is “to domesticate him into a tabby cat,” Mr. Remnick said. Then he shrugged. “It’s an award dinner.”
And indeed it was. The cause was the newly created Norman Mailer Writers Colony, the brainchild of Lawrence Schiller, Mailer’s longtime friend and collaborator, who created this nonprofit organization and these awards both to honor Mailer and to support both new and established writers. With the help of Mailer’s widow, Norris Church Mailer, the couple’s house in Provincetown, Mass., has been turned into a residential educational center. Mr. Schiller said the event brought in about $200,000. (The publisher and investor Spas Roussev, who is on the colony’s executive board, underwrote the dinner.)
The brightest stars of PBS, the “Charlie Rose” show and PEN attended, including the Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, who was recognized with a lifetime achievement award; Salman Rushdie; Don DeLille: Joan Didion; Doris Kearns Goodwin; Michael Cunningham; Colum McCann; Jhumpa Lahiri; and Calvin Trillin, who served as master of ceremonies. The filmmakers Oliver Stone, in a camel sport coat, khakis and sneakers, andJohn Walters, in a purple-and-black suit, lent the evening a sprinkle of Hollywood celebrity and fashion diversity. (Mr. Waters’s Provincetown home was five blocks from Mailer’s.)
Gay Talese, trim in a tuxedo, delivered the most-distinguished writer award to David Halberstam, which was accepted by his widow, Jean. To Mr. Talese the event, which he helped organize, underscores how New York’s literary world is a “basket of crabs,” with a small group all vying for a limited pool of money, attention and prestige. Mr. Talese was thinking of Mailer’s love-hate relationship with the PEN American Center, of which Mailer was president between 1984 and 1986, when Mr. Talese was a vice president.
“PEN was more or less a literary tea party with a small budget and limited influence in the book and academic industry,” he explained. Mailer put it on the map, he said, by organizing an international writers’ conference and tapping his wealthy friends for support. “Mailer being Mailer, however, had ways of offending others who were part of PEN,” Mr. Talese said. Some resented the commercialism, while many women were furious at him for his antifeminist stance. Mailer meanwhile was insulted because he felt PEN did not appreciate him. PEN didn’t even bother to honor Mailer until last year, after his death, Mr. Talese said, nor was the group interested in cosponsoring some of the Mailer awards. “Now we have Mailer Inc. and PEN Inc.,” he said, and “just so much money to go around to fund these organizations.”
Before Cipriani’s waiters began handing out Bellinis, Mr. Schiller mentioned that he was at a book party recently where he ran into an officer of PEN, who wanted to revisit the idea of a collaboration between the two organizations. As Mr. Schiller recalled, she said: “There is only so much money to go around in the literary community. Is this the right thing to do?”
Mr. Schiller replied, “That ship has sailed.”
Other writers who attended the fund-raising benefit and are active in PEN scoffed at suggestions of a conflict, though. “PEN is in my heart,” said Ms. Brown, who has also helped organized PEN’s annual spring galas. While the recession has made it difficult to raise money, the two groups are doing different things, she added, with the Mailer group focused on education and PEN following human rights and freedom of speech.
Mr. Schiller gave PEN a table. The center’s current president, Kwame Anthony Appiah, along with other trustees attended. Francine Prose, a former PEN president, praised the new Mailer awards, saying “anything that helps younger writers” was welcome.
Two of those young writers were in attendance. One of them, John Gilmore, a senior at Utah State University won the National College Award for nonfiction writing. When William Kennedy announced his name and home state, one could see the heads of audience members tip sideways as they whispered. Could he be related to Gary Gilmore, the convicted murderer who asked Utah officials to execute him, and whose life was chronicled by Mailer and Mr. Schiller in the Pulitzer Prize winning 1979 novel “The Executioner’s Song”?
“No,” Mr. Gilmore said afterward with a laugh as he stood arm in arm with his wife, Maryssa DeLeon, who is also in college, studying mortuary science. He added that Mr. Schiller told him the awards committee had spent three weeks investigating if there were any connection before it contacted him about the prize.
The other winner, Emily Swanagin from Birmingham, Ala., won the National High School Award. “I’m so nervous,” she said, standing on a platform in front of the more than 320 guests. “I’ve never been this famous before.”
A glimpse of Mailer’s rougher side did come through in the end. Ms. Goodwin, who was asked to bring the evening’s events to a close, told a story about Mailer’s kvetching during a final stay as her guest in Boston shortly before he died in 2007. He had demanded a more accommodating toilet in the guest bathroom for his next visit, and she promised to oblige. “Now every time I go into that bathroom and see that toilet, I think of Norman,” she said.
It may not have been the image of the heroic novelist that Mailer would most like to be remembered by, but at least he wasn’t a teddy bear.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/books/22mailer.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateemb4
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Did you see the great segment on MJ with DKG and RE talking about the Monuments Men? http://bit.ly/80KnZ
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