Advertisements for Myself
“Like many another vain, empty, and bullying body of our time, I have been running for President these last ten years in the privacy of my mind, and it occurs to me that I am less close now than when I began.”
No one loves Norman Mailer’s writing more than Norman Mailer. No one hates Norman Mailer’s writing more than Norman Mailer.
This book is a kind of collected work from Norman Mailer, but really only a decade or so into his publishing career. If that seems arrogant, it is, and I think Norman Mailer would agree with you. But at the same time, as Mailer mentions early on, if he models himself a little after Ernest Hemingway (in terms of self-promotion) then this makes a lot of sense, as, according to Mailer, Hemingway spent his early career developing and buttressing the public reputation of Hemingway, Hemingway can make it to 1959 (when this book came out) with that reputation in tact, and with the world all agreeing how good The Old Man and the Sea is. For Mailer, that novel is only good if you know much about Hemingway, and imagine him as both the writer and the lead character.
So Mailer forges on here. This book is ostensibly the collected works, with a healthy dose of juvenilia in the front section which includes several short stories mailer wrote as an undergrad and before he was famous, and before he went to army.
The later sections include some political essays written from commissions, some additional short stories, cultural essays, and various drafts and abandoned drafts from his second and third novels.
What makes this collection interesting at all is that Mailer, in the vein of Hemingway, has written self-aggrandizing essays selling himself and the various pieces to his audience to support each of the sections and pieces. And I will tell you, I am very bearish on Mailer’s fiction, and quite bullish on his nonfiction, and almost ecstatic about his personal writing. So for me, this often works.
The Deer Park
“In the cactus wild of Southern California, a distance of two hundred miles from the capital of cinema as I choose to call it is the town of Desert D’Or. There I went from the Air Force to look for a good time. Some time ago.”
In the movie Ingrid Goes West, we’re told that a trip to the desert outside of Los Angeles by the actor character that Ingrid’s character goes out to visit on the eve of her wedding is made in the style and idea of Norman Mailer’s novel The Deer Park. This is meant to be embarrassing. But what I couldn’t tell in watching the movie is the nature of the embarrassment. Is it embarrassing because they dare compare themselves to Norman Mailer’s novel? Or is embarrassing because they compared themselves to Norman Mailer’s awful novel? I couldn’t tell.
In Advertisements for Myself, Mailer reprints a good review and a bad review of this novel. The bad review calls it (something to the effect of) a pale imitation of Day of the Locust. Which feels true, and I don’t even really like that book either.
This is a Hollywood book, with some roman a clef happening here, about a fighter pilot turned actor whose Hollywood romance hits it kind of big and the fallout therein. Mailer himself worried that he sculpted a too simple novel from his original ideas, and that may be true, but there is some good writing here, and a real rendering of a set of characters. The failure is that he (admittedly both in and out of the text) is writing a Hemingway novel set within a Fitzgerald plot, and it doesn’t work. It does not help that he is too cute in his naming here as well.
